Welcome to Sunny Southern California

“Help! Help me, please! He’s trying to kill me!”

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We were at a stop light, sitting in the sweltering Southern California summer heat, to which we hadn’t become accustomed in our first three weeks of living here.

“Help!” The haggard young woman screamed in desperation through the tiny crack in her car window, with a baby in her lap. Our heads turned to the car next to us, startled by the scene. A grim-faced man with jaw set and eyes riveted ahead sat in front of the frightened woman.

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Claire rolled down the window, making the cries louder and more gripping.“Please! You’ve got to do something! He tried to run me over!”

“Jason, we’ve got to do something!” Claire asserted, as the light turned green and the beat up hatchback jolted forward and began turning right. “Follow them!”

“What? Follow them? I’m not sure that would be a good idea.” I stammered. The thought terrified me.

Claire wasn’t accepting that for an answer. “We’ve got to help her!”

I had already passed through the intersection, somewhat waveringly.“Turn around and help her!” she persisted.

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Very uneasy, I turned the car around and then made a left turn through the yellow light, in hot but reluctant pursuit. We followed the car into the parking lot of Camping World. The man jumped out of the car and rushed to the payphone. We pulled up, and Claire jumped out of the car, spilling a huge pile of important papers that I was taking home from work. I panicked as they went with the wind, scrambling to recover them while Claire opened the door of the other car and helped the woman and baby out, squeezing them into the back seat with Hilary and Amelia.

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“Oh, thank you, thank you, oh, he tried to kill me!” As we rushed away, I just knew gunshots were going to follow us. But glancing in the mirror, the man continued his phone conversation. I sped down the street to our new apartment, and to Claire’s urging, parked next to a different building, and rushed our kids over to our building and through our door, slamming and locking it. Trembling and heart racing, I called the police.

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Meanwhile, Claire was trying to persuade the woman, who she determined was named Sharon, to follow her into our apartment. However, out of fear and panic, Sharon disappeared behind another building. Claire chased her calling, “Sharon! Sharon! It’s okay! We’ll help you! We’re calling the police! Sharon!” But she was gone.

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Telling my story to the police, they said they would send a squad car to our complex, stating that there had been reports a few minutes previous that someone had seen a man trying to run over a woman and her baby.Claire was still searching when the officers arrived. They looked around for a few minutes as well, but soon gave up the search and returned and asked us to give a statement. They asked us if we would be willing to make an identification or testify at a later date, to which we agreed.

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A few weeks later we were subpoenaed to testify in this domestic abuse case, so we took the day off and went to court. After waiting for what seemed like forever, a frustrated attorney came out of the courtroom and informed us that the plaintiff had never shown up, which meant she was dropping charges and the case was dismissed.

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I was baffled. How could someone possibly drop charges against someone else who deliberately tried to run her and her baby over?

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Since then, I've learned that this is actually common, and women live with this kind of abuse much more than you or I would ever guess.

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In spite of this unnerving event, we loved living here and we didn't let it shake our determination to survive in hot, expensive, sometimes frightening Southern California. That is, until six months later when we were pounded by the Northridge earthquake. But that's a whole 'nother Welcome to Sunny Southern California blog post!

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This episode originally aired July 28, 2007

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This Is What I Want

Cruises

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Soon

Then

After

Next

Also

And finally, this

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Who's joining me?

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Teacher Burnout

Teacher burnout. There. I said it. Don't get me wrong, I love my job and I can't think of any other profession I would rather have, except for being a powerful, yet kind CEO of a huge, successful company.

Teacher burnout. If I were a powerful CEO of a huge, successful company, this would enable me to travel the world on my expense account, and more importantly, allow me my own private bathroom in my private corner office. My own private bathroom with a trustworthy exhaust fan. Yes, my own private bathroom that I could use whenever I wanted, not just before 8:09, at 9:50, 12:30, and 2:40.

Teacher burnout. If I were a powerful CEO of a huge, successful company, then I wouldn't have to talk when I didn't feel like it. I could just tell my hot male secretary that I wasn't to be disturbed and sit there quietly in my comfy desk chair enjoying the quiet. And someone else would take care of any employee discipline issues for me.

Teacher burnout. Speaking of my hot male secretary, he would hand me my coffee, just the way I like it, as I saunter in each morning. He would know that after about 20 minutes I would like one more cup, and then bring me fresh cold water periodically throughout the day.

Teacher burnout. If I were a powerful CEO, I could come home at the end of the day without that guilt-inducing inner recoil that occurs when I need to deal with my own children. I would be okay if I had to repeat myself with them and answer their countless, endless, infinite stream of questions that I so adore, yet avoid all at once.

Teacher burnout. If I were a powerful CEO, my hot male secretary, or other employees, would accomplish the menial tasks that I don't enjoy, such as the paperwork and scheduling. I would do the important things. Unless I didn't want to. And then I wouldn't. Someone else would do them for me.

Teacher burnout. If I were a powerful CEO, the thing that I would enjoy most besides my comfortable paycheck and giving other people raises, would be choosing the charitable organizations to which I would contribute, and whose worthy cause I would sponsor.

Teacher burnout. If I were a powerful CEO, I wouldn't get lots of hugs and quirky little gifts and drawings. I wouldn't get to watch the transformation as a child transitions from being a non-reader to a sound reader. I wouldn't be able to tell the corniest jokes in the world and have everyone laugh without rolling their eyes. I wouldn't get to look struggling mothers and fathers in the eye as they thank me with all sincerity for helping their child.

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But I still want my own frickin' bathroom to use whenever I dern well please.

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In Loving Memory

Please forgive me if this seems insensitive. I have been seeing these "In Loving Memory" stickers on the back windows of cars all over the place for the past couple of years. I understand wanting to commemorate, remember, and celebrate a loved one who has died. I do. But is this truly the best way to pass on the legacy of someone special...with a sticker? On the back of a car window? For people to read at stoplights or on busy freeways who are left to wonder exactly who Maria Delgado Gonzales de Jesus was? Is this how you hope to be remembered by your family when you leave this existence?

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This leaves me wondering. . .why stop at car windows? Maybe it would be nice to put an "In Loving Memory" sticker in the corner of your 58 inch plasma TV screen so you can muse over the full and productive life Cousin Edna had working a Woolworth's for 42 years and crocheting untold amounts of toaster cozies? I think I like the idea of putting one in the corner of the shower door, so while you towel off you can ponder dear Aunt Ramona who passed from a serious case of emphysema, who wore the patch but kept on smoking anyway, in the bathroom with the exhaust fan on thinking nobody noticed. Perhaps a sticker on your paper shredder would be good, so as you're shredding your old financial documents you could have a moment of remembrance for Grandpa Turner who in his last days was known to keep chocolate chip cookies in his shirt pocket and asked the same question several times in the same minute?

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What do you think? Where do you think would be a good place for an "In Loving Memory" sticker?

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It's Never Too Hot For Single Sentence Soup

Each week The Jason Show sends scouts out into the blogosphere, scouring blogs both well-known and yet-to-be-discovered for those single lines that are attention grabbers. Single sentences that resonate for their element of humor, touch of the bizarre, or ability to provoke thought are prestigiously linked to their author, in hopes that viewers of The Jason Show like you will be able to savor a serving of Single Sentence Soup just as our scouts have.

The girls have to be resituated a few times, as being pressed into a towel-wrapped cushion with the comfort and density of a Sedona boulder is not their idea of fun. And my girls are no stranger to fun.

I love a man with soft hands, a high voice and a tight 'fro!

Is the grunting necessary? Not really. Does it make it more interesting? In my opinion, yes it does.

If this perversity keeps up, how long will it be before old men like me are be forced to sport purple beehives and wear capri pants, lip gloss and charm bracelets?

I says ta him, "Don, Joseph Smith had a Urimm and Thumim, but in these Latter-days, the good Lord provided ALL his children with Facebook!

The event is outdoors and amazingly enough it is calling for sunny and hot in Sudan that day. So I need to find something that goes with sweat rings. I'm also in the market for some sort of mask to put over my face because any makeup I would put on just falls right off my face like some sort of sad, scary clown.

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Agnostic Blessings, Episode Eleven

Blessing # 701

Going commando in summer

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Built-in air conditioning, comfort, and nearly unsurpassed freedom.

The best things in life really are free.

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Ex Marks the Spot, Vol. V

The Jason Show. Touting guest posts from Claire, Jason's ex, since 2008.

In the mail Friday there was another letter from one of the various agencies involved in the care of Daniel. I opened it in the driveway while sitting in my car. It was an exact repeat of one that I had received only last week. I had one of those experiences where the same thing happens and the same emotions happen with the same intensity even though it had happened before. Let me explain.
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Quickly skimming the cover letter and then turning to the copies of reports behind it, I see the name Elijah Davis. My eyes read that name and it takes a millisecond for my mind to catch up. Elijah Davis. That is so foreign to me now. Elijah Davis is now a little boy we know as Daniel. While sitting in my car I turn to my friend Debbie and I show her this page. I say, “Isn’t it strange to see that?” She looks at it and a long second later she says, “Yes, it is. It took me a minute to remember who that is.” For many of us this passage of time has been swift in erasing some of the things we used to know.

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Two months into this transition, The King turned to me and said, “It hardly seems like he was ever with those knuckleheads and it feels like he has always been ours.” My reply to him was, “Can you imagine what it will feel like in another year or in another two years?”

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Some people ask us why we changed his name. We offer this as our explanation and whether everyone agrees, it matters not…

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The subject of his name came up immediately because The King is a master tradesman and everything he owns is carefully inscribed with his initials D.C. so that it can be identified easily among the other crafters in his industry. Some day all of those big boy tools and toys will be handed down to the only son of The King. A son who should also share the initials D.C.. This strong father/son bond is vital to overshadow the day when we are forced to talk about the early rejections of his birth father. The King has taken on enormous responsibility and this is the only thing he has asked for. “Can my son be named for me.” It also happens that Daniel will now carry on the surname of immigrants whose name was to be lost without a male heir for it. This caused The Kings parents to physically rise from their seated position when they realized he was going to be adopted with the name change. Their excitement was notable.

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We knew it was important to change his name as early as possible before he recognized it as his own. Our first instinct was to take his last name of Davis and change that to his first name hoping to retain some of his paternal heritage. We began to introduce that idea into the family. Then the reports from the medical forensics came back and we realized what had actually happened and in our anger we withdrew any regard for his paternal heritage, as it were.
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Snoball named him. One day she said, “I think we should call him Daniel.” We agreed and it stuck. The family took a vote and since Daniel is an important name on my side of the family we settled on it quickly. When the adoption is final his name will be Daniel Lincoln with our last name. Elijah was a little boy without parents to care for and love him. Daniel knows quite the opposite.

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Teacher Tales: Mr. Willard Gerber

To date, all previous editions of Teacher Tales have been written from my perspective as a teacher. In this episode, I write from the perspective of a student, me, about a teacher I had in the seventh grade: Mr. Willard Gerber.

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From the first week that I started the sixth grade at my new elementary school, I was surrounded by students talking in mock horror of the infamous "Mr. Gerber," who taught art at the junior high to all seventh graders. "He's a faggot," some would say. "He takes his boy students into his back room and makes them suck his dick." I didn't really believe this was true, and I can't imagine that many other kids did either, but it was a great source of scandalous amusement for sixth graders the entire year, and I even found myself getting caught up in the hype a bit. Count after count surfaced of older brothers or friends who had experienced the hand of Mr. Gerber.

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I still remember the first day of seventh grade art. Everyone walked into the classroom with great trepidation, stifled grins and sideways glances. Nobody wanted to sit at the front. Mr. Gerber certainly possessed unfortunate characteristics that undoubtedly fed the fire. First of all, his name was Willard Gerber. If he had been named Rob Thomas or Colton Ford or Sean Penn, things wouldn't have been blown quite so much out of proportion. He had a long, severe nose, huge square glasses, a nasal voice and a slight lisp. Most days he wore polyester smocks in olive, mustard, and burgundy tones, and he drove an old Dodge Dart around town all by himself, looking not unlike a sad toad. He seemed to be an outcast among the faculty of the junior high, and I wondered from time to time if he had any friends at all.

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The manner in which kids treated him was appalling. They mocked him to his face, made detestable jokes about him behind his back yet loud enough so he could hear, and even taunted him with slurs that made me squirm. He seemed to just ignore it. He just took it, and taught his lessons.

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Often he needed help in the supply room to prepare for projects. He gave each student an opportunity to help, some accepted, and some declined with sheepish troublemaker grins. I accepted. I worked in the supply room for my allotted week, and of course, Mr. Gerber was nothing but professional in his interactions with me. Nevertheless, I was recipient to the usual teasing that came along with helping in the supply room. "So how did you like sucking Mr. Gerber's dick? I'll bet you liked it," they would sneer.

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Despite it all, Mr. Gerber was an outstanding art teacher. He was precise, methodical, encouraging, and downright talented. Each student produced an array of art projects using a variety of elements, each student was successful. And somehow, in spite of the taunting, he managed to maintain decent classroom discipline.

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Surprisingly enough, I didn't give that much thought to Mr. Gerber and his plight, probably because I was preoccupied with my own. But now, reflecting on the past, I ask myself, did Mr. Gerber go about each and every day with a heavy heart brought on by hatred, lies, and inhumane treatment? Did he love teaching so much that he just put up with the abuse? Did the administration know anything about these things? Did parents? Did anyone do anything to stop it all? Or, perhaps there actually was some kind of truth to all the rumors. Maybe he got away with crimes because in the early 80's not as much was done about inappropriate teacher-child interactions. It could be that I am missing a very critical part of the story.

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From my perspective, Mr. Willard Gerber was a victim of cruelty perpetuated by brutal young teenagers with a mob mentality. Perhaps they got away with it because the other adults at the time were too uncomfortable to address the topic, much less do anything about it.

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When I reached high school, Mr. Gerber took an early retirement, and I never heard anything more about him. But every once in a while, I would see him around town, driving his Dodge Dart in a polyester smock.

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Whatever became of Mr. Gerber?

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My Grandma's Rocking Toilet and Such

She was the sweetest, kindest woman I've ever known.

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She shaved her face weekly. She had whiskers like my dad.

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She was very short. 4 feet, 8 inches tall.

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Her husband, my grandpa, was 6 feet 4 inches tall.

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She constantly smelled of old urine.

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She always sent me five dollars on my birthday, even when I was a grown up.

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She worked in potato cellars most of her adult life.

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She had nine children within a 22 year span.

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Her idea of washing dishes was filling the sink with luke-warm water, dumping the dishes in, pulling them out, and putting them in the drying rack. No scrubbing of any kind involved.

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She and I wrote letters back and forth to each other nearly every month until I was a grown-up.

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She wore polyester. Lots of it. Polyester captures smells.

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She had an oozing sore on her arm that did not heal for two years.

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She colored her own hair varying shades of orange. Often she did not rinse out the colorant very well, and since she was balding I could often see crusty chunks of hair dye on her scalp.

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She did her wash at a laundromat every week until she was 60, when my grandpa broke down and bought her a mini washer. Five years later, a mini dryer.

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Speaking of laundromats, once on the way to the laundromat I was riding in the back of her ancient Cadillac and as she turned a corner, the door I was sitting next to flew open and I would have smacked the pavement except that I managed to grab the handle of the door and screamed, "Grandmaaaaaaa!!!!!!"

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Her children range from extremely strange to pretty much normal--they run the gamut. My father falls into the moderately strange category. Okay. I take that back. He falls into the extremely strange category.

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She never had an unpleasant thing to say about anyone or to anyone, except my grandfather. And the meanest thing she ever said to him, in a shrill, whiny voice, was,

"Oh, Rossssssssss, it did nooooooot! Oh, Rosssssssss, it wasn't eitherrrrrrrrr. Oh, Rosssssssss, it was tooooooooo."

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Her house was the filthiest house in America. The entire interior of the house was coated with a grimy build-up that smelled bad and wouldn't wash off. We couldn't wait to go home to our own filthy house. And that was really saying something!

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Her toilet constantly overflowed, and it wasn't fastened to the uneven ground that it sat on. So it rocked. Yes, my grandmother had a rocking toilet. This gave me intense toilet-overflowing-phobia. And dislike of rocking toilets.

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She served potatoes at every lunch and every dinner.

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She died the weekend I was in the middle of a big move. I didn't get to go to her funeral.

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Stream of Consciousness Blogging: Mafia Wars and Dog Pee

One of my dogs peed in our closet again. She does that every once in a while. Why? Why??? Ninety nine percent of the time she is very good and goes outside. But every so often. . . the closet. Is she mad at us? Marking her territory? Making a statement? Come on, all you dog experts out there, help me out. And how can I get her to stop? Keep in mind that this is the same dog that has coprophobia.

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Mafia Wars: Love it or hate it? Play it or not? While I have never tried it, I suppose I can't knock it. But when I sign on to Facebook I must admit that it is a bit annoying seeing nothing but a bunch of Mafia Wars junk all over the place. Plus I have the sneaky suspicion that some people just want me to be their friend so I can maybe be on their Mafia Wars team. Am I right? Now, I know that some of you play Mafia Wars. But is that really the point of Facebook? I'm just a little Facebook newbie so I'm sure I'm just way out of line. You can tell me to shut up if you want.

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Have you ever slept in and then woken with a start, looking at the clock and screaming, "Aaaaaaa! I'm late for my nap!"? I had a roommate once who did that every so often and he cracked me up. He was the best roommate I ever had; boy did I have some DOOZIES.

*He and I just reconnected through Facebook. That's right.*

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