Warning to gals who use public places, like Safeway's check-out lines, for their personal confessionals: Others will be listening in

It's true. I have no shame. If people are talking loudly in public about their personal problems--whether to a another human being who is present or to someone on their cell phone--I'll listen in. 

Will you?

Maybe I'm obnoxiously nosy. Oh, wait! I'm a writer! And, I'm gathering bits and pieces of true-life human drama to, uh, put into my trashy new novel, which has the working title: Peyton Place 2010: Walnut Creek.

My latest eavesdropping on a personal confessional occurred Sunday night. But, as with all these situations, my eavesdropping, I swear, was totally unvoluntary.

After I went to the emergency room for gashing my thumb with a potato peeler, I stopped in at Safeway in downtown Walnut Creek to pick up some Motrin. I wound up in line behind two artsy young women who looked like they were on their way to a party. They were dressed up and buying beer and party snacks.  

One of the women was striking, with long, wavy dark hair and big brown Penelope Cruz eyes. She was dressed in a silky turquoise jacket and brightly patterned skirt, shining with tiny mirror tiles--very unusual but pretty. This Penelope Cruz look-alike was with her friend, who was, to be blunt, more plain, dressed in a dark somber suit.

The Plain Jane was playing the role of the less glamorous sidekick, listening and looking up sympathetically, as Penelope Cruz spoke in desparate, dramatic and very audible tones about her relationship woes.

I couldn't help but overhear. Neither could anyone else, including the clerk who was trying to get Penlope to focus on showing her ID for the beer. 

Penelope Cruz sounded like she was on the verge of making a big life decision, whether to stay with Him--We really love each other!--but not sure if love is enough: We just need to hold on a little longer... I'm not sure this is how I want to live the rest of my life!

At some point, I caught Plain Jane's eye, but she seemed unconcerned that I was obviously watching the two of them and listening in. She turned her attention back to Penelope Cruz, who revealed more reasons she was having a really bad day. She had just learned that she had been rejected from Berkeley--for graduate school in art--but, well, she shrugged, she still had a chance at some other schools. 

That's nice to hear.

Hate to make stereotypes about my gender, but it is usually females who have no shame about crying a river in public about their personal woes. Can you imagine men doing that? Oh, men can be loud and obnoxious and self-absorbed when out socializing in public, but it's never about their girlfriend difficulties or anything else remotely personal.  

The worst are, probably not surprisingly, teenage girls.

She's just so unfair! declaired a sulky, slouchy, faux-plantinum blond nymphette. She, too, was standing in the check-out line at Safeway, complaining to her friend about her mom not letting her go out that night. And, she went on--and on--to loudly voice other complaints.
Once when I was changing in the locker room at my gym, I got to listen to another girl in her late teens complain into her cell phone about a whole range of personal issues.

Of course, I listen--even though, in some cases, as with the squawking-voiced girl in  the locker room-- the confessional ceases to be entertaining and starts to become annoying.

Maybe I have no morals or decency by eavesdropping. Then again, if people are going to talk loudly and fill the air of grocery store lines, locker rooms, and restaurant dining rooms,with their personal dramas, well, they don't deserve their privacy.

Walnut Creek defined by Urban Dictionary

In several posts, I've been asking readers to share their views on how they view this fair East Bay suburb that they either live in or visit. What do they see for its future? Should it become more urban, or should it retain a sense of Mayberry?

Well, a reader has suggested a good place to find some answers to the question of what makes Walnut Creek Walnut Creek. It's dictionary, specifically, the online Urban Dictionary. This is a very useful resource for anyone in 2010, especially if you want to understand what your kids are talking about or you want to attempt to sound cool in front of your kids. (Good luck with that!)

Urban Dictionary is the place where you can find answers to such pressing questions as how to spell "beyotch," and what is "Grand Theft Impairment" (The 4-hour period of time that you cannot drive or function in society due to playing Grand Theft Auto.)

Anyway, it is, like Wikipedia, reader written and edited, so you have to accept that some bias and personal opinion will seep into the definitions. And, the demographics of contributors appear to skew younger. But here is how the authoritative Urban Dictionary contributors define Walnut Creek, California. There are 11 entries. I thought No. 5 was particularly insightful. Some excerpts (with spelling retained):

1. It's getting bigger and better. has a lot of stupid people. but the number of cool kids is catching up. : - )
2. Hella cool city in NorCal.
3. Population is filled with rich preps, wanna-be-ghettos, pretty girls, or really good skateboarders. All the kids know how to have fun, including parties every night, alcohol for illegal age, joy riding, and tagging walls. Corey Duffel (pro skateboarder) is from w.c.
4. The local high school is predominantly inhabited by:
(but not limited to)
--Rich kids who have adopted the Southern California surfer look and lifestyle, while still maintaining a prep sensibility. I.e. toting a longboard everywhere you go, wearing a parka, and flip flops, whilst inhaling a scalding starbucks frappuccino.
--Ghetto imitating white kids (most likely also rich)
--These fellows are a puzzling breed, while these lads are probably your former best friends from Walnut Creek Intermediate, the same ones who used to wear ac/dc shirts and had skater cuts. Somewhere along the transitory line between 8th grade and freshman beginning, they discovered Mac dre and keak da sneak, and all was lost. Now they spend their time getting hyphy on the weekends and before 1st period. While still trying to figure out why everyone stares in bewilderment at the length of their t-shirts.
Everyone else: Now apparently walnut creek has fostered itself a fresh crop of 'scenesters' 'hipsters' and the like.
--Whether these be confused children who gage their ears, and listen to 3oh!3 and norma jean. Or the guy who can't get over syd barrett, looks like lou reed, wears porkpie hats and rolls his own cigarettes, and has an affinity for all things vintage. There are reported sightings of both of these types throughout the charming township of Walnut Creek.
5. Walnut Creek is a city in the Bay Area with an amazing downtown, good schools, and fun things to do if you know the right people. While the downtown is famous for its high end stores like Betsey Johnson, it also has cool underground thrift stores.
6. Well, can't include this one, because it's a little risque--with references, for example, to teen sexual activities--for my supposedly family-friendly blog.
7. A pretty boring city filled with sluts and wanna-be ghetto people. at least it's close to fun places like oakland. lots of drugs in most of the schools here.
8. A s---- sack town that's full of police and dumb blonde socal people. The socal immigration started around the same time as the remodeling of the downtown area, which was a few years back (around '00). Before then, walnut creek was just a small quiet town. At that time, walnut creek also became a magnet for wiggers, thugs, brodys, beaners, and just about [anyone] around the bay area who could afford a BART pass. Basically there are no "locals" in walnut creek anymore.
9. An almost all white, small town with little to do but sample music at Barnes and Nobles.
10. Can't include this one either because of racist terms.
11. Nothing ever happens here and the local hang out is the small downtown area. None of the couples under 18 ever have sex because they are all to stupid and cowardly to do so.

Home (under the bridge) for the holidays!

A roof over one's head? Well, that's something right? Found one man or woman's retreat under the Ironhorse Trail bridge that crosses Ygnacio Valley Road this morning. A sleeping bag, a pair of shoes ... Maybe someone slept there last night, and will do so again tonight, and tomorrow night, Christmas Eve. Or maybe this denizen of our community, temporary or not, has found another place to stay, has moved on--but left behind some belongings that could still be very the cold nights we're having.

Plundering a long vacant house here in Walnut Creek

Thieves pulling up to a house, long vacant and long on the market. They have a U-Haul truck. They go in and tear out countertops and possibly other appliances, load it them in their truck and start to drive away.

Sounds like a scene out of a post-apocalyptic movie (The Road anyone?), or from one of those foreclosure-hit neighborhoods in East Contra Costa.

But it happened recently here in Walnut Creek. I heard about it at a party last night, attended by some other people in the 'hood. This house, a ranch, was overhauled after its former owner, the neighborhood "cat lady" died. A family with young kids moved in, and seem to be settling in to the school and the 'hood. Then they had to move--maybe a job relocation--and put the house on the market--just as home prices started to tumble and the Great Recession hit.

And there the house stood, and stood, and stood, for more than 400 days. Apparently they were asking around $900,000 for it initially. Word is that the price was reduced to $625,00, and word is that had been recently been sold and that the buyers may have some controversial plans in mind...

Heard about the plundering because my party's hostess was driving by the house when the U-haul was being loaded up. Looked suspicious to her, so she followed the truck, and called the cops...

Happy Autumn Walnut Creek!

Okay, it's not officially the start of autumn--yet. But it is the day after Labor Day, which in many people's minds, the start of the slide into autumn and then winter.

Did you feel that special, almost fall-like chill in the air this morning? And yesterday, I noticed a large number of oak leaves carpeting my back yard patio. On Friday, I noticed that the leaves on a Japanese maple near my workplace were starting to turn orange.

The sign on a Halloween Spirit store has appeared in the windows of the former tire shop at Mt. Diablo Boulevard and Locust Street, prompting my son to ponder what he'll be for Halloween.

I love autumn. It's my favorite season. Bye bye summer. I still retain that schoolgirl sense of the calendar: that autumn signals the start of a new school year for students and the promise of new beginnings for everyone else.

Great thing to do on a beautiful, sunny day: cardboard sliding

The semi-ancient sport of cardboard sliding down a grassy hill. Or cardboard tobogganing, as some purists might call it.

Ever do that as a kid around here? My son and I just got back from a walk around our neighborhood. He has the day off from school, me from work, because of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

Our walk included a stop at his elementary school playground. His school is built against a steep hill that, ever since I was a kid, growing up in this neighborhood, was well known in the neighborhood, and even around Walnut Creek, as a primo spot for cardboard sliding.

My older brother used to bring me to this hill to do this. On visits to Walnut Creek with his sons, now all teenagers, he's brought them back to the hill to cardboard slide.

This afternoon, my son was scootering around the playground, then we sat on the swings and talked. We noticed three middle-school-aged boys ride by us on their bikes and toward the hill. One boy was holding huge, long pieces of cardboard. These boys came well prepared.

A few minutes later they had climbed to a particularly steep part of the hill, with a slope of more than 45 degrees. One by one, they seated themselves on the cardboard at a level spot on the hill just below an oak tree. They then launched themselves, like Olympic tobogganers, off that platform and down the slope.

It was fun to watch, and I thought of doing this with my brother when we were kids. He would say, though, that the moist green winter grass around here does not offer optimal sliding conditions. You need to wait for summer, when the grass is yellow, bone-dry and as slick as ice. It's in those conditions that you get real, heart-pounding speed down the hill.

Still, these three boys got some speed going. One crashed and took a roll, once, twice. He stood, brushed himself off ,and headed back up the hill for another slide.

As a parent, I see potential broken bones. But in trying to remember doing that as a kid, I could remember pure, thrilling, free-falling joy.

A WC Man’s Christmas Story of a Precious Family Heirloom Surviving War and Revolution

A friend from Chicago, who is crazy about crèches and nativity scenes, e-mailed this New York Times story that features a lovely holiday tale about a Walnut Creek man and his strong attachment to his family’s 19th century miniature scene of Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and the Wise Men in that Bethlehem manger.

The December 18 story, "Many Takes on a Traveler’s Tale," discusses the history of creating nativity scenes and the American hobbyists who specialize in collecting and building them. It ends with the nearly miraculous turn of events that brought a family crèche to Tom Scovel, a San Francisco State University linguistics professor who lives in Walnut Creek’s Rudgear area.

Scovel is pictured here in a Times photo. The Scovel section of the story reads:

Tom Scovel seems equally unlikely to part with his 19th-century German crèche, which has survived in his family for decades: it was hidden during Japan’s occupation of China in World War II; trucked across the battle lines of the Chinese revolution; and smuggled into Hong Kong in 1951, at the height of the mainland’s communist zeal.

Today, the crèche resides safely atop a tall cabinet in a house on a cul-de-sac … where Mr. Scovel, 69, lives with his wife, Janene, and their two school-age grandchildren. Or relatively safely, anyway. “Invariably, angels fall,” he said. “There’s nothing metaphorical about it.” Looking at the small figure that has hung atop his family Nativity for some 70 years, he added, “My father has glued her back together, and so have I.”

Mr. Scovel was born in Jining, China, a district capital in Shandong Province, where his Presbyterian parents — a doctor and nurse — served in a mission hospital through the 1930s. On the day Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Japanese Army installed two soldiers at the Scovels’ home and placed the family under house arrest.

Mr. Scovel’s parents, preparing for even worse, buried their collection of antique Chinese coins and stamps in the backyard under cover of darkness; his grandmother’s crèche they stashed behind a false wall in the attic. Soon after, the army dispatched the Scovels and their four children by train to the Weifang concentration camp, where they remained until a Red Cross prisoner exchange delivered them back to American shores.

It was 1946 when the Scovels returned to missionary work in China, and another year before they borrowed a truck to try to recover what they had lost. The coins and stamps in the backyard were gone, but the crèche remained untouched in its original box.

This week, Mr. Scovel will tell the story of the crèche’s survival to a fourth-grade Sunday school class. “They have no concept of World War II,” he said. “They get it mixed up with the War of 1812.” Still, he said, he won’t be surprised if the crèche exerts the same kind of hold on them that it does on his grandchildren — and on him.

“Winter is coming and long nights, and God knows all the troubles that pervade us,” Mr. Scovel said. “And every year when it’s the darkest, there’s this crèche that survived so much.”

My neighbor is a hoarder

The Mayo Clinic defines hoarding as:

The excessive collection of items that seem to have limited or no value, such as newspapers or trash, along with the inability to discard them. Hoarding creates such cramped living conditions that entire rooms may be filled to capacity, and homes may be left with only narrow pathways winding through stacks of clutter. Some people also collect animals, keeping hundreds of dogs, cats or other animals in their homes, as filth and waste pile up and the animals become sick.

Hoarding, also called compulsive hoarding and compulsive hoarding syndrome, is thought to be connected to obsessive-compulsive disorder. But many aspects of hoarding remain a mystery, and researchers continue to learn about this recently recognized problem.

This, I’ve learned recently, is the deal with a neighbor.

I’ll call her “Esther.” She’s probably in her mid-50s and owns a modest three-bedroom house that sits on a rather large parcel of land (about one acre). From the outside, her house looks like a dump, and, yes, its appearances causes consternation among neighbors. You know, the front yard is full of overgrown weeds and miscellaneous flowering plants she put in a half-hearted attempt at landscaping.

She’s been a vague sort of neighborhood nuisance for years for allowing deer, raccoons and other critters to breed in her back acre. My neighborhood isn’t exactly rural. It’s within a mile of downtown Walnut Creek, California, a major San Francisco suburb that has about 63,000 residents. However, my neighborhood backs up against what they call here in California “open space”—hillsides studded with grasses and oaks, though those undeveloped acres in my neighborhood are diminishing and becoming homes to McMansions and other small, new developments.

With regard to the deer, Esther leaves the side gate to her back yard open, so the deer wander onto our street and into other people’s yards. They ate the buds of some tomatoes that I, in one of my half-hearted attempts at gardening, planted. The destruction of my tomatoes made me briefly contemplate joining the National Rifle Association and arming myself with the kind of weaponry that would pick off those tick-ridden Bambis—one by one.

As for the raccoons, I guess they got into the basement of one of Esther’s next-door neighbor’s. I'll call that neighbor “Paula." Paula had to hire an exterminator or some other professional to get it out.

Paula is my source for various bits of news related to Esther’s hoarding disorder. Paula used to work as a nurse, which makes her rather practical, compassionate and knowledgeable about dealing with different individuals and their mental idiosyncrasies. So, Paula says, Esther lives in cramped living quarters, similar to those who meet the Mayo Clinic definition for hoarding. Entire rooms in Esther's home are filled to capacity with junk. She must move through one part of a room to the other, or from one part of her house to the other, through narrow pathways of clutter.

And that deer-breeding back yard? It’s a fire hazard, and, according to Paula, the fire department had to come out, inspect it, and declare it so. Apparently, the back yard was a tangle of brush and weeds. Some clumps stood as high and as wide as a garage door. This was incendiary bone-dry, California drought-parched brush and weeds. The smallest spark from fireplace, barbecue or cigarette ash could set it off. And some of this tangle backed up to adjacent neighbor’s property lines, including Paula's.

Saddest of all, Esther had a trio of cats she proclaims to love but who were apparently neglected—at least according to Paula, who would slip them food. One of those cats was once a friendy, fluffy white cat, whose name is something like “Bobby.” When my now 10-year-old son was little, and before we got a cat of our own, we would sometimes encounter Bobby rolling around happily on our driveway. He was a sweet cat. My son, then 4, would love crouching down to pet Bobby, who wasn’t afraid of strangers and was not the kind of cat who would suddenly lash out at anyone, including a small child who could be clumsy in how he stroked an animal.

Several months ago, I happened to be home late one weekday afternoon and saw a county animal services truck roll up to Esther’s home. Esther was not yet home, and the officer left a note posted on her front door screen. And then, she pulled up, home from work. She actually drives a newer model Volkswagon that always looks shiny, clean and nicely maintained. The animal services officer approached her, and she admitted him into her probably cluttered living room.

Paula says a neighbor complained about the sad, neglected condition of her cats, including Bobby. I’ve seen Bobby a few times over the past couple months. He’s not the same fearless, friendly cat that my son used to pet. I see him crouching on Esther’s driveway, near the garage door, looking sad and weak. And I can see, even from across the street, that his ears always look scabbed. Paula says Bobby got one of his ears half chewed off in a fight—presumably with one of the raccoons that Esther lets breed in her yard.

I mentioned that Esther works. Yes, she does. She’s a manager for a government agency, in a department that actually requires lots of organization and attention to meticulous detail. I guess she’s one way in her professional life, and another way in her personal life.

I don’t speak to her much, except hellos across the street, as either she or I are coming or going. She's always nice enough, but I guess she’s not a well person. In fact, she might be pretty disturbed. Hoarding is, according to the Mayo Clinic and other experts, a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder. But, also according to the experts, there is not a whole lot others can do until the hoarder acknowledges she’s ill and seeks treatment.