Indoor Camping

Habitat for Honeybees

2011-10-21T14:18:00.000-07:00

We've made it official: we're a non-profit association, pending 501(c)3 approval. (The paperwork is done, filled out, stamped and mailed, and now it's all in the IRS's hands.)

We're Habitat for Honeybees, and you can find our new website here, or at habitatforhoneybees.org.

A little more information, you say? Here you go:

Our mission is to create opportunities for disadvantaged honeybees.

Habitat forHoneybees is a non-profit association located near Golden Gate Park and OceanBeach in San Francisco, and in the rural hills and open space above Saratoga,California.

We are dedicated to capturing feral bees and relocating them into mutuallybeneficial habitats. The world is a better place when bees are allowed tothrive and pollinate in organic farms and neighborhood gardens, rather thanstow away in residential rafters or sneak through the crack in your ceilingskylight.

If you find yourself in the midst of a swarm of ten thousand bees, relax. Beesswarm when they've outgrown their hive, stuffed themselves with honey and takento finding a new home. Without a hive to defend, they're not likely to sting.If they need to be captured, this is the easiest time to do so. Once they findan empty space behind your bathroom wall, they're not going to leave even ifyou ask nicely.

You can ask us nicely and we'll remove them for free. We have extensiveconstruction skills and a bee-friendly bee vacuum that gently removes the beeswithout hurting them. Once dislodged, we house the bees into one of ourhand-made Langstroth hive boxes and set them out in a secure location near goodfood sources.

In this way, wild, local bees become useful pollinators at family backyardgardens and small organic farms, creating natural honey from pesticide-freeflowers.

Seventy-five percent of swarms don't survive through their first winter, mostlydue to starvation. A swarm must find a new home, create frames of honeycomb andfill each cell with enough honey to last until flowers begin to bloom again inthe spring. This is why we harvest our bees' honey only in the spring.

Please check back in Spring 2012 for information on honey availability.

Sucking Up Swarms

2011-09-16T13:27:00.000-07:00

Real gardeners can tell right away that we're poseurs. Lettuce we can grow if we buyseedlings. With seeds from my mom, we accidentally grew enough peas to share. Our squash, grown from donated seedlings, lookedhealthy in the spring. When the sun disappeared for summer, the squash plantsshriveled up and got mushy. The leaves acquired a pretty coat of powdery mildew andwe gave up on that box of dirt.

It's Charlie's job to water the roof beds and it's not one of his high priorities: probably another one of the reasons the squash became squashed. After almost a week, right at dusk, he decided to put on his shoes and gardening hat and see if there was something alive in the raised beds that he could pretend to save. It's been so foggy and wet this summer that watering seems redundant.

What do you think was clumped to the squashed squash? Again?

We were told in our beekeeping classthat swarming in September didn’t happen.

Charlie recently created a bee-vac out of paintbuckets and a shop vac motor to use for sucking up swarms. He could be heard whining that he wassad he couldn't test his new bee-vac out until spring.

He wasn’t sad anymore. This big, fat swarm was huddled together as if they were tucked in for the night. They looked cold. How, you ask? They weren't moving. Like, not at all. Bees not moving seems wrong. Looking closely, very closely, the outside bees seemed to be tightly shaking their wings to keep everyone warm underneath. If I were a bee, I'd have picked somewhere less exposed to spend the night.

Charlie vacuumed them up with his new toy, without killing a single one. In the morning, they were granted a brand-new hive box. What are we going to do with these bees? Dump them into a weaker hive? Here, or down the valley at my mom's where it's warmer? At this late date, how could they make enough comb and honeyto survive the winter?

At night, Charlie went up to the roof towater since he didn't get around to it the night before. This time, he found yet another swarm on the deadsquash bed. He didn’t have enough time to do anything but suck up this smallercluster, probably an afterswarm from the same hive, and toss them into the previous night's swarm hive.

In case they were from one of our hives, we placed their hive far from the rest and onto a different, far corner of the roof. If they were within smelling distance to their old hive, they'd just go back and create a big confused mess, and demand a do-over.

Next time we opened the PGE hive, we noticed there were only half the previous amount of bees. That must be the swarm's old hive. They'd made queen cells, which we left, and hoped that it would be a calm, sunny day when the new virgin queen was ready to take her mating flight across Fulton.

Charlie didn't stop whining, though. He was able to use his bee-vac twice with no fatalities. He stares across the street at the park, saying, "There must be a lot of feral swarms within sucking distance."

"Your extension cord wouldn't reach," I reply. "Besides, hunting with a vacuum doesn't seem right."

The bee-vac sits by the door, as ready as Charlie to rescue any swarm oddly attracted to our dying squash. At least the whining has slowed down a bit.

Replacing Royalty

2011-09-16T12:40:00.000-07:00

When a hive swarms, the departing bees take their old queenalong with them. The remaining bees will have a new queen once she emerges fromher cell about a week later. If there are other new, baby queens, they’ll stingeach other and fight to the death until there’s only one virgin queen.

The first thing that queen needs to do is to get laid. Sheflies off, and if she’s in one of our hives, that means she has to get acrossFulton St. The wind builds heavily off the ocean all day long except for between about1 and 3 pm. If she’s smart, she’ll wait until she doesn’t have to get blowneastward. Never having flown or been outside, virgin queens aren't skilled pilots. Complicatingmatters, once they’re done with their 12 to 15 one-night-stands, they have to get their head on straight and rememberhow to get back home again.

With two swarming hives, we’ve had two virgin queens. Botheither couldn’t find the drone pick-up bar or couldn’t find their way back home. The sign of a failed virgin is no eggs after 35 days. Bothour swarmed hives remain eggless.

The solution was Peter the queen breeder. As long as we were traveling all the way to San Jose, we picked up a couple of extras. One of the Italian bee packages that we named Team Gelato,had a dud queen: Team Gelato. When you name a hive after an indulgent Roman dessert, you're begging for failure.

The Gelato queen acted like a laying worker. Laying workers are bees so worried about the lack of a queen that they try to take over the job. They lay eggs, but they're obviously unfertilized. Unfertilized eggs are males, and a hive cannot survive without women (males don't even feed themselves).

Eggs from workers also don't have the queen's pheromone smell, so when the other worker bees notice, they remove these eggs from the cells. This results in a spotty brood pattern on the frames. In addition, laying workers don't have a long enough body to reach all the way down to the bottom of the cell so their eggs are typically half-way down, off to the side. These fake queens also lay several eggs in one cell; another indicator but not a foolproof one as new queens will do this too, until they get the hang of it.

Societal collapse was inevitable with Team Gelato's barren queen. We didn't need a barbaric invasion to know the end was near. Thanks to Peter, she was replaced.

Team Gelato's home base was a ten-frame hive but they stubbornly stayedout the last two frames on either end. It’s genetic with some bees. They’re used to living in trees. They like the close-in feel of a condo, rather than the space of a stretched out mid-century ranch home.

Charlie noticed their preference and, since they've gone through enough pandemonium already, moved them to a more tree-ish, urban loft-like, eight-frame hive.

After doing so, he returned to his shed to take off his bee suit. With his pants around his ankles, he noticed something fat and wiggly, perched on his shoe. Since Team Gelato was the only hive he had opened, this big, dumb bee must be their queen.

He dumped her back home and the rest of the bees seemed okay with her. They weren’t attacking, so she must be theirs. She must have fallen off while Charlie was transferring herframe. Queens are the heaviest thing on the frame, so it’s natural that they’dbe the first thing to drop. This is one of those close calls you get to brag about in bee meetings.

We checked the first thing next morning, just because we're that kind of beekeepers. Team Gelato was going great. The fallen queenwas making up for lost time, grateful for a second chance, and laying eggs everywhere.

As long as we were checking hives, we went next door to theEspresso Girls. These were the other Italian package bees we bought at the same time as Team Gelato. They werealways strong like the beverage they were named after, but it didn’t hurt to check.

The first thing we saw was a dead queen onthe bottom board. Your sense of justice takes a hit when you see such a benevolent, hard-working leader lying dead at the feet of her former followers. This was going to be dead Espresso without a quick, strong replacement.

Charlie begged Peter for another queen. “Sure, I’ll save you one," he said. "They’re being fed by nurse bees in my back yard. Call beforeyou get there and I’ll make sure I’m there.”

Charlie called but couldn’t get through. When he arrived,Peter wasn't there. Instead, Peter's dad answered the door and wasn't too excited about digging out a queen. Peter, on the phone, talked him into it. “You’re going to take a few stings,dad,” Peter said. “You know that.”

Dad, grumbling, put on a bee suit and went out back.

There was no honey or brood in Peter's queen box - just a lotof queens and a few angry, Nurse Rached-like nurse bees feeding them. They were furious because the queens weren’t laying. They want to take care of eggs and brood, sogoing against their nature like this is a sure way to get them to impersonate Africanized killer honeybees.

Dad pulls out a queen cage and drops it into aplastic container. The killer nurse bees are all over him, bumping him, stinking his hands, and loudly buzzing everywhere. Now they're doubly angry: first about no babies to take care of, and now about this big, white, cloth-covered bear stealing their queen.

As soon as Peter's dad completed his assignment, he turned and walked as quickly as he could straight to Charlie. Charlie, not wearing a bee suit, had been hiding as far from the queen box as he could get. Peter's dad, covered with angry, stinging bees, thrusts the queen into Charlie's hands.

Now the nurse bees have a new target: Charlie, the possessor of their queen, and specifically Charlie's eyes. They sting him wherever they could get him. The left side of his face didn't move. From the side, he looked like Joan Rivers.

Back home, with both Italian hives properly queened, people were more interested in Charlie's face. "What happened?" everyone asked.

Unfortunately, this happened to be the week where several Killer Bee stories were in the news. Africanized bees can't deal with cold, so they'll never be this far north but that doesn't stop people from asking about them. All. The. Time. Charlie, therefore, was reluctant to say he was a beekeeper and he was stung in the face. This admission could make you sound rather stupid.

Instead, Charlie said, "Botox."

"One only one side of your face?"

"That's the side where the wrinkles were bad," he said. "I thought it was weird, too."

Almost everyone knew he was joking.

Bee Links

2011-08-20T18:21:00.000-07:00

Chicago's O'Hare Airport had some unused land and since airports are all about flying, made this a new home for one and a half million bees. Sweet Beginnings, the organization that trains felons in the art of beekeeping and bee products, is managing the project through a local economic development agency. The airport beekeeping movement began in Germany, in 1999, when scientists used bees to monitor air quality. O'Hare, however, is the first American airport apiary. Cocktail party fact: O'Hare was once an apple orchard, which lives on in its three-letter airport code, "ORD."

Click here for the story.

Four Not-To-Be-Missed Marvelous Bee Movies (and one Bee Viddy):

1. Queen of the Sun: What are the Bees Telling Us?

This is the most recent effort from Taggart Siegel, the filmmaker who gave us the wonderful and one-of-a-kind, The Real Dirt on Farmer John. Full of gorgeous photography, eccentric beekeepers, and rational scientists, this film is mostly about Colony Collapse Disorder. Regarding CCD, most people are unaware that:

Artificially bred bees are malnourished on a diet of high-fructose corn-syrup.
Many are confined in plastic hives and transported thousands of miles (as they are bombarded by exhaust fumes) only to be forced to work in crops soaked in pesticides.
Because of these conditions, exhausted and weakened pollinators become easy prey for mites, climate change, environmental radiation, viruses, air and water pollution, and the challenging effects of genetically modified crops.
In order for urban beekeepers to thrive, certain antiquated laws need to be changed.

Don't get the idea this is a downer, boo-hoo, what can we do? kind of a movie. It's not. Even the movie website is fascinating and educational without being boring. Click on the title above, go to the movie website link, and scroll down to read their Ten Amazing Bee Facts. If that doesn't give you scintillating cocktail party conversation, you need to stay home (and watch a good bee movie).

2. Vanishing of the Bees

This documentary really gets into the issue of Colony Collapse Disorder, explaining what caused colony collapse disorder, how the cause was identified, and what people can do to prevent its spread. The approach is quite scientific and includes an interview with Michael Pollan, among others.

In France, you learn that the government uses the "precautionary principle" regarding the use of pesticides: a pesticide must be proven not to have harmful side effects. In the United States, most of the studies are conducted by the manufacturers of the very same pesticides that are causing the problems.

Even so, the filmmakers are conservative when it comes to drawing firm scientific conclusions and placing blame even though neonicotinoids, pesticides made by Bayer, obviously negatively affect bees. All you have to do is watch a bee on a pesticide-treated sunflower: she loses her orientation, can't work, and falls to the ground. That alone is worth the extra effort to go find this movie.

3. Colony: No Bees. No Honey. No Work. No Money.

This might just be my favorite bee movie, ever, thanks to the Seppi brothers. These are the boys who decide to start up a bee pollinating business at the exact wrong time - at the beginning of Colony Collapse Disorder - and are the thread running through this movie that holds it together. They live in a deeply religious family with a mother who understands nothing about agricultural economics or even basics about farming business. With these two strikes against them, you can't help but get attached and watch with the hope they can persevere.

As with the first two documentaries, you get a healthy dose of David Hackenberg and David Mendes, two professional pollinators who pack thousands of their hives onto trailers and travel across the country, renting out their bees to farmers for weeks at a time. They're both quirky, honest, fascinating, and seemingly just trying to make a living at something incredibly difficult. Mr. Hackenberg is known for first identifying Colony Collapse Disorder when he mysteriously lost 80 million bees from his Florida hives. Mr. Mendes is shown selflessly trying to save his, as well as the rest of the world's, collapsing hives. They are a couple of interesting characters in a movie full of interesting characters, but the characters who stick with you for days later while you wonder and worry are the Seppi brothers, Lance and Victor. I still worry and hope the best for them, even now.

4. Nova: Bees: Tales From The Hive

This is an older documentary and, as you'll find if you click on the title, available through Amazon (and Netflix), rather than on TV or at a screen somewhere, so Colony Collapse Disorder isn't discussed. Instead you'll find the most unbelievable close-up footage of bees in flight, foraging, fighting, mating, and dancing.

If you ever wanted to be a bee, this is your movie. It's the closest you'll ever get to carrying pollen on your legs.

5. TED Talks: Dennis vanEngelsdorp: a plea for bees

One more little video, back to the subject of Colony Collapse Disorder. This is a TED talk from 2008 given by the Acting State Apiarist for Pennsylvania's Department of Agriculture. Mr. VanEngelsdorp describes the role that bees (and beekeepers) play in our lives, their importance, and their future given this massive and frightening bee colony death called Colony Collapse Disorder. It's less than twenty minutes long and, like all TED talks, worth every second of your time. Every third bite you take is thanks to a bee, and if there's a better cocktail party conversation starter than that, you're going to better parties than me.

Bee Ambassadors

2011-08-19T17:15:00.000-07:00

When you're as excited about bees as my mom and Yo, you invite your friends over to look at your new pets. Whenever we schedule a time to come down to do hive inspections, my mom asks her friends if they want to come over and watch. We get a good lunch and they get the potential to get stung.

Last week, not only did her friends stop by for a visit, but they brought along visitors who happened to be visiting them, too. My mom's friends wanted to show their guests something different and exciting. We got the idea of what it's like to be one of the stops on a wine-tasting tour. Except there's no wine - there's not even honey yet - and you have to wear a veil.

Yo gave them an overview while we finished our lunch. After that, we got them ready to stand in the hot sun in front of a million bees. We made them wear lighter clothing, which meant putting on sweaters during a 90 degree day, since bees think you're a bear if you're wearing dark colors. At least that's what we've been told. We made them wear veils, too, since a sting in the eye means you're now blind and that would ruin anyone's vacation.

Charlie opened up a hive and showed them a frame of bees. They took photos and asked lots of questions. One woman said, "Oh my gosh, look at all those bees!" She said it many times, just as if we really were a stop on someone's fun vacation tour.

Not only did we get to also talk about bees, but they left us with a video of their trip to the Kalahari desert. Maybe next time we can trade vacation tours.

Hit The Road, Drone

2011-08-19T16:41:00.000-07:00

Pushed out drone

Male bees - drones - are so lazy they don't even feed themselves. They don't clean themselves and they don't do any work, ever. All they're good for is just the one thing.

Otherwise, the girls have to take care of them like big babies.

When the bees begin to get ready for winter, they're making as much honey as they can to build up stores. The slacker drones start to become as annoying as lazy teenagers so the girls escort them out the front door and won't let them back into the hive.

Watching the hive entrance around this time of the year, you'll see huge, wandering, teenage-boy-looking bees. You can pick them out right away because all the other bees are scurrying around looking busy. These big guys walk from one bee to another, as if they're asking for a handout. They never get one. Often they get pushed off the porch and fall onto the ground, and that's where their story ends.

One of our hives on the roof has a virgin queen. Or she was. Charlie found a drone recently kicked out, on the ground in front of this particular hive. You'll notice this guy has a different look. He looks like he died with a smile on his face.

The virgin queen is no longer virgin.

Pocketful of Bees

2011-08-19T16:26:00.000-07:00

What is good for bees is good for everything else. Once we put the bees out in my mom's back yard, it seemed as if everything that could hop, crawl or fly over, did exactly that and moved in.

Along the ground, armies of yellow jackets hover even though there are thirteen traps hung along the nearby trees, and those are filled within days. Sometimes they're filled within hours if the traps happen to be particularly situated or if they smell like really good, dead things.

But the worst problem are the ants. We've had some success with painting Tanglefoot around the legs of the hive stand. Ants are smart, though. They'll stack up leaves and debris over the sticky Tanglefoot to crawl over it. They'll even crawl up over their stuck, dead relatives to get to the honey.

And they do. Get to the honey, that is. Beekeepers say, "You'll only have ant problems with a weak hive." They haven't been to my mom's. It's like the Amazon: there's so much life that it's impossible to clear out an ant-free zone. They could take down coyotes.

Charlie bought another bottle of Tanglefoot and reapplied our sticky defense. We knew that wasn't the end of the story.

He needed to move the lower hives. He made a new hive stand, a taller one this time, and placed it back further into the hill. This way the yellow jackets would have to fly out of their comfort zone and, more importantly, the ants would have to traverse over a retaining wall and up the legs of a taller stand. There'd have to be a lot more dead bodies to climb over if they were going to get into these hives.

Once he built the stand, he moved the hives. This created a problem for the bees. They'd been out foraging and when they came home, home was not there anymore.

Instead, they found Charlie's hive toolbelt. In the pocket was his hive tool, which he'd just used to open their hives for the move. Smelling the smells of home, that was good enough for these tired bees. The rest of their sisters flew around in the general area, as if they were circling the block, thinking, "This has to be the right place."

After emptying his belt pocket a few times, the bees got the idea and fanned their wings to let their sisters know where to go. If all goes well, the ants won't catch on.

George's Swarm #2

2011-08-08T18:44:00.000-07:00

"It happened again," George said. He called Charlie about a week ago when a huge swarm landed on his cherry tree. Now he's calling again. "They're on a lower branch this time. Come on over."

It was cold and almost dark. The bees would want to stick close together for the night to keep warm, so Charlie wouldn't have to wait a long time for the bees to march in, once he got the queen. Rescuing them would be a snap.

Don't tell me bees aren't smart. George's garden is stunning, lush, and probably the most beautiful piece of greenery within a mile. They picked the best place they could find to swarm.

If you want to attract bees (maybe not this many) plant a beautiful garden.

Crutches, Compost and Yellow Jackets

2011-08-08T18:30:00.000-07:00

Ants on a yellow jacket trap

“I’m on crutches,” Philip said. “While removing a colony from a roof in Petaluma, I took a fall. Would you mind helping me inspect my hives?”

Who wouldn't want to see what a real beekeeper’s hives look like? “Sure,” Charlie said.

Arriving at his house, the first thing he said was, “I have something to show you. I did a couple of yellow jacket rescues. They’re out on the compost pile.”

“You rescued yellow jackets? I would have sprayed them with Raid.”

“I don’t like releasing that kind of poison in the environment. I do it a little differently.”

“Why are you rescuing yellow jackets?”

“I get bee calls. I arrive and the bees turn out to be yellow jackets. I don’t want to say, ‘they’re yellow jackets, sorry,’ and walk away. Yellow jackets are dangerous.”

“How do you capture yellow jackets?”

“I spray them with this powder that stops them from flying. Next, I cover them with a cloth laundry-type bag, pull the drawstring and take them home, out to the compost pile. Grab the butane torch on the table and I’ll show you.”

“This ought to be good.”

On top of the compost heap is a paper nest the size of a watermelon.

“What I like to do is torch ‘em. You want to do it?”

“Of course.” Charlie, the undercover pyro, lit the torch.

“Start with the wasp nest. You’ll see the layers burn away. After that, you’ll see the comb.”

The yellow jacket nest walls are extremely thick. Even with a butane torch, it took a while to burn through. As it did, the layers of comb began to appear, like a cut-away view of a house. Everything in the yellow jacket nest is made out of paper, but a paper that’s impervious to weather. It looks like a rolled asphalt roof with one layer overlapping the next, using gravity to shed water.

The yellow jackets, of course, came flying out when their house began to burn. Charlie made sure to torch each one as they escaped, so they wouldn't survive to sting him.

Inside the comb were larvae and - thinking of how much yellow jackets were making his bees' life hard - Charlie became even more enthusiastic in the process of killing them.

Once the nest was toast, Charlie concentrated on the dirt nest also stored in the compost pile. He used the same vigor and excitement to spray each and every single one of those flying evil bee killers. They sting multiple times while bees only get one chance. It's not fair.

Soon the compost pile was scorched earth, but that didn't slow him down. Knowing yellow jackets, there could be more hiding somewhere. Charlie sprayed as if his life depended on it.

Philip, not as interested in the yellow jackets as Charlie, said, "That's probably enough."

Worth A Fly?

2011-08-08T12:06:00.000-07:00

Healthy Saratoga bees

At the Santa Clara Beekeepers Guild, Serge Labesque got us enthusiastic about getting our hives ready for winter. That's not easy. Getting beekeepers excited is easy - just ask us about our girls - but winter? Some of us get the shakes just anticipating all that down time we'll have while our bees stay inside their hive, snuggling up in a tight ball to keep warm, eating honey and relaxing.

Serge showed slides of top boards to create proper wintering ventilation flow, racks to make to keep frames dry and moth-free, and explained how to stack two hives on top of each other with a queen excluder between. This way, he said, the worker bees can move freely between the hives without the queens killing each other.

Often weak hives starve over the winter as they can't eat cold honey even if it's nearby, and they can't get to honey if it isn't nearby. With a two hive colony, the starving bees send out distress signals and the warm, healthy bees fly up and feed them. You use nature to keep them alive.

However, when Charlie asked a question about swarms, Serge answered with, "Swarms? I don't waste my time with swarms. They're not going to make it anyway."

Notice swarm hanging from top

The first thing a beekeeper learns is that 75% of swarms don't survive winter. In fact, there's a saying, "A swarm in May is worth a bale of hay, a swarm in June is worth a silver spoon but a swarm in July isn't worth a fly."

It's August. There's not enough time to build up comb and store enough honey for winter, all while making enough babies to keep the hive alive.

Stopping by my mom's before the meeting, Charlie got around to doing some cleanup. When you have a lot of pretty property to leave extra hive traps lying around, you do. There's no use bringing them home. Who needs another tiny, frail swarm caught from Golden Gate park? We had to merge the two swarms we caught on the roof together, being so small.

They weren't thriving - even then - so we brought them to the Saratoga bee hospital at my mom's, to recover. Better but still sickly, we merged them with the Alameda girls - a third, healthy swarm. After all that, they're going strong. No wonder Serge doesn't have time for swarms.

When Charlie lifted the hive trap, it was heavy. You know what that means: another swarm had moved in. This is the fourth Saratoga swarm we've caught since Father's Day. Where were all these bees before?

Inside the Little Giants hive

During his last inspection, Charlie noticed the Little Giants - the bees from our Giants hive with the too-fat-to-fly queen that swarmed ten feet from their hive onto our squash plants - didn't have any eggs. Maybe that fat queen couldn't make the trip down to Saratoga, or she didn't like the warm weather, or the virgin queen injured her during their battle for the top job. Either way, they needed a new queen.

Charlie added a frame of babies stolen from another healthy hive so they could make a new queen, but that would take a while. If they were going to survive winter, they needed a push.

They got it. Charlie didn't have time, being late for the bee meeting already, to do anything but dump the new swarm into the Little Giants's hive, queen and all. Usually you put a sheet of newspaper between the two colonies. That way, during the time it takes for them to chew through, they get used to each other. We'd rather talk about bees than deal with these here.

Cleaning each other

The Little Giants, at first, chased the new Saratoga girls away. That didn't last long.

Bees on top of the frames began to clean each other, as if to say, "Come in, we have plenty of room. And let's clean you up a little before you meet the rest of the girls."

We put the top back on, hoping this new queen stays and lays, being August and all. If not, a guy at the bee meeting introduced himself to us by saying, "If you need good queens, I'll have a few for sale soon." We got his number.

We're In Business

2011-08-04T18:32:00.000-07:00

Cat, our new best bee friend, called to say, “Would you mind responding to a swarm call? It’s in San Francisco and I’m too busy to drive all the way up there.”

A real swarm capture? Not just reclaiming our own bees?

“Sure,” Charlie said and put down his mouse for the first time all morning. He now had an excuse to quit hanging out on the bee chat groups, writing passionate comments while drinking strong coffee: his morning routine until, well, lunch.

When he arrived, George the homeowner told him, “I was out in my garden yesterday. I heard this thunder-like sound. I looked up and there was a cloud of bees landing on my cherry tree. It was so exciting to watch but now I feel sorry for them. They’re not moving.”

“This is perfect,” Charlie said. “I've got a queenless hive.”

The first swarm Charlie ever caught, our Slacker swarm that escaped across the street, don’t have a queen. After capturing them we gave them a new box on the other end of the stand and named them Slacktivists. They never got around to making babies so we wonder if that queen, the one who swarmed, gave up her wild ways and went back home to her old, familiar hive.

The rest of the swarm stayed in their new box and started building up honey, hoping she’d come back. She never did. She most likely killed the Slackers' new queen and went back to work laying eggs. Somebody’s laying a lot of eggs in that hive and from the looks of it, it’s someone who knows what she’s doing. There are frames full of babies.

Back at the swarm, George took Charlie back to his garden, a beautiful sunny oasis with huge pots of flowers, planter boxes lush with trees and green growing vegetation everywhere, like only a garden with lots of sun can be. No wonder the swarm stopped here.

The bees made their temporary home up thirty feet high, even though Cat was told it was fifteen feet max. Bees balled up about the size of a volleyball.

“I have a big extension ladder you can use,” George said.

Charlie propped it up against the neighbor’s fence and brought out his nuc box. A nuc box is a cardboard box in which frames can be put in, used only to capture swarms or starting a nucleus colony. He’d only used it once before to capture the escaping Giants girls who swarmed ten feet from their hive onto our squash plant. The box was barely big enough to hold all those girls, so it probably smelled a lot like sweaty bees, like an apiary gym locker.

Charlie held the box under the swarm and lifted it up until the whole swarm was inside the box to minimize the drop distance and the potential bee trauma.

Thwap! Charlie hit the branch and they all fell in.

He put the lid on and held it in place. A couple of tiny clusters congregated by the entrance, proving there was a queen and she was inside the box.

He couldn’t stand there for the several hours it would take to make sure the stragglers got in. Instead, Charlie left it tied onto the highest part of the tree that would support the box, about five feet off the ground. It’s better to do that than have them fall. That happened already with the first swarm Charlie caught: the Slacker swarm. A gusty wind came up and knocked the whole nuc to the ground. Perhaps that had something to do with the reason the Slacker queen went back into her old hive?

“I’ll come back tonight about 7:30 to collect the box," Charlie told George. "It’ll take that long to make sure they’re all inside.”

“Do you get paid for this?" George asked. "How are you spending all this time without earning any money?”

“As long as people call me instead of an exterminator, I’m happy to do it for nothing.”

“Well," George said, holding up a hundred dollar bill. "I thank you and Ben thanks you. I can’t wait to tell all my gardening friends about this.”

Whacha Gonna Do With All Those (Chilly) Bees?

2011-08-04T18:06:00.000-07:00

We have an obstacle and it’s called fog. We have another called cold, as in summers never getting above 60 except for the rare days when it hits 62 and we all rush outside, get sunburned and, for a day, look like we live in California.

Otherwise, we and our bees practically hibernate. We can travel to get our Vitamin D but the bees aren't joining us in the car. On their own, they can go about three miles. Three miles east doesn't get them to the sunny side of San Francisco, and twenty blocks west is the Pacific Ocean. We feel like bee scientists, pushing the limits of bee toleration when it comes to living in adverse pollen-gathering weather conditions.

To survive winter, bees need a summer. Our girls need a better spot.

They have the best spot possible at my mom’s, but she agreed to a few hives. A few is two, and she's hosting that many hive stands, both full. She's not complaining, yet. In fact, the first thing she does every morning is to hike up her hill and say hello to the girls.

Less than six months ago a car rolled down from the house above and landed in her pool. The area all nicely cleared off, all ready for bees? A car ran through it. Sure it's only happened once in 39 years, but doesn't lightning strike twice in the same place?

We asked our CSA if they wanted bees and they said, “There’s a hive here already but if you think we should have more, go ahead.”

Charlie was ready to load up a hive and go, but I thought it'd be best to visit first being that their location was warmer, but just as foggy. While touring all their acres of broccoli and cabbage and so many different vegetables that I couldn't recognize, the hive's owner came by. We knew she was the hive's owner because who else would get out of a car wearing a full bee suit, including veil?

Cat said she's on a mission: to catch swarms and install them on organic farms up and down the coast. She wasn’t doing it for the money – is there money? – but to help establish bees on the coast, and to support organic farmers.

Later on we learned we weren't able to put one of our hives on the CSA property. The CSA only leases, so they didn't have the final say. Cat found out and told us, “There are a lot of other farms needing hives. Let’s keep in touch. We'll work it out.”

She mentioned she sold her honey at the Pacifica Farmer’s Market. “You ought to stop by,” she said. “Farmer John will be there. He’s a good guy. Maybe he'd want one of your hives.”

Farmer's Markets are the best excuse to buy cookies, so we stopped by. With a mouthful of cashew creams and whoopie pies, we were introduced to Farmer John.

“Cat’s crazy," he said. "You can do whatever you like, just go through her. You beekeepers are crazy.”

We were too stuffed with sugar to argue.

What Happened to Worrying about Mites?

2011-07-21T14:40:00.000-07:00

Golden Gate/Alameda Girls Defending their Hive

One good thing about rooftop beekeeping is the lack of ants. Sure, there's enough high winds and beefy fog to make you think you're on a seagoing vessel in Ireland the middle of March, but that's just summer in San Francisco. Wet streets, bad hair days, but no ants.

At my mom's a few visits ago, it seemed like there were more ants than usual. Usual to us is no ants. Like I said, we don't have ants at home. We don't think to look for them.

We asked around. People told us, “Ants only pick on weak hives," in a tone that implied we were obviously bad beekeepers with scrawny, 90-lb. weakling bees who couldn't even defend themselves against wingless, stingless ants. “There’s nothing you can do.”

We visited the farm at our CSA, Greenhearts Family Farm, and met their beekeeper. She was anything but judgmental so we weren't embarrassed to admit our ant issues. “Sprinkle cinnamon," she said. "That’s what I use.” She had ants? But she seemed so normal.

Santa Clara Beekeepers Guild gave us a free guide, Beekeeping with Essential Oils, when we stopped by their meeting. If cinnamon worked, they would know. Instead, they recommended using Tanglefoot, something so disgusting-sounding that having ants might be preferable. What is it? Where do you get it?

They warned you have to throw out whatever clothes and tools you used to apply it. The thought of something that gloppy made me not want to even google it. Their second solution was to soak strips of cloth with 3 in 1 oil and wrap it around each hive stand leg. Didn't they have any pleasant-smelling solutions?

Charlie’s chat group suggested setting the hive stand legs in tin cans and pouring in an half inch of oil into the can. Ants will climb in but perish in the deadly, but not stinky, oil moat.

Killing a Yellow Jacket

My mom's organic, natural gardening book recommended spraying the hive stand base with white vinegar. Ants apparently hate the smell of pickles, which is what vinegar smells like to me, or feet.

Since we were at my mom's and she had both vinegar and a spray bottle handy, it was about time somebody did something. (Bees come alive during warm weather. I'm the opposite.)

We squirted randomly around the base of the hives, staying far away from the bees as best we could. Bees don't like the smell of pickles, either. My mom found some cinnamon and sprinkled it around the hive stand base, too. In this warm weather, she is very much like a bee.

Nothing happened. Ants continued to march up the hive stand legs. Charlie swore at them and shot them with the spray but they kept going, undaunted. Ants can destroy a colony. We should have gone shopping, or at least googled Tanglefoot. Before we left, my mom found three natural, no-pesticide ant traps in her garage and put them down. That was easy enough.

When we returned, the ants were gone. It could have been the cinnamon, the vinegar or the natural ant trap contraptions. When you throw everything at a problem, next time you have that problem, you have to throw everything all over again.

Instead of ants, something else was terrorizing the Golden Gate/Alameda girls hive, our weakest colony. The girls were flying in tight, frenzied circles in front of their front porch. About twenty were flying in and out of the hive entrance, back and forth, pacing nervously. On the front post in front of the hive was the weirdest thing yet: a dozen bees shaking in a tight, little ball.

Yellow Jacket Catchers

There was something strange in the middle of the vibrating ball, something yellow. “It’s a yellow jacket,” Charlie said, looking over from across the hive stand. “They’re being invaded by yellow jackets.”

“Quick,” my mom said to her husband, Yo, standing by. “Get the wasp traps.”

He raced down the stairs with my mom following. Charlie and I watched as yellow jackets flew under the hive to try to get in through the screened bottom boards. "They smell the honey," Charlie said. They figured out they couldn't get in that way so they began to dive-bomb the front porch. We watched without knowing what to do. It was like watching murderers come into your home wanting to kill your children.

I found a block of wood and tried to crush the stupid yellow jackets still trying to get in through the screen bottom boards. It took a lot of concentration to even crush one against the soft earth a few inches below - their flight patterns were so erratic and quick. When I let go, no matter how hard I pressed, they flew off like they'd had a nice massage.

Charlie got down on the path in front and began to stomp. The yellow jackets thought they were escaping by hovering close to the ground but he got one, and smeared it until it was just yellow, stripey pieces in the dirt. I gave up on the wood block and found it was easier to stomp them, even with flip-flops. I flattened two. It felt good, but only until I looked up and saw a yellow jacket fly past security and right into the Golden Gate/Alameda girls' hive.

My mom and Yo returned with three plastic upside-down cup-looking things filled with pieces of bacon and other meaty treats. "The yellow jackets smell the bacon and enter through a hole at the bottom," my mom explained. "They can’t get back out. Sometimes the whole cup is full of yellow jackets."

As soon as they hung them, the yellow jackets ignored the bees. We ignored all of it and had lunch. While getting my mom a Klondike bar, Yo made a detour and checked the trap closest to the hive. "Seventeen," he said. "I counted seventeen yellow jackets already."

After the Yellow Jackets

People were right - this is our weakest hive and anybody who watches the Discovery channel knows predators pick the stragglers. This hive began as the first swarm we ever caught up on the rooftop: the Golden Gate girls. Being small, we combined it with the second, and last, swarm caught up on the roof. They still weren't thriving so we added the Alameda girls, a swarm we acquired in exchange for a six-pack of IPA. On the roof, they were still the scrawniest, so we brought them down to my mom's. What else can we do?

After the yellow jackets left them alone, we had to peek inside to learn what kind of bad beekeepers we really were. Were they making babies so they could grow big enough to stay warm over winter? Were they storing enough honey? Were they overtaken by ants, or something else? Did they have mites? Mice? Lizards?

Nope. They looked like a photo from Good Beekeeping Magazine. So there, people.

Swarming on Squash

2011-07-20T14:01:00.000-07:00

Charlie has been cutting out swarm cells, queen bee baby cells, from the Giants hive for a while now. The bees create baby queens by feeding royal jelly - bee steroids - to a regular baby girl bee and they grow into great big, long queens.

They're easy to find, swarm cells. They're big, droopy blobs stuck along the bottom of the brood frames. Drone cells are big, too, but they don't droop. Bees make new queens when they're unhappy with their old one or when they feel cramped and need to divide and swarm.

Charlie realized cutting out swarm cells wasn't going to work. They were determined to swarm no matter what. He realized he needed to split the hive.

He built a nuc box - a smaller version of a regular hive box - to take the queen and five frames from the Giants to fool them into thinking they’d already swarmed. It was too late and therefore too cold to split it when he finished, so he brought it up in the morning. He opened the door to the roof and saw the sun for the first time in over a week.

He saw something else: a huge black cloud of bees hovering over the raised vegetable beds.

Out loud, Charlie said, "Seriously? You guys couldn't wait another hour?" When you're on the roof, beekeeping and tending vegetables by yourself for hours on end, talking to yourself is the least of your acquired bad habits.

He assumed they were rallying to head across the street to swarm there, but the longer he watched, the more he realized they weren't going anywhere. In fact, they were lowering their cloud onto the squash box, right in front of their favorite saucer of water, and less than ten feet from their old hive.

"That Giants queen is a fat ass," Charlie said to himself again. "She probably couldn't fly much further."

The cloud landed and split between a zucchini plant and the wooden wind barrier right behind it. The Giants are our second package bees, healthy enough to swarm - duh - and there were at least 30,000 to 40,000 in this split. The original package contained no more than 10,000, so we must not be killer beekeepers (yet).

Charlie told himself, "If I can find the queen and get her into this box, they’ll all follow and this will be the laziest way to capture a swarm."

He inspected the small clumps beginning to form into clusters and easily found the old queen on a zucchini leaf. She'd been marked when we bought her, painted with a big, bright white dot, but that's not what he found on her now. Queens get a lot of cleaning and crawling on so all she had left was a little shadow of a speck.

Not wanting to lose her, Charlie cut the whole leaf off and set it in the box. Some of the bees followed, if you can call that following. They sort of meandered accidentally in that direction, as if they didn't want to go just yet.

While taking photos, I found what looked like a queen, too, a younger, thinner princess: a virgin queen. To be safe, we flipped her into the box, too.

That did it. There was enough pheromones coming from the box to get even the most laziest bees excited about making the journey into the box.

Being such a huge swarm, it took them until 8 at night to get in the box. Once they were mostly in, Charlie had to screen it shut. They were so tightly packed that he had to squish some of them just to get the screen secure.

When he caught the swarm from the Slackers, our first bee package, he put them in a new box and back on the same hive stand from which they'd left. It must have confused them, as at least half the swarmers returned to their old hive.

"It's better to move you," Charlie said, this time to the bees. "Guess where you're going?"

Again, we drove to my mom's, this time with a cardboard box tightly packed with loudly humming bees. If you told me they'd lifted off and were hovering above the back seat, I would have believed you.

Charlie added a frame of honey and a frame of babies to their new home, once they'd been released. With honey and brood, they'd stay. They'd have food and something to take care of while getting settled in. They'll love it in this ritzy, pollen-filled, sunny neighborhood.

Later in the day, Charlie peeked through the entrance slot to see how they were doing. When you do that, you can see the bottom of the frames and the bottom of the cluster. Inside their hive, bees cluster into a ball to keep their brood warm. There were a few dead bees on the screen bottom board and that’s normal. There were well over 30,000 bees in this little box and they only live six weeks. He thought he would see more.

Having his hive tool and being nosy, he scooped out the dead bees to get a better view. One of the bees he pulled out had an unusually long abdomen; skinny but different than the rest. There goes the virgin queen they worked so hard to make. There can only be one queen and she didn't stand a chance against that old, big fat ass queen.

Swarming in Sausalito

2011-07-20T13:04:00.000-07:00

Philip belongs to the Marin Beekeepers Association and he's on their list for swarm response and rescue. Someone in Sausalito found a swarm had moved into their house, under the roof and behind the fascia boards. They called Philip, and Philip invited Charlie to come along.

When they arrive they see a little tiny hole, no more than an inch in diameter and twelve feet above the deck floor below, with only three or four bees crawling around. “I think this is a tiny colony," Charlie says.

“You never know until you cut away the wall,” Philip said.

Charlie isn’t convinced. It'd take a long time for a swarm to get inside there with that little hole, wouldn't it? And with only a few bees flying in and out, if it is a swarm in there, they must be pretty laid back.

Philip pulls out his heat sensor and points at the hole to take temperature measurements. "This is how I learn where the clusters is," he said. His readings were hottest right below the hole. “That’s where they are,” he said. “Right there.”

He began to cut away the outside of the house. The bees, few that there were, didn't mind that he'd powered up a circular saw and was opening up their wall. They didn't even bother to bump him.

When he finished cutting, he pulled a piece of the exterior off and they both had a look inside. It's a huge cluster, like a basketball, hanging between the roof joists.

Time to begin sucking. Philip made a bee-vac, like a shop-vac, to extract bees. The machine sucks bees up through the hose and they land in the box. To lessen the impact, the landing spot is fitted with carpet padding.

The hose wasn’t long enough to stretch all the way to the ground so Charlie's job was to hold the box up high enough to reach.

Philip turned the bee-vac on and slowly, with a gentle, circular motion, started sucking bees. The bees, again, were calm. They seemed to be waiting for their turn to be shop-vac'd, watching as he went from the bottom up.

When he was done Philip said, “We’re going to have to wait for foragers to return, even though it’s early in the morning. We'll have to see if a new cluster forms. They may be in the next cavity over, too.”

They waited. Sure enough, a cluster began to form on the other side of the adjacent roof joist. Philip cut out the next section to see a softball-sized cluster. “I bet the queen’s in that cluster,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“The bees, if they sense they’re being compromised, rush the queen off and hide her.”

After slurping up those bees, Philip and Charlie shop vac’d each other since there were bees all over them and that wouldn't make for an easy car ride home.

Philip took out the inner box where the bees accumulated. He showed it to the homeowner while explaining the swarming process. That little box was so full of bees that, looking through the screens on both sides, it was impossible to find a vacant spot.

The box rode in the back of Philip’s pick up truck, along with a few unsucked-up bees holding on along the outside. They must have held on all through Marin, all the way over the bridge, all through the Richmond district, to Noe Valley where they were transferred into one of Charlie's hive boxes.

It’s a crime to make such nice bees reside in the soppy, foggy side of San Francisco. Especially when they had the option to live the cushy life in my mom’s back yard. We brought them down the next morning. When Charlie removed the screen on their hive entrance, they they flew out like, “We’re here! We’re here! Yay!”

Standing right in front of the hive and wearing inappropriate colored clothing, I didn’t get bumped once. Sausalito bees are too posh for that sort of behavior.

Bees Like It Hot

2011-07-09T19:05:00.000-07:00

Mom's back yard

Less than two months ago, my mom hadn't given a thought to bees. Now she called to say she caught a second swarm. "It's so hot here, over ninety degrees every day," she said. "They must want to come inside and cool off. There's a lot of them this time, too."

Are we here yet?

Our bees on the roof have been doing nothing but cooling off. Someone told me bees get grouchy when it's overcast. Don't we all? We watch them hang around on their front porches, tidying up, waiting for the sun so their little muscles can warm up enough to make it across the street to the pollen store at the park and back.

Our store-bought bee colonies are growing, even in this weather, but the swarm hives are barely hanging on.

The Alameda girls were the weakest, so why not give them a transfer to bee heaven?

When we drove down to check out my mom's new swarm, we brought them along. They were very quiet in the car, very good little travelers, unlike the PGE girls who seemed to power the car with their humming. With them, every bump in the road seemed to piss them off.

Charlie stealing a frame of Saratoga babies

When Charlie pulled the screen off the PGE girls' front door, they charged and swirled up into an ominous hurricane for the rest of the day. He was prepared to do the same when releasing the Alameda girls. But it was as if Charlie opened the back door of the minivan and the kids were happy they had arrived. They crawled out, flew around and inspected their new home. Even though we were all watching, standing too close, wearing inappropriate clothing, not one of us got bumped. They went straight for the flowers.

The second Saratoga swarm

After my mom fed us, another advantage to having a hive at her house, Charlie inspected the other hives. They all had grown, and grown more than twice as much as ours had on the cold roof. We're getting the idea why there aren't a lot of Outside Lands area beekeepers.

My mom's original swarm was doing so well, in particular, that Charlie took a frame of brood and gave it to the Alameda girls. We considered it a little gift to help them grow, even though they were already more active in this one afternoon than they had been all the previous week, thanks to good weather.

Healthy Saratoga bees

Opening up the hive trap (the pink box, the bigger of the two hive traps), we could see the new swarm was indeed a big one. The swarms we caught in San Francisco were like a few families coming down the Oregon trail in covered wagons compared to these huge, Irish potato-famine sized migrations at my mom's.

So that they wouldn't get annoyed and want to leave, Charlie stole a second brood frame from the original Saratoga girls and left it, along with some empty frames, in the hive trap for the new swarm. No matter how bothered the new swarm was, they wouldn't just up and abandon a frame full of babies. We're hard-wired, we women, to take care of babies, even if they're not "ours."

Marching in

Unlike last time, Charlie knew he had the queen inside the hive after all his messing around. Even though the bees were flying around the hive trap confused, they were also fanning their wings, signalling to their sisters that the queen was inside. They smelled whatever it is they smell, got their marching orders and, within minutes, moved in.

Unlike last time, my mom didn't call after we left with questions like, "Why are the bees clustered in a box under their new box?"

We're learning, or, more likely, we're lucky.

Come Back, Slackers

2011-07-04T13:27:00.000-07:00

A swarm clump on a branch

Once, when Michelle was calling her sister, staring out the window as she usually does, she saw a thick, black swarm of bees covering the three houses across the street.

They left a lot of poop on the neighbors' cars - our bees got the blame - but we couldn't catch them. Since we're on the third floor, we watched them settle onto a tree in one of the back yards. We wanted those bees. It was a huge swarm and it was free. Charlie left a note, got his ladders ready, and waited. Nobody called. The bees stopped swarming. We never saw them again. It was like money floating away.

This morning while Charlie was looking out our window, he saw a thick, black swarm of bees fly across Fulton street. Unlike Michelle's swarm, these were definitely our bees. Last time Charlie inspected the hives he found some queen cells in the Slacker hive. He destroyed them, hoping that this would quell their instinct to swarm. Instead, one of our first two package queens, up and ran out on us, talking half her sisters along with her.

Swarming is natural and there's not a lot you can do about it if you have a hive that is prone to enjoy the traveling life. Obviously getting rid of the queen cells doesn't work. He must have missed a few - it's a big hive and they were going to divide into two colonies whether Charlie liked it or not. They were the Slacker hive, and they were acting like ungrateful teenagers. While they created a thirty foot hurricane around an orangy-leafed tree right across the street, we made fun of ourselves and the way we were thinking. They were doing what came naturally. Still, it was easy to stare across the street and quote dumb movie lines like, "Come back, Shane. Mommy loves you! Daddy needs you!"

Big cluster

So far, Charlie hasn't convinced the more experienced beekeepers he knows to let him help catch swarms, so this was his chance. He called his mentors and, as usual, all three gave completely different and opposing solutions. None of them could help, either, being Fourth of July weekend.

Charlie brought Dylan over to help. Once the bees calmed down a bit, they congregated into three different clumps on the same tree. They hadn't gained enough composure to stay in one place, but at least where they chose was close to the ground. The bigger trees further inside the park are at least fifty feet tall. At least. It'd be stupid to climb up that high to chase after our $70 worth of bees.

If you know a beekeeper, you know Charlie thought of nothing else all day long. He watched and visited and waited for them to clump. He had his nuc box all ready. If you put a bit of comb in the box, they'll be more amenable to their new mobile home.

Climbing up

Eventually they clumped onto one small, bendable branch. Charlie put the nuc box under the swarm and bent the branch so the swarm was down inside the box, while still attached to their branch. (They really seemed to like this one tree.)

With a thump on the bent branch loud enough for us to hear it in our apartment across the street, the bees landed gently into the box. Once the clump fell, the other bees raced in. He clearly got the queen. That's the biggest worry. Even though she was a flighty teenager, we want her back. We need her, at least until we can replace her next spring.

Across the street, safely in our apartment, Michelle and I saw a huge yellowish bee hurricane rise up at the exact same time we heard Charlie's thwack. It's a sunny day, so the bees caught the light and looked golden, swirling like honey (heh, heh) in a whirl as tall as the tallest trees, and wide all the way out to the middle of the street.

Nuc box

Immediately, Charlie secured the top onto the box and balanced it on a couple of branches. At the slotted opening in the side, hundreds of bees lined up to get inside. Surrounding them were more girls fanning their wings, letting their sisters know the queen was inside. There were so many bees that it would take hours for them to get in.

All day, Charlie kept running across the street to check, a good thing since the wind picked up in the afternoon and knocked the box to the ground. Charlie checked, the bees were okay, and continued their march inside the nuc box.

By evening, most the bees were inside and Charlie was getting impatient so he used his bee brush to sweep the outside bees into the box. He couldn't close it up with so many clogging the entrance. And he had to close it up to take it to the roof, being that the last bit of stairs are inside. You don't want to have an open, heavy, buzzing box of pissed off bees inside an apartment building.

Marching in

The bees didn't like his hurrying and stung the crap out of him. Once one stung, all the bees around her stung, too. Beekeepers say that once you get stung enough, you're immunized. It's not something I personally want to experience, but Charlie says he didn't feel the stings. He wasn't swollen, so he might not be lying.

The Slackers are back on the roof, most of them, where Charlie transferred them into a new home. It's just down the hive stand from their old place, where their more stable, more mature sisters remain. We'll see if they have the maturity to stay.

Power Bees

2011-06-30T20:25:00.000-07:00

Dylan, Mom and Charlie

If PGE finds a swarm in a utility box, they call Philip. Philip is our bee Maharishi, and if there’s anyone who is calm enough to remove thousands of wired bees from a public place, it’s him. He has ten hives in his yard, as many as he wants, so he shares what he seizes. All you have to do is bring over a box. We dropped off two.

If you’re going to stress out the bees by sucking them out of a utility box, stress them once. People often catch swarms by knocking them off whatever they happened to land on, usually a tree branch, and into a bucket. After traumatizing them once, they shake them from their bucket and into a hive box for a second round of trouble. That’s more stress than necessary, Philip says. When he removes a swarm, they go from utility box to hive box, leaving the bucket under his sink.

Philip caught us two PGE swarms. The first one, a monstrous seven-pound swarm, came home to our roof. The second was a combination of a couple of small swarms he’d collected. These girls were going to my mom’s. They’d build faster over there, in her lush garden acre with real, authentic summer weather (sun instead of fog, in other words).

As long as we’re bringing a colony to my mom’s, we put our two struggling hives in the car and brought them along, too. These two hives were swarms we caught: the Golden Gate girls and another one too small to have their own name. Combining them in to one hive would make them stronger. Warming them up would make them stronger still. Everything does better in the sun.

Smoking bees

Both of Philip’s colonies seemed bitchy. Even inside the box, they were bumping and buzzing, clearly cranky like teenagers on a road trip. The last thing they remembered, they were in a PGE utility box, getting comfortable. Without any kind of warning, they all of a sudden got sucked into a shop vac (okay, a “bee vac”) and now they were trapped in a box with a mesh screen stapled to the entrance.

Looking at the mesh screen, the bees stare back as if they were in jail. They stay close against the mesh, their faces pressed to the screen, their tongues lashing out. It’s like they’re at the starting gate, waiting for the gun to go off, hyped up on ‘roids, saying, “Let me at ‘em! Let me out!”

Hoping to get it over quickly, Charlie yanked the entrance screen off like a band-aid, but one of the staples stuck. They didn’t care. They poured out of the half hive entrance like water out of a faucet, dive bombing Charlie’s head and face while he struggled with the staple. Seeing how angry they were, he ran off. Half open was good enough until they calmed down. Twenty minutes later, the rest of the screen came off in the midst of World War Bee, the bees not letting up on the dive-bombing. They made the Oakland girls look like kittens in comparison. Charlie didn’t get stung but it’s a good thing these bitches were staying here on the roof, far away from my 80 year-old mom.

Before Charlie pulled the screen off the second PGE hive we were setting up at my mom’s, he put his bee suit on. He’d learned his lesson.

Playing with hives

He ripped the mesh screen off with one strong yank, hoping these girls weren’t as aggressive. They were, and worse, they were smart enough to know Charlie was somehow responsible for their entrapment. They escaped and raced after Charlie like they were after their kidnapper. He raced down the steep, wooden stairs on my mom’s hill, a dark cloud of bees chasing closely after him. This wasn’t what we envisioned when we wanted to keep bees at my mom’s.

For the rest of the day, there was a huge swirling black tornado of bees surging above the PGE girls’ new home, over fifty feet in the air like a bee eruption. They never calmed down. We told my mom to stay away for a few days but she wasn’t listening. She really is one with nature. “At least don’t wear dark colors,” we told her. “The bees will think you’re a bear. And don’t stand in front of the hive entrance for the same reason.”

We knew she wouldn’t listen but there isn’t much you can do. If she gets stung, she’ll learn. Knowing her, she’ll be standing in front of the hive wearing dark colors tomorrow morning. Without getting stung.

In the midst of the PGE bee tempest, we had to set up and combine the two struggling wild colonies. Had we known we were bringing down a fusillade of angry power- infused bees, we would have done this first.

The Golden Gate girls, our first trapped feral swarm, weren’t growing at all. In fact, they were barely maintaining. The other swarm we caught recently was just a tiny colony and worse, wasn’t laying. They had a virgin queen, Philip surmised, and they were going to meet a worse fate than England.

Philip’s advice was to dump them in with the Golden Gate girls and let their queen kill the virgin queen. You can kill her yourself, if you want.

First you have to find the queen. Virgin queens are skinny, so even if you happen to see her, you might overlook her. Besides, try finding one bee in a baseball-sized clump of wiggly insects, all squirming on top of each other. You want to pick them apart to get a good peek, but that would be too disturbing.

We gave up and, instead, dumped both hive boxes together. They’ll both die on their own. Let’s join them up and see what happens.

What happened was the opposite of what we expected, once again. Philip says, “Bees like numbers. They like to be part of a big, successful group.” It must be true. The bees approached each other like long lost relatives, touching each other and sniffing each other like puppies. They seemed to enjoy their new family.

After a few hours, we watched the entrance to see if the undertaker bees had brought out their dead queen. Nothing. All we saw were forager bees going out to collect pollen, and we saw more of that than at their old, foggy, home on the roof: a normal colony, finally.

We left for our foggy home, the PGE girls still swirling in a blizzard above the tops of my mom’s huge oak trees. It’s a weird feeling drive away after leaving your own mother with the gift of a back yard full of terrorist bees.

My mom called a few days later and said they were still bumping and buzzing her when she stood by to watch them. How many times do you tell your mom to stand off to the side, don’t wear dark colors, don’t act like a bear?

“Have you been stung?” we asked. That would teach her. That is, if she needed teaching.

“Oh, no,” she said. “But I think they might want to go back to San Francisco. It’s been in the high 90’s since you left.”

You had your chance, bitches. Now stay away from my mom.

My Mom, the Beekeeper

2011-06-30T20:22:00.000-07:00

Yup, that's my mom with her tongue out!

We waited two weeks to check on the new swarm at my mom’s. Two weeks isn’t much time for a new colony to do much. Two weeks on our roof and our bees look like they’ve been on vacation. Besides, they need a couple of weeks to settle in. If they think you’re going to be disrupting them all the time, opening their hive and messing around, they’ll move out.

We needed to get them into a permanent hive box. Charlie brought one, assuming that’s all he’d need. He brought Dylan, too, to help him move the bees, and three bee suits. My mom is so excited about her new girls that Charlie wanted to lure her into a suit, if he could. She might want to see what her girls are doing with all her pollen they’re collecting.

After suiting up, Charlie started up the smoker and they marched up the hill to where the hive trap sat in some dirt under a tree. He gave the girls a good smoking and opened up the top of the trap.

Feral hive filled frame

Thousands of bees filled the top of the frames. Even from this vantage point, you could see that the girls had drawn out every frame with comb. There were eggs, brood, larvae, honey, and all you’d expect in a healthy hive after three or four months. Our very first package bee colonies don’t look this well-lived in and fruitful.

My mom had never seen so many little things working together so vigorously, so lively. Neither had we. Even Stella – only three - kept creeping closer to watch. If a package contains 10,000 bees, then this hive trap contained at least 30,000. Every frame hummed.

Mom's apiary

Carefully, Charlie took out each frame from the trap and put it in the new box in order, so they wouldn’t get confused. There was no room for more comb to be drawn. In two weeks, it was that full. We’d better schedule a trip to add another box. Soon.

With so many frames so thick with bees, it would have taken a week to find the queen. We tried but gave up and left the old box on the ground under the new one, hoping they’d get there on their own. Charlie left a piece of their own familiar-smelling comb at the entrance to make it easy for the less-trusting girls.

At about 8 pm, my mom called. “The old box is coated with an inch of bees. What’s happening?”

Drone

If the queen was inside the new box, they’d all be inside, too. Something’s wrong.

We asked around. “Either the queen is still in the old box ,” someone with more experience said, “or the scent of her is too strong and you’ll have to remove the box.”

Either way meant a trip back to mom’s.

When we arrived the next morning, it was 94 degrees and the old box was full of bees, like a thousand bees thickly layered in one end. While Charlie was opening up the hive, we looked for the queen. It was a lot easier with only a thousand bees. Easier, but not easy. She’s not that much different – just a little thicker downstairs.

Mom's hives

“Is that her?” my mom said, pointing to a drone. Looking for queens is pointless when you have bad eyes like me. I can’t tell queens apart from drones, even when they’re both dead stuck on a pin, side by side. Half the time, I can’t tell drones apart from females.

“No,” Charlie said. “See his big eyes, like fly eyes? That’s so the queen can’t hide from him when they’re on a mating flight. Look for a big one without the big eyes.”

“Like that one?”

“That’s a big lady,” mom said.

“That’s her,” Charlie said, scooping her up and flinging her inside the new hive before we lost sight of her. He put the top back on quickly before she could escape. She was so fat that none of this was probably necessary.

“Look,” mom said. “They’re all out.”

It was true: the box emptied as if we’d sprayed a can of anything by Monsanto.

“This must be normal,” Charlie said about the hive activity that was so bustling we could hear humming. We never hear humming on our roof – only screeching tires, honking horns, and, if we’re lucky, yelling homeless men. “This is beekeeping without fog.”

Our fog city bees are like the short, scrawny kids in class.

Buying Italians

2011-06-30T20:14:00.000-07:00

Bees get busy when the sun comes out

It’s way past package bee season but when you get the itch for more bees, buying packages is a quick and dirty solution. A package contains a mated queen, bred for honey production, and three pounds of random bees. They don’t know each other like a nuc or a swarm, but they’ll figure it out.

On the bee source forum, Powell Apiaries in Orland advertised package bees for sale. Why? Is it an old ad? It’s so late in the season but it wouldn’t hurt to call.

“Hello?” a soft voice answers, sounding completely unlike a big professional business.

“Is this Powell Apiaries?”

“Yep.”

“Do you have bee packages left?”

“No. I’m done for the season.”

“I’m from San Francisco. Our association chipped in and bought a bunch of packages from somewhere in Orland. Did we get our bees from you?”

“Doesn’t sound familiar.”

“Thanks for your time, then.”

“Well, hold on. How many you want? I’ve got the last of my packages going out in a couple of days. I always make a hundred extra.”

“A hundred extra?”

“What do you want? Fifty?”

“Fifty? How about two? I’m just a hobbyist.”

“I could give you two. They’re Italians.”

“I don’t have Italians.”

“Italians are the best.”

“So my Italian uncle tells me. How much?”

“Oh, how about sixty a piece. How’s that?”

We paid $70 each with the SF Beekeepers Association group discount. They usually go for $95. “That’s good,” Charlie said, and picked them up the next day. With this kind of a deal, waiting is torture. Besides, even people with soft voices can change their minds.

Italians

It was unusually sunny in our usually foggy side of the city when we brought the new girls home. They’d been in their packages for three days so Charlie set them free right away. They seemed like good, gentle girls, more intent on getting down to bee business rather than pissed off about being in a box for three days. Not one felt the need to dive-bomb or give a warning bump, even though they’d been trapped in a tiny box with a strange woman for 72 hours.

That same sunny evening, we came across one of our tenants. This tenant has the garage closest to the intersection. Instead of parking inside his garage, he prefers to park his black, weeks-old, high-end BMW in front of his driveway. “Too much trouble,” he says, “to get out and open the door first. You ever thought about getting automatic garage door openers for these old, heavy garage doors?”

“Probably not,” we say.

“Hey, you know what this yellow stuff is all over my car? Look,” he said, pointing to the polka-dotted, bright yellow tic-tac sized debris covering his metal symbol of red-blooded manliness.

“No.”

“I can’t figure it out. I thought it was pollen blowing from across the park, but it reeks. It really stinks. Like shit.”

“We have no idea,” we said, and quickly left.

Safely inside our apartment, we wondered aloud “Could that stinky shit have something to do with the girls on the roof? It looks like the same yellow dots covering the top of the hives.”

The next time we were near a beekeeper, we asked, “Do bees shit a lot?”

“They do,” he said, “right when you bring them home from a package. They’ve been cooped up for three or four days. They don’t like to mess their colony so they hold it.”

“Right when you put them in a hive box, they come roaring out ‘cause they have to take a crap?”

“Oh, yeah.”

That makes sense, and means we have to come clean and tell our tenant his hot, black beemer is full of Italian shit. We don’t have to, but we don’t have jobs or savings or much of anything besides our good word. If you don’t do what you’d want done to you, you end up paranoid and overly suspicious, and that’s just too much work when you’re unemployed.

“At least I know what it is,” the tenant said. “It was driving me crazy.” And, it turns out, his dad was once a beekeeper so he’s sympathetic.

“We’ll move the hives toward the other end of the roof,” we told him. “It might help if they aren’t right above where you park.”
“Don’t move them too far too fast or you’ll freak them out,” he said, now more worried about our bees than his bootylicious BMW. “That’s what my dad says.”

“Good to know,” we said, checking ourselves as to why we thought he’d have quite a different response.

Faking Farming

2011-06-17T13:03:00.000-07:00

When you're older, you wish that you'd paid more attention to people doing useful things when you were younger. My grandma grew vegetables so giant-like that neighbors brought their guests and friends over to visit and exclaim. They'd go on for hours, oohing and aahing as if she'd done something magical.

If I liked vegetables, this might have been interesting but vegetables to me were the same as bugs. Therefore, the people who talked on and on about them must be slightly simpleminded, like people to talked about the price of gas, or taxes. When you're a kid, who cares?

The only way I'd pay attention to something growing is if that something was candy. Chocolate, especially. I'd bring my friends over, maybe, although that would mean exposing them to my relatives who, for no reason I could figure, let out exclamations like, "Heavens to Betsy!" and "Jumping Jehosaphat!"

There were people in college who spent hours growing marijuana, but they were always high. Nobody listened to them.

Now I'm old. When I'm out with my mom in her garden, I listen to every word but I don't know what she's saying. What does "hardening" mean? "Bolting?" She says "deadhead" and I visualize Jerry Garcia.

When you're around someone talking too technically, maybe you do what I do: pretend. It's how I survived working at Fujitsu, spending all day sitting at big tables in hot meetings with super-polite Japanese men who couldn't speak English. I already faked that I knew all about chip manufacture to get that job, so I got paid to both impersonate a flash-memory expert and to pretend to understand Japanglish.

You have to use the words right, though, if you're going to be a good actor. You listen to figure out if they're talking about something good or bad, big or little, noun or verb. You repeat how they use it in a sentence. You wonder how many other people at the table are also full of shit. You keep faking it and you stop worrying that you'll get caught when they want you to train the new people. Use the words in correct way long enough and you fool even yourself.

Before we leave my mom's garden, she hands me a bag full of seeds. "Soak them in water for a day," she says, like I know why you'd want to do that. She says a lot of other things, but she talks to fast and so technical that I'm back at a Fujitsu meeting. I'm into nod and smile mode.

At home, instead of doing actual research, I leave glasses of water all around my kitchen with tiny seeds floating in them. Charlie doesn't ask. He didn't have a farming grandma, so he can't even begin to fake what I'm doing when it comes to gardening. I don't even know if he saw the seeds in the water. For all I know, he might have thought I had a new technique to drink enough water.

Stella and I planted them in old six-packs that Charlie filled with dirt. I figured I'd give them a week, throw them away and go to the nursery and buy seedlings.

Two days later, green sprouts appeared in some of the sections. Stella watched them every day, probably as amazed as me. Luckily, my mom called or those plants would still be in my kitchen. "They're ready for hardening," she said. "That's what you call it when you put them outside to acclimate."

That's where they are right now, awaiting a call from my mom to tell me what to do next. She knows what kind of actor I am.

Getting Mentored

2011-06-13T19:27:00.000-07:00

Our rooftop hives

Bees don't need a beekeeper to survive, but if you're going to take on that challenge, do it right. Get someone who knows what they're doing to follow you around to watch if you know what you're doing.

Paul started the San Francisco Beekeepers Association decades ago, or so we've been told (we weren't there). One late foggy morning, he stopped by and offered to guide Charlie through working our hives.

Charlie suited up in his electric-white, brand-new full suit while Paul threw on his veil. As Charlie began to move around the hives, he asked, "Am I disrupting anything?"

"You're moving fine," Paul said. "You obviously know what you're doing."

"I do?"

"You have good, healthy colonies," Paul said. "All your hives look really good. Let's pull out some drone larvae and see if we can find any varroa mites." Varroa mites, the parasites that attach themselves to the shoulders of bees and eat them alive one by one before eventually killing the whole colony, like to live and reproduce in the drone larvae. "You'll see little orange dots."

The only hives old enough to have drone larvae are the two packaged hives. They pulled them out of both and couldn’t find one mite. There were a few, round red mites on the bottom board, but Paul said that's normal.

The Golden Gate Girls, our feral swarm, is still so small that, since Paul was here, Charlie asked if he could look at them and see if they're okay.

Drone Larvae

"They're population is sustaining," Paul said, "but not growing. The queen is laying eggs but can't get ahead of the cycle. In a couple of weeks, you can take a brood frame from your strongest colony and put in their hive. That'll give them a jump start. Leave the nurse bees on the frame. Put it in the hive with the hitchhikers still attached. That'll increase the population in two ways."

"Won't the bees fight?"

"Nurse bees don't fight. All they care about is their babies. They don't care what colony they're in as long as they're nursing."

No fighting in nature? Who knew?

"If, by accident, foragers also hitchhike in," Paul added, "they will fight. Watch out for that. And don’t do it now or you’ll weaken the strong hive. Then you’ll have two weak hives."

"What about this feral hive from Oakland? When I opened up their hive, they dive-bombed me. They stayed right on me, trying to sting, attacking long after I put their roof back on and moved out of the way. I had to sit on the other side roof, swatting them off for a good fifteen minutes before I could go inside without them following me."

Still without a suit and gloves, he said, "Let me take a look."

Bottom board with two varroa mites (upper right/lower center)

He opened up the roof and started poking around the frames. The previously angry bees acted as if he wasn’t even there, making pollen, nursing, flying busily like bees normally do.

“That’s different than when I went in,” Charlie said. "To say the least."

“Was that the first time you’d been in their hive?”

“Oh yeah.”

“That’s probably it," Paul said. "They weren't used to human hands. They’re fine now.”

If you've ever watched "The Dog Whisperer" and seen how antagonistic, belligerant dogs become sweet little pups once Cesar's visited, replace Cesar with Paul and dogs with bees and you'll know exactly what we feel like.

Bee Cult

2011-06-11T19:15:00.000-07:00

You can't talk to us without getting an earful about bees.

My dad, who owns this apartment building, didn't freak out when he found out about the hives on his roof (through my blurting sister, thank you). If one of my kids stuck thousands of stinging insects on my property without mentioning it, I don't think I would have been half as graceful. Being a retired engineer, he asks questions, brings us bee articles he's clipped out of his newspaper (we don't get why he reads dead trees and he doesn't get why we don't) and proves he's used to tolerating things he doesn't understand.

My mom, they're long divorced, took a different route. The more we talked about the bees, the more she got sucked in, listening like when Seventh Day Adventists come to your door and you happen to be in a conversational mood. Pretty soon it all makes a lot of sense and, at least while they're smiling and talking back, you decide you, too, want to be one of the saved.

Bees being natural, she might have been predisposed. Her mother, my grandmother, had such a colorful, beautiful garden that people driving by would stop and take pictures of it. As a kid, I thought she was famous. She was in that garden, talking to her flowers, more than she was inside. That's how I was able to easily sneak all her candy.

My mom's garden is even better, because you can eat it. The best lemons ever made into bars happen to grow outside her bedroom window. I hated tomatoes until she convinced me to taste a little yellow pear-shaped one she picked for me. Even though I still prefer chocolate, that tomato was as close to candy as you can get - if candy grew on vines. Why doesn't candy grow on vines? Monsanto, stop being evil and work on that, please. I have to control myself when she's not looking and her peas are ripe. I'd eat them all, even after dessert.

Soon, my mom asked us if she could have a hive trap and try to catch a swarm. "There are millions of bees in my yard already," she said. "We might as well catch a few and share their honey." With that, I knew she was in the cult, one of us.

Charlie didn't need to be asked twice. We came down to her house on a steamy hot, 90+ degree day, brought along Dylan and Michelle to share her pool, set up a hive trap and hoped for the best.

She called after a week, leaving a message saying there are millions of bees flying like a black cloud, all trying to get into the hive. "I'm watching them now," she said, sounding like a little kid in a candy factory. "It's incredible."

When we called her back, she was still watching. "It looks like there is a really big, long bee, right in the middle of the swarm," she said. "Is that another type of bee? What is that?"

Only my mom would be so lucky to see the queen.

Counting Bees

2011-06-08T19:03:00.000-07:00

West of Twenty-Third Avenue, the sun hardly knows us. The Richmond district is like a beach town anyway with surfboards in open garages, breezes off the ocean, and no big city entertainment destinations or shopping malls like downtown. If we see the sun in summer, it's because it's after lunch and the fog finally gave up and burned off. We know we'd better get out and enjoy it as the afternoon fog rolls in thick and quickly, so dense it looks like it could push you over. It's a lucky day around here if it's still sunny after four pm. Summer in western San Francisco heats up to sixty degrees if you're lucky, and that's warm, sweater weather around here.

Everybody comes outside when the sun shows up, especially the bees. It looks like La Guardia on the rooftop: bees buzz in for a landing, bees shoot out from the hive, taking off. They're not crashing into each other but they're definitely not in any kind of air traffic controller order, either.

They fly off straight toward the park, but once freed from the roof stub wall they get blasted by the ocean gust coming straight up Fulton St. The bees roll and spin, get blown east down the street and eventually swoop around and loop back toward the park. I wonder if they warn their sisters? As long as they're bringing in pollen, they should be okay. The rule is seven out of twenty bees need to be coming home to the hive with a paycheck.

Compared to our overachiever Giants' hive, the Slacker bees are almost too calm. It's easy to get worried that they might not be doing what they're supposed to be doing.

At least it's easy for us, being parents of grown kids. Parents are overly programmed to worry about their kids anyway, especially when it comes to how hard they seem to be working. It's all we can do to not call up our grown-up kids every morning and act like kids ourselves, questioning them as if they're still in high school and they want to borrow the car. We remind each other we're not responsible. We can have a beer, watch the bees and relax. Nobody needs us to do what comes naturally.

So instead of worrying about kids or bees, we sat and had a beer up on the roof. Watching bees gets you into a meditative state familiar to any kid who has ever wasted an hour watching grass grow or ants march. It's amazing how relaxing it is to stare at bugs. Especially when drinking a delicious, dark beer on a rare, sunny day.

We weren't completely without motivation: we counted the little Slackers, just for reassurance. For every twenty bees, we counted ten Slacker bees coming home with pollen: three more than necessary. It didn't matter how often we counted, we clearly mislabeled these industrious ladies.

Not only that, these were creative pollen shoppers. Somewhere in Golden Gate park they were finding more than just the typical dirty yellow colored dinner. On their back legs, these girls carried neon bright yellow pollen, brownish dark orange pollen, purple pollen, blue pollen, and even bright red pollen. Their honey is going to be a work of art.

Pollen color is something we've heard bee people talk about. Honestly, there isn't a lot else to talk about if you want to talk about pollen. This is how we learned bees prefer to collect pollen from the same species of plant, as in only tomatoes or only almonds, until that item is out of stock. Only then will bee shoppers switch to another grocery aisle. Or so bee people say.

If we had access to a better camera, we'd get better pictures. We'd be artists ourselves. But we aren't, so we'll just have another beer, observe, and enjoy having something to say the next time someone starts talking pollen.

Bugs, Stay Away From My Insects

2011-05-31T17:55:00.000-07:00

Why do bees like Charlie's butt?

For a few days, Charlie left the bee girls alone. When it's warm, they're working. When it's windy and rainy, it's easy to get worried. They're up on top of a three-story building where, walking below, you can turn a corner and lose your hat, it's so gusty. They're nature, though. They don't need anyone poking around all the time bothering them.

You can check on them as long as you don't raise the bee roof and freeze them out. Charlie constructed his hives so there's a drawer-like pull-out he can open or shut to operate like cheap air conditioning (we call that a window): bottom boards. With the unusually cold weather, the bottom board has remained closed tight.

He's looked before and noticed what's fallen down in there. The bottom boards look like the ground under a construction project, which is what it is, with bits of pollen and shards of comb instead of wood and nails.

He started with the Golden Gate girls, the wild swarm he caught. They are the smallest, and their board was tidy and free of junk. Next he checked the Alameda girls, the bigger ex-wild swarm. Their bottom board looked like that of a big-city contractor, with lots of debris left from a hard day's work. The Oakland girls, two combined swarms, also looked pretty industrious if you were judging by the droppings.

The first of the store-bought bees, the Giants, had a normal-looking bottom board. The second, the Slackers', their bottom board was a mess and, worst of all, contained two dead varroa mites.

Varroa mites grab onto theback of bees' shoulders and eat their muscle tissue. They get everywhere and, like all parasites, eventually die when they kill the hive. Like all unwanted things, they breed like crazy. They’ll kill a hive within months.They’re said to be partially responsible for colony collapse disorder.

Finding two mites in a hive of 20,000 bees is okay, though. Varroa mites can come from anywhere, even flowers. They might have even found a free ridealong with the bees' package.

Looking closer, Charlie saw more than mites. Crawling over the bottom board were little light tan, spider-like dots. Are these baby varroa mites? If so, he'd have to sugar-dust right away, or as soon as the cold air stops blasting the roof.

Sugar-dusting is the same as what you do to cake, and with the same type of sugar. The mites can't hold onto the backs of bees when they've been powder-coated with sugar, so they slip off. You have to do it a on a regular basis to get the baby mites and even then there's a good chance this hive is screwed.

Baby varroa mites don't look like this, though. They hadfatter abdomens, were a different color and a different shape. Phew. They're something else.

He asked for help from the Organic Beekeeper's Chat Group. Even if you don't want advice, beekeepers on chat groups will give it to you. And none of it will agree.

"You're going to get spiders," people wrote in reply, "and all kinds of insects like that. It's a dark, warm place. They'll hang outinside the hive, mostly on the bottom board. If the bees don’t want them, don’t worry. The bees will get rid of them."

Spiders? He looked up photos of baby spiders. They looked like garden spiders; harmless and non-venomous.

He was planning to sugar dust, only inside on the computer while waiting for the wind to die down, until this. Opening a hive now would be bee-abuse anyway. Across the street, branches were breaking and crashing. Gusts of wind slammed and shook apartment windows all over the building. The fog was so thick that even if you were energetic enough to go outside, you'd have a hard time not being hit by flying something.Being in nature is like being unemployed: sometimes the best course of action is no action at all.

How Exciting Is a Bee Meeting?

2011-05-26T16:05:00.000-07:00

When you tell people you're going to a bee meeting, they ask you a lot of questions. Like, what the heck do you talk about? What kind of person goes to a meeting about bees? How long can a meeting about bees last? And, what the heck do you talk about?

The bees' view from our roof. Randall Museum's is much better.

We meet at 7:30 pm at the Randall Museum, up high on a hill with a three-quarter view of San Francisco. If it weren't so exciting to go to a bee meeting, the view would be hard to abandon. In summer you can see all the landmarks, most the neighborhoods, and the way to the Bay. In the winter, the city lights remind you how lucky you are to live in the twenty-first century with luxuries such as buses to get you uphill and electricity like stars on the ground. There's no better view unless you're up at Sutro Tower, and if you're there, you're getting blown away by the wind, you're chilly cold, you're trying to ignore stupid tourist comments, and the landscaping consists of weeds.

Most the people who attend are new beekeepers unless there's somebody famous speaking, like Randy Oliver. He's Mr. Science: "Beekeeping through a Biologist's eyes," a quick-talker who uses lots of technical terms and can make funny, on-the-fly bee jokes. Really. He's well worth coming inside for, even without the bee jokes.

This month there was no guest speaker so the senior beekeepers spoke about catching swarms. When they talk about catching swarms, they are referring to containing the swarms that land somewhere, usually on someone's backyard tree branch. Charlie was the only one who'd hive-trapped a swarm intentionally, so he was singled out by name. Embarrassing. We're new. Getting attention is fun only when there are tourists involved and you're purposely dressed like you want it.

New comb on an old frame

Bees swarm on anything and it freaks people out. You usually see a huge clump of bees on a branch, but also on weirder places. Philip had a call of a swarm in Potrero Hill on a woman’s car. She couldn’t even get inside. There's a great photo of it on the website.

He suggested putting lemongrass oil in a nuc box (a cardboard box used as a temporary hive) to attract them, and applying almond extract to where you don't want them (they hate the smell of it). You can cut a small branch or shake a larger one to allow them to drop into a box, but sometimes you have to use a scooper, like a gutter scooper, and scoop them in. Kirk Anderson at Backwards Beekeepers in L.A. has a shop vac he's modified so he doesn't even have to do that. He sucks them right up. When he's back home, he puts it in reverse, shooting them right into their new residence.

Swarms, all they want it a place to live. They have no hive to defend and no babies to protect so they're not aggressive. They're traveling light since they ate before they left. They stick together so they don't have to use all their energy to stay warm.

Around the room, older men stood up and spoke of swarms they'd caught. All of them seemed to like standing up and talking to a roomful of attentive people, giving advice about anything bee-worthy. "The first time you do it," one guy said, "you're intent on catching the swarm and you forget about your own safety. If it's forty feet up, it's not worth the $70 worth of bees if you fall and crack your skull." Most stories were about swarms knocked off tree branches until one guy shared how he pulled a swarm off a chain-link fence. That sounded pretty complicated since, if they won't go into the box, you can't simply saw off a piece of fence and shake it over the nuc.

A guy from San Mateo said when people call about bees swarming in their yard, they're frantic. "If you ask how big is it, they’ll say the swarm is huge. That doesn’t mean anything. A hundred bees is huge to someone who doesn't know. You want to ask how big is the swarm compared to a basketball. Ask how high it is too," he said, "but you won’t get a good answer about that, either, unless you ask in specifics. Is the swarm waist high? Head high? You'll need to know what kind of ladder to bring."

Bees on frames in their hive

"Swarming is as natural as swallows heading to San Juan Capistrano every year," he said, "the same as salmon swimming upstream. If you give them a comparison, if you tell them it's natural, people usually calm down."

Somebody else mentioned swarming is genetic. They'll swarm once, taking a new queen and about a third of the hive. They might do it again, depending. "Some bees swarm so much you can’t stop them," he said, "even if you get rid of the queen eggs. With some bees, it’s in their genetics to swarm."

This guy talked for a while about killing all the queen egg cells but two, insuring that the hive will swarm but it won't swarm every time another queen happens to hatch. "You don't want your hives to swarm so much that you have a weak colony," he said.

He had a lot of good information but by that time I was swarming myself, over by the cookies made by the wife of the most respected of all the beekeepers. They're both original members, but she's so allergic to bees that she has an epipen on her at all times. She's well respected, both for her willingness to support her husband's potentially deadly-to-her hobby, and for her amazing, benevolent baking skills.

Other senior beekeepers shared their swarm stories but by that time only the most serious and most patient members were sitting on the edge of their seats with raised hands and excited-sounding questions. The rest of us tiptoed to the back table and hovered, finishing off the five different kinds of cookies. Some of us at the meeting here appreciate nature and bees, and the cycle of life. Others of us are more respectful of the results of beekeeping, particularly when made into luscious home-made cookies.

Peeking Into Beekeeping

2011-05-26T11:36:00.000-07:00

Three weeks ago we brought the Slacker bees and the Giants to their newhome. That's plenty of time to settle in, make some babies and create a population explosion up on our roof. Unlike people, more babies are better; bees only live four to six weeks.

What doesn't reproduce best when left alone? Even though you might be itchy curious about what's going on inside your hives, you have to resist the urge to peek for the first three weeks. Just like with teenagers, if you give them the opportunity, they'll do what comes naturally.

At three weeks you can act like the mom and see how the kids are doing. You check to see if babies are being born, if the queen is laying eggs, if there are honey stores and pollen. You observe the brood patterns on the frames, making sure the queen lays her eggs in a regular pattern from the middle to the edge and the color of the brood light cardboard brown.

Our store-bought bees looked fine.

The wild bees are too new to bother just yet but the San Francisco girls hadn't been moved from the hive trap box. It's time they found a permanent home. Charlie rounded up Dylan - another opportunity to wear his bee suit - and they both took all the frames out of the hive trap box and put them into a new, fresh box. The bees in residence moved when their babies were moved. They were excited, flying all over the place, and that means they're happy. When they're depressed they stay inside, acting lethargic, just like you and me.

The forager bees were out collecting pollen when the rest of their family moved. To let them know where their new home is, Charlie put a piece of their familiar-smelling comb at the entrance to the new box. You can watch the forager bees fly toward the new, different box, wondering what happened. Once they sniff at the comb, they recognize the smell of mom and family, and confidently fly through the front door as if to say, "Honey, I'm home!"

Free Bees, Hella Oakland

2011-05-15T15:19:00.000-07:00

Michael, who trapped and gave us our Alameda colony, told Charlie "If you want more swarms, post on our website."

Two days later, Pat from Alameda Bee Club called. "I captured a swarm but it took a lot of work to get it, so I'm going to charge you," he said. "If you want it, come and get it."

"Do you know for sure if you have the queen?" With a wild swarm of bees, you never know if you capture the queen. The queen is the worst flier.

"I don't know," Pat said. "But if you want them, come and get them. I'll charge you $50."

Charlie wanted Dylan to come since he's unusually calm around bees. "Let's go to Oakland and pick up some bees," Charlie said.

Dylan agreed to go even though we don't have a truck. He'd be riding home with them, holding them in his lap. Pat caught them in a paint bucket in which he'd drilled tiny air holes. All the way home, the bees peered out at Dylan through the air holes, probably wondering where he was taking them. To cold San Francisco, that's where.

In the cold, foggy morning, Charlie dumped the bees out of their old paint bucket and into a fresh hive. He left the bucket near the entrance so the stragglers could make their way home, too.

It looked like a lot of bees in this colony, more than what we got in the bee packages. For the packages, the sellers measured out three pounds of bees and that adds up to about ten thousand. Don't ask how you weigh bees. That's why they're professionals. This Oakland colony seemed to be at least another pound's worth, justifying Pat's payment.

You can't see the queen when you dump them - there are simply too many bees. You're too busy doing dump and cover. With weather like this, they needed the rest of the day to adjust. Oakland, among other differences, definitely is more plentiful with the UVA and UVB rays.

When Charlie checked them again they were bearding around the entrance to the hive; congregating on their front porch. That's not normal. They should be doing orientation flights, looking for food sources and checking out the new scenery. When you see bearding, either one of two things is happening: it's too hot so they go outside to cool off, or they are queenless and they don't know what else to do. Why build comb or look for food if they have no babies, no future?

Charlie called Pat and told him "Fifty bucks is too much for a queenless colony."

"It's all good," Pat said. "I captured another swarm. They're really sweet bees, really gentle, about two pounds. Come get them for free."

This time Charlie brought a hive box with him so he could dump the bees right into their new home, right away. It's less traumatic to move once.

Inside the bucket, Charlie sprayed them with sugar-water. If this were an established hive, he'd use smoke. Without a hive to defend, smoke wouldn't calm them. He's hoping they'll eat the sugar-water stuck to their bodies rather than sting him. It's the same idea as if someone dumped cookies and cream ice cream all over you. Yeah you might be annoyed, but only after a few delicious sugary-sweet bites.

With his veil on, Charlie dumped the bees out of the bucket and into their new hive. He figured the veil would be good enough, what with Pat advertising their gentleness and the sugar water they'd be licking off themselves.

Wrong. With the first bump of the bucket, three bees flew out and attacked his left forearm. He kept shaking and bumping until the bucket was empty. Twenty or thirty fell to the ground outside the hive and he didn't want to abandon them. It's not like bee stragglers can just join a new colony. Even if they found one, they'd smell like strangers and wouldn't be accepted. So single bees are always dead bees. Beekeepers don't have the heart for that.

He closed up the hive, left the entrance open and waited to see if the stragglers would find their way into the hive on their own. If they went in, he'd save the stragglers and he'd know he got the queen. They can't resist the way she smells.

Pat and Charlie watched while Charlie pulled stingers from his forearm. If you scrape them out in the same direction as they entered and you don't squeeze the poison sac in the process, you won't feel the wound. The poison takes about twenty or thirty seconds to empty into the host.

Without hesitation, the stragglers marched straight into their new home. Charlie had a real queen.

At home, he removed the floor of this hive and the roof of the queenless hive, put the new hive on top of the old, separated by a sheet of newspaper. That way the bees could get used to each other, get familiar with each others' smells, before they chewed through. If you force them together without a proper introduction, they'd just argue.

The next morning, there were no dead bees at the entrance to the super Oakland hive duplex, and best of all, no bearding. Unfortunately, it's been rainy, foggy, and miserably cold since their arrival from the balmy East Bay. Sorry Oakland girls. San Francisco is the U.S.'s number one tourist destination, but this has nothing to do with the weather.

Catch Some Local Girls: They're Wild and Free

2011-05-13T10:16:00.000-07:00

Charlie's hive traps seemed to be compelling only to the dine-and-dashers. For about a month he noticed ten to thirty bees dropping by, checking it out, but not making the commitment to move in. They didn't want to sign the lease.

After he got the two packaged hives and the Alameda bees, he took the bigger pink trap down. Nobody in San Francisco has had success with hive traps, especially not in the foggy side of town. With two store-bought hives and one wild catch, he's already earned his "A" in beekeeping. Besides, there's only so many times you show a prospective tenant the apartment before you stop taking their calls.

He pushed the blue hive trap over to the low-rent side of the stand, the windy side, and ignored it. "See?" he thought. "I've got real bees living here. I don't need your pity visits."

When he checked on the Giants, the Slackers, and the Alameda Girls, that blue hive trap box got a sneer. Teasing girls aren't welcome anywhere. He wanted someone willing to settle down, to give up the wild life and put down some roots.

You're supposed to check your hives after two weeks to make sure you can see eggs. The queen needs to prove she's doing her job.

Charlie suited up and pulled the roof off the Slacker hive first. It took no time to find the queen. On the packaged bees, the queen has a white dot on her back. Even without the dot, she's pregnant and huge. As a big, beautiful woman, she's hard to miss.

He watched her drop her ass end into a honeycomb cell, deposit a rice grain-looking baby, situate herself at the next cell, and repeat .

Proud of his girls, he put the roof back on. Topless, they quickly lose heat. They get annoyed, they slow down, and if cold for too long, they'll die.

More carefully, he opened up the Giants hive. Those Giants don't do anything half-assed, and neither does their queen. She was squatting and giving birth like a professional, dropping clear rice grain babies into cells like Lincecum pitching scoreless balls.

Onto the Alameda Girls. How different would natural childbirth be for a bee? Even without a white dot she was hard to miss. Energetically crouching and spewing, she was giving the Giants' queen strong competition for Mother of the Year.

All three queens were alive, accepted by their hives, and squirting out kids. Worker bees were flying in from the park with leg sacs filled with loads of pollen. Unlike in his previous career in law enforcement, these citizens followed the rules without fear of penalty. The less he made his presence known, the better they did their work. There are so many stories about new beekeepers: the queen couldn't mate and wasn't laying eggs, the queen wasn't accepted by the colony and therefore killed, or the beekeeper himself killed the queen while putting the roof back on.

Charlie felt pretty smug until he spied the blue box at the end of the stand. The usual few bees hovered around the entrance. Don't move in, he thought. See what I care. I've got accomplished, upmarket bees from such exotic places as Orland and Alameda, and unlike you moochers, they like it here.

He lifted the roof to put more lemongrass oil in, hoping to attract a better class of bees. Right there, in the middle of the trap, was a football-sized clump of bees. A couple of bees flew out and up toward him, bumping his veil Kamikaze-style. It freaked him out enough that he dropped the roof, right down on top of the new tenants; something a new beekeeper would do.

Lifting the lid a second, more careful time, he removed the lemongrass oil and added frames to make this box into a real hive. In the process, more and more bees bumped his bonnet, acting assertive and bossy as if to tell him to hurry up and get out of here. When you're wild, you need to be spunky to survive. And with beekeeping, it's all about survival.

Even on the windy, foggy side of the city, you get lucky sometimes.

Alameda Bee Girls

2011-05-03T14:32:00.000-07:00

In L.A, beekeepers catch swarms every day. On a good day, they'll pick up three or four free swarms of local, healthy bees. People call Backwards Beekeepers from all over the greater L.A. area, begging them to come pick up bees. They pick swarms off trees at the Home Depot parking lot, off electric meters, barbeque grills, all free for the taking. It seems so easy.

Here in San Francisco, nobody ever catches bees. If you want bees, you have to buy them from breeders in Orland or from nowheresville, Central Valley, or get them sent in the mail. Charlie's inquired to all different types of beekeepers around here. Nobody has a good capture story. Not one, not here, not yet. Not good.

L.A. and San Francisco have this competitive nature - it's always been this way, at least to us northerners. The rest of the country lumps us together but we're two different States, joined together in self-absorption and sunny weather. When a SoCal girl moved to our high school, we'd imitate her Valley Girl oh my God! articulations, we ignored her bleachy, dry blond hair and too-browned bikini body, and we rolled our eyes at her knowledge of absolutely nothing useful, like how many calories were in Life Savers or Tic-Tacs. We're Silicon Valley. They're Hollywood. Of course we're better.

Charlie has been hanging around the Backwards Beekeeper chat groups in L.A. trying to learn how they're capturing all these swarms. Free wild bees are the best. They've already proven they can survive in the wild, coming from survivor stock specific to the area. They'll be most immune to colony collapse disorder. Why import when you can grow your own? It's like farming versus shopping. We want to be farmers: bee farmers. Shopping is more L.A.

After much research, Charlie put out a couple of hive traps. A hive trap is an old bee hive box. For bees, an old box contains familiar smells. It's like going to Grandma's house. It smells like home.

He put them out a month ago when all the L.A. beekeepers were buzzing about all the bees they were catching. He was jealous, like we were of the SoCal girls' tans and blond hair. We should be able to do anything they do in L.A. Silicon Valley is at least as important to the world as Hollywood.

Better doesn't mean first. Being south, when it comes to nature, L.A. gets everything first. Their flowers bloom earlier, their produce ripens sooner, the back of their hands dot with age spots sooner.

It wasn't as if Charlie had no visitors to his hive traps. On sunny days, bees took a drive across the park. They hung around for a couple of hours and went home before dark. Every sunny day they showed up for the free retreat. But they wouldn't commit. Before we left for Florida, we'd see one or two bees flying in for a quick visit and that was it. There was no reason to think we'd be catching wild bees.

Charlie gave up, left the hives out on the roof because he didn't have anywhere else to put them, and turned to Craigslist. What happened if he lost a queen? He'd be down to one hive. Since this is all he's got going in his life, it's not like he could even pretend it's a job. One hive is pure hobby.

On Craigslist, a beekeeper in Alameda, where it's sunnier sooner than San Francisco, had a swarm move into one of his old hives. Charlie asked if he could pick it up when we returned. He did, after getting lost for an hour in the Webster tube and having to call Michael the beekeeper for directions, again and again.

Michael helped Charlie put window screen over the hive entrance. He wanted the bees to breathe but not escape during the car ride home. Once home, he opened the trunk. It was quiet: no bees excited or angry, nothing lying dead anywhere.

Up on the roof at ten at night, he set the hive on his stand. He whipped up a tasty batch of sugar water - his specialty by now - and left the girls to sleep. They had a big day, moving to the big city.

This morning, they were still bashful. The slackers and the Giants brought in the Welcome Wagon to greet their new neighbors but no matter how many times they rang the doorbell, the Alameda girls pretended they weren't home. He kept watching all morning and only saw a couple of the Alameda bees come and go. Being Charlie, he panicked. What if they swarmed and left? He'd be a bad beekeeper. He wouldn't answer Michael's calls, asking how the girls were. He'd hide in the back at beekeeper meetings. He'd stick to growing arugula, which, being like a weed, he could grow pretty easily even if nobody wanted to actually eat it.

Bravely, Charlie put on his suit, lit up the smoker and went in to wake up the new arrivals, if there were new arrivals. He stuck the smoker tip into the entrance of the hive, squeezed the puffer and felt one step closer to a dirty uniform. Dirty uniforms, unlike in law enforcement, equal professionalism.

He was nervous there'd be no bees. That's all he envisioned. First he worried, then he got annoyed: why would they do that to him? He'd never live this down. Getting lost in the Alameda tube for an hour is embarrassing enough, but now this?

Calming down, he popped the lid. Inside, to his surprise, there were thousands of bees, all of them eating honey made from Alameda flowers, gorging themselves in response to the smoke. They didn't care they were in San Francisco. They acted like "We're from the East Bay. We don't need your pampering. We're big girls. We got this."

Bees build bridge comb between the frames, which these bees had started to do. You don't want that. You have to clean it up so you can get the honey out later on. This gave Charlie something important to do to help them.

He didn't wait around to look for the queen afterward. It would have been harder with these wild women: she wouldn't have the white dot on the back of her neck like store-bought queens. There was no question she was there. He could see eggs, shaped like tiny white bananas. That's all the proof you need.

He put the roof on and let nature do what it does best: create life, swarm and breed, even in cool and foggy San Francisco.

Back to the Bees

2011-05-03T12:57:00.000-07:00

Stella and Dylan

We returned home to a flurry of emails from SF Bee Association members. Several people, who received their bees when we did, found dead queens outside their hives. If you don't have a queen, you don't have a hive. They need an egg they can make into a queen but without a queen, how would they reproduce? We wondered: what happened to our hives while we were gone?

Dylan was our backup caretaker and for payment, Charlie bought him his own suit and veil. Charlie is a little too into uniforms if you ask me. It must be some kind of remnant from his former work life in law enforcement. In that field, if you aren't wearing a uniform, you aren't working. Uniforms for everybody! If you're working, make it official. Wear a uniform and you can call it work, and call it important even if you don't get paid.

Dylan went up all four days to check the sugar water levels and called Charlie right away with a status check report. The laid back hive, the one with slacker bees too relaxed even to stress about their move, had emptied their whole jar of sugar water. That's a lot of drinking, but that's what slackers do, right? Over the phone, Charlie walked Dylan through the steps of making more.

The Giants, by contrast, hadn't touched half of their liquids. Dylan thought that might mean they're relying on their natural pollen rather than the man-made sugar water, since they seemed to be busy, happy, productive, and flying around a lot. It's nature, this bee business. There's nothing you can do to change nature, especially when you're enjoying litter-free Florida freeways. Even if we were home, what could we do? You think cats are independent - try insects.

Four days later, Charlie raced upstairs first thing in the morning to be reunited with his darlings. Both hives were extremely active, meaning bees were racing around, working as if on a mission. The sun was out and, like everyone in San Francisco when the fog burns off, they were buzzing.

Dylan was right about the Giants' sugar water drinking habits: they were like Mormons in Las Vegas. The slackers, meanwhile, had already gulped down half of Dylan's replacement batch. What did this mean? Were the Giants dying or were they adapting?

Leaving sugar water out too long creates real alcohol. Charlie made up a fresh batch and brought it upstairs. It's the only thing he could do to help, if help was needed.

In nature, you can only guess: it's not foolproof. You learn by asking around and listen to everybody's different and sometimes opposite opinions. Then you observe; you do original research like any academic scientist. You figure out what's going on by putting the two together.

To prepare for the academic aspect, and on the pretense of calming the bees, Charlie brought up a chocolate cigar. We'd purchased these cigars for Evan, my oldest, in Hawaii on our last visit per his request. Since he hasn't visited us to claim them, Charlie's been pilfering the stash. Chocolate in our house quickly disappears, and cigars are no exception. This was the last of the chocolate ones. You'd better hurry up, Evan, or we'll have to go back to Hawaii and get you some more.

Oddly, bees really do calm down around smoke. Their natural reaction when they think there's a fire is to gorge themselves on honey, thinking they're going to have to move. Their focus is on eating rather than defending the hive. Just like anyone after a heavy meal, they get sluggish. They're like Grandma after Thanksgiving dinner. Murder is the last thing on her mind.

Before lighting up, Charlie poked around the gravel in front of the beehives, searching for a queen with a big white dot marked on her neck. Bees only live for six weeks. When they die in the hive, their sisters carry their bodies out and drop them out beyond their front porch. Charlie found a few big, fat drones, easily recognized by their big fly-like eyes, and some old, tired little grandmas. No big white dotted dead ladies, though. That's a big relief.

Reclined on a white plastic chair, three floors up, across from the park, under a clear blue warm sky, watching bees while smoking a chocolate cigar, Charlie tackled the important business of his personal academic bee research. Research involves counting, so Charlie counted how many bees flew into their hive with full pollen sacs. If you know what you're looking for, you can see pollen sacs. When they're full, it looks like the bees are carrying little bright yellow beach balls on the back of their legs.

Every fourth or fifth bee had full pollen sacs. Each hive was exactly the same. The Giants hive wasn't drinking their sugar water, just as Dylan suggested, due to adapting to their environment and relying on their pollen. The laid back bees in the slacker hive must have been true to their moniker and, like all layabouts, simply gotten a good case of the munchies.

Four Day Bee Break in Ruralsville, Florida

2011-05-01T14:06:00.000-07:00

Four days in the deep, rural part of Florida closest to nowheresville, Georgia: what does that mean to you? To me, in a word, backwards. There's no cell coverage, no internet, no healthy food (believe me), not even a Starbucks within an hour's drive. Everything I hold precious, and I don't include Starbucks in that, was absent.

It's the first time I've visited Charlie's relatives in their home base. His brother retired here and brought along his mother and special needs older sister to stay in a nearby rest home. For four years, I've been too scared to witness the rural South first-hand.

The rural South, in this case, is Sirmans Florida. Sirmans, if you don't know, is a town of about ten or fifteen farms that surround a dump and a Baptist church: the city center. The dump, Charlie's brother says, is where people get together when they want to be social. You'd think they'd want to go to the church for that but Charlie's brother said people, not him of course, ran the pastor out of town recently. He was too radical, voicing crazy ideas about starting a youth group.

Charlie's brother has a farm. Since we have bees, we're now open to looking at all kinds of nature and nature is what you find here, whether you like it or not.

Driving up to this farm, the first thing you see is a little fish house - a structure with windows and a porch - from which Charlie's brother ran a fish farm. He bulldozed the dirt around property the size of half of Golden Gate park and created lakes. He stocked them with fish that, no matter how many times I asked, I could never remember the names. They weren't salmon. People paid a dollar to fish and it seems like a good deal as you'd be guaranteed to at least catch something.

His aren't the only ponds, though. On the drive in, I spotted ponds big and small, with people fishing on them, everywhere. Who would drive all the way out to his property to fish? To fish at his lakes, you'd have to pass up an awful lot of free fishing opportunities.

We decided he must have wanted a reason to start a business. Either that or he really likes to fish and this was a way he could do that and take a tax write-off, too. Twenty years later, pretty lakes decorated with lily pads and generations of forgetfully-named kind of fish, a fish house with a porch, decorate the edge of his gorgeous property. I've started dumber, uglier businesses with less entertainment and good-eating value.

The next feature you see, the feature you see driving everywhere around Madison County, Florida, is Charlie's brother's herd of brown, lazy cows, if you can call twenty cows a herd. They were doing what all the cows along the drive here were doing: lying down, watching the passing cars along the road. The few who weren't staring at traffic were spread out on the meadows eating grass. It wasn't even hot and they looked like they were worn out.

Or like they weren't even trying. Coming from California, I'm used to driving by high-production Holsteins pumped up on hormones, steroids, and every other chemical known to maximize profitability. I've never seen a Holstein lying down or standing still. They even chew in a hurry. The herds are so huge and crowded in comparison that it's no wonder Cali cows don't lie down and watch cars. Keeping that growth hormone fed probably takes up all their energy, and the ratio of food to cow in a big herd must be a lot less. Even our cows are urban.

The last thing I noticed, the one that took me by surprise coming from the big city, is the lack of garbage.

I don't mean personal garbage. There's a lot of that. You know, the junk around peoples' mobile homes that looks like their house threw up everything inside and the owners gave up and decided to leave it there. Not all the homes in the area were mobile homes and not all of them had that fifteen-yard radius of crap all the way around, but too many did. When you think of people who are in real need, people who have nothing, you visualize people with an overwhelming amount of junk. Once that junk fills up their home's insides, somehow it migrates outside too. Is there a correlation between the amount of junk-surrounded mobile homes and the amount of "Repeal Obamacare" billboards? Yes, I think so.

The garbage I didn't see, the garbage we urban people have in abundance, is the side of the road kind. All the roads in cities, all freeways everywhere, have a lot of litter decoration. There are so many shoes along the sides of San Francisco city streets and highways that, if they had mates, we could give them out as souvenirs. There are clothes, too, on street corners all over the park so if you're cold you don't have to go far to find something to keep you warm. There are drink containers, broken glass from drink containers, cigarettes and packaging, other types of packaging, papers, notes that aren't interesting enough to pick up and read, plastic pieces and plastic shards of pieces, toys and newspapers, pacifiers, and anything you can throw out of a car window if you decide you don't want to own it for as long as it takes to find a trash can.

For four whole rural days I scoured the roads, spying. When the lazy brown cows and mobile homes with moats of broken cars and furniture became boring or sad, there was always the clean, mowed, junk-free side of the road to contemplate. Always. All the way from the Jacksonville airport to the innards of Madison county, a two and a half hour drive and all the time we rode to the Winn-Dixie and to Denny's, and all the way back to the airport where there was a Starbucks, it was verdantly, environmentally-friendly, extraordinarily, green.

Blue Sky in the Richmond District

2011-04-26T12:54:00.000-07:00

A queen in her box

It was like a bike fest out there this morning, there were so many bicyclists riding through the park this morning. That's what waking up to clear, icy blue sky and temperatures close to sixty will do. Dylan rode with me through the park, always the breeziest part of the ride, along the Ocean Beach path where it warmed up, and halfway around Lake Merced where he broke off to head to school.

It's been a while since I've ridden with anybody beside Scott Simon on Morning Edition in my ear buds. Getting out of my own head, or Scott's, was nice. The ocean seemed sparklier, the air fresher, and I felt like I was part of something rather than just another person with a mental list of things to do to get through another day.

On the bees' third day, they get great weather and a free queen. The queens come from a different colony in their own separate box. They've been bred with drones from another colony to strengthen the new hive's gene pool. If you put the new queen directly in with the hive of foreign bees, they would kill her. They need to be separate - within smelling distance - for three days.

The queen's box is mesh on two sides and has a hole drilled into one side. When we got her, the hole was corked up. Charlie replaced the cork with a mini-marshmallow. The idea being that the queen will eat away at one side of the marshmallow and the bees in the hive will eat away on the other. A mini-marshmallow is just big enough to last exactly three days, perfect timing.

As with the bees' mobile home, if you don't take the queen's box out quickly, they'll build comb all over it. They're eager to get busy building their comb, for good reason. The first comb is the brood chamber where the queen lays her eggs. The normal life of a bee is six weeks. If they don't start having babies, no one will take care of them in their old age.

Earlier, while eating his oatmeal, Charlie saw the bees hovering out our third-floor apartment window, watching him. He knew then that they were already out, awake and exploring.

They looked calm but he put on his suit anyway. He bought it, he might as well use it. The more he wears it, the more it'll get dirty and the more he'll look like an experienced beekeeper.

Once up on the roof, he saw the bees circle the hive and float across the street toward the flower garden at the corner bench seat by the entrance to the park. As he removed the first hive roof, not one bee crawled on him or flew toward him. He pulled out the queen box and brushed off the hitchhikers with his fingers. They flew right down into the hive as they should.

He was nervous taking the roof off the second hive. You never know quite what the Giants will do. You can't control nature.

He pulled off the roof. This time they acted like he wasn't even there, as if they were thinking, "Oh, this guy again. He's not going to hurt us."

Yesterday, the Giants circled in a big tornado that blanketed the whole street corner where we live. Today, only half the bees were even in their hives. That's how many were out exploring. Exploring means they're out after pollen. Pollen makes honey.

Blue sky is sweet!

Every Little Thing Gets Grumpy During Remodeling

2011-04-25T17:42:00.000-07:00

You don't want the bees' mobile home to remain inside the hive, just like you don't want your storage boxes lining the walls of your new home forever. Leaving the bees' temporary home in their hive gives them the idea to start decorating, in this case with honeycomb. They'll make comb all over the place instead of on the frame. Frames are easily lifted up for honey removal. Mobile home comb - nobody'd eat that honey.

One day is all you get, bees.

As Charlie approached, he saw that the bees were hanging out on their front porch drinking sugar water. Sugar water in an upside down glass jar with holes poked in the top is their food for now. They're disoriented from moving so they don't know where to find flowers. Without sugar water, they'll starve.

Charlie lifted the top off the hive and saw that half the bees hadn't even come out of the mobile home, thinking let's just live here. The big move is over. They're in their new home, making the beds, consulting with the decorator bees, thinking about comb placement.

He picked up the mobile home, turned it upside down, and the lazy bees hung on. They didn't get the hint. He had to shake the box to get them out. What happens when you push a passive creature too far?

They stopped being passive and went straight for aggressive. First they landed on Charlie's veil, looking through as if to say, "What the heck are you doing?"

When he didn't stop shaking, they went for the veil. Straight for it, Kamikaze-style. The more shaking, the more attacking.

Once most of them got the hint, Charlie put the mobile home on the front porch of their hive so the stupid, stubborn ones would realize they were now outside instead of inside, and get moving. He put the roof back on, left them alone, and moved onto the next hive.

We refer to the second hive as the Giants not because of their size but due to the sticker on the box. From the moment they were shown their new home, they became those rowdy neighbors everybody crosses the street to avoid. When Charlie first opened their mobile home, they went nuts. Unlike the first hive, they raced to the queen's separate quarters and tried to barge in. The ones not breaking into the castle acted like they were breaking out of jail. They went everywhere.

One of them found her way into Shelly's hoodie and buried herself in her hair. Shelly is like me - we do the important job of observing and hanging back; Shelly even more than me. So this little bee had to really hunt to search out the one of us who was the least bee-excited. Once her goal was met, the bee panicked. When you're a bee and you panic, you have but one option. Shelly's forehead became first casualty. Thus the Giants' reputation was born.

The Giants hive didn't go immediately crazy when Charlie raised the roof. They were already on edge, like they had their armaments ready and waiting, but they didn't strike without provocation.

Once provoked, that is once Charlie removed their mobile home, they went straight-up Kamikazi. No hesitation. These weren't contemplative bees.

Not all the bees went full combat. In fact, both hives had about the same percentage of attack bees.

After Charlie returned their roof, unlike the first hive, the Giants didn't calm right down. They had to burn off some of that excess irritation by pacing back and forth, racing, acting like a bunch of old men pissed they couldn't make the yellow light.

When it was time to pick lettuce for lunch, the Giants were revving their engines. With the fog clearing, they had another excuse to get out and show their team spirit. Charlie's veil came in handy once again. No bees were harmed in the picking of our salad.

The Suit Makes It Serious

2011-04-25T13:14:00.000-07:00

When you get a box of bees, they come in a little mobile home. You drop the whole thing into your hive and slam on the lid. The next day, you have to take their mobile home out. If you don't, they'll think it's part of the hive and you'd have a mess. Or they would. Either way, it'd be a lot harder to extract honey. That's why we're doing it.

The bees don't like you messing with their little trailer and their new home, so for this task Charlie put on his full beekeeping suit and veil. This is the first time he's had to wear it. It's so clean and business-like, as if it's his first day on a real job.

What do you do on the first day of your new job? Take a photo. So I did from the comfort of the living room. It's cold outside!

He left about an hour ago. Dressed like this, there's not a lot of places he'd go. He must be up there, like he was last night, simply watching his new pets. Last night he had a cigar and beer up there, watching and celebrating. I hope that's not what he's doing now.

What's That Buzzing Sound?

2011-04-24T14:19:00.000-07:00

With no kids, no jobs, no pets, no mortgage, and a sucky economy, the natural thing to do is start a rooftop garden and get bees, right? Especially since we live in a third floor apartment building that we don't own, and in the outer Richmond district where it's foggy all the time.

Okay, not all the time. On a good day, the fog burns off at 1:30 pm and if it's not raining - meaning not summer - we get glorious sixty degree sun until the fog blows in like steaming tea kettle no later than 3:30 pm.

First, the garden boxes. Anybody can find a container, throw some dirt in it and grow something, even kids. My kids grew beans from seeds they planted in old cans. They grew rapidly, just like in Jack and the Beanstalk, the book they were probably tying into this little nature experiment. Unlike Jack's beanstalk, my kids' plants grew spindly and ugly, and the kids forgot about them after a week. When they weren't looking, I threw them out and they never once asked where they went.

Charlie likes using his tools, so he built three big boxes and somehow lugged them up to the roof. Somehow he managed to get big sacks of soil up there, too, while pulling a muscle in his back. When he could stand upright, he planted lettuce and strawberries: seedlings instead of seeds since we need more immediate gratification than kids.

Why lettuce and strawberries? What are the two things you don't mind having in excess? Not carrots: if you eat too many, your nose turns orange. And anything taller, like corn, wouldn't survive the gusty ocean wind.

Now for the bees. We ordered two packages of bees, thinking one would be good since we don't know what we're doing, but two would be even better.

Two-is-better is the same philosophy I have with cookies, too. It works perfectly, up until my pants get tight. Then it works to give me motivation to increase my running mileage. If I had any discipline, I'd be so freakin' lazy.

The bees have their own busy schedule and you can't get them until they're good and ready. They waited until the next available holiday to be ready: Easter. That means we don't go to my sister's house and she tells my dad, the owner of our apartment, the specific reason why we're not coming.

She didn't have to be so honest, but that's my sister. I could have confronted her but the good thing is now my dad knows. The other good thing is that my sister told him. I wouldn't want him stumbling up there lifting the hive lid wondering what was going on in the boxes, but I sure wasn't going to tell him. He doesn't have pets, he pays someone to mow his lawn, and in order to be the property manager for this apartment, he made us give away our dog. I don't think he's the type, like Charlie, to call bees "cute."

So this morning, Easter Sunday, while other people celebrate joy and new life in their church, we drove home with six pounds of bees in the back seat of the car to celebrate joy and new life on our roof.

Charlie sneaked the bees up through the service stairs when nobody was looking and set them up. He's the one who spent hours every day looking at YouTube videos and, at bee association meetings, took notes instead of seconds and thirds at the cookie table, to figure out how to do it. He didn't use gloves (don't ask me why), he didn't get stung and the girls are buzzing around up there, adjusting to their new home.

Charlie hasn't been down from the roof in hours. He has had a hard time since we gave away our dog, so he could be excited to have pets again. Or he could be excited to have something to do besides listening to me complaining about my pants getting tight.

$500 Editing Advice - Yours for Free. Seriously.

2011-03-17T12:59:00.000-07:00

The San Francisco Writer's Conference was pricey, but there's such an emphasis on getting published that it seemed worth it. They arrange an hour for you to hit up a roomful of agents and pitch 'til you twitch. There are seminars and panels by successful writers, publishers, teachers and others, all focused on practical advice. The most useful part of the conference? The editor sign-ups. Ten minutes with an editor for free? Who doesn't need an editor? Ultimately, I signed up for three.

The first candidate was young, funny, and before I could say something stupid, he asked me, "Why are you writing?" and "Why this book specifically?" When he gave suggestions for what he could do for me, he focused on my answers. You can't solve a problem unless you define it first.

Being Asperger's, I was afraid I insulted him when I told him that everything regarding law enforcement on TV was fake. "That's why I'm writing this," I said. "Law enforcement is not 'As Seen On TV.'" Turns out he worked on Cops. Okay, not fake. But not real, either. No cop, even in a big city, gets to spend their whole shift chasing stupid criminals. Where's the report writing? The office politics? The admin bullshit?

I signed up for another editor, assuming he wouldn't want to contact me with his free estimate, especially when he said he was busy. That's what busy means, right?

I insulted editor #2, too. She was someone I'd heard of and respected, a wonder woman with five blogs, books published, columns in the Chron, and a remarkable poise that made me extra nervous.

I told her, to start, that I was a bit afraid of her. She was surprised. Why? Because you're intimidating, I said. She said nothing and in that silence, the danger zone I compulsively fill, I said, "You're so powerful. I thought you'd have fangs." As does most of what I blurt, it came out wrong. Writing will always be better than speaking, thanks to the delete button.

She said she wanted to work with me but fat chance, I thought. Poised people don't typically respond to blurters who insult.

At this point, I was mentally done but when I signed up for editor #2, I signed up for editor #3 immediately after. When #2 poised editor asked if I'd seen the most famous editor in the room, editor #3, I mentioned I wasn't going to keep that appointment. If she was intimidating enough for me to envision fangs, then what might he have? Horns and claws? I didn't want to go where my big mouth might take me.

Oddly, she told me I had to do it. Had to. Her words.

I met with the intimidating editor, I did. He smiled, read a page of my work and said he liked it. He would be delighted to work with me. He was the least intimidating so for ten whole minutes I remained blurt-free. He requested my complete manuscript so he could give me an approximate cost for a structural edit. One out of three is better than my usual odds when talking out loud. I had an editor.

He wrote me back and wanted to meet with me. For $500, he'd give me a specific plan for a revised draft. He advised me this early intervention was a normal step in the process of writing a successful book. It's what I was willing to pay for. He came up with the idea for "Shaft" after all, he mentioned. I don't know anything about "Shaft" - it's fiction - but I had heard the song and that alone seemed like a good reason to engage his services.

On Tuesday, I spent the morning getting lost in Berkeley, in the rain, trying to find his house. Once I did, I received not a "way of structuring and organizing these books so the first one is a hit" but - I kid you not - cliched ideas for a mystery. Agatha Christie was mentioned. Seriously.

His opening statement was, "Fiction! You'll write fiction." I've got Asperger's syndrome. I don't get fiction but, okay, I'll have an open mind. But why would I want to write something I don't read? The last mystery I read was Nancy Drew.

One question would have cleared this right up.

If he would have asked me why I'm writing, he would have known I'm trying to undo law enforcement cliches, not reinforce them. Do you have any idea how annoying it is to be around otherwise intelligent people who think that every cop drives around with a partner, that every cop would risk their career to lie on your speeding ticket, that every cop sits at a desk in a precinct, speaking perp-talk with a Brooklyn accent?

This "Shaft"-creating editor advised me to write something with a young cop protagonist to appeal to the kids, and an older, wiser "grace under fire" partner to show bravery and courage by protecting the young cop in some way. Nothing in my manuscript mentioned a partner because I've never met a cop who had a partner. That's in L.A. or some big city. Most agencies don't have money for that.

He told me to finish with the bad guy getting arrested. That's a great ending, he said. No it's not, and again, nothing based in my manuscript. The truth is cops see a revolving door of dirtbags: frequent flyers. That is if they even get a conviction. In the real world, defense lawyers pull tricks to get pedophiles off (heh, heh) and to get hung juries at murder trials. Criminals, even after successful arrests, don't always get what they deserve. Wouldn't you want to know that? It's real, so I would.

The cop husband laughed when I mentioned the editor's advice to have the main character meet a cop widow for a love interest. "That's a fantasy. It's something that cops laugh at when we see it on TV. That's somebody's romantic imaginings on the screen. Everybody makes fun of that kind of thing at briefing. And the last thing women who were married to cops and divorced, or cop widows, want to do is to get involved with another cop. There's your reality," he said. "Who wants to read about that?"

After that, the advice became ridiculous. "There has to be an attempt on the protagonist's life," the editor said. My cop husband burst out laughing at this. "In my experience of 24 years at different four agencies, I can tell you hands down, that has never happened," he said. "No cop ever interacts with a suspect in any situation where his or her life is in danger. The only interaction I've ever had is seeing someone I arrested in line at Starbucks. And, out of uniform, they don't recognize me."

The editor should have saved me the almost 1/3 of my husband's monthly cop retirement pension (he's not from Cali so it's about as low four figures as you can get without being three figures, another cop reality). He could have told me he wasn't able to give me a specific plan instead of gracing me with a general idea for a mystery cliche. He could have had something to do with "Shaft," too, but when I got home and googled, it turns out John Shaft was a Harlem born former foster child and street tough who kept an office in (then) seedy Times Square, a real person. And, according to google, a former New York Times reporter named Ernest R. Tidyman wrote seven "Shaft" novels and the original screenplay. The famous editor isn't mentioned.

I hope the next writer who wants his advice also wants a cliche murder mystery. Better yet: save your $500. You are welcome to use this one.

If not, here's his website. Who am I? I'll never be as famous. Give it a shot and let me know how it works for you.

For your info, the second editor, who surprisingly wrote to say she wants to work with me, is here. She's very professional and has normal, beautiful teeth.

If you want to know the first, funny guy editor's name, it's here. By the way, not only did he write me back but he gave me five pages of editing advice for free, just to show me what he could do. An excerpt is at the top of this post.

Success

2011-02-21T12:22:00.000-08:00

Real death for a cause:

“We appeal to every Muslim, within the regime or assisting it in any way, to recognize that the killing of innocent human beings is forbidden by our Creator and by His beloved Prophet of Compassion (peace be upon him). Do NOT kill your brothers and sisters. STOP the massacre NOW!” - a statement released by a group of 50 prominent Libyan Muslim religious leaders.

Nothing like death:

Me pitching to agents

Pitching to agents at the San Francisco Writer's Conference. But you wouldn't know this, hearing the fear and buzz in line, waiting for the door to open. There was even a guy behind me making a loud noise, several times, that sounded like Tuvan throat singing. Everybody has their own way of warming up. When authors from the session before were finished and walked by, they told us, "It'll be okay. You'll do great."

It wasn't. I pitched to three agents who didn't have claws and fangs but rather, were begging for a thirty-second cheap Super Bowl commercial. I believe in my project but Asperger's makes it hard for me to talk anyway, let alone sell. I tend to blurt and tell people exactly what I think, filter-free. I know this so I prefer people to talk first so I can read them and create a filter. At a pitch, you talk the whole time. Bad start.

Lying is even more difficult, not that I wanted to lie, but a sales pitch is like a movie trailer. Don't you feel cheated when the movie trailer gave away the funniest lines?

I wanted to say, "Imagine Napoleon Dynamite stumbling through junior college, on a mission to become a cop."

The more I waited in line, the more I thought about how stupid that sounded. My character is as different in as many ways as he is similar. They both share the tight curly hair and a lack of social skills, but my character is impulsive and crazy like that guy your best friend went out with for two weeks while everybody asked her what the hell she was thinking? And isn't Napoleon Dynamite so five years ago?

After three three-minute stammering pitches, I pretended to get a drink of water and instead kept walking out the side door. I skipped out to the quietest bathroom downstairs and hid until I could put on a confident face. At breakfast, I sat next to a beautiful, poised woman so I pretended to be her while walking out the front door of the conference and all the way home where it was safe.

Didn't my story make it into the finals of the Indie Publishing contest, sponsored by the SFWC? I could have bragged about that to an agent. I heard one guy mention he was in the finals every time he talked to someone, even after the winners were announced and he wasn't one of them. Who wants to be that guy?

There was another guy. At every Q&A session, he came up to the microphone holding his self-published book and handed it to the panel to pass around before asking his question. He never got around to asking a question. Instead, he pitched and pitched and pitched. I saw him so many times I could see his book cover graphic in my sleep. That graphic was embroidered on his tie and his shirt too, and he wore them every day.

While stumbling through my first pitch, I saw him pitching at the next table over. Not only was he wearing his logo-filled tie and shirt, not only were his book, cards and newsletters piled on the agent's table, but he was pulling license plates out of a bag. These were the same license plates I'd seen the day before on a big ass car parked directly in front of the hotel; custom plates with the title of his book.

That's the opposite of Asperger's. I'll bet he becomes very successful.

Bye-bye, Borders

2011-02-16T13:43:00.000-08:00

We are living in the middle of a revolution which, if you think about it, is perpetually true: we made tools, we learned language, we upgraded to indoor plumbing and then wireless internet. Now, though, we can't grab a table at Borders, sit uncomfortably close to a fragrant homeless guy, and read all the magazines for free. Not after today. Borders is bankrupt. How did that happen?

Don't blame me unless you blame milkmaids for factory farming.

Books are what your grandparents lined their walls with, using them for insulation almost as much as for intellectual stimulation, as demonstrated by the accumulated dust. Books are like albums, like 8-tracks and cassettes and paper towels. We have iTunes now, and washable towels (again). We share: solar and wind rather than coal and oil. After reduce, reuse, recycle, and repair, sharing is the fifth R (regift?). The future is not full of business models based on one-time use commodities. Sure, $30 hardback books can be shared, but not on YouTube.

Borders used to be the future: they stole it from the little, independent bookstores they stomped on and crushed while laughing all the way to the bank. Once king of the hill, they sat there, forgetting that revolution is dynamic. When you're in your fortress, complacent with achievements, ignoring every reason to improve, you're easily overtaken. It's simply a matter of time.

Even Barnes and Noble, the other king of the hill, jumped on the Nook.

Borders had this great set-up, like a library only with better refreshments, and all they had to do was capitalize on that. Charge something - a little bit - like a library with a entrance fee. But basing your business model on selling expensive hard-backed books? How is this commodity different than landlines, ice boxes, or physician house calls? Who would fund a business model based on those?

Borders had a good run, capitalizing on a product invented in 1450 with hardly an upgrade. Books predate the Dutch Tulip Bulb Bubble of 1637, indoor plumbing, and the exorbitant pay of CEOs who drive their businesses into the ground while collecting more pay than all the bottom wage earners put together.

The next revolution might not be so easy. Or, thinking positively, not so hard. Instead of losing places to hang out, we might lose exorbitantly paid future-ignoring CEOs. Revolution is also evolution.

I Hate(d) You, Jonathan Safran Foer

2011-01-15T13:21:00.000-08:00

Neva, my gifted and talented writing pal, told me she also thought Jonathan Safran Foer was overrated. "The first book was good, but the second, not so much." This made me as happy as you can get when someone you respect confirms your immature envy; when someone tells you you're justified in hating someone with more success, and when that someone pays your lunch bill on top of that. Thanks, Neva.

It might be that she was tired of listening to my complaining about how lucky he was. To me, he writes like you do when you're in school: full of energy without any awareness about how irritating it is to read writing too full of energy. Bits of his work are amazing. Look at a couple of hundred pages of it and you feel like you're babysitting an ADHD kid without his ritalin.

Being so successful, JSF is everywhere. That doesn't mean I listened. I didn't, which took a lot of effort, being that he was marketed more heavily than a Big Mac. Only when I was on my bike and couldn't get to my iPod fast enough to find something else to read, did I let him in. My iPod screen doesn't budge when you poke at it with gloves and last month, even in San Francisco, there were a few days cold enough to think twice before pulling off a glove, even when it's to avoid listening to someone you hate.

Okay, maybe I'm too jealous of his Big Mac-like ubiquitous, seeing that he has such a goofy disjointed voice. Why do people take his writing seriously when his books read like middle school crazy? How do you get to be on The New Yorker's Twenty under Forty when your second novel's first paragraph contains the line, "Another good thing is that I could train my anus to talk when I farted." His story in The New Yorker, to prove he was worthy of the honor, wasn't proof at all. It was more of the same: ritalin-loaded, snarky middle school kid with a long list of non-sequiturs. That's not talent: that's smart-ass.

Blame my fear of frozen bicycle fingers for listening to him read from "Eating Animals" his third book. Right away, he went straight to my heart with an anecdote about his grandmother stuffing him full of food, crappy awful food, and him enjoying the attention enough to be complicit. Who can hate a person like that?

It's to-the-heart-heart-heart from there, going from his grandmother to nature. The rest of the podcast was an interesting and disgusting account of what we allow factory farms to do to birds, fish and cows, all so we can enjoy cheap sushi.

He then explained that the UN says factory farming is the number one cause of global warming and one of the top causes of every environmental problem, everywhere. This was shocking enough to make me lurch practically off my bike and hit a sand patch. I couldn't hear the next thing he said, worrying at that moment about potentially getting run over by car commuters spewing hate and carbon out their tailpipes. Stupid people racing to stressful jobs, ignoring the ocean outside their passenger window, the waves dotted with surfers like ants on a dropped popsicle. Wake up, commuters. Look around. Take notice.

My potential murdering commuters aren't the only ones not looking around and taking notice. Turns out this book is "Food, Inc." for your kindle. If you haven't seen "Food, Inc," you're probably thinking that was just a flu bug you had after you ate chicken for dinner. Something like 76,000,000 cases of food poisoning happen in this country every year. Don't even try to blame all that on warm picnic food.

Sorry about the hating, Mr. Foer. This is a book for people who try to do the right thing, who want to make the world a better place but don't know how to start. I bought a copy and one for my daughter, too. That should make it even.

How Many Stars Does Your Heart Attack Have?

2010-12-06T18:33:00.000-08:00

I'll admit I watch more than my fair share of reality cooking shows. Why cooking, you ask? The more you cook at home, the better you eat and the healthier you are. The more you watch reality show cooking shows, the more you're motivated to cook at home.

It's true. It's called inspiration, and after that, it's called plagiarism (or theft) when you recreate the Barefoot Contessa's gratin recipe with no intention of ever buying her cookbooks. The more you cook at home, the more you save money on your food bill - that's not rocket surgery. Last time we went out, and it wasn't anywhere special, for two people it cost the same as two weeks' worth of CSA boxes.

Either I watch for motivation, or I watch because they aren't as loaded with crazies. You have to have some skill to get on and remain on a cooking show. And is it just me or are cooking shows less loaded with those narcissistic contestants who, when their self-indulgent behavior is called out, say, "I'm not here to make friends?"The more contestants say that, the more you're probably watching something on MTV.

The high-end professional chefs on these shows make a big deal out of using farm-sourced, fresh, organic, local ingredients. These are the contestants who work at fancy restaurants and have some mighty, superior attitude, particularly against other contestants who work in diners, cafes, or corporate law cafeterias. The pretensions fly down their noses, as if their food not only tastes better but is better in every other way, too.

I've got news for them. It's obvious news, so if you're smarter than me and figured this out already, good for you. Fine dining is no better for you than fast food. In fact, it might even be worse. Foie gras anyone? Ever watch those poncy chefs spoon the fat in their saucepan back onto the meat, over and over? It's as if they want their customers to get fat and die. They all seem to do it, the fancy ones. That and frying steak in inches of butter, to keep it moist, they say, and you know what moist means. It's as if they want the maximum possible density of artery-clogging death per serving. Meat prep is just the beginning.

Watch as the Iron Chefs drop big knobs of butter into their pans. Before Alton Brown even has a clue what they're preparing, there goes the big blob of butter. It's as if the more fat, the more their chances of winning.

Stare as Top Chef contestants shake cupfuls of oil around in their pans. The more oil, the more flavor, the fatter the judges get.

Cry as Hell's Kitchen contestants screw up another greasy pan full of scallops. "Too dry!" Gordon Ramsay will say if the little circles of death aren't oozing grease. It's worse than burgers at McDonald's, I suspect, but how would I know? Only McDonald's has labels.

Chefs don't care about you. You go out to eat because you want to eat something flavorful and pretty, and you aren't going to pay five times the price of a quarter-pounder if it doesn't taste five times as fancy.

Rich sauces make you salivate. Fat and salt tastes delicious. The more fat, the more you'll pay. I've known people who, when going out, purposefully close their mind to the fatty cooking methods. They know they're getting a plateful of indigestion and a heartful of grease, but discussing extra greasy calories isn't socially acceptable conversation topic when it costs so much. So they eat their 800 calorie, 62 fat grams' worth of Caesar salad and keep quiet, knowing they'd be better off at McDonald's.

Or home, which is where they would be, their spouses warned, if they brought up this (click for more proof) topic one more time.

Dirt Cheap

2010-12-02T13:45:00.000-08:00

fennel root

Once you get on a list somewhere, these cheapskaters are onto you. You click something sounding completely guiltless and pious, something you could use to save money, and within hours your inbox is stuffed with crap. You may be cheap, but they know a fanatic when they see one, and cheap people are nothing if not obsessed.

Some emails push positive suggestions such as raising chickens, rooftop gardening, beekeeping and many useless, time-consuming hobbies you could do badly for little financial gain, like making your own butter, or soap.

We made butter at Sunday school at my grandma's church and it still seems like a lesson I never got, a metaphor for resurrection I can't grasp years later. How's that a money-saving tip? Can't grasp that, either. You can get butter for less than two bucks at Safeway on sale and stock up, or better yet, pretend you're vegan like we're doing, use olive oil you already have, and save your heart and the two bucks both.

Soap is even cheaper. It's something you can also do without if you're like me and too lazy to buy more when it runs out. Instead, you can make a game of seeing how long you can do without. It's been three months so far, although my husband borrowed half a cupful of dish soap from the kids down the hall once.

Not to mention, if we made our own soap, we'd be poorer as well as smellier. Rather, we'd smell like soap ingredients gone bad because no matter what, the first time you do something, it never turns out right and there's a big mess at the end guaranteed: your prize for trying. You'd be wishing for real soap to clean up all the mess.

Other emails are full of no's, like, don't buy anything new, don't eat outside your home, ever, don't drive anywhere, don't spend on anything for a whole month at a time. Buy nothing, do nothing, go nowhere.

Being cheap is more like a game when you fill your list with positive suggestions, so I delete the no's. When you once spent half your life scrimping and pinching to feed your kids the two meals a day they couldn't get free at school, you don't need another no. Say yes. Yes, we will be happy with what we have. We may not have soap but we have coffee, and with a lot of calorie-burning scrubbing, those coffee cups get clean enough, oh yes.

After your first cheapskate spreadsheet, you're hooked on the simple life. You figure out where you can be in a year, financially, if you only use three squares of toilet paper. Soon, you're telling everyone to wash out their garbage bags, or better yet, don't use garbage bags. Don't make garbage. You hear yourself bragging about not showering, saving (albeit incrementally) on your shampoo and utility bills. You even volunteer at a voluntary simplicity seminar and end up sitting next to the guy who wrote "Voluntary Simplicity." When a boring speaker won't shut up, he leans in, tosses you a twenty, and says, "Can you go get me a light beer?"

You think, the guy who wrote 'Voluntary Simplicity' is okay with paying almost double digits for a beer in a swanky bar? A light beer? You might be taking this voluntary simplicity thing to an extreme. Your rules don't allow you to bring money to seminars like this. You could be tempted to spend on overpriced beverages outside the home - a guaranteed route to wastefulness and unhappiness. Instead, you remain cheap, thirsty, and practically drool in Duane Elgin's beer when you put it down in front of him.

Loosening up - something we can do if Duane Elgin is allowed - meant signing up for a CSA. For $33, we get a big cardboard box full of mostly green things delivered to our doorstep every Thursday. When we lived in Oregon, only rich people could afford CSAs. In Oregon, only rich people could afford produce. (Okay, I'm exaggerating. Only rich people could afford organic produce.)

We have an idea of what's been picked and pulled up for the week: they send out a warning email so if you have allergies, you can ask for substitutions. In my case, there are never, ever any beets in that box. Just looking at them makes me beet-red and ready to heave.

Opening that box is like Christmas, and by Christmas I mean Christmas with cheap bastards if what you get for Christmas is green and grows in the ground. Okay, heh heh, it's like Christmas with my grandma who I dearly loved but her idea of a gift was sometimes the jeans I desperately wanted, the ones the popular girls wore but mom said were too expensive, or, sometimes, an old bath towel. When you're ten and squeezing the wrapped gifts when nobody's looking, hoping and imagining, those two items are unfortunately interchangeable.

During the summer, our green Christmas box was full of the tastiest strawberries you've ever had, popping-ripe, exploding blueberries, and bags and bags of crunchy, bright vegetables you could name and explain. Each item was enjoyable to prepare, knowing that someone living in our zip code picked or pulled it just for us. You don't let that kind of love get squishy and slimy in the bottom drawer of the fridge. Instead, you eat slowly, enjoying the taste of somebody else's manual labor and transportation through San Francisco traffic.

Not only do you and your husband have plenty to talk about at dinner now, and you can talk plenty about broccoli and its after-effects especially if you're open to less proper types of conversations, but you eat differently. You taste every bite, considering if the last time you ate broccoli, did it taste like this? Like a sip from the coldest creek water? Did it crunch this way, even though it's soft around the edges? Not being that great of a cook, I know I can't take the credit for all the flavor, although I do. You don't want to discourage positive comments, however misguided.

Then there are the old bath towels you sometimes get in your box, like kohlrabi, romanescu and fennel root. And here's where everything changes.

Instead of a surprise CSA box, you could have headed to the Farmer's market every weekend, spending hours shopping for home-grown produce, cooking up familiar recipes, buying only what you have discerningly hand-picked from bins of vegetables, vegetables that you don't have to read the sign to figure out what they are. How boring. How safe.

Isn't Romanescu in the Czech Republic? How'd they get broccoli to grow in a fractal pattern? What's fennel and why only the root? How do you pronounce kohlrabi? What kinds of cultures eat these things? Yours, once it's on your doorstep. You're a cheap bastard, after all. Food waste causes methane-type global warming and is the basis for more admonitions from mothers, and the basis for the originating of more eating disorders, than anything else in any other room.

You didn't pick these vegetables. Do you trust the CSA enough to give you the prettiest pears? Or did they give you the crushed, sat-upon lettuce? You aren't in control so you can't think that way anymore. Free your mind.

You have to trust that someone eats kohlrabi or it wouldn't have been hand-placed next to a bag of persimmons. Although, to be honest, some of the more unusual items left on my doorstep have appeared in Chopped baskets. Chopped is the show where professional chefs compete at creating a dish incorporating the weirdest ingredients ever, like octopus, duck and animal crackers, or, chicken, blue tortillas, Tuscan kale and sea urchin. After Chopped, fennel root is child's play.

We never cooked squash and never ate it because, well, why would you? It looked like a lot of work and reminded me of the free food boxes in Montana where, in the winter, squash was the only thing you got that wasn't in a box labeled with a paragraph of ingredients.

Now we eat cute, little dumpling squash filled with brown rice, whole-wheat bread crumbs, leftover chopped grilled vegetables and browned in the oven. We mix leftover acorn squash into zucchini bread instead of butter or oil, and add delicata to soup of our own free will. This mystery box has saved us a ridiculous amount of money, forcing us to create meals from produce obscurity that taste better than I'm able to convince without you actually coming over for spaghetti squash pancakes with salsa and sour cream. Be positive - it's really good. Your mother would say so, too.

What Happens When You Move

2010-11-29T13:03:00.000-08:00

If you're a shy person, you have friends because you already had them. You went to school with them and kept on going. You worked with people, or your spouse did, and you gradually incorporated them into your evenings and weekends. Your kids had friends with parents you got to know bit by bit, and you continued the relationship. When you stay in one place, it takes little, simple steps to have a social life.

When you move like we did: not with a job and not with kids, you have to start over. It shouldn't be difficult with a son and his family down the hall (we're the apartment managers of my dad's building, not a real job). It should be easy with relatives by the houseful scattered an hour south. A few decades ago, I worked at jobs near here, went to high school and college near here, and even lived twenty-one blocks east in my mom's apartment for a year. Easy, easy, easy. Slipping into a past social life seemed simple.

The thing is when you move away, you become a stereotype. You aren't a bunch of little stories you tell about yourself when asked at birthdays. When you're gone, you can't admit what you want to share and leave out the embarrassing stuff. You can't defend yourself when the spin about those embarrassing situations goes south.

When you move, you become a relative with a tagline. I was the bohemian daughter. I didn't know this until I returned and was introduced, or re-introduced, to people I have known my whole life. I wasn't someone's daughter or niece. I was "that one," as in, "you remember her? That one?"

My relatives invited me for holidays again, and asked me the weirdest things. They had only heard bits of my life, and the bits were not representational. Like everyone, I'd had successes as well as failures, but unlike everyone, I had been on food stamps. It was twenty years ago or so, and for less than a year, but it was what had been said after my name. That was my label. That, and the reminder that I had moved around a lot. They didn't know I was fixing up and selling those houses I'd been moving around in for a profit. To my face, they told me I was "non-traditional."

It's going to take a lot of birthdays to forget those food stamps.

My idea of an easy social life died, too. Everyone had moved on without me for over twenty years. They weren't keeping a space open at the table, hoping and waiting for me to return. The table was filled with new people who didn't know me. When you go to Thanksgiving dinner at a close relative's home, at a table you sat at hundreds of times as a kid, and you don't know two-thirds of the people sitting there, you realize you are the newcomer. You are the one without a social life.

When we first moved, my husband stayed to finish work in Oregon for a year. For days I sat alone in my kitchen chair, or on the floor if I was really sad, holding my phone. It's hard for a shy person to call someone when they're lonely, and harder when people don't call back. Everyone has a full life but you and here's the proof. You could spend three days holding that phone, talking to nobody during that 72 hours. You make up an excuse to go to Safeway just to walk around three dimensional people and have a superficial conversation with the checker.

If I were one of my kids, I would have advised to join a group. Sign up for a meet-up and meet people with similar interests. When I got the reminder emails, I left them in my inbox. Shy people don't go to random locations and walk into a roomful of strangers. If I'm going to act on-stage, it's going to be around relatives, not people who may not be worth all the effort. I joined so many meetups that my inbox was full of potential social life but I declined every invitation.

When my husband moved down permanently, he had a lot of fix-up work to do. He talked to the other tenants, he had to. Talking to tenants was something my dad advised me against doing. He said, rightly, "You don't want to get too close. They're not your friends. You might have to evict one of them some day."

He didn't have to tell me in such an extreme. Avoiding people is something I do naturally. When we lived in a condo with a shared hallway, I put my ear to my door to make sure there was no one near before I opened it. My heart starts pumping and I stutter and blurt stupid comments if I happen upon someone without advance warning.

I couldn't always avoid tenants. I chose the quietest time of the day to water the plants or vacuum the hallway, but one tenant always caught me. She'd start talking and, even though the vacuum was so loud I couldn't hear, kept talking. She asked questions so I couldn't smile and keep on going, pretending I had to get the vacuuming done. She talked easily so she probably didn't realize I had no idea how to respond. Afterward, I'd finish vacuuming with a happy feeling, like I'd had a good conversation with a real friend, ready to spend another three days alone in my kitchen, holding my phone.

That tenant moved out a few months ago but by that time my husband had moved back into my kitchen and my life. All the deferred repairs from all the tenants who I'd avoided kept him busy, so he was gone most of the day. In this way, the transition from hermit-hood was gradual.

By talking with tenants and repair people all day, he wasn't worried about his lack of friendship outside the building. He seemed relieved he didn't have people calling him all day long like at the job he'd just left. He still might be in that sweet spot, like vacation, where the contrast between your regular day and your vacation day is so striking that you aren't bored yet.

Not me. It feels weird not to have unrelated people call up and ask you over for dinner. The electrician got to know my husband so well, thanks to an un-pampered building, that he eventually invited us over. It was the first time since moving that I'd been inside someone else's house. I felt like a country girl going to the big city for the first time. "Look at all your art," I said. "Look at your pots and pans."

How many times can you compliment someone's pots and pans? They were the nicest I'd ever seen, and more plentiful than I'd ever seen. My three that I was pretty proud of up until then, made me feel rural, like I had teeth missing. Maybe all their friends had the same kinds of nice pots and pans. Maybe they thought everybody had pots and pans worth $150 each, and so many.

They talked about things about which I couldn't add to the conversation, like jobs and work travel. It felt like going to a different country with strange customs, like cheese plates. How much cheese were you supposed to eat before dinner? It was just sitting there, a few pieces sliced, with a knife available to cut as much as you were allowed. How much were you allowed? Should I eat all the slices and stop after that? Should I leave the sliced pieces for someone else and slice my own?

They were busy stirring and cooking in those beautiful pans and it looked like dinner would be a while. Which bread went with what cheese? There were three of each and the bread had bits of hard, dark things mixed in that I couldn't recognize. I kept slicing more off, trying to figure out what the dark bits were. They were probably nuts but I'm still not sure. I'm sure I ate too much but that's what you do when you don't know what to talk about. One of the cheeses, the electrician's wife said, was eighty dollars. Did I hear that right? I kept quiet, not sure how to respond. Nothing I could come up with seemed appropriate.

Maybe it's best not to stress my lack of social life. I've lost all the questions that used to pop up in my head when people were talking to me. When you can't think of something to ask, you do a lot of sighing and really, that's just embarrassing. You can do that all you want at home, in your kitchen, by yourself, with your phone in your hand.

In the future, you'll spend a lot of time feeling like a dog leashed to a pole outside a grocery store

2010-10-24T16:15:00.000-07:00

Douglas Coupland is a Canadian so when he says something completely in-your-face radical, it doesn't sting. It doesn't stink, either, which is what I first wrote. Well, to be honest, no writing actually stinks, even mine. But Coupland is like what philosophy could be if it weren't so pleased with itself.

My title quote is from his NPR interview, talking about his Radical Pessimist's Guide to the Next Ten Years. Seriously, read it. It's short, one page, as this is not a long-winded guy. Or don't if you prefer to get your information spoon-fed like a baby and yes I mean all TV news, not just Fox.

Remember Generation X? If you do, one of his tips is make sure you have someone to change your diaper. Okay, that's something you'd expect from a radical pessimist.

How about this? It is going to become much easier to explain why you are the way you are, due to structural and chemical functions of the brain. I like that, although I don't want to live in a world where too many more people go around explaining why they are the way they are. I live in California, after all. There's too much self-absorption, way too much, especially by people who have nothing to say but say it over and over again.

Another one: enjoy lettuce while you can. Yeah, I suppose any pessimist could predict the end of trucked produce with the probable success of the old energy technology monopoly completely squashing the green shoots of energy innovation.

How about this one: dreams will get better. No explanation. If you have one, please share.

My justification? My dreams are better (how about that for being self-absorbed? oh, just read on - I can't give an example I haven't actually experienced, can I?), being older.

My husband said, "You were crying in your sleep last night, did you know that?" I remembered transferring Burma VJ into my imagined REM vacation. It's good to empathize with other people, far away without a voice, trapped in a shitty country with no way out, though. I felt - feel - like I lived that experience. I woke up grateful for living in the United States, Tea Party rights-removers and all, and energized about working for people less fortunate.

My husband said, "You were laughing, too." I think that had something to do with getting revenge on bad guys, but that does nothing except make me feel good enough to get out of bed and make a difference, maybe, hopefully. When I was younger, my dreams all occurred in the same place, like same neighborhood kind of place, and they were always stressful.

So in that way, it is just better when you're older. You feel things more deeply but it doesn't feel like the first time, thank you Foreigner. You deal with whatever hits the fan because you've been sprayed before, better and harder, and you can use that hurt to help. It's not just me explaining the way I am. I'm no different - no better than anyone.

Words about Water

2010-10-15T10:26:00.000-07:00

It's a wet day in the bloggy world.

Instead of scary, fear-building, depressing facts about the devastating environmental impacts of water scarcity and pollution (that comes later), there's a great documentary on the subject that does what words, at least my words, cannot. It's Tapped and it's not boring so don't make excuses. Watch it and love life.

My wish is that somewhere deep in our heads and hearts Americans will soon comprehend the luxury of life we take for granted while we flush our toilets with completely good, drinkable, potable water. Ever since living overseas where such a wasteful idea is considered stupid, this complaint slips out of my mouth inappropriately during social settings involving too much family or alcohol. Don't kill the messenger. Even Republicans know that much of what we take for granted as Americans is thought of as wasteful and stupid everywhere else on the planet.

It is stupid. It is wasteful and we know it. We whine, "What can I do about it?" while we flush and waste and drink bottled water and whine some more and say inappropriate things around family members.

Here's something to say to those family members who push you over the edge with their assumptions about how much better they are and how justified they are to live better than 99% of all humans who have ever lived on planet earth. (If you don't have family members like this, I feel badly for you. They are good for learning patience and learning how to disagree without disrespect).

This information is from Treehugger.com, and if you think treehugger is an insult, then you more than anyone in your family needs to read this, over and over while enjoying your day living in the richest country ever to exist on the planet where even poor people (not you, of course - you worked hard for your money, if you can justify luck as hard work) live better than most kings in history:

Every week, 42,000 people die from unsafe drinking water and unhygienic living conditions.
Students in developing countries lose 443 million school days each year due to diseases associated with the lack of water, sanitation and hygiene. Repeated episodes of diarrhea and worm infestations diminish a child's ability to learn and impair cognitive development.
More people have access to cell phones than to toilets. As a result, tons of untreated human waste make their way to water sources causing a litany of diseases, and even death.
The US, Mexico and China lead the world in bottled water consumption, with people in the US drinking an average of 200 bottles of water per person each year. Over 17 million barrels of oil are needed to manufacture those water bottles, 86 percent of which will never be recycled.

These facts are disheartening, but they don't have to be the norm. Even in the darkest depths of the water crisis, we found positive solutions that are already being put in place.

Organizations like Water.org and charity: water are leading the charge in bringing fresh water to communities in the developing world by not only building wells in remote villages but also creating sustainable infrastructure to maintain those wells.
The average person uses 465 liters of water per day. But by educating yourself about where you are most wasteful in your water use, you can begin to reduce that waste.
There are small steps we can all take to help keep pollution out of our rivers and streams, like correctly disposing of household wastes.
Communities around the world are saying no to bottled water. Doing so not only drastically reduces water bottle waste, but also saves taxpayers a pretty penny. For example, the city of San Francisco saved $500,000 per year by terminating all of its bottled water contracts.

While the realities of water issues around the world are grim, the organizations and individuals driving positive solutions show us that it doesn't have to be that way. Thank you for joining us, and for all of your work for a future filled with clean water.

Drink, Fish, Smoke: preparing for a life in law enforcement

2010-10-15T10:14:00.000-07:00

Here's where you can get my new book. Please buy a copy. It's cheap!

A somewhat general sort of description kind of thing:

Charlie was good at only two things: shooting a gun and driving fast. Cops get to be on a team with a bunch of other guys and wear the same uniforms like in football. Law enforcement would be like hanging around friends all the time without any girls telling you what to do, always saying, "Why are you doing that? Why don't you be with me?" Helping others starts with helping yourself, he thought. All he had to do was turn twenty-one, the minimum age to be a cop. Until then, living in Florida in the seventies, there was plenty of time to grow up.

Why I wrote this particular story:

Law enforcement is a career like no other.

Rarely do you get a honest explanation of what it takes to become a cop. You're told you have to be a good boy scout, an upstanding citizen, polite, get good grades, be confident but not judgmental, command presence but not be overbearing, and most of all, be truthful. There's no such person.

It isn't like a regular job. You're part of a family, part of a team, regardless of your private life. Your previously private life doesn't matter. Now when you go to parties, you'll hang out in the corner with other cops and talk cases or, rather, bitch about your department. While considering a career in law enforcement, details such this would be good to know. That, along with one young man's experience of growing up, is why I wrote this book.

Hungry Planet, Part II, Completely Guilt-Free

2010-09-19T10:24:00.000-07:00

India looks delicious.

Have a look at these eleven photos of families from around the world, sitting around their dining table, with their dining table filled with all the food they consume in a typical week.

After doing the Hunger Challenge, I can't stop myself from doing math every time I see a carrot. How many of those people, how many people of the six and a half billion alive now, must by on less than the $4 a day a person allotted for food stampers in the United States? The Hunger Challenge forces you to be aware of not only what you eat but how you eat and where you get it.

How low on the food chain must you go? You can make that conclusion yourself by looking at the brightly-dressed, happy-looking Guatemalan family and compare them to not only the narwhal-eating Canadians but the stuffy French. (Honestly - you already have a bad rep. The young woman sitting on the left looks as if she's thinking that, yeah, my cat eats better than you.)

And what the hell is with those Luxembourgers?

Hungry Planet: What the World Eats

Second Thoughts on Hunger Challenge

2010-09-18T10:33:00.000-07:00

Only my parents have money enough. Everybody, even those previously smarmy superior relatives that used to brag about how much they paid for things, has sunk a couple of notches on their tax bracket.

It's my hope that, excluding my parents (different generation = different way of codifying), more people will open their eyes and see a fellow individual, at least one, with a little more compassion. It's easy when you live by a strict rule structure to blame people for their circumstances, especially when you've never been anywhere remotely close to the edge.

When it's your own life that implodes, your rules about the benefits of hard work versus luck, for example, relax. It's the only good benefit - compassion - that comes from a personal earth shattering financial incident.

Now that the layer of my brain where the deep thoughts reside has been cleared, phew, all that remains is shallow, random ideas about the Hunger Challenge, food stamps and the inequality that will always exist due to trans-national corporations (oops, slipped on a deep spot there). I have three:

1. Location, location, location. This week I spent $4.75 at New May Wah on a big bag of beautiful deep pink pluots, an avocado, an onion, cilantro and some yogurt drinks for Stella. When I was on food stamps, I lived in Montana and Safeway was my only option and the only option for cheap produce was crappy squash and dried up root vegetables. I would have killed for a pluot or anything of any color pulled off of any tree.

I wake up every morning grateful for cheap produce, not only from little Chinatown but from the abundant and plentiful friendly Farmer's markets in San Francisco, and even the La Playa begging-for-a-remodel Safeway. All choices here are a good deal cheaper than anything I found even in Oregon last week.

2. When you're poor it's almost impossible to buy smart. My kids went to Costco and were nice enough to stop by first and ask me if I wanted anything. There is no better way to shop than handing over a list and a debit card and finding it magically carted up three flights of stairs so all you have to do is put it away.

All told, I spent $22.62 on so much half and half and soy milk that my husband will be in coffee and milk heaven for the next month. $22.62 at Safeway would have bought exactly half. Limited resources signifies shopping immediacy. It's hard to shop well and load up your pantry and refrigerator when you can't buy in bulk.

3. Don't even think about a CSA. I didn't until a few months ago and I am convinced this is the most decadent thing I do done all week. Greenhearts charges $33 a box a week for fresh, organic, local produce delivered to my door. There's no membership fee or share purchase up front. Still, who has $33 extra for food not qualified to be bought on stamps?

And yes math whizzes, this tipped me over my $4 a day a person. I spent a little over $60 for two people in a little over a week. We accidentally started our Hunger Challenge early due to laziness. After returning from several weeks in Oregon, it seemed like a lot of work to shop. So with nothing in our refrigerator and a fairly bare pantry, we re-enacted a more accurate week on food stamps (that's my excuse anyway).

Most importantly, there is more to life than money. When you're really poor, it's really hard to remember this. Obsessing over what you don't have, though, is a 100% sure way to repel friends, hate life and attract frowns. Money was created by kings 3,000 years ago who saw all this local bartering and wealth being exchanged and they weren't getting a cut of it so they stamped their faces on coins, killed those peasants who didn't conform, and kept the production of money scarce so they could control the supply.

I heard that on a podcast when I was running yesterday so the details might be a little sketchy. Once you have enough for the basics, it's been proven many times that more doesn't mean happier. Want what you have, even though that is too easy to say when you don't have enough.

The Hunger Challenge is Underway

2010-09-14T14:53:00.000-07:00

If you haven't done a food challenge lately, you're missing out on a lot of fun. There's the Eating Down the Fridge week and you can figure out the parameters of that challenge without much explanation. If you stock up the day before and have a well-stocked pantry full of fancy things I don't even know what they could be, a refrigerator all filled up with jars and packages of ingredients my friends don't even acknowledge on the grocery store shelves unless we want to laugh at the prices, and a freezer stuffed with whatever it is freezers get stuffed with, you are cheating. The challenge is to be honest with yourself. How willing are you when it comes to cravings and how dependent are you when it comes to your grocery store?

The excitement is turning nothing in your refrigerator into something good and the best part is that anybody can do it. You don't have to be creative, you don't have to have hours of prep time, you don't have to have expensive ingredients. If you have an internet connection, you have all. You knew that, though. Do a google search of the ingredients you have with the word "recipe" at the end and what you get will amaze you. There's so much you can make with nothing at all.

This week is the Hunger Challenge for the San Francisco Food Bank and it's even better than Fridge Eating Down. You can spend $3 a day, or $4 if you want to do what food stamp users live on in this, our fat year of 2010. Next year, without government support it shrinks back down to $3. It's just one week of $3 or $4 per person per day: your choice. Limits are a wonderful thing. Try it and when the week is done, it's like you're rich. It's like not eating sugar for a month and when you finally break into the Ben and Jerry's you think it's too sweet and you're disappointed.

I know what you're thinking: food stamps. Why would you want to do anything to simulate your life on food stamps? Food stamps aren't even stamps anymore, but you can sneak a look at the machine to see if the people ahead of you in line are using them. You know you look. You especially look when the people ahead of you in line LOOK like what you judge food stamp users to look like. You know you do.

Me, too. Last week at Winco, the last time I shopped, a couple of fake-tanned chunky young women were in the line ahead of me, sisters, both of them wearing better clothes than me - yes, it's so easy to judge, judge, judge - talking louder than anybody, buying more than everybody and taking their time bagging up all that food. They were buying so much packaged food, dinners that looked delicious, frozen things you could put in the microwave or oven and dinner would be ready without extra effort.

When the Oregon Trail card paid for their purchases I had an uncharacteristic teabagger-like thought: I wish I had food stamps so I could buy all those bottles of juice (I always think I'm too poor to spend money on juice). Did I think that, I thought. When did I become one of those people who convinces herself it's okay to judge what other people buy at the grocery store when they're buying it on food stamps? It isn't okay, although when I was on food stamps I was so careful to get only produce and flour/salt/baking powder kinds of things. I still look over my items lined up on the conveyor belt, judging my potential purchases like an observer, as if someone is judging me on what I'm buying here. Once you become one of those people that live in the glass house of food stamps, it's hard to be normal again. It's hard to not judge, even yourself.

With my face still red and swollen from getting the rosacea damage and pre cancerous stuff lasered off, ouch, I was already getting stared at and already telling myself I'd never see these people again so I don't have a reason to care what they think of me and my open sores. These sisters, though, they clearly didn't see themselves as representing every food stamp user, making ends meet by careful shopping and extreme budgeting of their scarce limited, ever-so-grateful for resources. I ought to get a spray tan, I thought. That's what I thought, after the first judgmental thought of how can you be that big and well-dressed and orange on food stamps? Orange, I have to say, is a better look than pink-face. What would it be like to be that orange and have that much packaged food in the house?

Only when they left did I stop thinking about their cavalier attitude toward shopping. They made it look so fun, doing it together, talking about how they're going to have to move the golf clubs in the truck to fit in all their groceries, acting as if they were actually golfing or doing some sport they excelled at, they were so excited, so good at it.

I should be that excited. I had more money to spend on food even if I don't because of all the guilt. Food stamps, when I was on them, were like Christmas the first of every month. I had more money to budget for food during that time than during any other time in my life except for last year when there were no kids at home and my husband was making the most he ever made and will ever make by about four or five times, and I told myself to relax and I listened for once.

Now it's back to living on a stingy fixed income but I'm into to doing these challenges even more. There's no reason to do them, not really. They don't solve the problem of getting food to hungry people. It's hard to live on little, I know that, too. And I even donated so I don't feel guilty for having more than others.

It feels good - it simply feels right - and that's why we do most of what we do. After the week is over, knowing you could easily eat for $3 a person a day without much planning or thinking about it, you feel like you do when you've completed a good run. You feel even better that you're not on food stamps and don't have to be on such a tight budget even if it didn't feel particularly tight to you.

Things could be a lot worse. It's just a week. We have the ability to return to normal and buy more coffee when we run out, more half and half, and restart the CSA box of produce for $33 we enjoy from Greenhearts. When you're done with food stamps though, you're done. Unless you sell the golf clubs, I suppose.

Madness

2010-07-12T11:22:00.000-07:00

Lately, the relatives haven't been as shy about admitting that little problem grandma had was alcoholism, or that no, grandpa wasn't just a little off - he had bipolar bad enough to require shock treatments, and you remember when your cousin kind of hid out for a while during college? Bipolar.

Not sure how you're supposed to respond to that. My relatives, thankfully, aren't the kind who stare at you until you say something pithy; they're zooming off to another subject, racing to brag about another relative's accomplishment to bring you back to earth, or below. Meanwhile you've stuck that crazy dna nugget in your head to mull over in the shower later, trying to deconstruct fractured memories to put back together into a new, truer, reality. Later, into the shower you go and it's still crazy: how do you piece together odd, incongruous dinner party conversations from twenty years ago with this new information?

At the AWP writer's convention, I happened to hear Marya Hornbacher talk at the "laughing at sickness" seminar (that's not the official professional-sounding title, but you get the idea). I'd read "Wasted," her book chronicling her experience with eating disorders - getting down to 52 pounds shows the extreme of her experience - and it stopped my dabbling with the same match and gasoline, just like that. Getting into those thoughts, even vicariously through written words on a page, was enough. When you can't fit into your fat pants, you remember reading about her throwing up toast at nine years old, her teeth outline showing through her cheeks and the thought of going to extremes dissipates. Who'd want to recreate what she lived through? You can learn moderation by her account of complete lack of it.

When returning home, I bought "Madness," as she seemed so approachable and just simply cute at the talk - the brightest star on the panel by far. All the other sickness ladies brought dolls, talked about the cancer bitch, and generally made fun of their diseases while sounding like one of your old out-of-touch high school teachers while explaining the consequences of necking with boys. No, Ms. Hornbacher was interesting, young, and read her excerpt she was talking to a friend. Moreover, she answered all the crazy girls' questions (the audience was filled with her fans, some of them not far from their own 52-pound nightmare from what I could tell) with genuine, humorous compassion.

That's how I came to "Madness:" for the author, not the subject. With all the family birthday party confessions lately, however, the timing seems perfect. Or is it that when you have your mind on something you are like a magnet, noticing these things more? Either way, I wouldn't wish this disease on anyone. I started to feel bipolar, understanding the craziness of it, at about page 200, and unlike my relatives, was treated simply by taking a break. (And not reading right before I went to sleep, duh.)

Now, rather than looking kind of oddly at my relatives who have been outed and have lived through this, I have such a deep respect for what they've survived. Us normal people have it so easy. We take no meds to straighten us out that then for no reason stop working, our obstacles are due mostly to our decisions rather than our dna, and the psych ward isn't a possibility in our future except in dumb, probably inappropriate jokes.

People ask why read? Who does that anymore? To me, the best books take you somewhere new, some other place with a whole new you that you get to be in the process. Not saying going crazy is a preferred destination, but if you're going to do it - this kind of smart, sweet, fascinating writer is the one you want as a tourguide. Compassion and deference for your "crazy" relatives is a great benefit, too, don't you think?

Ah-Oooo! Bacon!

2010-06-25T09:43:00.000-07:00

The sea lions are out at Seal Rock, barking madly at whatever it is that has caught their tiny eyes and an IRS agent will be squinting her beady eyes over my 2008 real estate paperwork on Wednesday, so putting words together on a screen for some future publication seems somehow superfluous. (I'm on the fourth draft of something or other.)

Riding the bike around Lake Merced in the morning, as I do every morning, is off, too. Yesterday my brakes didn't work in this soupy fog - not at all. I tried to stop for the N-Judah on La Playa and nothing - not even a squeak or a slowing down. Instead, armed with excuses, I stayed in and finished the last bit of Kenyan roast, clicked on every twitter link that looked interesting and looked out the window at other, more energetic people exercising at the park. For some reason right now there are about a dozen high school-aged kids standing in the crosswalk on Fulton, facing traffic in a line like they're practicing for some future protest. They're yelling something but I can't understand it. It sounds like, "Ah-Oooo! Bacon!" Like kids, they're really confident, standing tall, arms outstretched like they're in front of a tank at Tiananmen square until the light changes. Without hesitation, they dash to the curb, laughing when they stop there, back to being kids.

I could spend all day (not) doing taxes.

Stella Bubbles

2010-05-30T19:18:00.000-07:00

Wheel

2010-04-15T09:44:00.000-07:00

You wanted someone to love, a baby 'cause the guys you knew were so weird, 'cause tough love wasn't love. Got pregnant, married, loved the baby so much you wanted another. You can do that: you have the job, the insurance. Who would know? It was an accident, you say. Nobody questions that. Another accident. Just one more.

One more again. A girl. Someone on my side, mine. Husband gets fired, gets fired again, loses money, can't keep his hands off a little girl. He does bad, bad things but your parents say I can't help you. I have a new life and a new husband, your mom says. No room for you and all those kids.

The oldest imitates your husband, pushes you against walls, leaves marks. That happens. When he throws the only other girl in the house across the bedroom, spraying paper clips, post-it notes and pens, too, you leave. Not for you. For her. She's not going to have such a thoughtless life.

You lose, you lose, you lose again. The lawyer, a friend of a new friend, tells you stupid things. What do you know? You do what she says 'cause you don't trust yourself. Even the judge says you were stupid. The lawyer bats her eyelashes. She says nothing so you don't, either. Your husband's parents blame you even though he's still a felon, still can't keep a job, still borrows their money.

You give your kids a normal life, considering. You work two jobs, fix up a foundation-less house so they can stay in the same schools. You pay for good grades and proms out of your new husband's craigslist profits. You hurt when they take their music and move out. It's too quiet. You love them as much or more.

Ten years later, you convince yourself they want to see you when they are all in the same town, back home for Christmas, far away from you now. You drive up to meet them. You pick them up, take them to revisit friends, you watch them as they sit in the back of the car, reading, giving you one word answers. You spend an hour at the movies, at a restaurant, anywhere they'll meet you, anytime. You cry at night in the freezing basement you've talked a friend into lending you for your visit, wishing you didn't have to do 80%, 90%, that they would just do 50%, just call you back, just call once in a while without you calling, texting, emailing, begging.

You go home. You look at their pictures. You think about calling, texting, emailing, begging but mostly you remember their first words, their little feet and their funny ways of saying "shoes" and "Spiderman."

Your parents call, and again. They invite you to birthdays and lunch, living closer to you now. You go, uncomfortably. Tough love becomes less tough. They don't seem so tough when you study their gray hair, sitting behind them at their church. You look straight at them, their eyes watery blue. You start to forget why you moved away, why you never called. You answer the first time when they call now, most of the time. You don't want to be thoughtless.

Body and Other Battles

2010-03-26T10:29:00.000-07:00

What's worse than waking up sick? How about having someone else wake up sick and reliving it back to you, in full mucus detail. Hearing someone talk about the golf ball in their throat, unless they're your kid or you're a doctor, is about as bad as having to hear my husband talk about the details of his last dump. You could pretty much go your whole life happily oblivious.

So I'll just say I woke up in battle, the details of which I will hold close. Women are familiar with body battles - we start the war against ourselves early; fighting calories, pants sizes, and hair textures until the day we die. You fight sickness to the death only once, and rarely is that battle with a cold. Unless I sneeze, my suffering shall be silent.

Silent suffering is a gift, to a point. My mother-in-law cannot share, to the point that it's a lot of work to find something to break up the dead quiet. It's a lot easier, and this is going to sound awful, now that she has dementia. You find one thing she's interested in, repeat it for half an hour until she's tired, and go home. You learn only one new piece of information but you learn it well and everybody's happy.

Californians are known for over-sharing, having long one-sided conversations with clerks at Starbucks, not about the details of their last dumps, but close. They'll hold up the line, saying, my uncle, who is a cop in New York and should have surgery for his heart problems but won't and I should call him to find out if he'll get that scheduled soon? Anyway, he came out here once to visit and he had this wet cappuccino and it was really good and I asked him what was a wet cappuccino and he said he doesn't like lattes cause they're too milky but regular cappuccinos are too dry, and he asked a rude clerk, not like you, for a suggestion and he was told what you want is a wet cappuccino, so that's what he had, and that's how I learned about wet cappuccinos. Everybody should learn about wet cappuccinos, they're really good, don't you think?

You can learn a lot just by listening, and there's always something better to talk about than body battles. Wet cappuccinos, for example.

I Dream Of A World Where All Have Access to Kitchens

2010-03-25T19:08:00.000-07:00

It's been hard to find contractors who'll work on an 80 year-old apartment building that hasn't seen an abundance of maintenance. I'm being nice. There's an icebox in my kitchen. A real ice box, like a safe with a drawer. The paint in my closet pre-dates lead-based paint - it's some weird stuff that peels if you paint over.

So we're upgrading the vacant apartment but just the functional stuff, like electrical. While getting bids, one electrician came by, noticed all the breakers were forced open, fixed them, and didn't charge us. He got the job and he got the permits to do the work.

The good thing about a detail-oriented electrician is that he'll save your apartment from an electrical fire without charging you. They'll also find the junction boxes plastered over, hidden in walls and above the garage, installed when electricity was the hot new thing and who needed standards, code, and inspections? The bad thing is the same hardship working with anyone detail-oriented: anal people are annoying.

Charlie talked one of his friend's workers into pulling off the old earthquake (yes, the 1989 earthquake) damaged plaster and re-walling the kitchen in this vacant unit while the workers had some down time. Charlie would have had to do it otherwise. It's their first day and they've already done more than Charlie could do in a week (or more - let's be honest. A 55 year-old man isn't a match for two crazy-for-work hungry kids).

The electrician sees they're doing work and says something about permits. The workers don't speak English but they know this word. Charlie gets a call.

All they're doing is tearing out crappy plaster and replacing it with drywall, putting the electrical work inside the walls this time (seriously - our apartment's electricity is stuck in metal tubes against the wall). Nothing's being changed except that instead of having an 80 year-old kitchen with a tiny doorway fit for a tiny housewife like you would build in 1930, there'll be a normal-sized doorway allowing kitchen access to all sizes and genders. It's an exciting day for men in kitchens everywhere.

Now, since the electrician asked, we have to find out: is there a permit for kitchen access equality?

New May Waht?

2010-03-24T18:38:00.000-07:00

Ew, it stinks, the lady says.

Yep.

I move away a little so she knows it's not me. I suspect it's the guy, not the cleanest-looking, hovering over the frozen bun section, stinking up the little piece of ground on which I planned to stand. I stepped off to the side - he smelled like a dead body - and I'm waiting for him to stop touching frozen bun packages and go away.

He won't go, though. He leans over, touches a bag, stares, touches another bag. Am I stupid? I'll just reach over and grab something. Wrong decision. Even a few inches closer and I felt like my nose hairs would burn off. I grabbed a bag anyway but it was nasty bamboo rather than red bean. For a second I thought about keeping it so I could get the hell out of here. Now this lady is standing on the other side of me, pushing me closer toward Mr. Stinky. Why won't he leave?

Durian, the lady says.

Oh yeah. I forgot how nasty durian smells, and New May Wah sells it on the stands outside. It smells like this. Did the guy take a bath in it?

I took another dive into the frozen bun packages, pulled out a red bean, and got the hell out of there. It was weird that I kept smelling durian all the way home, though. I even looked to see if the stinky man was following me. I figured out it was something in my bag. Can stink attach itself to a frozen bun package, just from slight contact?

It got me home fast, as I was wanting to say 'it's not me - it's my package' when I passed by people. I kept trying to outrun that smell. Durian is amazing to eat but it's not allowed on public transportation in Southeast Asia. It smells like dead body and feet.

When I got home nothing in my bag smelled at all. I took it out and put it all away. Still - stinky. Why is my bag, the bag I held against me while shopping and all the way home, full of wet marks? When did I brush up against something wet? The only time I touched something all afternoon was . . . I need a shower.

Before Revision, as Proof it Gets Better: Growing Up Stupid, Chapter 1 (not)

2010-03-20T11:08:00.001-07:00

“It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

1.

For being the outcast, George knows more about our history than anybody. He’s like a library of stories for me, my own private Southern storyteller brother. We’ll be sitting at the table, nobody’s talking and he says, did you know? That’s how he starts it: did you know? Did you know dad was wild man, he says.

No.

He was a wild man. He stole a neighbor’s carriage, took it apart and reassembled it on top of the roof of their church. You don’t think the pastor gave our grandparents an earful on that, do you? He did a lot of fooling about and got a girl pregnant, an ugly girl. He himself wasn’t all that pretty to look at, even then. Dad’s dad, he about had enough of that. You can’t marry that girl, his dad tells him. She too ugly. You best get yer ass in the military. We don’t want no ugly babies round here.

Dad did just that and got himself captured the very first battle in North Africa. War’s over, he comes home to find a pretty nurse and marries her. He’s in the Air Force now, moving all over. One day this girl Sue shows up. We’re living way the hell out in Newfoundland. Mom says, who’s this? That’s how she finds out he had whole life before her. Sue moves in, another kid in our house. Do you remember her?

I don’t.

You must have been too young. Being the oldest normal kid, I ask who’s this. Mom says, ask your daddy. She knows I won’t talk to him. I learned it from Aunt Hattie. After a while Sue’s gone. Never saw her again. We were the lucky ones, George says. We have a family ‘cause mom’s not ugly.

The way dad is with George I don’t know how he can call that lucky, particularly once we moved to Florida. We got this crappy apartment above Western Auto on Drew Street and right away mom’s upset. It’s such a run-down place. It’s small, too, and she’s used to living in officer’s quarters, larger houses off base. Here we have a set of outside stairs to get to the front door and once you’re inside the front door it’s still kind of weird. There’s this screened-in enclosure with dirt on the floor, like a patio or an unattended garden upstairs between the front door and the real front door. Mom hates this part the most. There’s dirt and everybody knows she does not like dirt. I’ve never seen her go outside. Dad says this is the only rental I could find until our house is ready. Mom is always crying about the apartment, no matter how temporary. We’re upset at dad for making mom cry. The facts don’t matter. You made mom cry so you’re the bad person. Welcome to retirement, dad, now we hate you.

George goes outside, makes new friends and disappears. He’s gone all the time. He’s the smart one. That leaves me home with my little sister, the twins, mom and dad. At least I’m smart enough to get out of the house too, but I don’t know where to go. What kid is going to go hang out around the Western Auto? I go down the creaky stairs and walk around the aisles at Western Auto looking at bolts and tools. When I can’t stand that any longer, I go outside. Outside, in this case, is a messed up screened-in abandoned garden out back. The bushes are dead and all pulled up so it’s a lot of dry, hot dirt, but it’s in the shade.

I like playing out here so dad gets me a Civil War army set, with blue soldiers and gray soldiers, to set up in the dirt. I build hills and valleys and I facilitate battles for hours. It’s an escape to be outside, even though Florida is so sticky hot. I didn’t think anyplace could be hotter than Mesa, but I’d never heard of humidity. I can feel sweat through my pants and down my legs. I can’t say I miss Arizona, but I’ll be more careful next time I say anyplace is better than Mesa.

This army men set has generals and officers and enlisted men, each with different uniforms. I like the uniforms and I think everybody should have a uniform. They’re neat, professional and they have a purpose. You know who everyone is when people wear uniforms. I learn this from my Civil War experience and I learned this from dad being in the Air Force. I like rank and structure. I like order. You can learn a lot more from army men than real people sometimes.

Other families talk to each other. Why doesn’t our family talk to each other? We move into the house so now everybody has a room to hide in unless we’re watching TV but when we’re watching TV, we aren’t commenting on what we’re watching. We’re just watching. I’m floundering from being shy and moving so many times, and with George gone so much how am I going to learn how to talk?

My family calls me Davey because my middle name is David. I’m done with Davey. I want Davey dead. I want out of my head that badly. There’s nobody else in there to talk to and I’m tired of me. I’m all out of tricks to entertain myself. When I start sixth grade at Skycrest Elementary, the teacher leans over and asks me, do you want to be called Davey, Charles, Charlie or what?

If I have a new name, I will be somebody else without even switching bodies - more like changing clothes than going from caterpillar to butterfly. I can be someone that people will like. I’ll have friends, like George. George has a lot of friends at school he talks to, even girls. He does the things other kids at school do, like talk to people and go places with them. He’s the only one who talks at home, but my dad says you don’t want to be like George. Don’t be like George, Davey.

I want to be Charlie, I say. Davey is officially dead.

She tells the class, we have a new student today. Please welcome Charlie to our class.

Everyone in my class has gone to the same school since the first grade, you can tell. They all look at me like, who is this? They keep talking to each other about the Little League game they had the night before. It’s obvious everyone knows everything you could possibly want to learn about other kids but no one comes over to talk to me.

At P.E. I’m sitting on the bench with the rest of my assigned team, trying to remember I’m Charlie if someone calls my new name. I’ve never played softball before so I’m worried I’m not going to be very good. Kids near me start talking.

What time you coming over?

Are we spending the night at your house?

What time you want my dad to drive me over?

Who else is coming?

The kid closest to me says, Gary and John. And Alan. And everybody. We’re all spending the night.

I’ll ask my mom if I can do a sleepover. We’re supposed to do a family day.

I’m listening. Should I not be? They catch me looking at them so they stop talking.
What are you guys planning? I say. I’m not trying to invite myself. I know enough not to do that.

Nothing, the kid next to me says. He gets up and moves over to the other end of the bench. The rest of the team scoots over closer to him and away from me. I listen to everybody being friends with everybody else and I don’t try to make any more conversation, ever. Now everybody wonders why the new guy doesn’t talk, so they don’t try to talk to me, either. I did the best wrong thing I could possibly do.

We go back to class and it’s time for math. They’re doing long division and I never had that before, either. The teacher has a game she wants to play. She splits the class in half and we line up into two teams. She puts a long division problem on the board and says she’ll see which team can finish the problem first. She has a stop watch to time us.

She puts the first math problem up on the board. I can’t do that. I don’t know what the long division symbol means or what’s divided into what. The kids go up and do these problems like they’re nothing. I’m fifth in line and getting sweatier as I get closer. Can I figure this out? My heart’s pounding and I’m trying not to breathe too hard through my mouth.

It’s my turn. I know long division like I know softball and how to make friends. I pick up my piece of chalk and wait. I’m against another kid and he’s focused, staring at the stupid board with his face tight, ready to try to beat me. If I could talk, I’d tell this kid he should thank me: he’s going to look really good in a minute. He’s going to be good at math, starting right now.

The teacher writes 384 divided by 11 on the board and says, Okay, go. I freeze. Show your work, she says. I don’t even move. The other kid finishes in five or six seconds. It’s official: I’m a moron. I’m so embarrassed. Right in front of the whole class, I prove I’m a retard. I go back to my seat and look down at the floor for the rest of the day.

My walk home begins on Cleveland Street. I cross at Venus. Before I get to Mars where I turn left, I start to cry. I’m walking down Mars Street, a sixth-grader, crying. Why am I so stupid and everybody else is so smart? My chances of making friends now went from very little to zero. Who would ever talk to me now? My heart feels like it weighs five hundred pounds.

When I turn the corner at Rainbow, I make sure my eyes are dry since I have to go inside to quiet as outer space family. I look up enough to watch where I’m going but I keep my head down for the rest of the year, walking to and from school, at school and everywhere.

I told them I want to be called Charlie, I tell my mom.

That was my daddy’s name, Charlie was, she says. I’m glad you decided to do that.
My dad comes home and my mom says Davey wants to be called Charlie. I think it’s wonderful.

My dad gets all huffy, How come you want to be called Charlie? Your name’s Davey.

I don’t like Davey anymore. I want to be called Charlie.

You’ve been called Davey all your life.

Yeah and I don’t like it. It’s a baby name and I don’t like it anymore. I want to be called Charlie.

That’s the end of that. My mom immediately starts to call me Charlie but my dad won’t call me Charlie, no matter what. A couple of days later I ask my mom, Why does he refuse to call me Charlie?

’Cause it was my daddy’s name, she says, and he doesn’t like him.

The kids in class can’t wait for recess but I dread it. It’s when it’s the most obvious that no one likes me. I stand all by myself - far away from anyone so there’s no question no one likes me - waiting for it to be over. It’s torture every day. I watch kids play, walk around, sit under a tree and look around, look at the sky, praying recess will be over soon so I don’t have to keep reminding everyone I have no friends. I never threw a ball or held a mitt before so I’m not going to join the softball game and prove I’m not only friendless but also uncoordinated. All I know how to do is shoot firearms in the Arizona desert and that’s not a skill meant for recess.

George comes around to get something to eat at our new house sometimes. He’s having a sandwich so I make a sandwich and sit down at the table with him. You know mom’s dad died of drinking, he says.

Yeah, mom said he vomited buckets of blood before he died.

I’ll never drink because of that, and because of the way it makes daddy act.

Daddy drinks? I had no idea.

At my first parent teacher conference we all sit down around a little table in the back of class, the teacher, mom and dad, and me. We’re very happy to have Charlie in our class, the teacher says. It’s the first thing she says and she’s already pissed off my dad.

Charlie? my dad says. His name’s Davey.

My mom says, all Southern-like, He wants to be called Charlie.

Why do you want to be called Charlie for? my dad says to me. I continue to look at the teacher, ignoring dad like mom does.

The teacher can see I’m nervous so she looks at my mom and, when that gets uncomfortable, over to my dad. There’s not enough time allotted for this conference if she’s waiting for us to talk. We have the communication skills of zombies, without the personality. She’s going to have to carry the whole conversation: the reason everybody regrets starting a conversation with us.

Anyway, she says, he told us he wants to be called Charlie so we call him Charlie. And we’re happy to have him in our class this year. He’s coming along, he’s at grade level in most of his subjects but he needs a little work on his spelling. Spelling and math, I notice . . .

What problems is Davey having in spelling? my dad says. He won’t let it go. He keeps calling me Davey while the teacher answers calling me Charlie. My mom sits there with the serene little look on her face that she always has. My dad sits there steaming. I don’t know why he’s so pissed. It’s my name. Let me be called what I want to be called. I’m not really worried about your opinion of my name. I don’t know why he’s taking it personally. It’s not like I vanished. I’m here until I can reinvent myself again. Next time I do it right.

Ever take a road trip with a friend you don't know? Me, too.

2010-03-13T10:45:00.000-08:00

Chicken Shit

“I’m taking a trip to North Carolina,” my dad says. “I talked to Ed’s pop and he’d like to go. You and Ed can come.” That sounds uninteresting. I don’t even know that kid and I don’t know how to be friends. How am I going to be friends with him for a whole trip? What if he gets bored? What if he thinks my dad is weird? Or me? I’ll be stuck in a car with some fat-cheeked kid for a couple of days, with my dad and his, too.

“Your aunt Hattie owns a chicken farm.”

Who is aunt Hattie? Why would I want to see her chickens?

“Hattie likes to shoot guns. They have a lot of room to shoot.”

Guns? That’s one thing that’s good. Firecrackers are legal in North Carolina, too. Even if Ed is bored, or boring, neither one of us would be bored with firecrackers. That’s two things, then. “Okay.”

I run over to Ed’s and knock on the door. I’ve never done this before but I’ve never had a reason before. “My dad says you guys are coming with us to North Carolina.”

“Pop’s talking about it,” he says like he’s been sleeping. Is he bored all the time, like me? Neither of us says anything for a minute or two. “What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “It could be fun.” The more I think about it, the more I want to go. There’s no place to shoot around here and my dad hasn’t taken me anywhere since Camp Waterdog so I think I want to go at least to shoot. It’s something I’m good at and so far that’s the only thing I’m good at. “I heard they have guns. We might be able to shoot guns and do neat stuff like that.”

“Yeah?” Ed says.

“Yeah.” I’m starting to get excited. “My aunt likes to shoot guns. We can stop and get firecrackers and light them and throw them at each other.”

“Okay. If we can shoot guns and mess around with fireworks, at least that will be something to do. Let’s do it.”

My dad has so many cars he buys and sells that it’s hard to remember what’s in the driveway. His latest big tank is a Buick Skylark so that’s what we take to North Carolina, wherever that is. We wake up early in the morning, get in the car and go right back to sleep. We’re trapped in the back of a big hunk of screaming, grinding, airtight metal coffin on wheels. My dad’s over six feet tall so he has the seat all the way back. We’re really cramped and I hardly know this guy. We don’t have anything to read. We have nothing. All we can do is sleep but the more we drive on, the more boring it gets. Get me out of this car. It’s really hot in here and it’s as dull as hell.

“This is boring,” I say.

“Yeah,” Ed says. “It is.”

We brought food: peanut butter sandwiches, bags of potato chips, beef jerky, moon pies and glass bottles of coke. When we can’t sleep anymore, we eat. We eat all this junk we’re not used to eating so we get too full, too sick, go back to sleep, and do it all over again. We’re aching from eating all the disgusting food on the first day so I don’t eat anything on the second, and so neither does Ed. We drive straight through. That’s what you do, you drive until you get there. I don’t know what kind of people stay in hotels, but not our kind. Ed’s pop and my dad took turns driving while the other one sleeps. If they’re talking, we don’t care. They’re not going to talk about anything interesting. All they talk about is grown-up stuff, like work, weather and what they see outside.

We get off the main freeway and onto these long country roads. There are a lot of mountains, a lot of ups and downs, and a lot of curves. I look outside and see a bunch of dirty old houses with dilapidated rusted-out pick-up trucks in the front yards. We keep going along the country roads and progress further until we don’t see anything but trees and dirt roads. It’s trees and mountains, trees and mountains. There are fences all along the dirt roads for the cattle and pig farms. This is livestock farmland. The mountains are so different than flat Florida but I don’t care about scenery and mountains. I would much rather be out of the car blowing up stuff or shooting guns. Scenery isn’t interesting.

“Oh, look at this farmland. Look at all that farmland,” Ed’s pop says. “What do they grow there? What do they grow here in North Carolina? What kind of crops are those?”
“Well, Ed, they grow a lot of tobacco, corn, you know. Crops like that.”
Ed’s pop seems to be expecting more of an answer, judging by the look he gave him. But nothing else comes out of my dad’s mouth. My dad likes to pretend he knows the answer to everything.

“Davey,” my dad says. “Look at that,” trying to change the subject.

“Look at this farmhouse in this little valley,” Ed’s pop says. “Oh will you look at that, isn’t that beautiful? That looks like it could be on a postcard.”

Ed and I aren’t having any of it. We don’t give a care. If it were righteous to look at something, we’d look. We want out of the car. We’ve been here for two, hot, raunchy days, riding in the back for over five hundred miles already. We don’t look and we don’t talk. We’re not even looking out the window. The only things we move are out eyes. We press our heads against the side of the car and leave them there, in extreme lazy boredom.

My dad takes a turn onto another dirt road. It’s really steep going up this mountain. It levels off and we come up to a driveway, a long dirt road with grass growing between the tire tracks. My dad says, “We’re here.”

“Oh,” Ed’s pop says. “Oh. See, that didn’t take long.”

“Thank God,” Ed says.

“Get me out of this car,” I say.

We keep driving through the dirt to this big old brick farmhouse. I don’t care about scenery but even I can tell this place is gnarly. It’s a big old-fashioned ranch-style farmhouse with a big old lawn all up on top of this hill with two gates you have to go through to get to the house. There are bushes and trees covering the sides of the house and the dirt roads, growing kind of out of control. I’m used to seeing suburban neighborhoods and houses with trimmed lawns, all the same. This is untamed and wild.

“Far out,” Ed says.

“Yeah,” I say. “Far out.”

There’s a big, shiny, red tractor parked in front of the house, like it’s on display. Ed and I look at each other. “I want to drive that tractor,” Ed says. “It’s radical.”

“Yeah, me too.” We get out of the car. We don’t know what to expect or what to say.
Here comes Aunt Hattie. She opens the front door and jumps out of the house to greet us. She looks exactly like my dad except she has long hair. She’s tall, like six foot, and an imposing woman. She has these long stork legs, a little bit of a belly like my dad, same small eyes with a big nose like my dad, kind of a weak, double chin, kind of soft. She’s loud, loud and bossy, and I’ll bet Ed’s thinking the same thing I am. Who is this hillbilly?

“Y’all made it, huh?” she says. “Y’all made it!”

“How you doing?” my dad says. They hug and that’s the only time I’ve ever seen my dad embrace anyone, male or female. “There’s Davey and this is Ed, and Ed Junior,” my dad says, pointing.

I look at Ed. “Ed Junior? Ah ha ha!”

“Shut up.”

I’m Davey-Charlie and Ed’s Ed Junior. No wonder no one talks. You can piss someone off just by saying his name.

“Hey, Ed,” my aunt says. “I guess we got two Ed’s now, huh? Well, come on in. Y’all must be hungry.”

We walk into this farmhouse and it’s a throwback to something. It looks like George Washington’s house at Mount Vernon. There is a pile of old antique furniture everywhere, and on top of everything is a doily. All you can see are white snowflake doilies all over the place. She uses them to protect her furniture, I guess. Old people do that: they put crap everywhere so you can’t use your furniture for the reasons you have it because there’s so much shit on it. These bogus doilies are on the coffee tables, end tables, the fireplace mantel, and over all the rest of the place like spider webs. Then she has these two little raunchy dogs; little yappy Chihuahuas, one black and one white. As soon as they see us they run up to us barking and nipping at our feet. “Grrr! Grrr!” they say, showing all three of their old gray teeth.

“Just kick ‘em out of the way,” Aunt Hattie says. “Kick ‘em out of the way if they bother you.”

Ed lifts his foot up to try to move them out of the way. He’s too timid to kick so he just tries to guide them away. “Grrr-ruff!” they say. One of them bites the crap out of Ed’s shoe.

“Queenie!” Aunt Hattie says. “I call her Queenie because she thinks she’s queen of the house. Queenie, don’t you bite him!” She picks them both up, shoves them into another room and shuts the door. Now they’re quiet.

I look at the dining table and there is a ton of food there, just a ton. The table itself is as big as a normal dining room. There are biscuits and gravy, pancakes, huge slabs of bacon, like a mountain of bacon, and so many eggs like I’ve never seen before. There’s a huge ceramic bowl, at least a couple of feet in diameter with a top on it that’s as big as a garbage can lid, full of scrambled eggs. There must be ten pounds of scrambled eggs in this thing. There’s nothing like fruit or vegetables anywhere. We’re really hungry and it’s nice to see all this food but there’s so much of it. My mom doesn’t cook like this. She buys a roast beef or a ham, already cooked, and puts it on the table and we eat in our rooms. She makes tuna salad that I love, with pickle relish and mayonnaise, but you get it out of the refrigerator and help yourself when you’re hungry.

“I’ll go get Bill,” Aunt Hattie says. “Hey Buddy! Buddy! Get over here. Buddy! Buddy! Get over here!” I look out the front window and see some old geezer drive up on an ancient four-wheel Jeep that doesn’t have a body. It has a seat and a steering wheel and a wooden bed somebody built on the back of it, like a prop for a Depression movie. It must be the farm vehicle. “Go get Bill. Go get Bill. Tell Bill family’s here. Get Bill!”

“Okay.” Five minutes later, while we watch, Bill comes up, riding alongside Buddy. He’s a short guy with a cowboy hat, in good shape and tan, with lines on his face. Buddy drops him off and takes off.

Bill comes in, takes off his hat, and Hattie introduces him to everyone. “Nice to meet you,” he says, meekly. “Is breakfast ready?”

“Well Bill of course it’s ready!” Aunt Hattie says. “It’s been on the table for an hour. Sit down now.” She directs us to where each of us is supposed to sit. This is new, too. Bill sits at the head of the table and Hattie sits at the opposite end. “Bill, say the grace. Say the grace, Bill.”

“Lord, um,” Bill says. “Thank you for your bounty that you’ve bestowed upon us. Thank you for the harvest you have given to us. Thank you for our visitors. Amen.”
We’re back in the 1920’s and they way people were when my parents were kids. The way they act, the way they dress: it’s like a different country here. I don’t even know Ed. He must think I’m like this, too.

We start putting food on our plates and pass it around. I scarf down biscuits and gravy, pancakes with maple syrup, and a ton of eggs. I eat quickly and I’m done. I’d get up but it doesn’t seem right. I look around and all the old people keep eating, and putting big hunks of butter on everything. Bill drinks a lot of whole milk and my dad drinks lumpy buttermilk. He seems to like buttermilk. I don’t even want to look at it. Who drinks milk with butter in it?

“Eat,” Hattie says. “You can eat more. Y’all have another serving. Eat. Eat. Eat. Eat. Eat.” I can’t eat another bite. I can’t even breathe.

“Eat. Eat. Eat.”

Shut up! I say in my head. I’m full. I’m not used to sitting at a table for a long time. This is the first time I’ve ever had anyone hover over me and force me to eat. What’s wrong with her?

“Eat. Eat. Eat. Eat.”

Eventually I say, “I can’t.”

“You barely made a dent in that meal,” she says. “Are you sure, Davey? Are you sure? There’s plenty more where that come from.”

It’s different, sitting at a table with other people, all at the same time. Nobody says a single word, since half of us are uncommunicative Blevins’ and the other half are freaked out by us Blevins’. There’s a weird kind of silence until Hattie says, “How long did it take you to get up here, George?”

George? That’s strange. Hey, George! What a weird name for my dad. It was his dad’s name, too, and now my brother’s. Who would force that name on a baby, turn around and punish future generations in the same way? Another reason to be thankful George is my older brother. My sister and my mom are both named Martha, after my mom’s grandma. Ed’s pop is Ed, too. I could have easily ended up Obadiah, Homer, or some other cranky old man name, so I’m grateful I’m just Charlie although my dad won’t even call me that. If names are such a big deal to him, he ought to realize his name is the dorkiest of all. I heard him telling Ed’s pop once, ‘I’m George and my wife’s Martha. You know, George and Martha, like George and Martha Washington. America’s first First Couple.’ Do me a favor dad - don’t say that to anyone ever again. George by itself is bad enough.

“A couple of days,” my dad says. “We drove straight through. Almost six hundred miles.” He says it like we’re Lewis and Clark and we just arrived in Astoria. Ed’s pop isn’t saying a word. You can tell all this is weird to him, too. This is probably the first time he’s ever visited a chicken farm, or the 1920’s.

“I’m going to put Ed Junior and Davey to work,” Bill says. Ed and I look at each other. What? “We want you to help us gather eggs. Get eggs from the hens.” He tells us this like it’s an exciting adventure, like he’s doing us a favor.

“Okay,” we say. “I guess.” Work?

“I’m going down for a while,” my dad says.

“Yeah, that’s a good idea,” Ed’s pop says.

“Come back here, y’all can lay down and let the children work. I got clean sheets!” Hattie says.

Buddy comes back in the farm vehicle. Bill gets in the front and we crawl up on the back. Buddy takes off driving down the dirt road, downhill from the ranch house. There are a lot of twists and turns and trees so we can’t see where we’re going. We’re sick from all the eggs and getting sicker from the bumpy ride. The scrambled eggs are up to my neck. I don’t want to see another scrambled egg in my life. The ride is making it worse.

We get to this clearing with six huge buildings and chickens everywhere. I’ve never seen so many chickens before. There are chickens everywhere, in the buildings and all over. “Boys. This is the baby chick house over here. This is the house for the chicks a little older. This is where we keep our roosters. These hen houses are where they lay the eggs and this is where you will get the eggs. You put them in bushel baskets.” Bill’s talking and we’re pretending to be interested. “Let me show you what you boys are going to be doing here,” Bill says.

It reeks. It smells so badly that I can’t breathe. It’s raunchy. “Oh God,” Ed says. “It stinks.”

“It stinks so bad,” I say. “Who died?”

“Take a big, deep breath,” Bill says. “It’s good to be alive.”

Old people are so bogus. Bill leads us into one of the three back buildings with rows and rows of hundreds of hens sitting on their eggs, all lined up on these shelf-like structures. “Lemme show you,” Bill says. He sticks his hand out, reaches under and grabs an egg from a hen and puts it in a basket. “That’s what you’ll be doing. Grab the eggs, put them in a basket. Basket’s full, put them over there, get a new one. Buddy will come and pick them up.” I don’t want to do this. Ed looks at me kind of pissed off, like it’s my fault. “Here’s some leather gloves. Sometimes the hens will pick at you so wear these. Start with one row and remember where you started. Go through the whole place. Ed, you come with me.”

“Okay,” Ed says. He takes Ed out to another building.

The hen Bill demonstrated with didn’t peck at him so I don’t think the hens are really going to peck. The gloves are too big and uncomfortable so I take them off. I start in on the first one. The very first hen I stick my hand under bites the living shit out of me. That bitch put three holes on the top of my hand. It hurts to the bone. I pull my hand back really quick, yell, “Fuck!” really loud, shake my hand and put the gloves on and try again. The hen bites the crap out of my glove. The gloves are thick so it’s better and I move on to the next one, and then the next one. By the tenth chicken, I do it quickly enough so they don’t bite. When you show confidence, they leave you alone.

I start to think about what I’m doing and I start to feel bad. These eggs are their babies. We’re taking their babies from the hens. What a fucked up way to live, ripping chicken babies off from their mothers. I’d hate myself if this is what I ended up doing with my life, kidnapping and eating all these bird babies.

Hens fly all over the place. They’re squawking and peeing, shitting and flapping their wings. They’re above me, and everywhere, all pissed off at me for stealing their babies. I’m about halfway done with this whole building, putting eggs in a basket, filling the basket, setting the basket down in the corner, and grabbing another basket and starting all over again when a chicken flies right over me and shits right on top of my head. It’s like Hershey’s syrup, runny chicken shit is, and it’s all over the top of my head and running down the back of my neck through my shirt. It’s warm and I can feel it dripping. It stinks so sharply, this close up. Oh my God! Why is this my life?

I reach up and feel my hair. It’s like axle grease. It’s sticky and gummy, like tar all over the back of my head. Now I know why Bill wears that cowboy hat. I work faster to finish up the building. It’s the only way I’ll get out of here. I finish just as Buddy comes driving over with Bill. “This chicken shit all over my head,” I say. I turn around to show them. “Look.”

They start laughing their asses off. “Ar har har har,” they snort. “That’ll teach you to wear a hat.”

“But I don’t have a hat.”

“Ar har har har.”

Ed hears us and comes walking out from his hen house. “How’d you do, Ed?” Bill says.

“I almost got done, like halfway done. Maybe almost halfway done. Can we do something else now?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I need to get this shit off my head.”

Ed sees it and starts laughing. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“What do you think I’m doing? What are you doing?”

He’s laughing too hard to talk. “I didn’t do it on purpose,” I say. “What kind of question is that? I didn’t tell the chicken to shit on my head.” I’m not laughing but he can’t stop.

“Hop on,” Bill says. “We got some hands that can take over. Hop on and we’ll go to the house.”

We drive back up to the house on the back of the farm vehicle, nobody saying anything. “I have to take a shower, man,” I tell Bill when we stop.” This is bad.”

“Shower?” Bill says. “We don’t got no showers. Got a bath. You can take a bath.”

Great. No shower. I gotta stick my head in the same water that my ass is in just to get this shit off my head. I hate baths. I say nothing. I don’t want to be disrespectful.

“Hattie,” Bill yells. “Davey got chicken shit all over him. He needs a bath.”

“How come he didn’t wear a hat?”

Bill’s quiet. I’m quiet. Even Ed Junior’s quiet.

Hattie shows me the bathroom. There’s only one and in it is one old claw foot bathtub. I bring in my suitcase, fill the tub and as soon as I submerge, the water’s brown, oily and shitty. I’m soaking in shit and I have a thin, even coat of it all over me. I can’t do anything about it so I get out, dry off, get dressed, and come back out to where Ed is, sitting amongst the doilies.

“I hear you have guns,” I say to Hattie. “Can we shoot some guns?”

“We got guns. We got plenty of guns. Lemme get Bill. I don’t want you shootin’ yourselfs.” She goes outside and starts yelling for Bill. “Bill! Bill get them handguns.”

Bill gets a couple of these weird old small handguns like I’ve never seen before. My dad and Ed’s pop are still sleeping even through all this. We go out to the back yard and Bill gets these old tin cans. There’s a fence all around the back yard. “Set these cans up back here,” Bill says. “Make sure you shoot in this direction ‘cause there’s a hill back behind.” He hands us a big case of ammo and shows us how to load the guns.

We set the cans on the fence post, right where we’re told. We step back about ten yards, start shooting and we can’t hit a thing. We get closer and closer, shooting and missing, shooting and missing. Fifty rounds later, we’re five feet from the cans and finally, finally we start to hit them. “Ping!” my can says. “Ping, ping.” Ed looks over at me, looks back at his can, and shoots. “Ping.” Now we’re both hitting the cans. We move back a little, still hitting, still pinging the cans. We move back a little more, still hitting the cans, scooting back more and more. Ten yards, fifteen yards, we keep shooting. “Ping! Ping! Ping!”

Each magazine has about six rounds. We shoot, reload, put the magazine back in and shoot some more. We’re absolutely silent, focusing on cans and only cans. We’ve shot about a couple of thousand rounds. We shoot all afternoon. Both of us are intensely focused on shooting. Ed’s just as into it as I am and I’m really into it. Even though we don’t talk, we’re connecting with each other. This guy’s okay and I can tell he thinks I’m okay, too.

“This is far fucking out,” Ed says. “Let’s just do this the whole time we’re here.” Ed is so focused that he wants to do this one thing and blocks everything else out. He’s so intense he can’t think of anything but this. Neither can I. I’m happier than I’ve ever been with Danny or at school, or with girls, or anywhere in my life so far. “It’s better than getting shit on, collecting eggs, isn’t it?” he says.

“Yeah, I’d rather do this.” This is rad. I love this shit. We’ve been left alone all afternoon, no old people bothering us, shooting a couple of tin cans. Far fucking out. I am so happy.

“Y’all gonna shoot up all my ammo,” Bill says, appearing from nowhere.

“Oh, sorry,” I say. “You left us here with all these bullets.” We have to stop now, no question. Even I can see that he wants us to stop. We give the guns back. Now what are we going to do? The dads come out back and light up. Both of them smoke. They sit down in these two lawn chairs in the big expanse of a back yard, smoking and talking, smoking and talking. They smoke all the time. All the time.

“George, Ed,” Bill says, showing them the guns, “You wanna take a run at it?” Sure, give the dads an opportunity to have fun while we sit around and watch. What are we supposed to do? Smoke?

“No,” my dad says.

“No,” Ed’s pop says.

What lazy fucks. Why not? Why would you sit around when you can shoot? We watch them smoking and sitting for what seems like hours. “You’re boring,” I tell them. “All you guys want to do is sit around. Let’s do something.”

“Let’s do something,” Ed says. “Let’s go hunting.”

The dads laugh and smoke, and ignore us. All they want to do is take naps and smoke. My dad talks to Ed’s pop the whole time. He doesn’t talk to us. There isn’t a conversation with us, not about farm life or anything. He talks to Ed senior and if I talk to anyone, I talk to Ed junior. We watch them sitting and smoking. What else are we supposed to do? Look through their garbage? I’m too old for that now but it reminds me. “We gotta get firecrackers,” I tell my dad.

He doesn’t say anything but he must have realized we’re not going to let up. He sighs, like he does before he gets up. Now I know I’ve won. What is the cure for bored kids who won’t get out of his hair? Firecrackers.

“I’ll ask Bill where we get firecrackers at,” he says, taking a few steps toward the house. “Bill, where you get firecrackers?”

“Right down the road there’s a store,” he says. “They wanna get firecrackers?”

“Yep.”

Bill goes off to get his truck. Ed’s pop gives Ed $30 so I get $30, too, from my cheap ass dad. This is another good thing about having a friend – my dad won’t be a cheap ass in front of witnesses. We sit in the front of the truck with Bill and drive to the store. My dad sits back and lights up another cigarette. What a big blob.

They have everything. They have ash cans, M-80’s, and I’m surprised they don’t have dynamite. All these fireworks are illegal in Florida. We are pretty freaking stoked. This is quickly making up for kidnapping chicken babies and soaking in shit. We load up. We have bags full of fireworks and matches, and everything we could ever want.
Bill drives up to the house and we race out of the truck. “Where you going?”

“We’re just going to go and walk around the farm,” I say.

“Stay away from the hen houses,” Bill says.

Ed and I walk around the roads. We find these holes in the ground where there are gophers and snakes. We pack fireworks in the holes, cover them back up with dirt and light them off. We throw them at each other when we start getting bored. Soon even that’s boring.

“Man, our dads are lazy,” I say. “They don’t want to do anything.”

“Yeah, all they want to do is sit around,” Ed says. We’ve made these comments before but we’re not responsible for entertaining our own dads. “What can we do?”

“I have an idea. Let’s sneak up on them and surprise them with some firecrackers.”

“Don’t do that to my pop,” Ed says. “He’ll get pissed. Do it to your dad. Do it to your own dad.”

Since the farmhouse is on the top of a hill and since we went down the hill to blow stuff up, we can’t walk up the hill on the road or the dads will see us from the vantage point of their lawn chairs. That is, they’d see us if they had their eyes open. If they aren’t smoking, they’re sleeping. They are so lazy.

We sneak around the perimeter of the house and get behind them. One of the fireworks I bought is a whole pack with all the fuses intertwined and touching each other. If you light one fuse, fifty firecrackers will go off. This is the pack I have in my hand right now.

“I’m not going up to them,” Ed says. He hides behind the corner of the house, watching me. I look over to the dads. They’re about fifty feet away, their lawn chairs halfway between vertical and horizontal. They look so lazy. They deserve this. I sneak up behind them. They’re both snoring loudly, so boring, so asleep. I can see the back of my dad’s bald head. I light the fuse and throw it under my dad’s lawn chair and run. It lands about a foot away from my dad, right under his chair. I don’t even make it back to where Ed’s hiding at the corner of the house when I hear: “Bam! Ba-bam! Ba-bam-bam! Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam!”

I turn around to see my dad leap up from his chair. He jumps up so fast he gets tangled up in his lawn chair. He knocks over the lawn chair with his feet, falls down from tripping and starts to run. He has this scared look on his face like ‘What the fuck is going on?’ I didn’t know then that he’d been a prisoner of war in a German concentration camp and this might have brought back some unpleasant memories. I don’t think about things like that. I only think he’s lazy. I can’t think ahead past that. It takes me another twenty years, at least, to get to the point where I can think things all the way through. This is unfortunate for everyone that happens across my impulsive path, but it makes for more fun for me.

Ed’s pop’s eyes are as big as sunny-side up eggs. He has a look on his face like he doesn’t know where he is or what he’s doing, as you would if you were napping and you woke up to an air raid. It’s so funny I stop running and start laughing. This is funny! I look over to Ed and he looks like he’s going to cry. What a pussy! You’re not in trouble. This is hilarious! Come on! Have a sense of humor.

I look back over to the dads. They ran about twenty feet away from the lawn chairs and stand there, watching the fireworks. “Bam! Ba-bam! Ba-bam-bam! Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam!” They’re still going off. It seems like they went off for about an hour. It’s a big pack. I’m halfway to Ed and the dads are halfway to me. I’m laughing uncontrollably. They’re looking at me, at the fireworks, and you can tell they’re trying to figure out what happened. They put it together pretty quickly. When they’re not lazy and napping, they’re pretty quick.

“Damn it!” my dad says, the first and last time I ever hear him swear. “That’s not funny! Davey, that’s not funny.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Ed’s pop says. “That’s not funny.”

I keep laughing. Hell yeah, it is. I look at Ed and he’s scared. He looks like a scared squirrel, but I’m laughing so he starts laughing. Then his pop starts laughing. “I guess he got you, George,” Ed’s pop says. He laughs harder. My dad won’t laugh. I know he won’t laugh anyway because he never laughs. He doesn’t have a sense of humor. You don’t joke with him but I don’t care. Everybody’s laughing but him.

My dad calms down, we have dinner – steak and gravy, biscuits and butter on everything - and leave early the next morning so Ed’s dad can go home and get back to work.

“I want to show you something,” my dad says on the way back. “It’s not too far out of the way. I’ll tell you when we get there.” Ed’s pop already knows what it is because they talk, but we don’t know. At this point I don’t know what to expect. More chicken shit? See a pig farm? Who knows what my dad thinks is interesting.

We drive up this dirt road in the mountains with overgrown trees and grass, like at Hattie’s farm. There’s a gate open and we drive through. I’m sick of all the trees and mountains. Trees and mountains are everywhere. We pull up to this clearing in the trees and drive onto some grass. We get out of the car and start to walk around a little bit. There’s a wooden sign saying something about a cemetery. I start looking at the gravestones and they’re all “Blevins.” I have to look hard to find one that isn’t “Blevins.”

You can tell where the graves are as they’re indented in the grass lawn. There are at least forty gravestones, mostly rectangle with a rounded top. They all have crosses engraved on them. They’re really old, like creepy old, not interesting old. Dead people are not fascinating to me, no matter what their last names used to be.

“Well Davey,” my dad says. “This is where most of your ancestors are buried.”

Great Dad. My dad and Ed’s pop walk away from the car and toward the tombstones. They bend over looking at them. I think it’s disrespectful to walk on a grave and honestly, the whole thing is starting to freak me out. I’ve never been to a graveyard before and seeing “Blevins” all over the place is scary. I’ve never even met another Blevins anywhere, at school or anyplace else. Now their ghosts surround me. I stay close to the car.

Ed stays close to the car, too. He pulls me aside and says, very seriously, “Why are we here?”

“I don’t know why we’re here, Ed. I don’t know.”

We stand close to each other watching the dads walk around the tombstones, examining them and looking around like they’re at a show. I don’t want to walk around here and it’s clear Ed doesn’t, either. I might fall in and touch a dead person.

The dads notice us standing by the car so they both come back and we take off. Ed and I get in the back and go to sleep. Within a couple of years, Bill is dead. All those eggs gave him a heart attack. Bill was Aunt Hattie’s third husband. Her husbands keep dying on her so she gives up on husbands and on the chicken farm. She gives up on my dad, too, when he keeps reminding her she sold his pony when he went off to war. He won’t let it go so we never saw her again.

Deleted Chapter 7, or Short Story #7. You Decide.

2010-03-12T11:51:00.000-08:00

Wait ‘Till I See

I’m in eighth grade again so in less than a year I’ll be fifteen. I can get my learner’s permit and ride a motorcycle but I need to do something to make this happen. This is really important. I don’t know anyone with a motorcycle and I’ve never ridden on one but I’ve looked at magazines and done a lot of research. I know about Harley and Davidson and how they made a motorcycle. I have a lot of respect for that but I’m not the inventive type. I might be the driving type, though. I think about cars and motorcycles almost as much as I think about guns. More, even, now that I’m older.

Danny’s dad has a rider mower and that gives me an idea. When my dad comes home, he’s in a good mood so I tell him, “I want a motorcycle and I know you’re not going to buy me one. I want to earn my motorcycle so I want to start mowing lawns. I need a lawnmower. Lawn businesses have rider mowers and I need one if I’m going to mow lawns. We could use it for our own lawn.” This is the most I’ve ever said to him all at once like that. It all came out, just like that. I really wasn’t sure what I was going to say. I hate having to try to convince my dad, who doesn’t care about anything interesting, that something’s interesting.

My dad says nothing and walks away, probably to take another nap. We have a fairly large lawn, like a double lot lawn, and it’s a lot of work to mow by hand. I have to do it and I don’t do it right. I sweat a lot, so when I’m mowing with a push mower, I sweat a whole lot. I just want to get it over with as soon as I can.

A lot of the neighbors, those that do their own lawns, have riding mowers. There’s no escape from mowing the lawn and if you put it off, it only gets worse. One way or another, though, it has to be done. Our house is the only house on this side of Rainbow where it dead-ends at Keane, and the only thing semi-growing in it is grass. If I enjoy mowing it, I’ll do it. Next time I see him, I’ll try to remember to tell him these convincing reasons, too. It’s almost a week when I see him again and I can’t figure out the right way to start talking.

“We need to build a shed out back,” he says. “A garden shed.”

“What for?”

“To put our garden tools in.”

“Okay,” I say. What does this have to do with me? Who cares about garden tools? He picks up a metal garden shed kit from the hardware store, brings it home and I help him put it together. We don’t talk when we’re working on it and that’s the end of that. A few days later, I come home from school and he’s home again, which is kind of weird. “Go look out in the garden shed,” he says.

“What?”

“Go out and look in there.” He’s kind of smiling.

I go out back and open the garden shed door. Inside is a brand new Sear’s rider mower. Wow. He got one. I get on it, back it out of the shed and start to mow the lawn. This is neat. It’s like a tractor. I’m on a nifty tractor on our own lawn. I can’t believe my dad got this for me. He is so incredibly cheap.

I mow for a little while and that’s when I figure out why he got it for me. He wants his lawn mowed and I wasn’t doing it a good job with the push mower in this steamy Florida heat. Our lawn is immense and it’s so much work. He wasn’t going to do it and he’s too cheap to pay someone to do it. No way. Not the way he runs around the house turning off lights just to save a few cents.

After I mowed our lawn, I disengaged the blade and drove it over to Danny’s house. I drove right up to his driveway, left it running and knocked on the door. Danny opens the door and stares. “Look at my rider mower,” I say.

“You gotta rider mower?”

“Yeah,” I say, pointing behind me. “Five horse Sears Craftsman. It’s a shiny brand new one.”

“How fast does it go?”

“It doesn’t go as fast as yours.” There are two types of rider mowers: the tractor type with a hood up in front, or the open type with a steering wheel and an open mowing deck. Danny’s dad had a mowing deck and we had the tractor type. Danny didn’t say anything. He went out to his garage and got his rider mower and we both rode down the street.

His was a lot faster than mine so he stopped to let me catch up. As soon as I got beside him, we had a drag race. I saw that as we started racing, he reached around behind where the motor was and disconnected the governor. The governor regulates the rpm of the gas motor so as soon as it was disengaged he went even faster. My motor was up in front so while we were racing, I searched around for my governor. When I found it, I disengaged and went faster, too. This is neat!

Right in the middle of the road, we put the rider mowers in reverse and went as fast as we could backwards. If you cram it in forward gear while pulling up on the steering wheel you can make the mower do a wheelie, so we have wheelie contests out in the street. The tires squeal when we go from reverse to forward gear and we make rubber patches all over the street, too, doing burnouts.

“Danny!” we hear. “What the hell you doin’? What you doin’ with the rider mower?” Danny’s dad comes scuffling closer. Neither of us move. We just stop and sit there. Danny’s dad looks down and sees the rubber marks on the road. “You gonna wear out those goddamn tires. And you gonna break the transmission. Knock it off. Get that mower back home.”

Danny doesn’t say a word, not a goodbye or anything. He put his rider mower in forward gear and heads home. I know Danny is like that so it’s okay. He won’t look at me, or anything. I kind of begin to see why he doesn’t have any friends. He lacks the social pleasantries that develop friendships. So does his dad.

It’s okay. I have a rider mower. This rider mower to me represents something fun to do, something so I don’t have to rely on someone else to entertain myself. I can ride around and focus my attention on it. As small and insignificant as I am, the rider mower opens up the heavens to me. It’s a means to get around and a means to get money to buy a motorcycle. I’m too young for anything else right now so I’ll have to settle for a rider mower.

I drive my rider mower up and down the street to look for business. I do this for hours because I don’t know what to do next. The neighbor kids see me riding so they get on their rider mowers and follow me. “Where the hell you going?”

“I’m just riding around.” I don’t want to tell them I’m starting a lawn service. They might get the idea, too, and then I’d have competition.

“I’m Frank,” one of them says. We ride around in the church parking lot for a while then we go back out on the street. Riding on the street in a rider mower is totally slow. You could pedal faster on a bike. Next time I’m riding around the neighborhood, the neighbor kids follow me over to Danny’s house. It turns out his dad is hardly ever home. Without adults around, we can do burnouts. If my dad ever saw me do burnouts, he’d become unglued so we always meet at Danny’s house. There’s five or six of us with rider mowers showing up in front of Danny’s house on Saturday morning. We all back our mowers up at an angle to the curb, like you see motorcycles do when they’re parking in front of bars. There had to be equal spacing between mowers, so we’d get off and say, “Do this angle here,” and “I’ll go first,” to get it just right.

When one of our neighbor’s rider mowers breaks down, we all go to Danny’s when his dad is home. We bring him our problems so he can tell us what’s wrong. Danny, however, wants to figure out the problem, too, so he starts messing with whatever he thinks is broken while waiting for his dad to come out. When Danny’s dad opens the door and sees Danny, he says, “Wait ‘till I see.” He doesn’t want Danny touching anything. “Wait ‘till I see!” he says. “Don’t touch it until I see. Wait, Danny, ‘till I see.” Danny’s dad doesn’t have a lot of confidence in Danny’s mechanical skills, or in ours, either.

As soon as Danny’s dad fixes the problem and he’s back inside their house, we all start to imitate him. “Wait ‘till I see!” we say. “Danny, don’t touch that. Wait ‘till I see!” We imitate him in an old man’s voice and laugh for a long time, right in front of Danny.

We sit on our mowers, parked at perfect angles and smoke cigarettes we steal from our parents. We sit there and smoke and talk like we’re at a drive-in, showing off our cars.

Our parents know what we’re doing. They even know we’re smoking. They drive by and see us. They never wave. They drive by and stare at us. They’re watching us sitting and smoking, and we stare back at them. We say, “There goes your dad, Frank.” At least they know where we are and that we aren’t getting into trouble. Our parents are so stupid, we think. They don’t know anything. There are all these burnout tire marks in front of Danny’s house, from us abusing our rider mowers, all of our rear tires bald from the burnouts. They can’t figure out that one and they don’t say a thing except, “How’d those tires get so bald?”

A new family moves into the apartment complex across the street on the opposite corner. I watch them unload a rider mower into the garage. This family has the lawn deck variety, like Danny has, the better kind of rider mower. I see this kid my age walking around but I don’t know what to do or how to have the confidence to introduce myself so I just watch. I don’t go over there even though I know they have a rider mower.

My dad has confidence. He walks straight over, introduces himself and becomes friends with the dad. They’re from some weird place like Ohio. My dad says, “You should meet the new neighbor.”

We walk across the street, my dad and me, and I meet Ed. He’s a goofy-looking kid, just goofy. His face looks odd to me. He looks like a frog. He has a wide mouth, he’s pudgy and he has these big old fat cheeks. No one’s going to hang around with this kid. He’s exactly my size but tubbier. Those cheeks! He looks like a baby. This is one goofy-looking kid.

He’s kind of shy like me. We don’t say a word to each other besides hi. We don’t know how to start a conversation with someone our own age, forcefully introduced to each other with our dads standing there, watching us. It’s like an arranged friendship. The dads start talking while we stare at each other. What do we do? They’re talking about work and we’re staring at each other. “So, you have a rider mower?” I say.

Ed looks at me like, what? “Yeah, we have a rider mower.” This kid has never even thought about riding a rider mower for fun, I can tell.

“Me and a friend of mine, and some other kids like to do burnouts on our rider mowers.”

“Oh.”

“Can I see your rider mower?”

He stands there. Is he going to say anything? Probably just to get away from our dads, he says, “Okay.” We walk out to the garage and start to look at the rider mower. Before we can say anything else, before I can tell him about our Saturday morning meetings at Danny’s, the dads follow us in.

“Say,” my dad says, completely fake, “Why don’t Ed and you take this boat over to the lake and go float in it?”

Now? I don’t want to go to the dumb dinky lake in the little park down the street and float on a dumb old boat. It is obviously their way of trying to get us to do something together. It’s stupid. It’s embarrassing.

We walk out of the garage. Leaning on the side of the house is this big wooden skiff of a boat. I’ll talk to Ed about rider mowers later. Maybe he’ll want to start a lawn business with me. Maybe he’s into motorcycles and motorized vehicles like me. Danny’s too unpredictable and I know I can’t rely on him to get work because his dad is so weird. I like Danny but you just never know with Danny.

Our dads grab both of us, put us in the back of my dad’s Chevy Impala station wagon, the boring-mobile, and say, “You boys will have fun!” They load this heavy wooden skiff onto the wagon and we drive the block and a half to the dumb man-made pond in the middle of a city block park. We’re not saying anything. This is the most retarded thing ever. What are we going to do while sitting in this boat in the middle of the Florida sun? We don’t have paddles, we don’t have fishing poles, what are we going to do on this boat? Ed’s quiet, too. He must be thinking the same thing. What the hell are we going to do just floating on this stupid pond? This is something ten year-olds would do. This is the most corniest thing in the world. This is not how I want to meet this guy. It’s embarrassing for him, too, I’m sure.

“We’ll give you boys a ride to the lake, you’ll be on the lake, it’ll be great!” my dad says. What’s he so excited about all of a sudden?

“You boys will have fun,” Ed’s dad agrees.

They drive to the edge of the grass at Crest View Lake where the road dead-ends. There’s a guardrail at the end of the dead end street where they pull over. They drop the boat off, lay it on the grass and take off. “See you later,” they say.

Ed and I look at each other. I guess we gotta do this. We drag the boat across the grass, we’re wrestling with this heavy boat, and we’re struggling. We get it in the water, hop in, push ourselves off, and now we’re floating in this pond. Now what? Now that we’re out here, what the heck are we supposed to do? We’re big kids floating in a little pond.

“I really like motorcycles,” I say. “I’m going to save up to get a Honda 90.”

“I don’t really know anything about motorcycles. It sounds like something I would try.”

“I’m trying to save up to buy one. I want to start a lawn mowing business. That’s why I asked you about your rider mower.”

“Oh.”

If people saw us in this stupid little pond with this stupid boat, they’d think we were stupid, too.

“I wonder if there’s any fish in this pond?” Ed says.

“We don’t have any fishing poles so I guess we won’t know.”

Awkward silence.

“School’s a downer,” I say. “I don’t care much for school.”

“Yeah, I don’t like school, either. How’s the school here?”

“Terrible,” I say. “All schools are terrible.”

“Yeah, I know. I don’t like school. They make you learn stuff you don’t care about.”

“I don’t care about any of it.”

Ed looks directly at me. “You have to learn how to read.”

“I already know how to read. I don’t need to go to school no more.”

We sit in the boat for a minute, looking around.

“This is boring,” Ed says. “Let’s go.”

We had a stick we used to push off from the bottom of the lake. We used it to make it to shore and when we did, we pulled the boat up out of the water as best we could. I’m hot and tired of this boat and this dumb lake.

“I’m not carrying this thing home,” I say.

“I’m not carrying it either.”

“Where’d your dad get this?”

“I don’t know. It was leaning up against the wall when we moved in.”

My dad and the boring-mobile were gone when we got home so I couldn’t tell him about leaving the boat at the lake. It might still be there for all I care.