Coffeehouse Chronicles ...She Ain't Heavy

Buckle up, this is gonna be a long one.

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I’m feeling some sort of way this morning.

A few days ago, I got a text from my sister. Not my sister, Mia. My other sister, Leslie. Leslie isn’t our sister by blood, technically, she’s our step-sister although I’ve never called her that. She’s my sister.

You see, my dad and her mom met and married right about the time I was in the 9th grade. And although they were only married for about 4 or 5 years, us sibs, especially Leslie and I, have kept in contact and remained pretty close over the years. This has kept me in contact with their mom, my stepmother, Jeanette.

Who knows why our parents split? Water under the bridge as far as I'm concerned and the fact they weren’t together anymore, never affected any of us.

Now I'm pretty sure everyone is familiar with the fairy tales where the stepmothers are sinister, mean, and only out to get theirs. Yeah, Walt Disney really put the lips to step-parents. He made it hard for the parents in every extra marriage because of those scary stereotypes. As for me, I’m pretty sure that I went into my new family dynamic expecting to wear tattered clothing and always keeping my head with a swivel and a sharp eye out for shiny apples and such.

The truth was that my dad married a really lovely woman with two kids who once I gave them a chance, were some pretty chill folks.

The first time I met my new family-to-be, my dad picked me up in the van.

Okay, take a sec, I'm gonna need you to picture this: it’s the early 70s, and Pops drove around in a Chevy Van 30, just like the one on The A-Team. Ours was light blue with a six-inch linear rainbow stripe painted all the way around it, bisecting the top from the bottom. BONUS: it had a tinted porthole window on either side near the back barn doors.

Yep, my dad drove the original "creeper van” before anyone knew that they were the standard issue serial killer rides.

Okay so, he picked me up, and I met my soon-to-be new mom, Jeanette, who smiled at me from the front seat. I slid the door open to the back to climb in and there was my new sister, Leslie, leaning against the wood paneling, sitting cross-legged on the light purple wall-to-wall shag carpeting, smiling at me from the back.

“Hi,” she said

Small talk ensued as we became acquainted and I learned that we were headed to pick up the rest of this nuclear family, my new brother, Victor. Skateparks were a very new thing and I had never in life actually heard of one, let alone been to one. Skateboards were a newer thing too and I don’t think I’d expected any brother of mine to be entrenched in the surf scene. We stopped at a skatepark somewhere in the South Bay, the van door slid open, and in bounds, this kid four years younger than me with an afro that was sun-bleached light brown, his badge of honor, because of how much time he had spent at the beach chasing waves! He was wearing matching earth tones from head to toe, a brown Hang Ten polo, dark brown Ocean Pacific corduroy shorts, and brown Vans tennis shoes. All of his attire was new stuff to me, but because the home that we would soon share, was much closer to the beach, and this was pretty much the uniform of the day for most of the kids in my new neighborhood. Victor is still a surf cat. He lives down in San Diego now, close to the beach so that he can still be close to the waves.

But I digress. Leslie’s text said that her mom was transitioning. Look, I’ve known that she’d had some health issues for a little while, I’d just seen Jeanette about a week or so prior at a different assisted living home, and she appeared to be on the mend. I was expecting my next visit to be back at their home in Lake View Terrace. Yup, the town made infamous at the termination of a legendary pursuit and the simultaneous advent of the personal video recording camera. So this was kind of unexpected to me. But sometimes the Good Lord Above has other plans. I knew I had to make time. A few years back, I missed out on seeing a very dear friend, Jeff, before he passed and that has affected me deeply. Anyway, I drove out to see my stepmom, just to see her and kiss her forehead one last time.

Many of you Chroniclers live in SoCal or are at least familiar anecdotally with our traffic woes here. You probably know that driving anywhere in the Metro Los Angeles area takes a great deal of time, a great deal of patience, and a great deal of planning. Most likely not in the order that I’ve listed here. I set the car’s GPS for the Valley, a very unfamiliar area to me because, well you know, sprawl, and set off.

Okie doke. The Google advised me that it was gonna take me over an hour to reach my destination, so I figured that I had better get some supplies. Luckily, there was a Seven-Eleven right there on the corner, so I pulled over and headed in. I grabbed a bag of sour cream and onion Ruffles and a Mountain Dew. I surmised that should keep me nourished as I listened to a podcast in bumper-to-bumper traffic through Pasadena.

Wouldn't you know it? I ended up in line behind some 40-year-old veterano and his ol’ lady. She kept running back and forth to the soda fountain to top off her 64-ounce Big Gulp of Diet Coke and the chip rack getting stuff she remembered that she’d forgotten as they prepped for their hours-long drive to wherever they were going.

Ooh? So I’m stereotyping, you say? I would debate you on that and call it knowledge-based information, tempered by my over thirty years of training and experience.

I was trying not to look too much like a retired cop as I couldn’t help but stare at the tattoos covering, and I do mean COVERING his bald head indicating the neighborhood in which he resided. I also took notice of the grey sweater with the 3 or 4 thick horizontal contrasting stripes across his chest and back and the grey Dickies he’d strategically cut off just below his knees, to meet up with his white crew socks, pulled up to cover his calves.

Question: so are the tattoos this generation’s version of the note our parents pinned to the inside of our coats in case we got lost?

Aw geez, is he really paying for all this junk food with an EBT card? Yep, a dollar fifty-three short, I could’ve called that one. Oh c’mon, bruh! I just cannot make this stuff up! Please, just let me get my wham-whams and zoom-zooms and be on my way. Ugh!

As I entered the 210, I reminisced about the first time I had a home-made cookie. Jeanette made the house smell so good. OH MY GOSH! And they were so buttery! Every single cookie that I remember before that had been store-bought. I was thirteen years old the first time I got a chance to lick the bowl. Cookie dough. Holy moly! Are ya kidding me? I was in heaven!

My stepmom, Jeanette was a housewife, very domestic, and a wonderful cook. I can also remember the first time she treated me to gumbo. It was at her parent’s home near Central Park, off 102nd Street. Her mother, my step-grandmother made it for us. A Thomas family recipe. DEE-LISH-US!

A lot of memories came to me about those days as I drove out to the board and care where she was staying.

When I arrived I hugged Leslie, and we sat down next to her mom sleeping peacefully in the hospital bed. For a couple of hours, I shared with Leslie, hoping that Jeanette could hear us in her reverie, all of the memories that had rushed back to me on my trip over.

We talked about the first time I had ever used a dishwasher. The tract home in the Woods we shared our childhood in had a dishwasher. Before that, all I remembered was a house in LA that had been built in the early twentieth century. A modern kitchen had been foreign to me and was a real luxury.

Leslie brought up the time that Eddie Griffin and I handcuffed her to the stairwell banister of our house again. She always seemed to remember that incident. Eddie & I were explorers together at LAPD, Redondo Beach PD, and Carson Station (disclaimer: we did not get kicked out of all of these places, we were laterally transferred). He’d gone somewhere and bought his first set of cuffs and we just had to try them out. Who better than on my little sister, Leslie? We only left her there for like three minutes, but it probably seemed like ages.

I asked Leslie if she remembered the homemade speaker that I’d concocted.

In our house, my bedroom was on the lower level of our tri-level home. Leslie’s bedroom was directly above mine on the top level. With all my electrical skills, I built a speaker out of compressed wood and a ten-inch woofer, then ran a speaker wire from her stereo, out of her window, down the outside of the house, and into my bedroom window so that I could listen to whatever music she was listening to.

One of my favorite songs at the time was “Fire” by the Ohio Players. It would come on and then I would yell up to her to play it over and over again adnausea. That was until we retrieved the self-titled “Commodores” album from my dad's collection. I knew every word from every song on that album and could sing all of them, at the top of my lungs, even though I was asked not to, way before karaoke was a thing.

She remembered once that apparently, I had partaken in some big brotherly mischief, of which she sometimes found herself the victim. She had planned for her revenge well and told my dad that I was in for it. She came home late from a party, early one morning and decided that since I was asleep, she was gonna blast her music as loud as humanly possible. My dad, ever the prankster, was down for that and gave tacit approval for retribution. That was an evening, more like an early morning, that will live in infamy. Leslie, Jeanette, and my dad all got a giggle out of that. I, on the other hand, believe that the punishment far outweighed the crime.

Mainly, I tried to keep it light with Leslie, and all about the good times we had. Any memories of bad times had long faded away anyway…

One more thing I remembered. On a visit, some years ago when Jeanette came out to see Bridget & me, I made a comment about about how hard it was raising stepkids. Jeanette just looked at me with a wry smile, and that twinkle in her eye. The one that I’ll always remember fondly, and laughed. She laughed hard.

Wait. It wasn’t that funny. Then I thought back, I probably gave her heck raising a teenage stepson.

Oh well, I’m bringing this up, because Jeanette passed away quietly yesterday morning. I’ll miss her, but there’s no doubt that Leslie and Victor will miss her more.

Sleep well, angel.

Love,

Me