The entrance to the beach was on a switchback road just outside of Fort Bragg, California. It’s easy to miss it you don’t know it’s there. I’m sure the locals know it well. When I was there for the second time, I was surprised to see a horse on the beach tied to a trailer. There were few clouds in the sky and I could feel the breeze that is always present as you near the waves. I saw some people who had just been or were about to go out into the water. One guy had on a body suit. Another was just in trunks. A girl was in a swimsuit. I couldn’t imagine how they could stand it. It was cold even though it was June. To get closer to the waves, I had to make a tough walk over a stretch of sand. Muscles were being used that hadn’t been used in a while as my feet sank in with each step. I started to adjust to the temperature. I wasn’t exactly warm but I was no longer cold.

That crevice of sand I had to cross opens up to a long beach with the kinds of views of the Pacific that you hope for. There are rocks, there’s the breeze, all shades of blue as you look at the sky and the waves, shiny sand just washed by the water, weird sea stuff washed up on the beach and driftwood. I saw a couple walking without shoes with their dog across the beach. The lack of shoes looked very free, and as crazy as it sounds, I had never been barefoot on a beach before. I love playing chicken with the waves, but I always risked getting my shoes wet. This happened when I was a kid at a different beach in Fort Bragg. I think I was seven or eight and my mom had to help me clean up my feet.

I’m annoyingly cautious sometimes, but I try not to be. I walked away from the waves towards a wall of rocks, removed my shoes and socks and rolled up my jeans. The sand was warm. It felt like a massage as I walked across it back toward the waves. I was still overdressed compared to the locals, but I felt good in my shoeless state even if it was with jeans, a cardigan and a scarf. I walked up to the waves, and instead of having to run I let the water run over my feet, rising up to my ankles. It was cold. The water rushed toward me and I could just stand there and take it. Such a simple, freeing pleasure to be closure to the waves.

I’ve been in retail over four years now. I’ve only worked in one particular store, but I notice certain behavioral patterns and suspect they are universal to this kind of setting. If you have worked in a job requiring customer service, you will understand. If you haven’t, this will show you what it’s like on the other side of the register. 

In the store I work in, my customers are unusually on a mission. With this mission comes a preconceived idea of what is needed to complete that mission and how it should be accomplished. But then you interrupt their plan.

You tell the customer that she can’t get cash because she doesn’t have a receipt and the best you can give her is store credit. You tell him the item he wants won’t ship to California because of Califirnia’s high environmental standards, or sorry, that item is only carried in store and we no longer have it, or no, we don’t do same day delivery. Whatever the case may be, what I notice and am no longer surprised by though still irritated with is the slowness in which these people accept new data that goes against their preconceived notions of what was supposed do happen.

I’m sorry. That item can’t be shipped to Califirnia.

Well what if you order it and not me?

I don’t have any more power than you do.

What if you order it to the store?

Well…this is still a store…in California…

What if you have it transferred from a store in Nevada?

We don’t do those kinds of transfers.

Well, what am I supposed to do? Drive to Nevada?

I mean, you might just have to pick a different model.

But this is the exact one I need.

Oh wait, let me get the governor on the phone for you. He’s going to make an exception just for you.

 

And you know what goes with denial? Outrage.

I paid cash. Why shouldn’t I get cash?

Because you don’t have a receipt, all I can give you is store credit.

But that isn’t right. I paid cash. What am I going to do with a store credit?

I mean, they don’t expire.

 

And you know what else goes with denial and outage? A lack of responsibility.

Why didn’t you hang on to the receipt?

Well I didn’t think I’d have to return this.

Well then all I can do is store credit sir.

But I paid cash!

 

And when a solution isn’t found, out comes what I like to call An Appeal to the Magic Manager.

I’m sorry but we can’t apply those kinds of discounts to online purchases.

Why not?

Because the online part of our store is different from the brick and mortar part. I know it seems silly, but I’ve tried to call it through myself and they won’t do it. There’s no way around it.

Well, we’re gonna have to get a manager up here then because this is ridiculous.

 

Desperate to stay in denial and not consider a new reality for their situation, the customer appeals to the power of the Magic Manager, the Santa Clause of retail. He (and let’s face it, I hardly think the customer is imagining the possibility of a “she”) will wave his magic wand over the undesired situation and make everything happen the way the customer wants.

Well, we’ll just have to get a manager up here then because this isn’t right.

Akrught…well it may not be “right,” but it’s reality. Deal with it.

Plants and flowers fascinate me; the shapes of the leaves and petals, the colors, the textures, the names, and the forms. Recently, when walking through the nursery at a chain home improvement store, I stopped like I’d discovered treasure. The store was carrying hellebores. They’re an uncommon find and I first noticed and liked hellebores because of a magazine article. A few days passed, and I bought one. I don’t always think very practically when a plant catches my eye in a special way. I feel like I have to have it. I want its beauty or uniqueness to come home with me so I can keep it as long as I can. When I read the marker or tag that comes with one, and find out whether it takes sun or shade and how big it can get, I think of everything it could be, how it will grow, bloom and develop or how it could transform a certain location. A plant is bought in hope of what it will become.

Growing up and into adulthood, my mom and I worked hard to transform the front and back yards of the family home which, as it turns out, is the same home my mom grew up in. My green thumbed grandma gardened years before on the same land as my mom and me. But while she had a green thumb, frankly, all too often we have felt the sting of failure. I remember the photinia we planted along the chain link fence in the back yard with a vision that it would create a large natural wall and visual barrier that world block our neighbors yard and shield ours. My mom and I would drive into town and see full grown photinia, over six feet tall, which is often used in the landscaping and stores in our area, and imagine how ours world eventually look. Despite my mom’s warnings, my dad accidentally mowed most of them over. The ones that survived dried out in the sun for lack of watering. I also remember when we planted ferns and spread bark in the shady side yard since ferns love shade. It seemed we had done everything right, and almost everything in our power to help the ferns do well there. At the beginning, they flourished. Inexplicably, they took a turn for the worse and most died. I knew our soil wasn’t the best, but it still didn’t make sense.

On one occasion, we decided do add a row of trellises for more privacy and plant bougainvilleas to grow on them. We envisioned how beautiful the bougainvilleas would look with their delicate white and green leaves once they had covered the wooden frames of the trellises and extended to the wire fence behind them. Seven trellises and seven bougainvilleas were purchased. I dug holes with much effort as the dirt in that area can hardly be called soil. It’s more like sticky globs. I struggled to get those trellises straight and even with one another. I remember not being entirely satisfied but once we added the bougainvillea and some solar lights, it looked pretty for a while. I remember seeing the line of solar lights glowing in the middle of a summer night and feeling proud. None of it lasted. Once winter came, the wind blew those trellises this way and that and eventually broke some of them. The bougainvillea died, and eventually the solar lights quit working and got lost.

Amongst our other failures, a bed of French lavender that froze to death which was planted to help cover the smell our neighbors chickens, two iceberg roses that were hard to care for with the water restrictions of the California drought in years past, and several dead hydrangeas. There were coral bells that met the same fate as the photinia, dahlia tubers that sprouted but never bloomed, and an Alice in Wonderland themed area complete with garden statues and tea cup shaped flower pots holding bleeding heats that eventually became an area for our cats to relieve themselves.

Whenever my mom and I bought plants and landscaping materials for a project, we went forward with hope and expectation. We had visions of what we wanted and what we were striving for. We tried to understand what went wrong before and make changes in watering, light, or soil that would give our plants a greater chance at life. A few successes kept us going, but it was hard to keep our heads up when our losses far outweighed them. Seeing all those little dreams for the front and back yards fail to succeed was disheartening. I still have a bit of hope. I’m going to put that hellebore in a pot and try to take care of it, if I remember to, if I have enough energy to. But occasionally when I try to exercise that hope, especially for larger projects, I feel defeated before I even begin. It’s buying plants but fearing that they’re just going to die. It’s feeling like my efforts count for nothing, no progress has been made, nothing lasts, and everything turns to crap. But I’m not really talking about plants anymore.

When I look at a plant I believed to be dead and discover new growth, it feels like a small miracle.

When I first found out that there would be an exhibit in San Francisco featuring Gustav Klimt, I was excited because I had recently become more interested in his work. When I looked at his paintings online, the combination of realistic looking human figures with wild bouts of color and pattern were very appealing to me. I had also seen the movie Woman in Gold which had one of his paintings at its center. This past summer, my friend Alicia mentioned that her boyfriend wasn’t as into art exhibits as she was, so we thought that it would be fun to go to San Francisco together and go to a museum. As time passed, and we finally got an opportunity to go in October, I stayed set on this museum idea and convinced her to go see “Klimt and Rodin: An Artistic Encounter” at the Legion of Honor.

I haven’t been to many major art exhibits, but the ones I have been to left an impression on me. I remember the Andy Warhol exhibit I saw at the DeYoung museum as a college student and how it was so multidimensional: music, art, objects, video, even a room dedicated to zoning out to the Velvet Underground complete with a large padded ottoman and psychedelic lights. I remember the Impressionists exhibit I went to in the same museum. I had known about them since I was a little kid because of my mom, and have grown to love them myself. All around me were real paintings from Manet, Monet, Degas and Renoir. I distinctly remember looking at Renoir’s, “The Swing,” and noticing how the colors were more intense in person than in any reproduction I had seen in a book. Klimt’s work, however, was somehow less impressive in person.

I don’t know what it was. I wasn’t completely unaffected, but there was an emotional connection I wasn’t feeling to Klimt’s paintings. I had forgotten that a lot of the mystery of art is the unpredictability of whether you will connect with it or not. Not only that, but the exhibit had no clear beginning and it didn’t tell a defined story about Klimt and Rodin. It was easy to disengage from the art. It was better to make jokes with Alicia and observe the other people there. Being that I travel three hours from a small town north of Sacramento in order to get to San Francisco, the people I come across in the city are not the kinds of people I come across in my daily life. The people I see walking around the streets as I ride through town fascinate me mainly because I enjoy looking at their style. When I stand side by side with fellow visitors of the art exhibits I’ve attended at the DeYoung and The Legion of Honor, I find them fascinating but also irritating.

Both Alicia and I drew a lot when we were younger and appreciate art, but serious art connoisseurs we apparently are not. When we went to the Klimt-Rodin exhibit, I felt the difference between us and the people who surrounded us. They seemed like Art People and our smiles and laughter as we made jokes about the paintings and sculptures seemed extra irreverent in their presence. They wore serious expressions and spoke quietly. Some posed in front of paintings touching their chins in contemplation. They had informed and intellectual conversation about the art at hand if they did choose to speak. I exaggerate only a little. Alicia and I weren’t making observations about the similarities and differences between Klimt and Rodin. We were taking pictures for Snapchat and coming up with funny captions. After seeing the paintings and sculptures, all that was left of the exhibit was a wall of Klimt’s drawings. Most were nudes of women. Looking at one drawing, Alicia cracked, “I think he just slept around a lot and said, ‘Hey, let me draw you naked.'” Immediately after that, Alicia told me that the girl standing beside her gave her a disapproving look. It’s not that we didn’t enjoy the art at all, or take any time to notice particular details of the pieces there, but for us it wasn’t sacred. If you want to fit in with this crowd, make sure to check your sense of humor in at the door.