Cross Country Travelogue #17
When a Sunrise Gives You Paws
Barry Bub, MD and Rabbi
Goldie Milgram
The air in Santa Barbara is scented with every variety of roses. One huge peach globe of a rose arrested both of us outside the Victorian Upham Inn where we are staying. Maybe six inches in diameter each diaphanous petal was gracefully dancing in the breeze like prom dress chiffon. Should we bother to go to the botanical gardens? The whole town is in bloom! (Could call this place Scenta Barbara.) The air is cool and moist, 40 degrees lower than in Vegas.
This weekend's festival is an Italian Sidewalk Painting Festival. Families, art students, best friends, adults, children - hundreds of people all squatting within the squares allotted to them in front of the old Spanish Mission church. Over a matter of hours sensuous works of pastel art emerge. While everyone is busily engaged staring at their emerging masterpieces, we look up, and wonder about the possible consequences of the threatening clouds.
I try to imagine Barry and I working on a section together....should we? A memory recurs:
Early in our relationship we went to Turquoise Island together. A silk painting studio at the resort caught my eye. Hmmm. Been getting invested in this relationship, let's see......how could we test our ability to survive some challenges. "Barry, how about we do a silk painting together?" He agrees.
We select a panel that is six feet long and two and a half feet wide. The sketching part goes well....a multi-colored pastel parrot superimposed on a turquoise sea with Bougainvillea in the back ground and ferns in the foreground. So far so good.
We begin painting. His style is poster-color clarity, vivid, bold direct. Mine is buttery merging of softened shades, oil-painting like. The battle commences for whose style is correct. He stalks off to the beach. Oh, no, no, NO. I stalk him and seconds after he settles into a divan to watch the sunset....flam! I flip his lounge chair over and he goes sprawling into the sand, comes up sputtering......"How dare......"
(What she is not pointing out is that this has become a typical pattern for us. We had never done a silk painting before and we do the largest one possible - 15 square feet, pushing ourselves past any reasonable limit. Barry)
We agree to work through disputes rather than increasing distance. Five days later a truly gorgeous piece has emerged......poster-style background, buttery-detailed foreground. That night at dinner a woman at the table asks if we are the couple who was working in the silk studio.
"Yes..."
She wants to know if we are both psychiatrists.
"No....why do you ask that?"
"Because you two processed everything!"
"Yes...and?"
She looks straight at Goldie. "Honey, if it was me I just would've upped and hit him!"
Ok. Maybe we'll skip taking a turn at sidewalk painting.
Shabbat dinner was going to be candles in the room and Kabbalat Shabbat by the ocean. Following up on a thoughtful email from Marcia of Kehilla in San Francisco let us know that: "There's one Jewish renewal person in Santa Barbara, you must call him." Rick whisked us right over to his house in the hills for shabbat dinner with a cluster of spontaneous, deep, delightful folk...sang great niggunim, studied the parsha [wherein, we see swings of intimacy between God and the people - in one verse letting them eat meat "until it comes out of their noses" and many die of it, in another verse extending the benefit of Shechinah connection that Moshe feels to include seventy elders......sounds like a regular relationship to us....]
We also had dramatized for us the unique challenges of living in refined, lovely, picture-perfect Santa Barbara. Rick's concrete driveway had slid when the hill shifted and is unuseable.
The last time Goldie was here was in the 1970's, as a hitch hiker (in those days it wasn't perceived to be as dangerous) coming down from visiting San Francisco on her way to attend the Brandeis Institute near LA.
FLASHBACK: The August day was blazing hot, the folks who drop me off and are continuing on comment how unusually smoggy the air seemed. Not smog, it was smoke. All possible ways to the house of my pen pal were closed off and no one answered their phone. Fire trucks were clanging everywhere. With $5 in my pocket I slide into a juice bar seat and wonder what to do next, it was getting dark. The proprietor is a friendly fellow who invites me to stay over with him and his wife, accepting began to seem prudent once the moonless night became more evident.
Back at their place they offer me a drink.
"Orange juice would be great," I mutter, mouth dry and ashy.
"How about a Sunrise?"
"Sure." What did I care what brand they like?
The long, tall glass of thirst quenching juice arrives and I down it in seconds.
"Are you sure you want to drink like that?" asks the wife.
"Always drink OJ that way, love it!" I exclaim and fall off my chair within minutes, crash landing on the chartreuse shag rug. PAUSE PAWS
On either side of my head were huge paws, bigger than huge with claws extending and retracting spasmodically. "Dead, must be dead", was my first thought....."do the dead have headaches like this? Hope not." was the second.
A huge tongue is heading toward my face, leonine teeth descending with it and a crop of lengthy whiskers shading dilated pupils set in golden eyes............SLURP...........my scream must have outshone the fire engines..........footsteps pounding and laughter. LAUGHTER?
Seems the proprietor's wife was a large animal veterinarian. Her pet puma was distressed at my downfall from the TEQUILA sunrise and has been perched on my chest trying to revive me for hours. The puma was nothin', you should have seen the boa constrictor in the bathroom. Never hitch hiked again......for that matter never drank that kind of OJ again either.
BACK TO THE PRESENT: The fog is lifting, sunlight streaming, some rather good jazz wafting in from the street....Barry's off at the botanical gardens with Rick and will return for dinner and Contra dancing tonight....sweet feat!