Marcee Stiltner 1948-2017

My mom died two months ago. She suddenly got very sick in mid-January, and was quickly re-diagnosed with the cancer she had managed to fight off for a couple of good years. Only it had spread to all the places you don't want cancer to spread to. The plane ticket she bought for me to fly to DC so I could go the Women's March was changed into a last minute ticket up to Olympia, where I spent almost two weeks by her side with my younger sister. She died at home in hospice care, which is where I hear most people want to die, but very few actually do.

My mom refused further treatment for her cancer, a decision she was completely clear on and my sister and I had both been prepared for long before. My mom believed in quality of life. She was a mental health advocate her entire professional life which informed her choices about a lot of things and shaped her character. For her, getting treatment that may extend her life by a few months while at the same time making her so sick that she would not be able to work and enjoy her family wasn't even a choice. It was amazing how long it took her oncologist to understand that. He had all kinds of life-extending plans for her. She wasn't having any of it. And she didn't. She died quickly, which many have told me is a mercy, but I can tell you is just a total shock to the system.

My sister and I took several weeks to clean out my mom's house, with help from friends and family. Our mom's actual living quarters were pretty easy to deal with-- aside from that peculiarly American habit of buying paper goods in extreme bulk and her obsession with office supplies, my mom was not a collector or hoarder of things. She was very neat and organized by habit, with contained areas of chaos, mostly isolated in a junk drawer or a laundry room cabinet. While I was growing up we moved so many times to follow her career that I think it gave everyone in my family an allergy to tchotchkes. She did have a lot of jewelry which I was moved to meticulously collect in 3-inch plastic baggies, one baggie for each item and pair, and store in a bin. The jewelry is not valuable nor to my taste, but I can't give it away. Not yet.

It was my mom's sewing studio that tripped us up. My mom was a self-taught master seamstress. She has sewn since she was a teenager and she has always sewn, no matter what, no matter how busy or overwhelmed with work or raising kids on her own. I remember a period of time when I was in elementary school and she was briefly unemployed, and I often came home in the afternoon to find her sewing.  Next to reading, it was her main hobby in life and she never got bored with it.

The home she has owned for the last 15 years has a large basement where she finally had the dream sewing studio she always wanted. She had four sewing machines: a regular machine that most seamstresses have, a serger machine, a quilting machine, and an embroidery machine. She had a professional iron that I barely knew how to turn on, and a custom made ironing board that was longer and wider than a regular board. She had a cutting table that dominated the space, with a huge cutting mat so you could line up your fabric perfectly. One wall was lined with racks that held thread of every color. The opposite wall was lined with shelving that held over a dozen bins of fabric, ordered by type, color, and print. Other bins that held scores of zippers of every length and color. More bins that held sewing notions. Even more bins that held stuff for fun sewing projects. One giant bin of just patterns. My mom was an early adopter of the internet (she was the first person I knew to install Prodigy and start surfing the web) and was always trolling online looking for the latest sewing gadgets and tools, and those gadgets and tools were everywhere in her studio. I can't even begin to list them all.

My mom made everything, all the clothes she wore, down to her own tailored slips, for most of her adult life. Women and men always asked where she got her clothes, and she loved telling people that she made them herself. She was a professional woman through most of her career and made the most beautiful suits: tailored jackets, skirts, pants, blouses.  She copied the first designer jeans in the 80's, making her own Calvin Klein's that looked exactly like the real thing, missing only the Calvin Klein label.  She made her own t-shirts and shorts. She sewed her own bathing suits. When jogging became a thing she sewed up her own jogging outfit and actually jogged 3 or 4 times. She made a floor length fur coat made from fake fur and took shit from people on street who thought it was real.  In my closet I have an exact copy of a Chanel jacket she made, down to the quilted lining and gold chain that runs around the inside hem. It is a work of art, yet my mom never thought she was an artist or even particularly creative. She just like to sew. A lot.

My mom once rented a RV with one of her friends and they drove to a national park where they sewed all day in beautiful surroundings. She was a little bit crazy when it came to sewing.

Later, she started making other things: quilts, wall hangings, curtains, toiletry bags, throw pillows, oven mitts, purses, wallets. Slippers. Cell phone covers. Laptop bags. When she got her embroidery machine she would sew something up and then embroider it. When she got her quilting machine she would sew, quilt, and embroider. When she was diagnosed with cancer the first time she made bunch of cute hats in anticipation of losing her hair during chemo, and then she didn't lose any hair and gave them all away.  She made ridiculous things too: she created an item she called a "charger cozy"-- a colorful sleeve that slipped over a cell phone cord so it would be more difficult to leave behind when you were traveling. She had little interest in buying anything that could be made. Sewing was more fun than shopping.

My mom mostly liked to sew for herself, and for me and my sister, and she liked making gifts for friends. She had no enthusiasm in doing it for money. She tried a couple of times but she said it took the fun right out of it. She made me a dress for Pioneer Day when I was 7 with a matching bonnet that I continued to wear for everyday attire. I loved that outfit, especially the bonnet, and refused to take off even for a formal portrait with my sister, which led to a huge throw down in the portrait studio (I won). She made the dresses that we wore to dances in high school. She made the dresses that we wore to our college graduations. She made my wedding dress and my sister's bridesmaid dress and of course, her own mother-of-the-bride dress. She made the aprons I wear to work every day. She sent me sheets embroidered with mine and my husband's name along the top. She made me a silk "sleep sack" so I would not have to be tortured by low thread count sheets when I travel, a personality quirk of mine she thought showed a specific weakness of character, but made me a sleep sack nonetheless. (It's not that I have such refined taste, I just have very sensitive skin.)

My mom taught me how to sew in a two week marathon of sewing at her house when I was about 21.  Up until that time I had no interest in sewing. My sister and I grew up trying to entertain ourselves in fabric shops, and I can tell you there is very little that is entertaining in a fabric shop unless you want to buy fabric. My mom and I did sewing marathons almost every time we got together for a visit, and she did the same thing with my sister. It was a great way to spend time together: my mom would fix all of my mistakes and I had new clothes at the end of it.

There was a period of time where I was making all of my clothes too, but I lacked the meticulous skill my mom brought to sewing. I liked to take shortcuts, skip reading the directions, fudge on steps. I didn't have patience. I started sewing again in the past couple of years, and finally my mom's lessons came through: take your time, do it right. I will never be as obsessed as she was with sewing, I have my own obsessions to tend to, but I enjoy the process now in a way I didn't before.

In recent years as rhuemetoid arthritis started causing pain in her hands she slowed down with sewing and started wearing store bought clothes more often, which always profoundly disturbed me. It was a small sign that she had to give up something she loved. And it was just a slight loss of dignity, of being forced to flip through racks for mass-produced clothing like the rest of us. As I've watched people age, I've realized that everything you love becomes everything you eventually lose, sometimes slowly, sometimes more quickly. Trying to hold on to your dignity through this process  is one of the most difficult things of all.

Cleaning out her sewing space seemed like an insurmountable task. There were days where I couldn't even go down there because it was so overwhelming. It was like a fabric bomb had gone off. My mom gave us permission to throw away every item in her home, except for the poetry she wrote (she's written poetry since she was a child), which she wanted my sister and I to keep. While I had little problem boxing up most of her home for Goodwill, her sewing stuff was another thing. My sister and I divided up the machines and some gadgets, her best friend hauled off a lion's share of fabric and supplies, and that still left a ton of stuff. We felt it all needed to go to people who would appreciate it, not a scrap would go to Goodwill. And we did it, down to the last box filled with cotton quilting fabric and quilting books which went to a quilter friend. We probably could have headed home two weeks earlier if not for the sewing studio.

I can write about my mother for a very long time. I was a terrible, terrible teenager, to the point where my mom kicked me out for a while because I refused to go to a drug rehab (I didn't need it, not really), but even during those times I always loved her, always felt loved by her, and always knew I could count on her. I know many people are not as lucky as I was with my mom. I have always been able to take her unconditional love and support for granted. She has helped me through every difficult period in my life, never telling me what to do, but helping me figure it out. She knew everything about me, I stopped keeping secrets from her once I moved out of the house at 17. She never judged me. Or if she did she kept it absolutely to herself.

My mom had many stellar qualities, but her ability to help me and my sister prepare for her death and talk about it openly was one of the last amazing things she did for us. My sister and I wondered if we were too open with her about our anxiety about taking care of her at the end of her life; my sister could get paid family leave for 3 months but I would have to improvise. We were semi-panicked at the idea that she would be in hospice beyond our ability to personally care for her, dreaded the idea of draining her account or having to sell her house to continue her care. But she kept telling us she wouldn't last more than a week, even though she was talking and laughing with her friends and making jokes, so we didn't take her totally seriously. But she was right. We brought her home for hospice on a Wednesday, and she died on the following Sunday.

My mom did a lot for me, but unfortunately she could not prepare me for what life now feels like without her. There is no wrapping your head around that until it actually happens. People who have been through it tell me it gets better, but I don't know what that looks or feels like, I just try to hold on to the idea that I might one day feel better. I try to be grateful that I had two weeks with her before she died, but she was only 69 and I wish I could have had another 20 years.

You can read her obituary here.

process is everything

I'm doing something a little weird right now, which is reading Thomas Keller's The French Laundry cookbook cover to cover.  The French Laundry is a Napa Valley restaurant about an hour away from where I live. I've never eaten there. I will eat there someday, and I know people who have eaten there and talked to them about the experience. The French Laundry creates two 9-course tasting menus every day for their customers, each course very small, and from what I've heard it takes hours to go  through the courses. The food is incredibly labor-intensive and made out of the highest quality ingredients, so the base price is $270 a person. It's not a casual meal and they are always booked out two months in advance.

Running a very high-end restaurant and a pottery studio has one major issue in common: every day you go in, and you create from scratch something over and over again. The major challenge is to not become bored, or to hurry through it with your mind elsewhere, or to become deadened to the process and just create by rote. All of these things have happened to me over the years, and when I'm there, I don't even like my job anymore and I feel like a failure. As an artist, this is the most painful place to be. Thomas Keller writes about maintaining passion for the endlessly repeated acts he performs in the kitchen, and he does this by giving each step his full attention. When you give something your full attention, no matter how mundane, you have the opportunity to be filled not with boredom and the urge to rush, but with a sense of wonder and pleasure with your process.

I know this, but still, I can find myself in the studio, banging stuff out as quickly as I can and just trying to get through the day. Reading Keller's cookbook has re-focused me in the studio and made me once again realize that the finished product is worthless to me if I don't enjoy the process.

Both potters and cooks know there are all of these steps that happen in between the idea of what you want to make, and then the finished product. Most of the time what you have at the end is not something that is perfect, or exactly how you imagined it. But this does not necessarily decrease its value.  Thomas Keller writes in his book that we must acknowledge there is no such thing as perfect food--or pottery-- only the idea of it. But that doesn't mean we don't strive for perfection anyway. We continue to try for one purpose: to make people happy.

When I read the recipes that Keller has created for the French Laundry, I am filled with wonder. He takes each ingredient and brings out its full essence, not by some kind of magic but by fully appreciating what that ingredient is and treating it with his full attention and respect. He understands what each ingredient can do and in his process, he creates a peak experience. In the flurry of running a successful pottery business, I've put aside labor-intensiveness in favor of efficient production, and frankly, that bores me to death.  Keller is inspiring me to not be just about production, but to focus once again on process. Slow down, take my time, and create pieces that receive my full attention. Even when I am reading a recipe in the French Laundry cookbook, I can find my mind drifting and my eyes skimming over the text. When I notice this, I re-focus and start over. And in the studio, when I find myself wondering how soon I can be done with one thing so I can move on to the other, I take a breath, and re-focus.

big brother don't lie

One of my oldest friends in California is JT. I moved in next door to him in Santa Cruz when I was 18 and renting my first apartment. We became fast friends because we had a mutual love for beer, the beach, and bbq pork burritos. JT is one of the few people who I know for sure reads every blog posting I write, and complains when I haven't posted. I went to go visit him last weekend in Santa Cruz and he told me my blog has lately been "really boring!"

JT is like the older brother I wish I had but never did, so when he says something like that he could be messing with my head-- because that's what big brothers like to do-- or he could be telling me the truth. I quickly scanned some recent posts and I admit there is a lot of whining and feeling a bit sorry for myself. I think it's fascinating stuff, but it's possible others are not as entertained. I started to write a post the other day titled, "Collapsing under the weight of 1,000 fucked-up cake plates", but decided to stop myself from continuing the theme after talking to JT. It's possible that even I am getting bored with whining.

Today was the first day in a long time-- I'm talking months-- that I got to make some stuff that was not directly related to my wholesale business. The plan that's been in the works for a while is that Sara will deal with wholesale and I will make Art capital A. And receive visitors into my kingdom while eating bon-bons and getting a shoulder massage. And also, getting fanned with palm fronds by the palace slaves-- I mean interns.

So today I fooled around with my porcelain and here is some of what I made:
I threw away most of what came out today, but at least it wasn't boring!

the learning curve

The five-figure order finally left the station this week. On Monday, I took the three-hour drive up to the factory to give the final seal of approval before shipment. After the last box was sealed, Hector and I promptly drank a bottle of Patron tequila to celebrate. It wasn't the biggest bottle of tequila one can buy; it wasn’t the smallest either.

I’ve been getting lots of supportive and amazing emails in the last weeks as the five-figure order has hit bumps, slowly derailed, gone off the tracks, and almost burst into flames. I haven’t been posting about every twist and turn and permeation the order has taken because it’s basically the Melrose Place of pottery: every little messed-up thing that you think couldn’t possibly happen… happened. I had a draft going where I detailed everything that went wrong, but it’s too long and agonizing for even me to read. I will happily send a copy to the hardcore who love watching train wrecks.

The best thing about pushing this order through was realizing the power I have to utilize some amazing resources. Of course I have my man Hector at the factory, my main resource. Not only is he the very best at what he does, he cares about me and my pottery. When the first glaze came in and didn’t work, and then the second custom batch didn’t work either, he didn’t hit the panic button even once. He worked with it: thinned it out, double-dipped it, fired it to a higher temperature, talked to the glaze tech, and in the end totally made it work. A lot of people could have said, “Get back to me when you work it out”, and that would have been totally legit. I don’t pay Hector enough to deal with the problems that came up, but he dealt with it.

And then there are the guys at Spectrum Glaze. They created the original glaze the client wanted, but what I didn't know until I ran more thorough tests is that this glaze turns a crazy color of blue where it gets thick. The final platter was supposed to be olive green. Of course, I didn’t run these tests until about 10 days before the order was supposed to ship, I was so confident I had a handle on everything. I was on vacation when I realized this glaze wasn’t going to cut it no matter what Hector did to it. I cried for about 5 minutes then called up the owner of Spectrum, Bob Arnfield. Within 48 hours his techs mixed up 4 batches of glaze they thought would meet my needs, photographed them, and sent me the results via email. By the time I got off vacation I had two batches of test glaze waiting for me at the studio. They shipped me 150 pounds of my choice glaze 2 days later via express mail and gave me a steep discount. Despite the problems we ran into with this glaze too, in the end it did the job and I will sing the praises of Spectrum until the day I die.

And of course I could not have gotten through this without my amazing husband, friends and people who read this blog. I got calls, supportive emails, and lots of bitch time as I agonized over every aspect of this order that did no turn out as I expected. Thank you.

When was celebrating with Hector it was half-hearted; I was still feeling doomed, certain the client would send my leaf platters right back to me and yank my five-figure fee. I was so out of touch with reality that I couldn't even begin to see how beautiful the platters actually are. On the drive home the next day, I had to repeat all kinds of mantras to keep myself from driving off the road, then play really loud aggressive music to turn down the noise in my head. I grumped at Sara when I got to my studio, but thankfully we are very much alike and she blew me off. The next day I had some time to myself to work; orders are pretty much wrapped up and I guess I’m supposed to be flying to Japan in a week. I made some stuff, and my feeling of doom lifted. Today, I made more stuff and almost lost myself in it. I think I remember that feeling now: it's my version of happiness and it's the best thing I know.

a friend's success

I'm on vacation, so it's great to get to write about what my friends are up to with their work instead. My oldest friend Waleed is on elle.com today, with a feature about his work for Cynthia Steffe. I'm so proud of him!

beloved teacher

I recently communicated with my favorite teacher in the world, Mr. Hobson. I call him Mr. Hobson because he was my fifth grade teacher, and there is no way in the world I could ever dream of calling him by his first name. Mr. Hobson is a mythic figure in my household and family: the perfect teacher that both my sister and myself were lucky enough to have.

Mr. Hobson was very important to me for one reason: he made me feel like I was the most special and smartest kid in the classroom. I had just come off a really bad year in fourth grade, where my teacher, Mrs Foote-- yes that was her name and yes, that was the appropriate name-- constantly harped on me for not paying attention, not following directions, "living in my own world" (what does that mean anyway?), and spending an abnormal amount of time with my nose buried in a book. I had just started earning what would be years of low grades in the public schools, and while I knew I was not stupid, I was starting to get the idea that maybe I was not completely "normal" and I was going to have a difficult road ahead of me paved with Mrs. Foote types. Above is a recent picture of Mr. Hobson with students in Japan.

On top of this, I was a very shy kid. Now, in this wonderful life I live now, my dear friends have no way of imagining me as shy, but I was. Painfully so. I was very sensitive and lacked coping skills, other than to be hyper-aware of everything happening around me and totally self-conscious. Mr. Hobson thought I was great just the way I was. He also thought it was great I read so much, and he was amused by my obsession and incessant chatter about gymnastics, the only thing that could pull me away from my books. He told me recently his most vivid memory of me is sitting in the splits during recess, while reading a book. He let me read as much as I wanted throughout the day, skip ahead on material that bored me, and express myself during class, which usually came in the form of hysterical giggles. My shyness, which I didn't really start getting over until my late teens, started cracking during Mr. Hobson's class, and it began with these giggles that I could not contain, usually in the middle of his lessons.

Mr. Hobson once busted me cheating during a spelling test. I never bothered with any kind of studying, ever. Anything else I didn't give a damn about, but in spelling I wanted the perfect "100". I was a champion speller-- that reading thing-- and words were the only thing I never had a problem with. In the written form, that is. To me, cheating in school wasn't a big deal. I viewed school as jail time, and who cared how one got through it? The important thing was to graduate high school so you could get released and have a life. Mr. Hobson was utterly flummoxed that a child as smart, as bright as myself could ever cheat. He wasn't angry with me. If he yelled at me I would have cried and said I was sorry and then gone on to do the exact same thing during the next test. But his questioning me, not with anger, but with curiosity, was a challenging experience for me. Mr. Hobson said, "What kind of grade you get doesn't matter, it's what you are learning that matters. All you are doing is cheating yourself." That, of course, is the philosophy of a brilliant teacher. Suddenly, the cliched expression came to life for me and I understood what he was saying, actually felt ashamed for cheating and not just ashamed for getting caught. I also understood the "100" didn't really mean much when school held no significance to me.

Fifth grade was the first time in my life when I enjoyed school, looked forward to Mondays so I could see my beloved Mr. Hobson, and started figuring out what was important to me. While school rarely trumped gymnastics, I started placing value on what was in my mind and realizing not everyone could appreciate me or my outlook, but I was worthy in the larger world outside of my home.

When I was ten years old all I wanted in life was to be on the 1984 Olympic gymnastics team, but Mr. Hobson thought I was going to be a writer. I cracked my knee before I could manage the Olympics, and I'm obviously working on the writing, but I still adore Mr. Hobson. I do not think it is a coincidence that all my closest friends today are artists, teachers, or both. And I have a couple of lawyers in there too, gotta have someone watching my back!

a factory visit

The husband and I paid a visit to my man at the factory, Hector, to pick up some bisque that I needed for orders. Hector's company, Earth Needs, is located in Red Bluff, California. For the past year he's been making some of my pottery for me. I give him a piece that I've made, he makes a mold out of it, makes the piece, bisques it, and delivers it to me. I glaze the work and send it out to my stores. It's amazing. There is no way I could keep up with my wholesale orders if he wasn't doing that for me.

I had a hard time getting to the point where I felt comfortable having some of my work made out of molds. Five years ago I would have laughed in your face if you suggested I make some of my work in molds. I love to throw on the potter's wheel, I'm obsessed with it, and for me, that's what the fun is all about. But I had to get realistic about what I'm capable of actually producing. If I want to wholesale my work and get a lot of my pottery out there all over the country, I have to be able to make a consistent product that isn't sucking the lifeblood out of me. By that I mean spending all my creative juice making the same thing over and over again. I'm very fortunate to work with Hector; he's an artist himself, and a master mold maker. He understands my work and where I'm coming from, which is so important to me when I have someone producing my pottery. Here he is with some of the work he does on the side-- Hector designs big granite statues that are made in Asia and shipped over here for people's gardens, front gates, etc.

I am by far Hector's smallest client, which became even more apparent when I looked at the factory. The factory is very neat and clean, and each client has their own shelf where their molds are stored, and another shelf where finished bisque us stored. A lot of people have shelf after shelf packed with pottery and molds, and some of this pottery is going to some very big stores. My shelf was kind of tiny and looked sort of empty and lonely. But I don't care, I'm just happy Hector lets me hang around with my teeny tiny orders.

Most people have probably never heard of Red Bluff, California, because it's kind of in the middle of nowhere. But check out this view from one of the factory rooms! I doesn't get any better than this; a pottery factory in the middle of paradise:

efficiency, pt 2

Those dogwood flowers are getting cranked out right now, thanks to my new mold:
I got the mold on Thursday and immediately started pouring it, and have made enough flowers in two days for two of my dogwood bowls. Not terribly efficient because the mold turns out two flowers at a time, but My Man at the Factory, Hector, is going to make me 5 more of these molds and then it's going to be raining dogwood blossoms. I also got a little mold made of my birds:

I always refer to Hector as "My Man Hector" because he has been making molds for some of my work this past year and I am amazed at how good the work comes out and how skilled Hector and his crew are. I never have been into the idea of having my work molded, I just love throwing too much. But the first time I went to the New York Gift show last year and took a bunch of orders, I came home and threw everything and had blood blisters on my fingers from throwing so much. I'll suffer for my art as much as the next person, but this was ridiculous. I sat on Hector's waiting list for almost a year before he took me on as a client, and it's really great working with him. It also totally changes what kind of orders I can take. I'm working with a client right now who wants 300 leaf platters for a hotel. A year ago an order for 300 anything would have made me insane with worry about how to pull off a big order like that. With Hector on my team, I haven't lost even a second of sleep, it will be totally taken care of.

Back to pouring more dogwood blossoms...

new york

With the help of my friends-- Joanna who helped me glaze the remainder of my work, my fab husband who unloaded and reloaded kilns, Sidney who folded and stuffed my new brochure, Sara who packed my work, and Bronwyn who helped me get it to the FedEx-- I managed to get off to New York City without a hitch despite not having much use of my left arm. I have always said that I have the best friends and most amazing people in my life, and in an emergency like I had with my arm and trying to get ready for the New York trade show, it's great to be proven right again.

My arm at this moment is doing so much better. Very little pain and I am quickly regaining movement. I will be in New York for three weeks and I think by the time I get home I will be almost as good as new.

When I stay in New York I live with my dearest and oldest friend, Waleed, who has a great apartment in the Chelsea district, which is also the heart of the New York Gallery district. When I come to New York for the trade show, I usually stay an extra week or two so I have time to visit the galleries and museums, and visit with my circle of friends who live here. I also like to stick around for Fashion Week because Waleed, a clothing designer, always has a show and he also usually needs an Errand Girl (me) in the days leading up to the actual show.

Yesterday I went to the Japan Society to check out their exhibition of some contemporary Japanese potters. It's rare that I have time to check out pottery, and this was a wonderful exhibit to see. There were a few pieces I found especially inspiring, like Yagi Akira's work to the right here. I love to make nested forms, and I love the idea of nested forms that fit inside each other. I can't wait to get back to work and give it a shot! I also saw a set of 22 nested bowls, the smallest one thrown with a needle and a magnifying glass. At first I thought that it would have been a lot easier for the artist to just pinch it out, a tiny little bowl like that. But then I realized that the challenge is to throw each piece on the wheel to maintain the integrity of the set. I'm not as anxious to try throwing with a needle, but I love to think about someone else doing it.

sailing the bay

When Frank called me at my studio Friday afternoon and asked me to go sailing with him on Saturday, I had to say "yes". Frank bought this junky sailboat, the "Del Corazon", two years ago for $1800, docked it at the Berkeley Marina, and went to work restoring it. When a man buys a junky boat and says he's going to restore it, buys any junky thing and says he's going to restore it, the women around him will always doubt him. Women generally don't spend a lot of time restoring things. I know I love the idea of restoration, but the reality is I'd rather spend Saturday afternoons having tea parties with my girlfriends. Men, on the other hand, don't want to have tea parties on Saturday afternoon. In fact, they need somewhere to get away from the tea party. And so there you will find Frank working on his boat week after week, Andrew working on his VW's or bicycles, et cetera. When the men finally produce a restored product after a week, many months, or a couple of years, the women are delighted. So when Frank called me up to go sailing on his newly restored boat, I could only say yes.

Andrew was out of town that weekend, and Sidney was teaching a Saturday course, so it turned out to be just me and Frank and Florabelle the dog. The day was pristine, a real California fall day. Clear blue skies, a little searing edge on the temperature, and a breeze. Frank picked me up in his blue-smoke belching work van and very sweetly put a mat down over the layers of Peet's paper coffee cups and other effluvia of the past months. We laughed hysterically on the drive to the Marina as Frank menaced society in his usual fashion; buzzing joggers who have the nerve to jog in the road when there is a perfectly serviceable jogging path off the road, threatening a little kick dog and its cell-phone-talking-mercedes-driving-owner in the parking lot, nearly clipping another mercedes when the owner threw open his door without checking the rearview. I know I'm a bad influence on Frank because I find these things hilarious, which only encourages this behavior.

As Frank and I were readying the Del Corazon for sailing I asked him casually how many times he'd taken the boat out. Since I knew its maiden voyage was back in July, I figured it hadn't been out much. "Well..." said Frank, eyeing me out if the corner of his eye, "I've only taken it out twice so far".
"Okay", I said.
"Are you scared?" he asked.
"Of course not!" I said. We continued getting the boat ready as Frank gave me a rundown on terms and things I would be doing. I have sailed many times but usually in boats where I'm not expected to do much. This time was going to be very different since we were two on a 31-foot boat. I tried to absorb the information he was throwing at me and then asked, "Where did you learn how to sail?"
"Where?" Frank asked.
"Yeah, like did you grow up sailing or what?" I asked.
"Ummmm..." Frank said, choosing his words, "I'm just learning how to sail... on this boat".
"Oh", I said. Pause. "So you've really only sailed twice?" I asked.
"Yeah!" said Frank in this really positive way, like, "it's so much fun and here we are about to do it again!"
I sat with that for another minute. I really wasn't concerned about Frank's ability; Andrew is quite large and would happily kill anyone who brought harm to me, and my friends know it. Not to mention my sister who would scratch the perpetrator's eyes out. And my mom who would wail horribly at my funeral and make everyone wish they had never been born. I was actually way more concerned about my own ability. I know on a sailboat you have to move fast, and when I don't know exactly what I'm doing I have a hard time understanding English and following directions. The next question I asked him, "What inspired you to buy a sailboat when you don't know how to sail?"
"Well," said Frank, unwrapping the last of the jib sail (I think that's what he said it was called anyway), "I thought there would be a lot to learn", and if you know Frank, then that is the perfect answer.

We headed out into the Bay. It's Fleet Week in the Bay Area and the Blue Angels were going to be doing their thing over the water near the San Francisco marina. It was a big party on the water, tons of sailboats and raceboats and yachts. And sailboat races. And probably some race boat races too.

When the Blue Angels came out, I was so excited. I love air technology--jets, space shuttles, rockets--and the Blue Angels are so fast, they are completely silent. 10 seconds after they go by..."BOOOOOM!" I'm not into military stuff at all, and I think about the people around the world who have bombs dropped on them by these planes and whose homes are already on fire by the time they hear the jets go by. That said, human ingenuity never ceases to amaze me. It fucks with my head that it is used to hurt, maim, and kill, but I am impressed and thrilled to witness it nevertheless.

From where we were we saw the Blue Angels make an incredibly dramatic entrance over the Richmond hills, and then head over to the Marina area to do their stunts. I pointed and said to Frank, "I want to be over there". I wanted to be in the middle of the action. We sailed over and spent an hour or so dodging through boats as we watched the planes. A huge C-130 flew so low and so silently over the water, just yards above the tops of boats. The Blue Angels flew amazingly tight formations, peeling off, flying upside-down, and coming together again. Other jets flew straight up into the air, seemed to stall, and then twisted back down toward the bay, pulling out at the last second before hitting the water. I was actually steering the boat while Frank manned the sails and I finally had to say to him, "Tell me if I'm going to hit something because I can't take my eyes off these jets". I took a hundred pictures but the planes were so fast it was hard to get anything good.

Finally, the show was over. We set our course for Berkeley and I immediately became seasick. Frank gave me instructions on where not to puke, where I should puke if I were to puke, and then asked several times if I still felt like puking. I finally had to tell him to stop saying the word "puke" or I really would. He fed me some ginger candy and I fell asleep. When I woke up I felt well enough to pretend to puke on Frank's computer, eat the cupcake he'd been saving, and help steer the boat into harbor. On the map to the right you can see most of our course for the day as mapped by Frank's GPS, which is always strapped to his person. We are the green line. Can't wait to go again!