Mid-Night Adventure

I locked myself out of my own house last night, actually 1:30 a.m., a first for me. I had brought a pair of slacks down to wash and opened the back door to see that all was as it should be in the garage. Everything looked fine, so I turned the lock as I stood there. But there was a smell I couldn’t identify, so I stepped into the garage and let the door close behind me. Great.

The house key in my car did me no good—that’s right, the car was locked, car keys just inside the back door. No cell phone; it was in the house. No spare key hidden in the garage (there is now, you’d better believe). No lights on in any neighbor’s house. I was stuck.

Yes, I could call Lola, but I'd have to wake a neighbor to use a phone. At 2 a.m.? I didn’t want to. Didn’t want to bother anyone. Didn’t want anyone to know what a stupid thing I had done.

Five hours before I could hope for anyone in the neighborhood to be up, and I was already cold. I had to get resourceful. I put the slacks on over my pj bottoms and tried the door again. Still locked. Funny.

Maybe something in the garage could unlock the thing. After trying a tiny screw driver, tiny saw blade, paper clip, nail, and what I will call brute force, and having no success at getting in my house, I began to look for anything I could use to keep warm through the night. Found a pillow that smelled of petroleum, but hey, an old Mexican blanket with the same smell, and a tarp, and planned for a hard night by the back door—between the fridge and the garbage can. I spread the tarp on the mat and then thought there must be a sleeping bag on one of those garage shelves Wayne had built, so I climbed on the old wooden stool that had belonged to Grandpa Schiess, pulled down a black plastic bag, and found my own sleeping bag in it. I lay down—note the correct use of the verb.

As I struggled to find some comfort, I thought of things. 1. Have a key in the garage for such emergencies. Okay, I would take care of that in the morning. 2. Maybe the ladder would be tall enough to reach my upstairs deck and I could climb up and go through my bedroom door. I got up, carried the ladder to the deck (and it's dark and cold outside, you know). Ladder way too short. Back to the garage, and thank goodness I didn't lock that door, too. 3. Try to sleep. 4. What about when I need to use the “facilities” of which I have none in the garage? 5. Try harder to sleep.

I can’t say I was entirely comfortable, but eventually I was tired enough that I did sleep a little.

When I woke I checked the sprinkler control clock, 5:47. I checked the neighborhood, no lights on. At 6:20 I saw Clarks had their lights on. I walked down, knocked on their door, rang their bell. No one came. I turned to go back home and saw the kitchen light in Shuells’s house. I headed there, scaring Pam Shuell only slightly. I used their phone to call Lola. She might still have a key to my house. She made a search but found no key. (6. Make sure my kids have a key.) I told her about my ladder idea and thought maybe Bryan could negotiate the climb up and onto the upper deck. But Mr Shuell heard me, said he had a tall ladder, came over, did the job, let me in, and here I am to write the happy ending.

For a while this whole thing made me feel very old and very stupid. But when my neighbor told me he had locked himself out many times and what he does now because of it—always leaves a certain door unlocked because his kids have lost all the spare and hidden keys—and when I remember everything I tried to do and then look at the little bed I made for myself, I realize I may be old but not too old to think, and I’m not stupid. This was an accident. We all have them.

A New Family in the Neighborhood

Crows are nesting in the Hessings’s cedar tree, which hangs way over into my front yard. I did not invite them and, frankly, do not want them here. They are predators. Okay, fine. They can’t help what they are. But because they are here, my finches are not. My finches, my house finches, who have nested in my Christmas wreath every spring since 1992, are not coming this year.

I love those little birds, the male with his orange head and throat. They build their nest together and take turns sitting on the eggs. I could stand in my laundry room and watch the whole thing, from selecting the nest site to the flying exit of the last baby. Last year all four eggs hatched, and how those babies squawked for food. I watched them learn to fly, even the runt. Then off they went, and I took down the wreath and washed the wall again. Some years I had two finch families. Too bad. That’s history.

And that’s not all. I have no robins in my yard, no quail, no sparrows, red-winged blackbirds, doves, junkoes, not even a magpie. And the goldfinches have deserted their feeder. It's the crows. I should be happy about this? I can’t. Also, I can’t do anything to change it. It’s against the law to kill the crows. I couldn’t kill them anyway, but I like to tell them I could. And I did think of calling my tree guy to come over and remove their nest. That’s against the law, too.

“Corvus brachyrhynchos
“The loud and frequent 'caw-caw' of this good-sized bird with shiny black plumage is quite familiar in southern Canada. Their return in late winter means, to many people, the advent of spring. [Southern Canada. Sounds like a good place for them.]
“The American Crow, in spite of its reputation as a predator, is useful to humans because it consumes large quantities of pestful insects. [We shall see. Is pestful a word?]
“The crow nests in trees where four to six eggs are laid after the breeding season. Immatures and adults often assemble in large flocks on their way to the southern wintering grounds. Many birds remain year-round in several parts of the country.” [Great.]

Charles Atlas, Vic Tanny, and Muscle Beach

In the late 1940s you could see an ad strip in comic books and newspapers about a 97-pound weakling at the beach with his girlfriend who was humiliated by some muscly bully kicking sand in his face. But the weakling was no dummy. He sent for the Charles Atlas body building plan and soon went back to the beach a muscled guy himself and beat up the sand-kicking bully, who for some reason was still there in the same place. Then, because of his muscles, the former weakling could get his girlfriend back—and any other girl he wanted.

I'm not sure I ever believed the ads, but I loved the look of the muscled body, and I liked the justice of the whole thing.

Charles Atlas was a real person, and I remember those advertisement pictures of him holding the world on his shoulder. He was a body builder who didn’t use weights but his own system, Dynamic Tension. In 1921 and 1922 he won the title of the World’s Most Perfectly Developed Man, which is what he called himself ever after. The contest that gave him the title wasn’t held after 1922 because its promoters knew there was no one else in America who could ever win the title away from Charles Atlas.

Charles Atlas had no gym. His was a mail-order business. But Vic Tanny had a gym on 4th Street just down from the Hitching Post theater in the town where I grew up, Santa Monica. In those days Santa Monica was small, and I don’t remember it being populated by the kind of ignorant stupid people Jay Leno finds there and then displays on his Jaywalking episodes. These folks know nothing and are proud of it. But that is another story.

I went to the Hitching Post theater—Saturday matinee for a dime—but I never went inside the Vic Tanny gym. (My brothers may have, I’m not sure.) What went on there remained a mystery to me. I think it was one of those upstairs places—step in from 4th Street and take the stairs to the second floor. My parents would never have allowed me to go. I may have asked. Besides, in the late 1940s women were pretty much excluded from body building gyms except as spectators, and few at that. And in the late 1940s I was no woman, only a small girl who clearly did not belong in a men’s gym.

But I have learned that it was Vic Tanny who changed the workout gym from a dark and smelly place to one of light, color, and even carpet, and he hoped his gyms would attract not men only but everyone. Eventually, they did, and he had 80 some Vic Tanny gyms throughout the country. Joe Gold was a frequenter of Vic Tanny’s Santa Monica, and we know what he learned there.

Muscle Beach? Yes, in those days it was in Santa Monica, not Venice, just south of the Santa Monica Pier. It was a place of interest for me, and when I could get someone to take me there I loved to watch the gymnastics and body building that went on. Those muscly, oiled bodies looked good, if a bit unreal. Nothing like any boy I ever knew. But Muscle Beach was not a place where I could hang out, even in my teen years.

Today a Gold’s Gym is within walking distance of my home in Boise, Idaho. It has lots of light and lots of women working out, as well as men. But I don’t go to Gold's. I drive on down the road to Curves to do my work outs. There’s not much atmosphere, not much excitement, nothing very fun going on at Curves. But I go, for the health of it.