Category: Family

Near Death, Divine Providence, and Mining the Past

photo credit: DSC03226 via photopin (license)

When I was 12 years old, I nearly died.

At the time, my two older sisters and I lived with our mom in the San Bernardino Mountains, about 2 hours east of Los Angeles. It was Easter Sunday, and we’d gone to visit my grandmother in L.A. for Spring Break. Grandma and Papa had dropped us off at the bus station in downtown L.A., and Mom came to pick us up at the bus depot in San Bernardino.

My mom, God love her, was a terrible driver. She was a lead-foot, not only on the gas, but on the brake as well. She drove “down the hill” (from nearly mile-high Blue Jay to San Berdoo’s thousand foot elevation) screaming around those mountain curves, most likely with her foot on the brake most of the way.

She picked us up at the bus depot, me and my sisters still wearing our Easter dresses. We tucked our luggage and our basket of Easter eggs in the trunk, then Mom headed back up the hill. My older sister Debbie sat in the middle of the car’s bench front seat next to Mom, and I sat next to Debbie by the door. Our oldest sister, Linda, sat behind me in the back seat.

Mom might have used less brake going up, but the brake drum nevertheless got hotter and hotter until about halfway up the hill, the heat actually blew a tire. We pulled into a nice, level turnout and a kind passerby changed the tire for us. The gentleman told my mom she better let the brakes cool before continuing on home. We sat around for what Mom thought was long enough, then pulled out again.

Me, Debbie, & Linda celebrating Linda’s birthday with a Barbie doll cake.

I don’t remember if there was a smell, or Mom could feel the heat through the brake pedal. In any case, she decided to pull over into another turnout and let the brakes cool again.

Except this turnout was sloped. The car started rolling backwards. The brakes were well and truly fried and no amount of stomping on Mom’s part would get that car to stop. The car just kept rolling toward the edge where the mountainside plunged down a couple hundred feet of steep embankment.

For some reason, Mom didn’t think to try the emergency brake. I suppose it might not have worked anyway. She was struggling to put the car into park. When that didn’t work, she jumped out and tried to stop the car with her body. The car knocked her down and partially rolled over her. Not with its full weight because at that point, the rear of the car was already over the edge, so the front end was partially off the ground.

While Mom was fighting to stop the car, Debbie had gotten the passenger side door open and was yelling at me to get out. I remember sitting sideways, my feet hanging out of the car, watching the pavement roll by under my feet. But I was frozen. Debbie couldn’t get me to budge. All the while, Linda kept yelling from the back seat, “I can’t open the door! I can’t open the door!”

We were all about to die. And then a miracle happened.

The car stopped. Linda got her door open, I finally scrambled out of the car with Debbie close on my heels. When we turned back to the car, we realized it had stopped with one front tire hooked to the berm that edged the turnout. That berm wasn’t even a foot high.

Mom was banged up but nothing was broken or needed stitches. We three girls were perfectly fine. The car was towed out of its predicament, and it went on to suffer through more of my mom’s abuse. The Easter eggs ended up rotting in the trunk because we all forgot they were in there, a fact that we girls chortled over for years to come.

Yeah. A miracle. That my mom wasn’t hurt more badly. That we girls didn’t flip right over the edge, none of us seat-belted into that pre-airbag car. That Debbie and I didn’t bail, and the car didn’t flip with Linda trapped inside. All those possibilities make me shudder now.

Oddly enough, as dramatic as this experience was, I’ve never used it in a book. I’ve probably used the fear, the panic, the horror of it without consciously realizing where I might be pulling it from. It became a story that we all found hysterically funny because it did have a happy ending.

In this case, reality was much better than the what-ifs. Thanks to God and miracles.

March 19, 2015
Alpaca, Get Yer Alpaca Here!

Since I live out in the boonies, and countryside even boonier is close at hand, I have the opportunity to see plenty of critters that all you city folk don’t. For instance, I regularly see deer (aka, rodents with hoofs), red-tail hawk, the rare bald eagle, beaver, wild turkey, and peacocks. Okay, that last one is just a bizarre fluke since they don’t really belong in my boonies, they’ve just been brought in and set loose by someone.

In addition to the wild critters, there are any number of domesticated and semi-domesticated animals close at hand. Horses and cattle and goats, of course, but also emus, a zebra, bison, and lovely little alpaca.

Good friends of mine own a ranch called Bluestone Meadow up in an area of Northern California known as Apple Hill. They grow pumpkins in the fall and scrumptious, fragrant lavender year-round. They’re developing a Christmas tree farm. They have this amazing trebuchet they use to fling pumpkins with during pumpkin season.

They’d been wanting to add alpaca to their farm, and found four females at a ranch where the breeder was selling out her stock. I was about to sell my horse trailer, but I took it on one last haul up to Grass Valley.

It was very entertaining watching them wrangle the “girls” onboard. Alpaca don’t exactly lead as willingly as a horse (at least these didn’t–they were a bit rusty). But what’s cool is that when alpaca ride in a trailer, they “cush” (if I’ve got the spelling right). They lie down, which makes them much easier to transport than horses.

Once the first two were in, the second two should have been a piece of cake. But while the third alpaca hopped right in, the final one had to be persuaded. It took a little wrassling, lifting her front feet onto the trailer bed to persuade her back feet to follow. But then even she was inside, and we were ready to head out.

They traveled pretty well (although a few times, I wondered if one or more of them had un-cushed because the trailer was rocking) and after backing the trailer into the pasture gate, they all exited and explored their new digs. I took a couple of videos, one of them wandering about, and one of the smallest girl, Foxy, meeting Jake, one of their the Bluestone Meadow dogs.

http://youtu.be/oUZiqJtcmXY
http://youtu.be/21x9DOLZrtg

A footnote about Jake. He was obsessed with these new giant creatures and managed to make his way into the pasture while my friends were away. When my friends found him and got him out again, he was covered with stinky alpaca spit. I hope he learned his lesson.

February 3, 2015
Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide

L-R, my mom, Barbara, and my grandma, Pauline.

January 16th would have been my mom’s 83rd birthday, so my sisters and I were sharing memories of her that day. My mom was a hoot–wacky, creative, and with a great sense of humor. She’s the one who invented our imaginary family friend, Henry, and she introduced all of us to the Tilly Williams Club.

But a common thread in my and my sisters’ reminiscences was Mom’s oft-repeated advice: Let your conscience be your guide.

We all admitted that when Mom said that, we’d always feel a tug of guilt inside. Probably because she knew that we knew what the right decision was to make, even though we really wanted to choose the wrong (easier) path. Mom didn’t judge us for that desire to make things soft for ourselves. “Let your conscience be your guide” was just her way of reminding us to make the moral choice rather than the convenient or self-indulgent choice.

While I was mulling over my memories of Mom, I happened to pick up my old high school yearbook. To my surprise, I found an inscription from my grandmother. I had no memory of her writing in my yearbook. It’s great advice, and such a precious gift to have it written in her own hand.

So many people are generous with advice whether we want it or not. But when counsel comes from someone who we know loves us and wants the best for us, it’s good to pay attention and give it more weight.

What good advice have you gotten over the years, either from your parents/grandparents or friends? Feel free to share in the comments.

January 26, 2015
Any Excuse for a Celebration
That’s me, front left, 7 months pregnant with son number 2, ladling some of my grandmother’s fabulous gravy.

In my family, any holiday was an excuse for a party, and usually included a table full of food. New Year’s Day was ham and potato salad, Easter featured deviled eggs and bunny cakes (and plenty of candy since Lent had ended), there were special meals for Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, barbecues for Memorial Day, softball games in the park for 4th of July and fireworks and hot dogs after, Labor Day was a last hurrah after summer, we all dressed up in costumes and ate more candy for Halloween, and the table would groan with turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy, cranberries and pumpkin pie for both Thanksgiving and Christmas. If any month didn’t have a holiday (or even if it did), we celebrated birthdays, lots and lots of birthday, each one with its own cake and party.

So it’s no surprise that when some author friends suggested we do a joint holiday anthology, I jumped at the chance. Five of us contributed lovely, happily-ever-after stories to the Celebrate! anthology (buy it here), spanning five holidays throughout the year. Since they’re short stories between about 30 and 60 pages each, they’re quick reads, but each one is long enough to feature a satisfying romance. They’re kind of like little, bite-sized romance novels, like that gooey Cadbury egg you might savor at Easter or a luscious truffle you enjoy at Christmas.

Here’s the lineup of authors in Celebrate!:
- Linda Barrett, “Man of the House,” Mother’s/Father’s Day
- Rogenna Brewer, “One Star-Spangled Night,” Independence Day
- Barbara McMahon, “Love and all the Trimmings,” Thanksgiving
- Karen Sandler (moi!), “The 8th Gift,” Hanukkah
- Debra Salonen, “My Christmas Angel,” Christmas
Take a taste of the holidays with Celebrate! Buy it here.
October 21, 2013
Road Trip Memories

This week, YA Highway’s Road Trip Wednesday asks the question, What’s the most dramatic road trip you’ve ever been on? What immediately pops into my mind might not have been a dramatic road trip, but it left wonderful, indelible memories. It was the summer my dad had to spend several weeks working on a satellite launch in Florida. He agreed to take us kids with us, so we drove from Los Angeles to Cocoa Beach in a 1957 Ford station wagon.

NPS Photo by Peter Jones

I was ten years old, and had just finished fifth grade. In fact, I missed the last few days of fifth grade because my dad had to be in Florida by a certain date, so I left school early. We departed on a Tuesday in early June, me, Dad, and my older sister, Debbie. The plan was that my oldest sister, Linda, and a friend named Cathy would fly out later and join us.

But the three of us drove. We started in Hawthorne, California and headed east. In those days, no one wore seat belts (the old Ford probably didn’t have any), so sometimes my sister and I would travel in the “way back” behind the middle seat. We also would sleep back there while my dad drove.

We made stops along the way. The first was at Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. We arrived at the caverns Wednesday evening, just in time to watch the resident bats leave for their nightly flight. The next day, we descended into the cave on a tour, which ended in an enormous cavern set up as a cafeteria. They gave us box lunches and I still remember the taste of that cheese sandwich, and eating it hundreds of feet underground.

Years later, I wrote a romantic suspense novel based in a similar cavern underneath the Arizona desert (Dark Whispers). In the book I’m working on now, Revolution, the third book in the Tankborn trilogy, several important scenes also take place underground.

We left New Mexico on Thursday after the tour and headed into Texas. Because we were driving through the “fat” part of Texas, it seemed to take forever to get through the state (on our way home, my mom drove through the Texas panhandle in one night). At some point in Texas, we stopped at a truck stop and my dad bought me a copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. (I might be giving away my age here, but if you take a close look at the cover, you’ll see the book cost 65 cents.)

I devoured Tom Sawyer as we passed through the South, crossing through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Tom Sawyer takes place in Missouri, but the flavor of the book’s setting fit the countryside we drove through, adding to the experience of reading the book.

We made it to Florida on Saturday of that week, five days of driving to cross the country. My dad had often driven through the night, only pulling over to sleep in the car when he got too tired. Not long after crossing the border into Florida, we stopped at a restaurant for breakfast where I had grits for the first time. To my Southern California eyes and palate, they looked and tasted pretty strange, but it certainly told me I was a long way from home. We spent that night in a hotel and the next day, moved into the apartment we stayed in for the summer.

There was more to the trip. I got to see three satellites launched from the beach outside our apartment. We spent every day in the pool or on the beach, or walking down to the Howard Johnson’s in the rain for ice cream. When my dad’s job was done, we all drove from Florida to Brooklyn (now it was Dad, Mom, me and my two older sisters and Cathy). Mom and Dad took turns driving so it was a fast trip. Then we visited our Brooklyn relatives a few days (which included a trip to the World’s Fair). Finally, we drove from New York back to Los Angeles, finishing the big triangle-shaped road trip.

We rode through or visited 25 of the 50 states that summer. It was a fabulous trip, one I’ll always remember.

January 30, 2013