Miller Land | Our Family's Little Blog

Maira Kalman has been posting mesmerizing blogs for almost a year now. Part history lesson, part musings, parts art and poetry, they are a pleasure to read. Here is her last entry.

…to the one I love. Found it in the archives while packing.

Storm

You are
the eye of my storm,
the calm after it’s gone,
the sweet light
through the clouds
heralding the dawn.

Time management experts say that in a crisis, one needs a detailed list of steps for survival. For instance, if you’re in a bunker in the remotest part of Antarctica and your power goes out, the steps might be:

1) Find the nearest wall. Put wall on your right.

2) Walk five steps forward. Turn right.

3) Walk three steps forward.

4) Open cabinet.

5) Flip circuit breaker.

6) Go drink some hot chocolate.

I wonder what a list would look like for someone who is moving across the country in three weeks AND STILL HASN’T PACKED ONE SINGLE BOX. Whatever it entails, that last step better have the word drink in it but it sure better not be hot chocolate. I’m thinking of a drink that starts with “sc” and ends “otch.”

The Daily Text comments quoted Exodus 3:8. I could tell where the scripture was going, but I wondered if Lia could yet. At what point do we pick up familiar Bible phrases? So I conducted a test.

“I am proceeding to go down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them…to a land flowing with…”

“Love?” asked Lia. Try again, I thought.

“A land flowing with MILK and…”

“Cookies?”

We painted the exterior and re-upholstered the seats, two long ones in our dad’s garage, Marlton Auto. Once customers came to my dad, they never went to another mechanic, he was their mechanic for life. It’s good to have someone like that, someone you know won’t rip you off. Before they realized that, however, some were skeptical and wanted to know why he had a shop in the Crenshaw district, but lived in Hollywood. If they only knew how glamorous our neighborhood wasn’t, they wouldn’t have bothered.

With Duke chained up we “helped” my dad and mom give our beloved ‘63 Chevy Bel Air station wagon a makeover. How much help were John and I really? That’s debatable, but I remember pulling the brown vinyl over the seat frame and holding it there with white knuckles as my dad power-stapled it down. I remember sanding down hardened pink putty, and thinking all the while, this is hopeless, it’ll never be smooth. And I remember the choking sensation I felt as he power-sprayed a narrow beige mist over the surface, slowly from side to side.

It was beautiful. It was noticed. And one night it was stolen.

The police told us that it was most likely taken to Mexico. But a few weeks later, we got a parking ticket for it in the mail. Apparently it had been parked illegally in the neighborhood of my dad’s garage, south, but not quite Mexico. We drove around and around, the whole family, straining for a glimpse, drums beating in our chests. What could we have done if we DID find it? Perhaps it was better that we didn’t. After all, my dad was the guy who ran after purse snatchers and dangled from the window of their speeding getaway car. If he did that for my grandmother’s purse, no telling what he would do for our Beige Beauty.

We humans are very good at taking things for granted like:

• soft hands
• black hair
• flattish stomach
• being able to stay up past 11pm

In the last year I’ve had a couple of instances, glorious few days at a time, when my hands got so soft that I remembered those days when I did not know such an evil thing as eczema existed. Oh yes, there was such a time. This past week has been like that. I’m so afraid it’ll end that I’ve been applying lotion too frequently. I subscribe to the following theory on lotion – if you apply too much, you don’t let the skin repair itself, you take away its power.

I still have the familiar plaid pattern of dry grooves on my fingers and palms, but the skin is supple like regular skin, not broken, and most of the redness is gone. I haven’t babied my skin to achieve this, I continued to wash the dishes several times a day without gloves. They got really bad for a few days, excruciatingly painful and itchy. Polaner minced garlic in the big jar became my best friend for a while, but as they started to heal, my hands kept getting better and better.  Another theory – it’s one of those things that age will fix. I think my eyelids are another – I predict that both of my eyelids will have creases in them by the time I’m 60. See me then.

My third and last theory is what may have initiated healing this time around. Two things: First, the last time I enjoyed a temporary respite from the tyranny of eczema, I was undergoing an experimental treatment using an electric stimulation machine. I hold paddles in my hands and run varying patterns and strengths of electric currents through them. Shocking I know, literally. I would dismiss the idea except that whenever I hit the depths of despair and am willing to try even THIS, something positive happens. I can’t explain it, but then there are a lot of things in this world that I can’t explain, like 7-week-old babies able to say “I love you.” The two main reasons I tried this treatment again were:

• My hands were a mess when we got back from Nashville.
• My dad had jury-rigged some paddles out of brass garden hose nozzles (thanks Midtown OSH!) for use with a portable unit he had.

My dad is a real-life MacGyver, he’s just awesome like that. I didn’t want his efforts to go to waste so I decided to give it another shot. Glad I did. I may be on to something.

The second contributing factor may be the homemade “toner” that my cousin gave me for my face. She combines soju, lemon, and glycerin for a natural inexpensive moisturizer. The formula is a yellowish liquid, slightly sweet-smelling, and does amazing things for the skin. It’s the only thing my cousin uses throughout the day and she has beautiful skin. Used in conjunction with sunscreen, I think it is the perfect moisturizer to combat the wickedness of aging, a cruel feature of this world administration. I pour a little into my palm, cover both hands, and pat it onto my face twice a day. Maybe what helps my face is also helping my hands.