Turtle Island

     Once upon a time, there was a special, magic place, where everyone was peaceful, although most were quite old, being mostly over 80 and even over 90 years old. Although the people were mostly poor, they had enough to survive and have a good standard of living, based on community, not on wealth.

     This special place was America. It stretched “from sea to shining sea.” Many generations past, only a Native People lived in this great land they called “Turtle Island.” It was a large landmass that saw a new country named The United States of America, that eventually stretched from the Eastern Atlantic Ocean seaboard to the place in the Far West where the land again met the sea. We called this Western Sea the Pacific Ocean. Pacific means Peaceful. 

     On this western shore, where the sun set into an ocean of blue that reached the far horizons of the “Peaceful Ocean'' that “The Little Girl Who Could'' spent her first happy years on this beautiful planet we call Earth. The name of her hometown for the first 20 exciting and fulfilling years of her Earth journey was Venice Beach; it had been built with art, music, dance, and divine poetry of harmony between land and sea represented by the canals and cultural influences of Venice, Italy, in mind. It was a great experiment that failed, as Venice went bankrupt and joined LA in the early 1920’s. According to an LA city engineer she met in college in 1970, it was downhill for Venice ever since! He and his brother had come out west and were driving the trams that still drove the Boardwalk decades later. The Boardwalk was a large public walkway, as big as a two lane highway bordering the sand near the ocean’s edge in Venice Beach, CA. He said they passed out leaflets, saying “Don’t join LA!”, but no one listened who had any clout. Santa Monica, just next door to Venice Beach and the tram’s northern destination, had kept its own tax base, and was doing fine. Venice Beach was the old trams’ southern end near the Breakwater, a beach where thousands of children learned to swim over many generations, until an oil well went in right in the middle of Venice Pavilion and ran an outflow pipe under the middle of the beach and under the breakwater, and ruined the beach forever. That beach breakwater and the canals had been cleverly designed, but later developments and oil rigs destroyed the habitat of artists and birds and huge old palm trees that made it feel like Hawaii, although they were Mexican Palms that lined the beach near the ocean, until the early 70s, when the developers moved in again and ripped out the old trees and the soul of Venice, so she moved to Oregon. There were mostly old Jewish people lining the Boardwalk of Venice Beach in her earliest years. She knew not their language. She was a great observer and spent most of her life watching life go on around her as she did as she was told, being the child of apartment managers.

     Our little girl, who always knew, somehow, that she could save the world, was born in an LA County Doctor’s Hospital, just 2 blocks into East LA, where her mom and grandma arrived on an LA City Bus all the way from Venice Beach, and she arrived before the doctor got there. So, years later, she thought, “I was almost born on the LA City Bus!

     In those days, no one had yet gone to the moon and, although there were plenty of planes in the skies, people mostly traveled in cars or boats or trains, or they just stayed in one place or small town most of their lives. There were “Vagabonds” who “crossed blue waters to distant mountains” as her mom’s poetry books stated, but they were few. 

     In the early days of America, people went west, settling on lands that once belonged to the Native Peoples. However, many “white” people, believing they were “better” than all the other colors and races of mankind, did not respect the “Mother Earth” or “Father Sky” and they did not believe they had to keep their word or honor any “Treaty” or promise they made to other peoples or races. They did not honor the animals, the winged beings we call birds, the four-footed, or the fish in the oceans. Because of thinking they were better than anyone else, they made up a story about their “God” telling them it was OK to be that way. These took for granted the greatest gift of all, Mother Earth! And Mother Earth had had enough!

     So, she decided to awaken and, hiding herself in the body of the little girl about to be born, the Soul of the Universe took on human form.

     Of course, the little baby probably did not remember any of this. Maybe her Daddy had a hint or two and he loved her very much. He was old to be a Daddy. He was 44 years old and her mom was 40, and they had both lived through “The Great Depression” that was caused by bankers and hooligans who used America to get rich on deceit and to make war on most of the world whenever they could, getting richer on the spoils of other countries’ tears.

     Her parents had watched two World Wars in their own 20th Century and hoped that there would never be a Third. The nuclear bombs could kill a lot of people in a brief instant, with more poisons pouring out across the sad and crying Mother Earth, crying for her children who would have to pay the awful price of their parents’ mistaken ideas about Love and Life.

     So, by the time our little girl was born, a lot of people lived in big cities, where factories pumped poisons into the air and waters without cease with no care for those of us who need to breathe. The songs and teachings of the storytellers who were once honored guests in royal homes, bringing forgotten wisdom and light from ages past, were legislated out of favor or ignored in favor of canned entertainment called television, and, much later, the Internet. These honored peoples became street people, entertaining for a tip in alcoves and alleys across the Western states. In the mid-70s, many coastal cities had large populations of street artists and musicians. 

     The little girl was born happily in the great Metropolis called “Los Angeles” or “City of the Angels” where millions of people lived together. She was blessed to live very near the ocean in a big apartment house that stretched at least half a block along the alley named “Speedway.” On the roof of this four or five story building, she spent her earliest years, talking to the seagulls and foghorns in the distance on foggy summer mornings.

     Her daddy told her, many years after she grew up, that he was watching the stars in the early morning when her mom and grandma were riding the bus to East LA, and he said the very last star in the sky was her special star that would always watch over her. Since she was born after dawn, was this Jupiter or Venus, the Morning Star?

     The little girl was named after her dad, whose name, Andrew, meant manly in Greek. Her name, Andrea, meant womanly. The ocean became her sacred space, where she would go to make up poems to her “friend across the water.” Not until she was 26 years old did her mother confess that she had a half sister born in Waikiki or Honolulu six years before she was born. No wonder she thought she had a friend across the ocean! Finally, when she turned 56 years old and her mother whom she cared for at home was 96, she found her sister! What a joyous time that was! The ocean was her saving grace, because she was only surrounded on three sides by the city made by man.

     Because Venice was designed to have the same spirit of art and music that permeated Venice Italy, her artists and musicians survive to this day as harbingers of truth and justice and the “American way” that used to be for all, not just an obscene 1%. The Boardwalk saw the birth in the 60s and 70s of The Dog Boys and skateboarding, although our little girl chose the one speed Schwinn bicycle, roller skating rinks, and body surfing waves as her favorite sports.

     Our little girl’s life story spans many decades of oppression and harassment of these magical people who still carried the Spirit of Creation and musical interludes in a cosmic dance of light and love within each beating heart and beating drum. In Venice Beach there was an old concrete platform where all the conga players would come every Sunday and play their hearts and souls out to the crowd and the nearby ocean waves. She was there for many years listening to the heartbeat of the ocean’s waves and the heartbeats of the drums of Africa.

     America was a special place that stretched “from sea to shining sea”, but our little girl who could lived in magical, mystical Venice for the first 20 years of her life; first in an old apartment building designed by Isadora Duncan, who died in France in 1927. Thornton Towers was built early in the 20th Century and Isadora Duncan once had lived in the penthouse with blue curtains and candlelight glowing through at night, (she didn’t like electric lights) and she danced on the roof where our little girl’s mom hung her diapers to dry. Many years later, after she had children of her own and was listening to a radio program in the middle of the night from her live-in bus parked on the mountain on Blue Ridge in Boulder Creek CA, she heard a quote attributed to Isadora that she had never heard, although she had read her autobiography. It said she was “dancing in a woman who would be the Soul of the Universe.” Our little grown up girl burst into tears without knowing quite why. 

     She was only three or so when the day came that she felt she had been waiting for her whole life. Her mom and dad had promised to take her to the best national park ever, Yellowstone! Her mom and dad had two whole weeks of paid vacation they took at the same time every year in the summer. She loved to drive on her daddy’s lap or to stick her head out the window into the wind, especially when they left the ugly, stinky city far behind and the only aromas were the sweet smell of the desert or the rolling farmlands, where fresh cut hay brought blissful visions of wild horses and nature’s bounteous harvests.

     This was the life! The smells of nature were hearty and wholesome healing to one who lived in a smelly, noisy mix of toxic fumes and toxic refuse. A long drive across the country was a welcome break from the smell of gasoline and factories. When the park finally came into sight, she aroused from the drugged stupor of miles and miles of nothing but plains and fence posts flying by, to see the station wagon in front of her stopped for the most amazing sight of her short life: a HUGE BEAR!. He was standing at an open window (much taller than the car) and begging for treats from the delighted tourists. The trip just got better and better!

     At the next stop, Old Faithful it was called after the geyser that went off faithfully many times a day, left the old Chevy that had served them well, and then they saw a big white buffalo with blue eyes, the King of the Yellowstone herd, munching peacefully with his family near the lodge at the geyser. His name (she discovered many years later) was Big Medicine and he waited in a kingly manner for the accolades of human and bird alike. She read a book by the same name many years later, and found out he died in 1958, when she was 7. She thought when she first saw him, because she had just read a book about animals that changed color to white in the winter, “Do Buffalo change color in the winter too? And wait a minute, it’s summer!” Our little girl mentions this again because it was such a significant event in her short lifetime on planet earth. It would be many many years later that she discovered the story of white buffalo calf woman and the sacred nature of the white buffalo as counselor and friend to the Native Peoples of North America.

    Then they set up camp. Her parents were at once familiar and bizarre by turns. They seemed to enjoy the natural rituals of camp life that so delighted and amazed her with their varied yet necessary functions. Gathering firewood, water, cooking over an open fire, her father going to fish in a nearby roaring river were all happy moments, but an underlying tension seemed to take many quiet hours around the campfire to finally fade away into the night with its thousands of unknown stars and the unfamiliar cough of a moose or the howl of a wolf, the hoot of an owl, and the grunt of a bear in the velvet distances.

     The next day, they visited a group of pools of brilliant colors. From above, she watched herself and everyone there, still in her body but also above and also looking through the eyes of everyone there as though she were them. It was not until her own first born son turned one that she returned to those pools and compared her memories, but now from only one point of view. Because the pools were almost unchanged over those two decades in between, she became aware that she used to see from three perspectives. When did she forget? That she could not remember, how frustrating!

     Could it be when the rooftop life of early years at Thornton Towers and life on the penthouse roof where Isadora Duncan danced from her soul over 25 years before was replaced with a window in a new home about 10 blocks from her beloved ocean sound. Instead of seagulls and foghorns and the sounds of ocean waves crashing near the huge Mexican palm trees that lined the Venice beaches back then, there were pigeons who nested in the eaves of the roof above her head and cooed her awake every morning to the chatter of parakeets waking up in the yard next door? At 5 they moved to this new home on a one block long street called Beach Avenue, but her babysitter was still her Beloved Muzzy off and on at Thornton Towers until she was 7 and Muzzy got to live her final years in her son’s home on the beach in Malibu. She thinks her Muzzy died when she was 10, but her parents refused to let her go to the funeral.

  Marina del Rey came later; stolen from the people of Venice, as most developers had stolen and murdered those who lived there over the years, because it was once a public water skiing lake. Back then, you could drive from Venice to Playa del Rey, over a bridge to El Segundo along the ocean, until the LA developers dug a huge channel to the sea and built the Marina. Gentrification ensued. There was also a ”Hop-along-Cassidy Land” where even a very young child could ride a pony in the fast lane, securely tied to the saddle. This was her favorite place, where she fell in love with horses before she could even walk. It was right on the corner of Washington Blvd. and the main entrance to the lake where Marina del Rey now sits.

     She was still only 10 blocks from the ocean, and only 2 blocks from the canals for 15 more years, until she moved to Oregon in 1972, right after the first free concert of the year on Easter Sunday attracted more cops than people, and the LA Metro Squad moved in on Venice at the height of a movement where people from all over the country who loved freedom and good music and tolerance of all, rich and poor, white or black, etc., were all moving into Venice and surrounding climes.

     When she was only 7 years old, in 1958, she remembered the first beatniks moving into Venice. As a Catholic school kid, she had to dare herself to even peek in the door of the huge warehouse they had rented on the Boardwalk, where she saw rooms made of hanging tapestries lining the walls and a community central gathering place for art and music and sculpture, etc., at her quick and guilty glance into the life of true artists dedicated to their calling.     

     Since she grew up with parents who managed the apartment building where she spent the first happy years of her life surrounded by old folks, she thought she was in charge. Her parents had failed to tell her what a manager was, so, when her mom and dad were both working full time jobs and her babysitter was also over 80, she took over running notes to the Jewish grocer on the Boardwalk and took care of all of “her” old folks in the block long 4 story high place where she grew up, because the elevators were scary and the stairs too hard for over 90 year olds. She did not need to learn their language to communicate with gestures, as the old grocer read the notes, gave her the goods, and then pointed to what she could purchase with the change, her “tip”. She earned ice cream and candy and little penny toy money every weekday. Back then,  her neighborhood, surrounded by old Jews, was safe for a child or an elder to go about freely and without fears. 

     The pigeon lady especially was her favorite person to hang about with, and her mom told her she learned seagull and foghorn before she learned English. Only her parents and her babysitter, her “Muzzy” as she preferred to be called, spoke English. Also, her babysitter’s son did, who would come by the roof and let her play with the stray black and white collie mix he had adopted while writing the symphony orchestra music of the Walter Lanz cartoon Big Town, so her named the dog Towny. Towny would lie patiently before our little girl and let her delight in her long black and white fur when she couldn’t even walk yet. It was glorious! Our little girl’s mom also told her (when her mom was already in her late 90s herself) that they lived in Isadora Duncan’s penthouse on the roof when she was just a toddler.

     It was on the shores of the ocean called Peaceful that our little girl spent the first happy years of her amazing life. Because her friends asked her to write down some of her memories and experiences for her grandchildren to read someday, she began this book, but only from the point of view from above, one of the three points of view she remembered having from a very early age, but only recalled when she went to Yellowstone when her first born son was only a year or so old and she compared her memories as a three year old visiting Yellowstone and Old Faithful for the first time with her parents. She thought to herself, being able to read at three and having read a book on the way about animals who change color in the winter. When she saw the King of Yellowstone, a white buffalo with blue eyes peacefully grazing with his cows around Old Faithful, as grizzly bears ate from car windows, she thought to herself, “Do buffalo change color in the winter too? And wait a minute, it’s Summer!” when she saw Big Medicine. It was around a group of pools that had remained unchanged since she was a child that she was able to compare her memories, and she realized her past memories were vivid from three points of view at once. She was above, watching herself and everyone else around the pools, she was herself, looking out of her own eyes at the view, and she was everyone else there as though she was everyone, all at once! Looking back at her life, she could not recall when she began to only see straight ahead from her own eyes only. Was it when she was put in schools with roofs instead of stars? 

     Her parents had watched two World Wars in their 20th Century. The nuclear bombs killed a lot of people, and, reading the Book of Revelations in the Bible, including many Native prophecies like Hopi and Mayan Indians maintained for hundreds of years, many saw the first atomic bombs as the “Abomination unto Desolation” spoken of by Daniel the Prophet of the Hebrew Scriptures. Her dad believed in God or a Higher Power, as he was raised by devout Catholics.

     Our little angel was named after her dad. However, she preferred going by Andi, with an “i”, cuz ”y” is for guys, she used to say, when her dad introduced himself as Andy. At the time, she did not know her mom’s dad and great uncle on her grandma’s side were both named “Guy.” Since she could read at three, because her Muzzy read to her whenever she asked, from the favorite golden books as they were called. Lone Ranger and Tonto was a book she memorized and, suddenly, not even knowing what and alphabet was, she could read anything! Her phonics was not always perfect, but she could sense what a new word meant from the context.

     The Speedway was the name of the alley where Thornton Towers was built, just half a block from the Boardwalk and the beach. The ocean she considered her “saving grace” as there was only city on three sides, and Nature still making waves on her doorstep. One side made by God; the others by men who cared not for beauty as Mother Earth saw it. There was the remnants of an old pier or dock directly down from her apartment building and she would often escape out there, gazing across the ocean to she knew not where, where her “friend” waited to hear her poems on the ocean air. It was as if she could “feel” someone out there listening, but they never answered back. It was not until she was 26 years old, living on Maui, and 7 months pregnant with her first child, that her mother came to visit her and told her she was not an only child, but that she had a half sister born in the islands 6 years before her. Her mom knew her daughter’s maiden name, because she had been adopted by her best friend’s landlady and named after her. It took another 30 years before the little girl would finally find her sister, but what a joy that was, and how many things in their lives coincided or mirrored the other’s, like twins separated at birth whose lives took similar paths.