Within a couple weeks of hip surgery, my mother was doing physical therapy at a skilled nursing facility. c 2010 B.F. Newhall

 

 

 

 

 

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

Ten reasons why I’m finding it impossible to write about my 92-year-old mother, even though she’s all I can think about right now:   

1. I love my mother, and I don’t know how to write about that.
2. My mother is a pain in the butt, and I don’t know how to write about that.
3. My brothers can read, and they know about this blog.
4. My mother can read. So can all six grandchildren.
5. My mother has osteoporosis, dementia and a messed-up stomach. She is losing herself, piece by piece, like dandelion feathers floating off in the wind, and I don’t want to think about that.
6. My father is dead. My in-laws, Scott and Ruth, are dead. If my mother dies, there will be no more grown-ups left in my life.
7. I don’t want to be the grown-up. 
8. If my mother can die, anybody can die, me included.
9. If I write about my mother I might find out something about myself that I don’t want to know.
10. I’d rather grab a Clausthaler, curl up with the afghan that once belonged to my mother-in-law, and watch “House” re-runs. Except I’ve already watched every last one of  them in the three months since my mother broke her hip.

© 2010 Barbara Falconer Newhall

I discovered a forgotten pair of jeans at the back of my closet the other day. Nice jeans, I thought. I could throw them on for a quick trip to the drug store or the plant store. I tried them on. A perfect fit.

They were a size 10.

I did a double take. Wasn’t I a size 10 in high school way back in 1959? But that was twenty pounds ago. (Okay, okay. Thirty pounds ago.) How could I still be a size 10? Was I remembering my high school self all wrong?

My size 10 skirt from Pendleton Woolen Mills, Portland, Oregon, circa 1958 -- and my 21st century Charter Club low-waist jeans from Macy's, size 10 petite.

It was a digging-around-in-the-closet kind of day, so I kept on digging. There, in a garment bag at the farthest, dustiest, most forgotten reach of my closet was - my old plaid skirt from high school.

It was a Pendleton. Very high quality, my mother told me as she took out her credit card to pay. “You’ll be wearing it when you’re pushing a baby buggy around.”

Except by the time my kids were born, baby buggies were passé and all the moms I knew were tossing tidy little collapsible umbrella strollers into the trunks of their cars.

Also - by the time my kids were born I was fortyish and definitely not 106 pounds any more. But still a size 10 or 12. Somehow.

Which brings me back to the question - was I or was I not a size 10 in high school?

I pulled the Pendleton from the garment bag to get a closer look. Sure enough. The label read size 10.

So, there you have it. I did indeed wear a size 10 in high school - all 106 pounds of me. And in college, a couple of pounds later, I was a perfectly svelte size 12. I have my old plaid kilt from my Michigan days to prove it. It’s hanging right there in the closet next to the Pendleton. Size 12. Waist 24 inches.

It’s called vanity sizing. Manufacturers have been cutting women’s clothes larger and larger in recent years as the average American woman has grown plumper and plumper.  The strategy lets women do that denial thing about their avoirdupois, so they can go on believing they are smaller than they really are. The trouble is, today’s size 10 is too big for a lot of women, which is why we’re seeing more and more clothes in size extra-small, extra-extra-small, size 0 and even size 00 on the ready-to-wear racks.

The size 12 plaid kilt with the 24-inch waist I wore in college, and the size 12 petite jeans I bought a couple of years ago. Photos c 2010 B.F. Newhall

This is not a new trend. Way back in January, 1983, the US Department of Commerce dropped its universal sizing system for women’s clothes because it no longer had any relationship to the size and shape of the average American woman.

But back in 1983 I was too busy pushing babies around in strollers to notice. As far as I knew, I was a perfect size 10 (or 12), and all was right with the world. As a matter of fact, all is still right with the world. As long as I can squeeze myself into those size 10 jeans.

© 2010 Barbara Falconer Newhall

Grandma Falconer makes sand castles with Peter and his sister on Lake Michigan. c 1987 B.F. Newhall

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

The Oakland Tribune

Sunday, September 27, 1987

“Move,” said Peter. “I want to get by.”

My mother looked up from her book and gave my 6 1/2-year-old a hard look.

She was sitting on her sofa, in her house, feet up on her coffee table.

Reluctantly, she moved her feet to let Peter by. He squeezed wordlessly past.

Something was wrong, very wrong, with that exchange, said my gut.

But what? The chilly glare my mother threw at my son? The pleases and thank yous he left unsaid?

It isn’t easy to think clearly after a few days under the same roof with one’s mother and father. When I was a young career woman living in New York City, I discovered the three-nights-and-four-days-at-home rule.

That was all I could take of living eyeball to eyeball with my mother. I could be her kid again for four days, max. After that, it was flight - or fight.

I broke my own rule last summer and inflicted myself and my children upon my parents for an unprecedented stay of eight nights and nine days.

It was not until I was safely home under my own roof in the Eastbay, my feet tucked up on my own coffee table, that I could see what had gone wrong during that exchange between my mother and her grandson.

Peter had no respect.

It was more than a mere forgetting of his pleases and thank yous. It was downright presumptuous of him to think his grandmother should interrupt her reading to accommodate him at all. He should have walked quietly, respectfully, around the table the other way.

Had it been another child, a peer, in Peter’s path, squeezing past with a quick “excuse me” would be okay.

But around grandparents, children should show some respect.

Respect. The very word sticks in my craw. Question authority was the motto of my young adulthood. Challenge it.

There was no place for blind respect for one’s elders during the ’60s. We were equals under God and the U.S. Constitution. Every creature - adult, child, rhinoceros or whooping crane - was to be treated with respect.

Children, the clean slates of the future, were held in especially high regard in those days. As innocents, they possessed a unique wisdom lost to their time-sullied elders.

And today, the young child, the person of the future - not his parents and grandparents, the person of the past - continues to command unusual respect, even awe.

This small bundle of nerve endings is a miracle of creation, the child-rearing books coo. It has needs and feelings that deserve our utmost attention.

Little Samantha, but a fetus, can hear in utero. We should play her Beethoven.

She has feelings in utero. We should think nice thoughts about her as we experience morning sickness.

Unless, of course, we are planning to abort this particular fetus, in which case it is better not to think.

Through all of this, a stubborn something deep inside me has persisted, insisting that it is the grandparents, if anyone, who deserve the extra measure of unconditional respect.

Not because our elders have earned it. And not because our elders are in any way better, smarter or kinder than their descendents.

But because they are the elders.

Peter dotes on his grandmother these days -- and she on him. This is Christmas 2007, twenty years later, and I'm pretty sure he excused himself as he squeezed between the coffee table and my mother's knees. c 2007 B.F. Newhall

My mother deserves Peter’s esteem because of the life she has led as a mother and wife. Because of the potatoes peeled, the casseroles baked, the dustballs chased and the corporate VIPs entertained.

Because she holds the office of grandmother. Because she has done her do.

Peter won’t even clean up his room and he thinks he is on a par with my mother, who has cleaned up his bottom?

My friend Claudia sends her two small children to Chinese school every Saturday morning. “I want them to learn about their culture. I want them to learn that respect,” she explained.

“Your parents live in Michigan,” she went on. “So far away. I would never want to be that far away from my mother.”

The Chinese culture, thousands of years old, venerates the people of the past. It is not unique in this.

The elderly are held in high esteem in her native Belize, according to my friend Miriam.

“Old people are the root,” she explains. “If grandparents come to your house, they don’t sleep on the floor. You give them your bed or your hammock.”

Today’s Western culture, with its silicon chips, videocameras and interplanetary probes, venerates what it still to come.

It stands in awe of the future and its citizens - our children - as though our children possessed a hot line to the truth or, as the Chinese ancestors of yore, to Heaven.

The fact is, we and our forebears created the world into which our children are being launched.

We have done our best, sorry as it may be. We have done our do. And for that we deserve some respect.

By gosh.

© 1987 The Oakland Tribune

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

As a religion writer, I’ve got plenty of respect for Islam as well as for the many (friendly, smart, lovable, cool, inspiring) Muslims I’ve met on the religion beat over the years. So, trust me. This is not a rant against Islam or Muslims.

It’s about how it feels to have one’s culture and faith obliterated by someone else’s culture and faith.

Eight roundels emblazoned with Arabic script are focal points in the Hagia Sophia.

I got a close-up look at this when I entered the magnificent Hagia Sofia for the first time during a trip to Istanbul last October. Completed in 537 by order of the Emperor Justinian, this glorious Byzantine basilica was the focal point of Eastern Orthodox Christianity for nearly a millennium.

The Hagia Sophia’s status as a Christian church came to an abrupt end, however, when the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453 and converted the basilica into a mosque soon after.

I am fully aware that Western Christians have done their share of imposing their culture, technology and religion on the peoples they have conquered or overwhelmed. I know, just for starters, all about how the Parthenon, a temple built to honor the Pagan goddess Athena, was taken over and turned into a church dedicated to the Virgin Mary.

Still, I see now that I’ve understood religious oppression only intellectually all these years. As a Christian living in a mostly Christian country, I’ve never really known how it feels to have one’s faith and its most cherished symbols obliterated by a colonizing force.

Until I stepped inside the Hagia Sophia.

It was dark in there. The few remaining Christian mosaics - including those of Jesus, the Virgin Mary and Saint John Chrysostom - were nearly invisible.

Not at all invisible, however, were eight huge round black disks, each one nearly 25 feet across and each one emblazoned with — to me unintelligible — Arabic calligraphy. Constructed of wood and leather, the disks were conspicuously placed, high on the columns supporting the basilica’s massive dome.

The disks - also known as medallions or roundels — felt like giant, flashy billboards for Islam. I’ve got God on my side and you don’t, they seemed to argue. It didn’t help that, when I climbed to the upstairs balconies and stood behind the disks, I could see their crude wooden backsides.

To my Muslim friends no doubt the calligraphy on those medallions would feel holy and beautiful. The inscriptions represent, after all, the names of Allah, Muhammed, Islam’s first four caliphs, and Muhammed’s two grandsons. (Peace be upon them!)

But as a Christian standing in what had once been a magnificent church, I could not feel the holiness of those huge disks. I felt bullied by them.

In the apse, Madonna and Child are flanked in roundels bearing the names of Muhammed and Allah. Photos c 2009 B.F. Newhall

It’s been hundreds of years since the Hagia Sofia was seized and turned into a mosque, but on that day in 2009, it felt like the desecration had happened yesterday.

The Hagia Sophia is a museum now, and I hear there’s a campaign afoot to restore the basilica as a Christian church.

Part of me would love to see those eight in-your-face disks go away. But another part of me knows better. Just as Jerusalem has become a holy spot for Christians, Muslims and Baha’is as well as Jews. So has the Hagia Sophia come to belong to Muslims as well as Christians.

Back home now, sitting here in my writing room, I study my photos of the offending medallions. I hunt down more pictures of them on line. I ponder their elegant, swooping lines. I open my mind - I try to - to the beauty of the calligraphy.

And after a while I see that, yes, indeed, they are beautiful. Like the Christian icons that preceded them, I find the boldface disks with the strange writing on them to be windows into the sacred. Soon I am scouring the Web for more photos. My eyes follow and are amazed by their complex, mysterious lines.

I wonder, the next time I enter the Hagia Sophia, will I feel oppressed by those medallions - or touched? I honestly don’t know.

© 2010 Barbara Falconer Newhall

Well, I missed my Friday night 11:59 p.m. deadline last week. The reason: My 92-year-old mom is still in a skilled nursing facility recovering from a broken hip. My brothers and I are stressing ourselves out trying to figure out what her next residence will be. Assisted living, great though it has been for the past couple of years, no longer suffices. She needs a memory support unit.

Peter and Emily put together a vegetarian meal for the family. But that was before my mother broke her hip. Photo c 2010 B.F. Newhall

Driving home the other day from just one of  countless visits to my mother at the hospital, I had to ask myself, why aren’t I writing about her? Naturally, I prefer to think about happier things – the elegant dinner Peter and his girlfriend Emily put together when they visited here in January.

But why, really, do I resist the topic of my mom and me? I’ve got plenty of time for self-examination on those drives back and forth to the hospital.

I’ll see if I can persuade myself to give the subject some thought and get back to you. 

Maybe.

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

September 13, 1987, The Oakland Tribune

Little Max is off to kindergarten for his first taste of the real world. What will he learn?

Dr. Seuss? Two plus two? Maybe.

“Jingle bells, Batman smells,

Robin laid an egg . . .”

Probably.

“I was born in the U.S.S.R.

To blow up Mr. Reagan’s car.”

Yes. But if not that, then certainly:

“Robin’s in the kitchen.

Batman’s in the hall.

Joker’s in the bathroom.

Peeing on the wall.

Grossed out yet?

Max won’t be.

Peter, ready for his first day of kindergarten at Bentley School, September, 1986. Photo c 1986 B.F. Newhall

Out on the schoolyard, young Max will finally get to indulge his taste for raunchy - and there isn’t much his parents can do about it.

Maybe they shouldn’t.

It was 7-year-old Derek who picked up those three ditties - during lunch hour at a public school comfortably nestled on a hillside of split-level redwood houses starting at $300,000.

When Derek started school he found his mentor in things gross in Randy, who is 9.

Randy’s parents also are college educated and spent their own pretty penny buying into this exclusive hideaway in the hills.

Let’s face it. Kids, some kids, naturally love raunchy jokes and songs.

If we want to hang tough, we can keep them from bringing the Mad Balls into the house. We can insist they not spend their allowances on Garbage Pail Kids cards. We can refuse to buy the slime pits, the gummy worms, the plastic barf and the plastic poop.

We can decline to send the birthday party guests home with miniature trash cans stuffed with - edible - dead fish, hot dogs and zap guns.

We can lay down the law at the tiny toy washing machine full of - edible again - dirty sox and Jockey shorts.

Those items are simply the commercial expression - some would say the commercial exploitation - of the juvenile mind’s affinity for the naughty.

What we can’t control is what gets discussed on the playground.

Geoff Dettlinger used to steal the pencils off my desk and break them with a single irreverent crash of the hand. That was in seventh grade back in Birmingham, Mich., at a time when $30,000 for a split level was considered a pretty penny.

Geoff, who now lives in Alamo and sells tractors at Western Traction Co. in Union City, used to read Mad Magazine during recess.

He adored the Mad spoofs of contemporary society. I thought Geoff and his raunchy magazine were sick.

Geoff, who wouldn’t be caught dead using a term like contemporary society, laughed at the ’50s era cartoon Cadillac wearing a Maidenform bra over its big, pointy bumpers.

He was amused by things like the championship diver landing with a flourish in the empty swimming pool, or Pronto burning the Lone Stranger at the stake.

“Yes, I still have a sick sense of humor,” Geoff assured me over the telephone, in a voice that no longer cracked when he laughed.

We talked of his futile efforts to turn me into a Mad comics reader. “You thought it was wrong to laugh at that sort of thing,” he noted.

It’s true. I did then and still do deadpan at raunchy humor. I fail to see the humor in passed gas, noisy belches and flying lemon cream pies.

Andrew Sarris, film critic of the Village Voice, sheds some light on my knee-jerk distaste for slapstick humor. He offered it during a course in screenwriting I once took from him.

Women, he suggested, find little humor in the pie-in-your-face joke because, when all the yuks are yukked, it is they - the females of the race - who are expected to clean up the mess.

He’s right. What’s so funny, I ask you, about spending the next 20 minutes of your life on your knees with a washbucket?

Same thing with the passed gas, the noisy burp and the spoofs of such social niceties as eating one’s salad with a fork.

As mothers, it is up to us to civilize the adorable barbarians who are born to us.

They come out looking like frogs. As newborns, they behave more like banana slugs than members of species claiming to reflect God’s image. They eat, sleep, excrete and that’s it.

We do this, we women. We inflict polite ways and sanitary habits upon our beloved frogs and banana slugs because, without them, our children will not survive in society. Nor would society last long without a few key conventions.

Still, it’s tough being a banana slug in the process of becoming human. A little playground comic relief is to be expected.

So, when a certain kindergartener of my acquaintance - he requested anonymity - recited the following, I did not disapprove.

“Batman and Robin are flying in the air.

“Batman lost his underwear.”

Followed by:

“Mommy’s in the kitchen, burning the rice.

Papa’s on the corner, turning the dice . . . “

I managed a laugh.

“Welcome to the real world,” said Geoff.

© 1987 The Oakland Tribune

Andrew Sarris left the Village Voice long ago; the $300,000 split levels in Silicon Valley are going for more like $1.3 million these days ($3 million?), and the Garbage Patch Kids have surely given way to another clever, bestselling toy.

But some things never change. Mad Magzine lives on; I’m pretty sure I could still get my hands on some plastic poop or plastic barf if necessary, and Geoff Dettlinger is still a comedian – he emails me jokes from the Internet these days, some of them actually funny.

By the time I got my camera out, the fit young runners had pretty much disappered.

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

I was all of three or four years old, pumping away on the pedals of my tricycle, near tears because the big kids were leaving me behind.

“Wait for me!” I cried.

Nobody listened.

My six-year-old brother Davey and his friends had decided to ride their bikes - actual two-wheelers - all the way around the block. Davey had persuaded his friends to let me tag along, but I couldn’t keep up, and nobody would slow down for me, so little and so slow on my tricycle, not even my big brother.

When we reached the other side of the block - far from home - the big kids sped up. In tears, I watched them grow smaller and smaller down the sidewalk, then disappear around the corner.

Today, this morning - same thing. I watched in dismay as my daughter and a handful of other fit twenty- and thirty-somethings took off running, leaving me behind.

I decided to record my humiliation with a photo of their trim figures receding in the distance, but by the time I got my camera out, they had all but disappeared down College Avenue.

Christina had talked me into this. She’d gotten me out of bed at the crack of dawn - 8 a.m. - to meet the Berkeley Lululemon running club at College and Ashby for a six-mile, Saturday morning run to Lake Temescal and back.

At first, I trotted along behind the much-younger runners. But after half a block, I had to face up to reality; I’d never keep up with all those fit young things. But I could do a brisk three-mile walk down College to Broadway in Oakland and back. And that’s what I did.

A sweaty Christina was waiting for me outside the Lululemon store at the corner of Ashby and College.

I don’t know how my four-year-old self found her way home.  Maybe I sucked it up and managed on my own. More likely Davey eventually came back around the block to get me.

Today I sucked it up. I gave myself a terrific hour-plus walking workout. But by the time I got back to Lululemon, the rest of the running club had finished up and left for home. Except for Christina. Still sweaty from her six-mile run, my daughter was standing outside the store, waiting for me.

Photos c 2010 B.F. Newhall

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

I don’t like daffodils. I feel about daffodils the way I feel about some of my writing - too damned cheerful. Too nicey-nice. Too tidy. Too certain that in the end everything’s going to come out just fine, that all shall be well.

I prefer irises. I especially like the bearded irises that are volunteering up and down the hills of our neighborhood right now.  Their swooping, swooning petals are downright lascivious. So are the fuzzy, yellow-brown genitalia cascading from their centers. These are not nice flowers.

Daffodils, by comparison, are starchy, unequivocal. They are trumpets of optimism playing to the sun. Last month, there were daffodils blooming all over the neighborhood, as if there had not just been a winter. And if by chance there had been a winter, as if there would never be another.

The trouble with daffodils is they have no subtext. They are all cheer and sparkle and optimism. They are avatars of perky. They get on my nerves, no doubt, because of that daffodil place in my psyche, which from time to time locates itself in my writing.

In my daffodil brain, everything happens for the good. Problems can be solved. Human beings are redeemable. God is in God’s sweet heaven. And my 92-year-old mother, who’s been lying in a hospital bed with a broken hip for the past five weeks, is not going to die. Ever. In just a few weeks, my mother and I will head over to Nordstrom again for lunch. As usual, she’ll order the chicken salad with berries. I’ll get the one with artichokes. After lunch we’ll hijack Nordstrom’s loaner wheelchair and scoot over to Macy’s where things are more affordable. She’ll sit in the wheelchair with her purse in her lap, credit card at the ready, and I’ll roll her around the petites department. She’ll ask me to back up to take a second look at the crisp brown and white linen jacket. She’ll offer to buy it for me, I’ll decline.

My mother will come through this hip thing just fine. She always has. She always will.

My daffodil brain does not write about my mother’s spine, which is as curved and uncertain as question mark. It averts its eyes from the sun-damaged splotches darkening and growing across her cheeks. It makes excuses for the strings of nonsensical sentences coming from her mouth. (It’s the painkillers talking.) My daffodil brain is too polite to type words like constipation, commode, diaper, droopy buttocks, crepey skin, thinning hair, boney knuckles.

Photos c 2010 B.F. Newhall

No, my mother’s days are not numbered and, therefore, neither are mine. My mother will not spend her last days in pain and uncertainty, wondering how God, or death for that matter, could possibly be real. And neither will I.

© 2010 Barbara Falconer Newhall

Hint: Click and move your mouse around the image, then click on the plus or minus signs to get close-ups of the various paintings.

Enjoy!

Specifically, can the University of California’s Hastings College of Law deny recognition, services and financial support to a campus group called the Christian Legal Society? CLS is a  nationwide organization of Christian attorneys, judges and law students that requires voting members and leaders  to sign a pledge to limit their sexual activity to heterosexual marriage.

The CLS requirement is in conflict with the school’s non-discrimination policy, which includes discrimination based on sexual orientation.

The case, Christian Legal Society vs. Martinez, will come before the U.S. Supreme Court on April 19. For details, go to the Pew Forum website.

“When can Peter fly down for a visit?” she wanted to know. “How does a week in July sound?”

A week? A whole week?

I tried to sound grown up.

“Are you sure you want him for an entire week?” I said. “Are you sure you can manage?”

Of course she could manage.

Ruth Newhall. C 1995 B.F. Newhal

My mother-in-law is 77 years old, but she has the stamina of a 6-year-old with a weekend pass to Disneyland.

The fact is, Ruth is probably the only person in the family who can truly manage Peter. I can’t manage Peter. His father can’t manage Peter. Around our house, it is mostly Peter who manages Peter.

Ruth is different. She is like Peter. She is full of energy. She likes to get up early in the morning and get started on things.

I have seen her pruning her two-story palm trees at 6 a.m. Strike that. I have seen her dragging the cut palm fronds across her lawn at 8 a.m. as I come downstairs to breakfast.

And, unlike Peter’s overworked mom and dad, his paternal grandmother likes to play.

She likes checkers. She likes softball. She likes holding Peter’s hand as he glides around her house on roller skates.

Best of all, my mother-in-law likes to get down on the floor with Peter and his superhero toys for a hearty life-and-death struggle between the good guys and the bad guys.

Unlike Peter’s parents - and many of their contemporaries - Peter’s grandmother has nothing against loading up her guns and crossbows and blasting the evil hordes to bits.

No, the question was not whether Ruth and Peter would get along for a week.

The question was, could I get along without Peter?

I said yes. Did I have a choice?

Ruth and her son - my husband - insisted that Peter make the trip from Oakland International to Burbank Airport solo.

Peter and I weren’t so sure.

But again, the grown-ups prevailed.

On the way to the airport, Peter sat in the front seat of my car so we could talk.

“Don’t play near the swimming pool,” I began. “On the plane, don’t talk to strangers. Ruth will meet you when you get off the plane in Burbank. Don’t go with anyone but Ruth. Here is $5. Put it in your pocket.”

“How much money is $5?”

“It’s enough to buy dinner.”

“Will I have to buy dinner?”

“No. It’s just in case.”

“Just in case of what?”

“Just in case Ruth is a little late and you need to buy food.”

“Will Ruth be late?”

“No.”

I should stop this. I should be talking about the fun he is going to have. But I couldn’t stop.

“Peter, do you know your phone number?”

He told me his phone number.

“But do you know your area code?”

“What’s an area code?”

“Yours is 415.” I explained area codes.

“415, 415, 415, 415, 415,” Peter chanted all the way down Hegenberger Road.

Three days later I was to regret this lesson in long distance dialing when the telephone woke me up at 7 a.m.

It was Peter calling from his bedside phone to complain that Patrick, his sleepover friend, was pummeling him with pillows.

Peter, loaded for bear, Halloween. C 1987 B.F. Newhall

Aboard the plane, I buckled Peter in.

“Your ticket is in your backpack,” I said. “Put your toys back in your backpack when you are done playing. Don’t lose your backpack.”

A flight attendant was standing behind me. “They are closing the doors,” she said firmly.

I bent over Peter and pressed his cheek to mine. “I love you,” I whispered. “God bless you. Have fun.”

As I left the plane, I looked around to blow Peter one last kiss. He was chatting with the flight attendant.

I cried all the way to the parking lot.

Back at The Tribune, I wanted to stop by city desk to see if any PSA planes had crashed that afternoon.

I resisted.

Instead, I telephoned Burbank.

“That flight arrived 20 minutes ago,” said the voice at Burbank. “Yes, there was an unescorted minor aboard. They brought him out and gave him to someone.”

“They gave him to someone? You don’t know who?”

The man at Burbank laughed. “I’m sure he’s fine.”

Should I insist on talking to the flight attendant who handed Peter over to “someone?”

No. Everyone would laugh.

Oh, well, at least I knew the plane hadn’t crashed.

Let’s just hope that “someone,” whoever it is, likes to blast bad guys to smithereens at 7 a.m.

© 1987 The Oakland Tribune