Southwind

In my kitchen there is a round, white sugar bowl with blue birds along its rim that came from the dining hall of Sarah Lawrence. Joey sent it to me in the autumn of 1964, soon after she arrived in Bronxville, NY, to begin her freshman year of college. I like to imagine its theft was a small gesture of disobedience, as well as a way to stay connected to the home she’d made in our hearts. Of the pack of girls I knew, she seemed to assume the role of the scribe. She wrote letters and kept lengthy journals in her maddeningly tiny handwriting and I always imagined that she would be the one to tell our tale.

She came to us in our junior year of high school and we watched in amazement as she drove her father’s 1962 white Corvette to school with her long hair, blonde and unkempt, streaming behind her. Having skipped a year, she was younger than the rest of us. We got wind of her brilliant SAT scores, checked out the haphazard way she dressed and were filled with curiosity about her life. Clearly she was a misfit. Motherless, and an only child of an alcoholic father who wanted sons, she was a virtual orphan. Like Eloise of the children’s books, she lived, largely unsupervised, in a hotel. Or rather, in the Los Gatos Lodge, which was built and owned by her volatile Greek father, Joe Moucressey. We were dazzled by her freedom from convention and we adopted her.

Jolene didn’t have a home to go to – just a room in the Lodge which was always, despite maid service, a mess. It was littered with books and records. We were impressed by her encyclopedic, gourmet cookbook (Larousse Gastronomique) and blown away by her collection of Sonny Rollins records. She was more cerebral than the rest of us, and her choice of music was one indication of this. She lived out of boxes--always in transition--and that never really changed as long as I knew her.

She was a tomboy and a great companion who was always up for an adventure, no matter how ill conceived. Better yet, she had access to the dining room of the Lodge and the keys to its Jeep. The Lodge staff was ever mindful of the wisdom in sucking up to the boss’ daughter (which more often than not, extended to her friends); Jolene herself elicited the maternal instinct in almost everyone. There was no end to what we could get away with. Oh, the glory of unlimited orders of French fries or of going into the Lodge’s walk-in refrigerator for a midnight snack of cracked crab and smoked oysters, cheesecake and other Travelodge fare! There was unbridled joy in eating multiple flavors of ice cream straight out of giant industrial size containers after a day of narrow escapes of the Getting In Trouble With Our Parents For Doing Something Dumb variety. We learned to steer clear of her Dad except when he took us flying to the Nut Tree for lunch and then we tended to act like obedient children on our best behavior.

One year she accompanied my family to Carmel for Easter vacation. It was there in crowded spring break traffic that Joey decided I should learn to drive a stick shift—in her father’s Corvette, of course. We acted on this brainstorm while going uphill on Ocean Street through a sea of pedestrians and stop signs on every corner. Suffice it to say it’s a miracle that I am allowed on the California roadway to this day.

Another time, she and Eleanor and I drove up the riverbed at Scotts Creek north of Davenport and back down onto the beach where the river mouth fans out onto the hard sand and empties into the Pacific Ocean. We got the Jeep stuck in the sand just as the tide began to swirl in around the wheels. Deeper and deeper we sank. It was like a horror movie, only it was real life. Riding shotgun, Eleanor and I got pretty good at jumping out of the jeep and locking the manual hubs into four-wheel drive at the first signs of trouble. The two of us pushed and rocked, knee deep in water and sinking fast while Joey remained steady at the helm, jamming gears.

We didn’t limit our shenanigans to tomboy stuff and our adventures sometimes took a domestic turn. Eleanor recounts a tale in which Joey came to her house on Bella Vista, armed with Larousse, to make brioche. They left the brioche to rise in a bowl on the stovetop. When they came back it had grown over the top of the bowl and covered most of the stovetop, like something out of I Love Lucy. In retrospect, it was classic Jolene to begin with the Gastronomique instead of The Joy of Cooking, for instance, and working her way up.

We had lots of four-wheel drive and culinary fiascoes; I like to think that, as girls in the mid-sixties, we were on the cutting edge. Of what, I’m less certain. I do know we had great fun and our adventures gave us a sense of power and allowed us to explore the limits of our budding independence and potential. It was a time together free from boys, from worry about fitting into the girl-mold or other cultural directives of the day.

Joey’s and my bond was what we thought of as The Road, in a Kerouac kind of a way. We fashioned a mantra from a line in a poem by Carl Sandburg. "Let your words be softer than a slow southwind blowing thistledown." The year she went away to Sarah Lawrence, she and I exchanged St. Christopher medals and had them engraved with "Southwind Always’.

Our lives drifted together and apart in a natural progression. In the eighties our lives intersected again. Jolene and boyfriend Warren, Eleanor and David, Gary (my second husband) and I hooked up as couples. I used to meet Jolene for lunch at restaurants that met our criteria, which we based on the old Shorepost in Los Gatos. One of our haunts was Bini’s in San Jose, nestled unobtrusively amidst canneries and railroad tracks. After dining with the cannery day shift, we would go flying and I would gaze out at the landscape while she logged hours for her next rating.

Gary and I once took a trip with her and Warren to one of John Wayne’s favorite fishing (and drinking) spots in Baja. That’s really all we knew about the place, except that it had an airstrip and if it was good enough for the Duke, it was good enough for us. As we prepared to leave Mulegé, I got up with her at dawn prior to take-off to walk the dirt strip we’d landed on earlier in the week. She would check for potholes and kick big rocks out of the way while I kept an uneasy eye on the Federales (who looked ever so much like children armed with AK47s) as they in turn watched our every move. We left early before the air became too hot and thin to hold us up.

Flight was (and is) a mystery to me. The four of us (along with our gear) were loaded into what seemed, for all practical purposes, a lot like my claptrap1963 VW bug. The only difference was that we were cruising high and fast over the deserts and coastline of Baja and it was a long way down. What was a leap of faith for me, was for Joey an area of skill and discipline. Whether we were high above the earth or on motorcycles (we rode on the back in those days) bound for Yosemite or Big Sur, I admired her determination. When I look at old photos of her from that time, I am startled to see what looks to me like a 12 or 13 year old girl.

In those years she worked part time in Palo Alto for a maverick executive whose company had been acquired by a larger one. He appreciated her intelligence and accommodated her unconventional schedule and style, despite the corporate culture that engulfed them. She was also a flight instructor and a card-carrying airframe mechanic. We talked often during that period of time and once around 1979 she phoned me from work, to ask if I’d heard on the news about a mid-air collision that had taken place at the San Jose Municipal airport. I had. A training Cessna was making an instrument approach (highest priority in the lineup) while a larger Beechcraft was taxiing for takeoff. The impatient pilot of the Beechcraft thought he’d been cleared by the tower and began his climb as the Cessna descended (its nose up to slow the plane, blocking the forward and down view); In a tangle of propellers and ripping metal, the planes struck one another. Both were airborne at the time. "That was me," she said. "They’re saying I’m part of a small fraternity of pilots who’ve survived a mid-air collision."

In July of 1982, when I heard the radio report of another mid-air collision involving a small plane out of Reid-Hillview, my first thought was "No way could it happen twice". But that thought was followed by an abrupt falling sensation—the stuff of dreams, only worse. When I couldn’t reach her by phone, I waited for the call that told me my friend had fallen out of the sky.

In those days, I knew less about the rituals of death than I do now, so I did the only thing I could think to do for her. Just before daylight, I drove out to the airport to find her old white Porsche sitting alone in the parking lot. I took her journal out of its customary place in the side pocket of the car and brought it home for safekeeping. Knowing how guarded she was, I wanted to protect her in the only way I could.

Looking at the past through adult eyes, I see Jolene in a slightly different light. I still remember her perfume (ironically, the sophisticated "Joy"), the miscellaneous articles of expensive clothing she allowed herself (never a complete outfit) and, of course, there was the Gastronomique. Like the rest of us, she prepared for the woman she was becoming. Unlike us, the time she had to grow into that woman was cut short. All of this took place in the shadow of an overbearing father. I think it was her relationship with him that gave her the defiant stance she had toward life, though she never stopped seeking his love and approval. It was in the vacuum following his death, a year before hers, that her plane went down in East San Jose. Sadly, I have no recollection of our ever talking about her mother, or the grief she must have known. As I recall, Joey was barely 13 years old when her mother died.

The moon is full tonight and I can’t sleep so instead I am pouring through "Honey and Salt" looking for the poem whose last two lines we took as our watchword, our secret code. My dogs are stretched out on the bed, annoyed by my restlessness, but ever faithful. There is a chill in the ocean air coming in through the window this early morning.

I still use the sugar bowl from the Sarah Lawrence dining hall but I haven’t read Sandburg in a long while. His words, which we somehow took on as part of our story, are filled with color and light. Finally I find it, there in the last verse of a first sonata written for a young girl. For a couple of hooligans, it is surprisingly tender.

"Be shabbawobba now
before this pool of day to come.
Speak and be still.
Listen and be still.
A ring of topaz floats in rose-light.
Handles of moongold go in a hush.
The pool welcomes a pair of orange slippers,
the gauze of them winking out and coming back.
Come passwords, come numerals,
come changing altar lights.
Fingers, be cool, strum only half-heard chords.
Let your words be softer than
A slow south wind blowing thistledown"



For Jolene Moucressey, (April 24, 1947 - July 27, 1982)
Michael Edwards Dorenzo, 2004