The past few days have seen me quite involved with HOA stuff. The Board has dealt with the fact that items have been stolen from the storage rooms and that there is evidence of someone hanging out in the basement, smoking. The response to these disturbing events has involved lots of emails and an emergency board meeting Wednesday. Arranging the logistics to get back door locks changed and keys out to owners and residents has involved chunks of time. And then will come evaluating bids for a security system for the building.

Communication, as always, is the challenge. Clear communication and a calm attitude are vital. And so difficult to attain and maintain.

We attended knitting group last night. Present were: Marla and little Noemi, Nona and Kimba, Donna, Brad and Josh, Wendy. Interesting fact: all of the women present color their hair, none of the males do. Little Noemi is a delight, very focused and energetic. She loves exploring and interacting.

D and I had a good script writing session, putting together Arubian Nights. I like our collaboration, it feels very fun and energetic.

PUSNAKTSNĪBAS / MIDNIGHT MUSINGS. I, the the Vitauts Jaunarājs of today, am at the Union Blvd. house, where I lived until I left for college. It is furnished as the house I lived in, but there is no one in it. I am simply walking around and though it, looking. The first thing that strikes me is how small it is. All the rooms are quite little, certainly in comparison to today’s McMansion standards. I enter each room. First, the really tiny kitchen, then the living/dining “L”, the hallway, the bathroom, the TV room, my parents’ room, my father’s study. It strikes me how bland they are, how unlived in the house really feels.

I recall how totally run-down the whole house was until my last year or two in high school, when Zaiga bludgeoned Armīns into shelling out shekels to lift the place out of slumdom. The house really had gotten ap[pallingly run down, embarrassingly so. The wood floors that had been ruined with water washings so that they were a field of splinters and you could not walk on them without shoes. The cheap kitchen linoleum on floor and counters were worn through to blackness. The cheap plastic tiles were falling off the bathroom walls.

In my midnight visitation it struck me how inept my parents were in terms of maintaining a space. For Armīns it was about money, his appalling stinginess. But also there was the puzzling reality that beauty was of no value to him. I think he could have been perfectly content in a Baby Doe shack. Beauty was important to Zaiga, but she didn’t know how to DO anything. Both of them lived in constant states of depression. In this midnight meandering I felt a great tenderness for those two lost souls.

For the first time, this house felt neutral to me, not a vortex of black energies. I saw it as a 1950’s tract house in a working class neighborhood; not a space of joy or beauty, but not a Black Pit either.

I recalled that when I was in early elementary school, Armīns dealt with some sort of lawn disease by digging all the grass up in brick-sized chunks, which he then stacked in a massive, five or six foot tall, wall outside our alley fence. He would then put a few of the bricks of sod into the trash can every week. This amazing wall, which was fun to play on, only slowly disappeared. What a peculiar way to handle this lawn situation. Armīns would never even consider paying to have someone haul the turf away. So we were the strange house on the block with the enormous pile of sod in the alley.

Both of my parents were profoundly incompetent in terms of negotiating the logistics of day-to-day life. Armīns simply did nothing, would spend not a cent, and Zaiga only knew how to rage and nag. As a result, the space they spent decades living in turned out so palty, so niggardly. How sad.