Crazy how these foxes just roam around like a common house-cat!

Magic......and yet so many haven't experienced it across the pond!

Dear Ether, 

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw a fox for the first time roaming the streets in London.  To me, a fox was an animal you saw in a forest or a cartoon.  I never thought I would ever come face to face with one—especially one so bold as to stare me straight in the eye and then go back to rifling through the trash as if we were equals in this concrete jungle.  I was slightly afraid that a fox might want me for dinner, but my mates said that they could care less.  In fact, if I came too close, they would scuttle away.  I learned very quickly that the fox was as common as a cat patrolling the streets around the neighborhood.  

And just as I had been surprised by a fox being as common as a roaming house pet, I was surprised when I learned that certain things DIDN’T exist in ol’ Blighty that I took for granted in California.  English gent and I moved into a flat with a typical Victorian bay window that was bright and sunny (well, when the sun actually shone).  I told my folks that we’d finally moved up in the world (literally—we’d been living in a basement flat before) and they sent a hummingbird feeder to attract the lovely creatures so we would have a delightful view.  When I attached it to the outside of the window and proudly showed gent my handy work, he laughed.  He told me that hummingbirds didn’t exist in England!  I couldn’t believe it.  It was so foreign to me because I had grown up in a place where the sound of their buzzing wings and their iridescent bodies were so common. I was shocked to hear that many of my English peers had never seen one before.   I kept the damned feeder up for nostalgia’s sake, but it made me really think about how big the world is and how many things out there that I will never see that are magnificent.  

When English gent came to Los Angeles, we sat outside on the patio where we have a beautiful Cape Honeysuckle tree.  Its orange blossoms, though not fragrant, are vibrant and plentiful and are shaped like trumpets.  In the middle of lazy chatter, I heard the familiar buzzing of wings only a hummingbird makes.  I told English gent to quickly look over at the honeysuckle.  There, like a baby helicopter, it hovered.  He couldn’t believe its little body and long beak darting from bloom to bloom.  It’s chest reflected jewel tones of ruby and emerald in the sun.  He thought it magnificent.  

I love to travel and to discover.  And I hope that I will get a chance to jump back startled and then bemused by a fox like I did in London or have the same wide-eyed wonderment that English gent did when he spied the hummingbird. 

How vast a world we live in, eh? 

Dedicatedly yours, 

—One of 365

"Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world." George Bernard Shaw

Dear Ethers, 

Often times when I’m lying in bed thinking, I’ll leave the window open and cover myself up in the duvet.  I like the cool breeze on my face while my body is swathed in the rich down.  Today in Los Angeles we had very heavy winds.  It was the first sign of fall. Crackling leaves dragged their dead forms down the street making scratching noises as they flew pass.  The trees shook and swayed and crows squawked their horrid cry while picking the newly laid seeds in the fertilizer often laid just before Halloween.  I stared out my window while all this was happening, warm under my blanket, only my face exposed to the day outside, and I breathed everything in, squinting whenever a ray of sun peeked through a branch.   

This is the same thing I’ve been doing since I was a little girl.  It’s strange to me that I’ve been doing this in the same bed, through the same window and past the same tree; just a different date and an older body.  I never thought I’d be on the brink of 30 staring out this window pondering, waiting for another winter to come.  You know what’s funny? I never thought I’d ever BE 30.  I remember being in a bowling alley with my parents and there were a bunch of adults and college kids.  They seemed SO old.  I thought I’d never live to see that age.  And you know what, they were younger than I am today. 

But it’s crazy.  As the years go by, they go by so much faster.  My parents are in their late 60’s, the Big Apple Beauty is almost 70 (my god—she always seemed ageless) and the car my parents bought me for getting into college (that I still so vividly remember driving for the first time) is almost 11 years old.  How does time escape us?  My grandmother, who is 93, said that you look in the mirror at 25 and the next minute you’re her age (if you’re lucky)–that’s how quickly things go.  And the scary part is that things from your youth only seem like yesterday.  

Being human is such an odd condition.  It’s something I’ve never really gotten my hands around.  Someone took a picture of me about 8 years ago looking out my said window—they caught me with the sun in my eyes.  My pupils were lit by the sun—they looked like illuminated oak floors with a spray of black lines breaking through the wood.  I remember very clearly what I was thinking in that picture.  That I couldn’t believe another sunset was happening. Do you know that your eyes stay the same size as they were when from the day that you were born?  I’ve always had really big eyes.

I cannot tell the future.  I cannot fix the past.  I can wish, but I often find that futile. It’s nighttime now.  The wind is blowing heavily and I’ve shut the window because of the chill.  I’ll wake again tomorrow and spend a few minutes of the morning staring at the sky.  I’ll collect my thoughts.  It’ll be a new day.  New leaves will fall from trees and be blown down the street scratching away into oblivion and I wonder what my day will be like.  What will hit me next? What memory will fall into my mind?  And I’ll wrap myself tight in my duvet and ponder, feeling the breeze on my face seeing life’s clock ticking through each leaf that does a pirouette to the floor.

Dedicatedly yours, 

—One of 365

What a HUNK! Notice me Charles....me...the girl through the screen...c'mon...you're staring right at me. UGH! You just missed me and caught sight of that Camilla woman. Shame. Now I'm doomed to be a nobody for the rest of my life and you get to play polo and have servants while I get to look for work and earn a pittance but pay 30% taxes so you can travel in a Bentley! BRILLIANT! Oh Charlie. It could have been us.

Dear Ethers,

Tonight I am going to an event where I’m meeting a Prince.  I can’t tell you anything about the red carpet itself (ARGHHH) but that’s not really what the post is about anyway.  It’s about the idea of royalty and a girl who just doesn’t understand the significance of its importance.

For days I’ve been receiving details about security, how to present myself to him when we meet.  Oh and his biography (AKA: a dissertation).  Ethers, you have to remember that I am going to be also interviewing celebrities that would be considered Hollywood royalty—people much more famous and significant than this blue blooded gentleman.  And you know what—all I’ve had to do is IMDB for research–easy.

Growing up as an American I’ve never understood monarchies.  I suppose I understood the tradition, but I never understood the money that they cost and the opulence that they lived in just to do…………what exactly?  I know there are a lot of royalists.  Though having lived in England, it tends to be the older generation that likes the tradition rather than the younger folks.  We just don’t get Liz and Charlie and Hot Ginge and Wills.  Yes, they bring a lot of money in for tourism and that’s great.  But, does that really compensate for the money they cost the taxpayer?  I want to go to China White’s for free and have my Chanel bag stuffed full of 50 pound notes from the taxes of the cleaner on Piccadilly Circus buying me Grey Goose on the rocks all night.  I want my face on porcelain sold in shops around tourist attractions so that people can admire me.  Why…because……well……..why?

I’m not just picking on England.  I just know the monarchy best there.  I really think it’s ALL so ridiculous globally.  I mean, look at the royal families in Saudi Arabia.  They literally have dolphins brought in for parties to be a novelty in their pools where they die afterwards from the chlorine.  They live so opulently, while most of the country is so poor that they wear boiler suits in 100 degree weather fixing roads for $1 an hour.   There are people living in such horrible conditions–in slums and Council Estates.  People who need rehab and don’t have the money.  But, the queen has a “Diamond as Big As The Ritz” that could probably pay for hundreds of her subjects to seek the help they need.  Yet it sits in a vault getting steamed every so often by a royal gem cleaner (another expense) amongst the other masses of jewels she probably doesn’t even know she has.

Monarchies are not today what they were once were.  Elizabeth the 2^nd ain’t no Elizabeth the 1^st and we know it.  So why the hell do we back out of rooms and bow to these old birds?  Why do lords and ladies get estates and benefits that hard-working folks don’t?

So I’ve been instructed that I must curtsy and when introduced say “It is a pleasure to meet you, your Highness.”  I’ve had to practice this several times with a straight face and then without stuttering because I just can’t spit it out.  Classy, right?  It’s wrong of me not to embrace that this is the way this country operates and I have to accept this man for who he is.  I guess running through my veins is the blood of an American with the history of men who signed the Declaration of Independence—a veritable death warrant for a democracy so they could break free from the reigns of a king or a queen.

I know I should be looking at tonight as novel and fun.  And I will—it will all be looked at with a grain of salt.  But in that moment when he comes to me, and I have to curtsy—it will be very serious.  That’s when it becomes real and that’s why this idea came to my mind for a post.

I’m sure a lot of you are going to defend royalty or maybe agree with me about the foolishness of kings and queens.  There are many people who would kill to be in my shoes tonight and would see it as an absolute honor to even touch this mans hands.  I’m just looking at the bigger picture.  The idea of whether or not royalty is a rotting appendage of society.  I’d love to hear your comments and thoughts about this topic.

LOL.  I’m just imagining him showing up in ermine, a crown and shoes with a diamond buckles.  I’m sure he’ll probably be wearing Armani.  Anyway….until then…..I must practice……..so………..how does this sound………….. “It is a pleasure to meet you, your (eeeeeeeeeeek) Highness?”  Not too bad, right?  I hope he doesn’t notice my chewed fingernails.  I have been going through a lot lately.  But I’m only human—and you know what, at the end of the day, DNA-wise, so is he.

Dedicatedly yours,

—One of 365

"Death is always, under all circumstances, a tragedy, for if it is not then it means that life has become one." Theodore Roosevelt

Dear Ethers,

I was there.  I was in New York City.  I was 21 years old and had a plane ticket booked to leave out of JFK on American Airlines for September 13^th to London.   

Tuesday.  I remember the ceaseless noise of sirens.  Trash floating in the street.  The city a barren wasteland.  

Papers plastered everywhere on every possible surface with faces and names scrawled underneath begging for any information about loved ones.  College kids my age.  I stared at a picture of a boy.  It was a recent photo.  It said he was on a high floor.  I knew he was dead.  He looked so alive in the photo.  Handsome, even.  But the shaky pen on the flyer begged for information.  His picture was one of thousands on walls, on lamp posts, across the city.  I fingered these papers.  Hopeless cries for help, dirty and dusty from other fingerprints that had done exactly what I had just done—tried to touch their souls. 

I sat on a train where a couple had a list of hospitals that they were checking off looking for their daughter (this is what I could gather from their conversation).  It was grim.  They had many tick marks with X’s and not many hospitals left.  

The TV was relentless with coverage.  No one looked each other in the eye and if you did catch someone, it was a glazed over stare or a reddened, tear filled orb, exhausted from crying. 

No one understood.  The world had changed forever. 

I walked passed a firehouse that had candles burning for the men they lost.  

People clapped on the streets when a police car or a fire truck blazed by.

American flags were everywhere—it was a sea of red, white and blue.  But mainly blue. 

8 years.  Those interns would have been college graduates.  Some men and women might have been retired.  Many of those people might have been married and have had children.  

It used to haunt me.  The vision of that man who jumped out of the window.  What must he have been thinking?  Can you imagine having to decide to burn alive or jump to your death?  All he did was go into work. 

And then what about the woman who called in sick that day and never recovered? She still shakes everyday and is on disability from post-traumatic stress syndrome.  She believed it was her day to die and never forgave herself for not being in that building. 

I was one of 9 people who sat on the American Airlines 777 plane that finally got clearance to leave on September 19^th, 2001.  We all hoped that 777 was an omen.  I was grateful to leave.  I couldn’t bear the heaviness in the air anymore.  I couldn’t breathe from the pain and the loss.  

Being an American on September 10^th 2001 and being an American on September 11, 2001 was a transformation that will resonate with me for the rest of my life.  

I won’t say anything that anyone else hasn’t today.  But I felt it was essential to say my piece and honor those who perished.  Those who were strapped to their seats in horror when they hit the Pentagon.  Those who were brave and fought to their last breath to try and save their lives and their fellow man by rushing the pilot of that United plane.  Those who died in the towering inferno that was the World Trade Center.  The brave servicemen who went into that building knowing that they probably wouldn’t come out alive and put their lives aside to try and protect and serve.  

I am not a religious person.  It’s days like September 11^th that made me give up on that a LONG time ago.  But for those who perished and were pious—and for those whose families believe, I want to say that I hope that your loved ones are in heaven and are at peace.  And if I had a wish for you today it would be that you could touch those who you lost again and say good-bye one last time.  To have one last day.  To have it be September 10^th, 2001 again. 

Dedicatedly yours,

—One of 365