Allyson Johnson

A Piece of My Mind: Neighborhood

Fundraiser for Andra Young by Fiona Friedland : Devastating House Fire (gofundme.com)

“It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, a beautiful day for a neighbor. Would you be mine? Could you be mine?” 

When Fred Rogers sang about his neighborhood, he meant more than just “the people living near one another” as Merriam-Webster defines it.  In fact, the online dictionary gives circular definitions of the word – “A neighborly relationship”, and “the quality or state of being neighbors” , dancing around the meaning without coming close. 

But I know it when I see it.

I was visiting my son and his family, who live in the Lower Haight district of San Francisco.  Their front bay window looks out on the street, and as I watched I saw a hook-and-ladder fire truck zoom past, siren screaming.  My daughter-in-law returned from an errand and let us know that there was a fire just down the street and around the corner. “Lots of smoke, three or four fire trucks. I don’t think it’s anyone we know on Carmelita.”

My son checked the street.  “The fire trucks are still there.  Street’s closed.  No point in going to take a look; the firemen have enough to do.”

By the time we were preparing dinner, we knew that a “cute Victorian” several houses in on the alley was severely damaged, and the neighboring houses had some smoke damage but nothing serious.  No one had been injured, but the owner had lost her two cats, and she and her renter would need to find new shelter.

The next morning I spent time at my grand-daughter’s kindergarten, and then the three adults went for lunch at a neighborhood café where the owner greeted my son by name.  As we waited at our table several other people said hello, and the woman who lives in the downstairs flat came up to exchange news about the fire.

“The house is probably a total loss.  Too bad, all their stuff, and the rent from the lodger was probably the owner’s main income.  But there’s a GoFundMe started to help them out.  And someone has offered a two-bedroom apartment rental that’s just come vacant in the neighborhood, so they have a place to stay.”

My son checked the GoFundMe.  “It’s already up to $35,000!” he announced.   This was less than twenty-four hours after the fire had been extinguished.  As of the next Monday afternoon, almost five hundred people had chipped in to help with donations adding up to over $70,000.

Now that’s a neighborhood.

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My novel Fox Spirit is being published episodically on my sister site ajmccready.wordpress.com , starting February 27. You’re not too late to catch up!

Hard Facts

I love this country.  I get a little teary when I first see the American flag flying after a trip abroad, or when “The Star Spangled Banner” rings out over an Olympic podium or a baseball field.  My US passport is my most prized possession. I pay my taxes willingly as “The price one pays for freedom” per Ben Franklin.

Still, some facts are hard for me to face:

• The United States US has the shortest life expectancy of 21 developed nations – 77 years, compared to top-ranked Switzerland at 83 years. (per a Town Crier article 6/2/22)
• The United States has the highest infant mortality rate of the top 8 developed nations -5.9/1000, almost triple that of top-ranked Japan at 2.0 fatalities/1000 (World Health Organization)
• The United States has the least effective health-care system overall among 11 high-income countries, even though it spends the highest proportion of its gross domestic product -almost 17%- on health care. (based on % of population covered for core needs, life expectancy, infant mortality rates – the Commonwealth Fund). 
• The United States has the highest level of income inequality of the seven G7 countries, out-ranked world-wide only by Russia, India, and Brazil.  (Brink News, Credit Suisse Global Wealth Data book)  Income inequality in the United States is at its highest level in fifty years, and increasing. (US Census Bureau, 2018 figures.)

And for me the most troubling facts, because they hit close to home and seems so preventable:

• In the United States the #1 cause of death in those under 18 is gunshot wounds
• People living in a household with a gun owner are seven times as likely to be shot and killed as those in a gun-free home. (Stanford University study of nearly 18 million Californians).
• Handguns were used in three out of four US suicides in 2018.
• Despite claims from anti-gun-control groups that better mental health care, is the solution to gun violence, the amount  the United States spends on mental health is only 5% of total health care spending. 

I’m waiting for legislators opposed to the Affordable Care Act to propose their modifications or improvements to the coverage.

I’m waiting for the legislature to provide funding for those small local treatment centers which were supposed to be more effective than the state mental hospitals that were closed.  

I’m waiting for those who claim mental disturbance is behind gun violence to explain why someone with a history of mental disturbance should be able to buy a gun anyway.

I’m waiting to see Texas GovernorRon deSantis’ proposed legislation for increased funding for mental health services.

I’ll probably be waiting for a long time to come.  But the facts keep getting harder.

Freeway Free in Texas: Quirky

We drove three hours through the Texas Hill country to my brother’s house in Georgetown.  Along the way there were plenty of testaments to the ongoing quirkiness of the Texas character.

We passed a ranch house style building with a sign saying “Deer Dressing.”  Not a fashion center for bucks and does, but a place where you could drop off your after-the-hunt booty and have it carved into steaks, chops, hides, and heads for display in your family room. The fence was decorated with skulls of deer, wild goats, and longhorn cattle.  Atop a tower at the entrance was a human skeleton (artificial, I hope), underneath a camouflage net, dressed in camo, riding a bicycle, and flourishing a rifle.  Not sure what the message to potential customers was meant to be.

Later we passed a pasture in which a life size (I suppose) replica of Bigfoot tromped through the grass in lieu of a scarecrow.

At lunchtime we followed a Yelp recommendation to Alfredo’s in Lampasas, not the hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant we expected, but a large indoor-outdoor event venue nestled in a ben of Sulphur Creek.  The patio features thatched huts a la Baja sheltering each table, and a menagerie of life-size fiberglass or bronze  parrots, tigers, lions, and longhorn steers. In addition, a trio of larger-than-life-size mariachi bandsmen concocted from rusted metal machine parts.  The food was pretty good, too.

            To settle our lunch, we stopped off at the Hanna Springs Culture Garden, adjacent to the new but deserted Swim Center.  Here Texas quirky was fully on display.  My favorites were the basketball court painted as an homage to Mondrian, and the rusty pickup  with a giant sheet-metal catfish flopped on top.

            As we approached Austin, we began to see signs with the slogan  “Keep Austin Weird.” Looks like the surrounding environs give Austin something to draw on.

The New Normal is Already Sneaking Up

Lots of talk has been generated over the past months about how our lives have been permanently changed because of the pandemic, and what the “New Normal” will look like. But if you consider the pandemic as one of the many consequences of climate change, then in many ways the” New Normal” is already here.

I used to let the water run while I brushed my teeth.  Now I just wet the brush.  I used to pour soapy water from the dishpan down the drain.  Now I carry it outside and dump it on whichever plant looks thirstiest.  I used to soak in a hot bath.  Now I take 2-minute showers.  That’s the “New Normal” after five years of drought.

Formerly, in our bedroom suburb, the tallest building in town was the movie theater.  Now the movie theatre is gone, but we have several three-story buildings.  A few of them have trees growing on the roof.  A five-story building is planned. That’s the “New Normal” for smart land use.

Once upon a time, my aunt from Southern California would come up to visit in the summer so she could get away from the constant whirr of air conditioners.  She would have been dismayed when my husband added air conditioning to our home several summers ago.  But where we used to have “an occasional day over 90” we now get “an occasional week or two in the 90’s”. That’s the “New Normal.”

But it’s not just climate that has wrought change.

I used to get a chunk of suet from the meat counter to put on top of my chuck roast to tenderize it and to generate more pan juices for the gravy.  Now if I eat beef at all, it’s the leanest cuts, and if I have to chew longer, it’s probably good for my gums. Low cholesterol is the “New Normal.”

Re-reading a classic chlldren’s book from the 1950’s, my eyes widen as the mother sends her 9-year-old daughter to an art class in the community center, sending  along her 4-year-old  also with instructions “Let your sister play in the sandbox in the park while you are in art class.”  In our New Normal, this lack of parental supervision would be deemed at best irresponsible, at worst criminally neglectful. 

When I was a child I used to ride my bicycle all over town.  I felt as free as a bird, choosing my own road, my own speed, my own stops.  As long as I was home by dinner time, no one worried.   Now if I see a child riding a bicycle to school, one of the parents will be alongside.  More security, less freedom.  That’s the “New Normal.”

(Did you notice how carefully I avoided using a gender specific pronoun in the above sentence?  That’s the “New Normal” too.)

The changes brought about by the pandemic maybe will happen faster than those listed above.  The comfort comes from knowing that however new they seem at first, with the passage of time they will just be normal.

A Piece of My Mind: Post Election Reflections (Los Altos Town Crier 11/25/20)

When I first moved here Los Altos was a group of up-scale housing tracts thrown up in the midst of vast apricot orchards, each home a one-story ranch house boasting a gabled roof, two car garage, and a remnant apricot tree or two.  The front yards were set off with split-rail fences covered with fence roses or English ivy, and had velvety green lawns suitable for setting up croquet hoops or badminton nets.

The apricot trees have died off, the one-story ranchers are being scraped one by one in favor of two-story mock-Tudors or mock-Mission or mock-modern homes with an extra garage for an RV, and the lawns are being replaced with drought-tolerant landscaping.  Things have changed.

When I first moved here, Los Altos Hills was a scattering of older farm houses and former summer cottages, with large lots suitable for corralling a horse.  Equestrian trails bordered the two-lane roads or cut between houses on recognized rights-of-way.  Children rode school buses across the railroad tracks to schools in the flatlands.

The farm houses are being replaced one by one with mansions which fill the large lots up to the setback requirements.  The horse corrals have morphed into vanity vineyards.   The equestrian trail I rode on lea has been replaced by an eight-lane freeway, the railroad tracks are overlain by a four-lane expressway, and there are no school buses.   Things have changed.

Los Altos and Los Altos Hills were designed as white-collar bedroom communities, designed to provide shelter for families whose bread-winners were working locally (almost all my teachers lived in Los Altos within a short distance of the schools) or in nearby businesses spun off from Stanford (e.g. Varian)  or related to the military  (e.g. Lockheed).

It was assumed, if anyone thought about it, that our gardeners and gas station attendants would be living in blue-collar communities such as Mountain View or Redwood City or East Palo Alto.  In four years of my high school education there was only one black student at Los Altos High School, and she was a senior who graduates the year I entered as a freshman.  A quick run-down of last names in my graduating class shows, out of 500, only two Mexican surnames, four Japanese surnames, and zero Chinese surnames.  It was understood that El Camino Real, which divided attendance at Los Altos HS from MV HS, was also the dividing line between white-collar and blue-collar families. There was no thought  that a city zoned mostly for single family housing with off-street parking was exclusionary or practicing systemic racism.  Things have changed.

We can’t turn back the clock.  There’s no use in wallowing in nostalgia for a suburbia that no longer exists.  Things have changed.  Let’s do our best to deal with it.

Life in a COVID- Hot Spot: Week 15 – Testing

Our hot spot is cooling just a little: elective surgeries that were canceled or discouraged are now going forward.  I have an extremely minor surgery rescheduled for this week, but before going forward with it, I must be tested to make sure I am not, within a few days of the surgery, infected with the novel coronavirus.  So I make an appointment to be tested.

The closest testing spot which will guarantee results before the scheduled surgery is about 15 miles up the road. It is a drive-thru procedure.  I let the scheduling nurse know what kind of car I will be in, and whether I will be the driver or the passenger. Husband decides to be the driver.

We show up on time and are waved through the hospital’s parking garage to the test site – a tent staffed by young aides in hospital scrubs, face masks, and polymer shields.  I signal to the aide with my photo ID and medical group member card.  She comes to the passenger window and asks me to show her the cards so that my name shows – she is not supposed to touch the cards with her surgical gloves.  She asks me to confirm my birth date.  I pass inspection.

I lower my window, and my face mask.  Her eyes are smiling, though her mask hides it. “This will be uncomfortable, but quick,” she says.  “Open your mouth and say ‘Aah.'” She inserts a cotton swab on a long stick into the back of my mouth.  Not so bad.  Then she inserts the same or a similar swab into my left nostril. Waaay in. Tickle prickle want to sneeze. Then into my right nostril.  Tickle prickle want to sneeze. “That’s it. You’re done.”  Results in 2-4 days – in time to qualify or disqualify my minor surgery.  If I test positive, a lot more than my minor surgery will be up-ended.  Cross fingers.