As we all take a well-deserved break for the month of January to reflect on the future of Retrospect, thanks to all who read and commented as I responded every week to the question, “What’s Your Story?”
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The movie Marathon Man was released in 1976 and Laurence Olivier played the part of Szell a former WWII Nazi German enroute to New York City from South America to recover some stolen and previously hidden diamonds. Dustin Hoffman plays the part of Thomas Babington brother to a US secret agent and who unwittingly gets Thomas involved in the plot before he died. Quite a good movie – I recommend it. However …

My dental trauma comes from a scene in the movie where Szell uses dental tools including a drill, all without novacaine on poor Thomas. Ouch. I stopped going to a dentist for three years .

…and they want their stuff back! Oh, the clunkyness of it all.

This photo is easily worth one thousand words, but instead: my favorite screen saver: On Mighty Toaster Wings!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

West Side Story

One wintry afternoon feeling chilled I stopped at an upper-westside cafe.  I asked for a cup of tea and drinking it I overheard an attractive older woman at the next table tell the waiter someone was meeting her.

She was looking toward the door when a handsome gray-haired man entered,  glanced around the room,  and approached her table.  She rose and there in the middle of that small cafe they embraced and kissed,  and for those brief moments seemed oblivious to all around them.

Then they sat,  their hands touching on the small table as they talked,  and then ordered food and ate.  But seemingly pressed for time,  the man soon called for the bill,  paid the waiter,  and then rose to go.  The woman stood and they embraced once more,  and the man walked towards the door.

She watched him go and then put on her coat,  and I saw her gently touch the back of his empty chair before she too left the restaurant.

Through the window I watched her hurry down the street and disappear into the late afternoon,  upper Broadway crowd – leaving me to wonder how their star-crossed story would end.

– Dana Susan Lehrman

Shelf List

I was a librarian for almost 40 years,  most of those spent working in school libraries with several summers in a small public library as well.    (See The Diary of a Young Girl,  Magazines for the Principal,  My Snowy Year in Buffalo and Rainy Night on the Highway)

I loved my time in libraries and still believe bringing books and good literature to kids is surely the best job in the world.

But of course there was also the less inspiring,  technical side of the job –  ordering,  processing, and shelving books;  weeding the collection;  and maintaining the card catalog.

In fact I prided myself on keeping my card catalog current by adding extra subject cards to help students find books that reflected their interests as well as the school’s curriculum and my teaching colleagues’ assignments.

But by the late 1980’s the library card catalog was becoming a thing of the past and New York City’s school libraries –  as all school and university and public libraries around the country – were computerizing and their catalogs going online.

We librarians were trained to use and maintain the new online catalogs knowing our old wooden card catalogs would soon be obsolete.   But it was heart wrenching for me to think the custodian would soon come to haul mine away,   and so to make the parting less painful I decided to keep my library’s shelf list.   A shelf list is a listing –  in my library’s case on cards – of every book in the collection arranged not by author,  title,  or subject as in the public access catalog,  but rather by its Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress assigned classification number.

But of course my shelf list was accessible online as well with no need to keep those dog-eared 3 x 5 cards.   And so I eventually gave up my hard copy shelf list and crossed over – a bit nervously –  to the brave new world of technology.

The kids,  on the other hand,  had no trouble transitioning from the card to the online catalog.   In fact much of her early computer know-how this old school librarian learned from her tech savvy students!

– Dana Susan Lehrman 

To help us become proficient in using a mouse, Solitaire was installed on all our computers.
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It wasn’t until 2006 that I actually bought a computer for myself, my beloved iMac-7.1.
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There was a phone with buttons for hold and intercom, and a blocky computer console sitting squarely in the middle of the desk.  I think it was a Dell.  The font was clunky and there were no graphics.  This was my first computer. 
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As with most mountain lions in our region, P-22 was born in the Santa Monica mountains, probably in 2010. As of 2016, the National Park Service had caught, collared, and released 12 pumas, male and female. They roam in the relatively wild areas of the Santa Monica Mountain National Recreation Area. There, protected by law, P-22’s puma colleagues male and female, live their lives as wild creatures in a natural habitat bounded by the Pacific Ocean to the south and the overdeveloped flats of the San Fernando Valley to the north. Life is good for pumas in this area, But not for P-22!

No, P-22 was different. As a young lion, still almost a cub, he left his birthplace and headed east. Was he directionally challenged? Driven by curiosity or banished by a bigger male? Simply lost?  Whatever drove him, the young puma crossed both major north-south Angeleno freeways, the 405 and the 101. He continued eastward along Mulholland ridge to Beverly Hills and the Hollywood hills where he reached a small circle of wilderness known as Griffith Park.

Along its ridges and arroyos, the park is home to deer, bobcats, rabbits, and coyotes, all good eating for a hungry young puma. But Griffith Park has many inroads that have crept up the hills from Hollywood. A busy horse stable sits at the top of Beachwood Canyon, nestled under the HOLLYWOOD sign. The Greek Theater, an outdoor amphitheater rocks with concerts, fans, and cars from May to October. The Griffith Park Observatory and Planetarium sit on a ridge top in the middle of P-22’s range, looking out over LA’s ceaseless whoosh of traffic and the endless day of a well-lit metropolitan sprawl.

Perhaps most telling, P-22’s home range is an island, small and isolated. So P-22 has roamed his home alone, living on wildlife and interacting with civilization’s hillside communities that have been built up the canyons since the 1920s. With a range so small, it’s remarkable that P-22 never turned to domesticated animals for food. When he was periodically tranquilized and brought into the Fish and Wildlife clinic for checkups, veterinarians could easily surmise that P-22 had cadged no pugs, no dachshunds, no cats. Wild he was, and wildlife was his sustenance.

P-22 settled in. His range was small, but he grew strong. As always, most wild animals are gone before you know they’re there. But P-22 was often sighted by hikers and horse riders in the hills. Security cams on garages and front yards picked him up during his nocturnal wanderings. He sauntered across pool patios as easily as he ranged the brush of the Park’s arroyos.

People in the area lived in a state of wonder. He brought wildness and nobility to the overbuilt terrain. He was a beautiful animal. Any P-22 appearance went viral on YouTube and electronic neighborhood gazettes.  P-22 sightings became café talk. He brought us together with his effortless celebrity. He was big, beautiful, and wild and he excited us all with his solitary appearances.*

Lately, his loving fans began to notice he was lingering longer, closer to human habitats. He tried to capture a few loosely tended dogs. He had already survived a poison attack, had dodged cars on the narrow hillside roads. He had been rescued when he became stuck in a hillside crawlspace. And days later, after 10 years of gracing Griffith Park and its compromised ecosystem, P-22 took a hit from a car twisting around a hillside bend.

California Fish and Game brought P-22 in for a thorough medical checkup. He’d lost 35 pounds, had skin parasites, a hernia, arthritis, and the vehicle impact had fractured his skull. Sadly, after much consideration, the Fish and Game authorities decided to put P-22 down.

We will all miss his wild presence, his casual travels along back garden walls, down concrete driveways, and even along Sunset Boulevard. Every night, he roamed unseen across the precious but lonely palisades of Griffith Park. He crossed the sites of that once hosted the pre-Columbian dwellings of Maaw’nga, a village of the Tongva Chumash tribe.

During P-22’s 10-year tenure, we all lived here together, struggling to find our humanity and our wilderness in the concrete and asphalt jungles of Los Angeles. Although his domain was small, P-22 made the best of his world, a wild and princely creature who brought us all together, flora and fauna enduring the summer sun and heat, cooling beneath Hollywood’s unseen stars.

P-22 may have been directionally challenged, but he followed his wild will to become our neighbor, our companion, our hero. He bestowed upon us an assurance that nature still held sway in this over torqued world. companion. We will miss him terribly.

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*The etymological derivation of wild comes from Old Saxon wildi, Old Norse villr, meaning ‘willed.’ How perfect.

 

 

 

 

No matter where I am–at home or abroad–people ask me for directions. I don’t know why. Most of the time I can answer correctly, but I’m sure I’ve made some mistakes.

Years ago, I brought this up at lunch with my friends and colleagues at the high school where I worked.

One of the (younger) teachers said,”Well, everywhere I go people try to sell me drugs.”

We looked at each other and wondered…

 

 

 

 

Photo by Joshua Harris on Unsplash