Maude Frickert died last week. I’ll miss her. Even though she inhabited the body of a comedian named Jonathan Winters.

Winters passed away last Friday at 89: a guy who was more comfortable at being someone else than he ever was at being himself.

Luckily, he had lots of other selves to be; Winters was a crowd on two feet, an inexhaustible cast of crazy characters. And he could improvise endlessly.

But it’s Maude Frickert that I remember: an old woman in a bulky black dress with wire-frame glasses and a cap of silver hair – and the sharpest tongue on the planet. Winters as Maude was outrageous, shameless, and bluntly honest: all the things that proper older women aren’t supposed to be.

Only, they are. A lot of them, anyway. You aren’t supposed to know that. It contravenes the cultural script.

I learned the truth at my grandmother’s knee. Gramma was large, elderly, and Portuguese, with an accent as thick and rich as linguica sausage. She liked to tell me elderly Portuguese jokes. Because I was young and her accent was so thick, it took awhile to figure out that Gramma’s old jokes were off-color.  Wandering sailors, snooty priests, foul-mouthed parrots, not-so-innocent women: this was Gramma’s cast of characters.

“What were you talking to Gramma about?” Mom would ask my seven-year-old self.

“She told me a joke about the priest, the widow, and the sailor’s parrot.”

“She told you THAT one?” Mom would hiss in dismay. But she never had “a word” with Gramma. No one did. It was no use. Gramma had got through a tough life by being a live wire, a character who knew what she wanted and didn’t care what other people thought.

Back when I was a teenager Uncle Caesar, 65 if he was a day, ran off to get married without telling anyone. He’d just buried his second wife – he buried the first one, too – and the guy couldn’t stand being single. Six in the morning, inn the dawn following the wedding night, the phone rings.

“Yur?” Uncle Caesar answered. It was early.

“So what’s this about you getting married?” It was an old woman.

“Who’s this?” Caesar demanded groggily.

“Nosy Rosy!” It was Gramma, of course. Her network of spies had just gotten the word to her – I’m not sure she ever slept – and she didn’t care what time of day it was or who he was in bed with. By Uncle Caesar’s report, she gave him an earful.

Some of my aunts were practically Gramma’s clone: Aunt Lupe, for example. As a girl she’d been pushed into a bad marriage by Gramma; she got out of that and decided, later on, that it was more fun to live in sin and drink beer – especially other people’s beer.

And Aunt Amelia. She and Gramma fought like cats in a sack, because both of them wanted their own way and neither would ever yield.

After Gramma died, Aunt Amelia let her hair go gray and restyled it, so that she looked – just like Gramma. She acted like her, too, as she always had: did what she wanted, said what she felt like, and never looked back. Aunt Amelia was actually very easy to get along with: you could say absolutely anything to her, because she never listened.

After church service last week I charged to the men’s room – they’d baptized somebody’s spawn, and it took a while. As I zipped up at the urinal, after, a prim old woman strode into the men’s room. “My, isn’t church busy today,” she remarked, smiling, as if discussing the weather. She didn’t break step for a moment – just moved confidently into the toilet stall and shut the door.

Wow. Bold old women are alive and well. Maude Frickert could not have excelled her. I could tell you other stories, but that’s for another time.

There was once a very wise women who kept her eyes wide open all her life, and wrote very interesting novels about people and the things that they do – to themselves, and to others. From her work a couple of quotes stay with me: “Pain is the great teacher of mankind. Under its breath, human souls grow.” And she also said, “Old age transfigures – or petrifies.”

One thing that I can say about the bold, old women in my life is that they’ve all been through the mill, one way or another. And they survived, and figured out who they were, and accepted it. Even Jonathan Winters based the Maude Frickert character on his Aunt Lou, a large woman with lifelong physical handicaps – and a lightning wit, and a taste for apple brandy. And it seemed to me that as they got older these women seasoned liked old wood, knots and blemishes and all.

As a not-terribly-assertive man in late middle age, I still do ask myself sometimes what I’m going to be when I grow up. I can aspire to nothing better, I think, than to accept myself as I am and stop making excuses for not being what others want me to be. And just move forward from there. The bold, old ladies show the path forward. As did Jonathan Winters, the guy who became himself by becoming others. Rest in peace, sir. And Maude with you.

It’s a nice restaurant. But the kitchen misplaced our order. Our eggs and potatoes were long in coming.

On the plus side, the waitress kept the coffee flowing. Rhumba and I had much to chat about, and the surroundings were delightful.

But as time passed I became restless. Out of boredom, I fiddled with my place setting.

This proved to be instructive.

I rearranged the spoon, knife and fork until they were fanned out from each other, just barely touching at the handles. There’s a bit of the obsessive-compulsive in me.

Then I moved the knife to one side. The spoon moved with it.

I moved the knife even further.  The spoon continued to cling to the knife.

I repeated the operation several times. Both the spoon and fork followed the fork as is it were –

“Rhumba,” I said, “My table knife is magnetized.” I demonstrated.

Stout scientist that she is, Rhumba recreated the experiment. “So is mine,” she replied with some wonder.

I turned over the knife. The word “stainless” had been stamped on the blade. I frowned. Stainless steel was not magnetic, they’d always told me.

We soon found that only the knives were magnetized. They attracted the knife and fork, but not vice versa. I hauled out a camera and snapped pictures of the amorous tableware. I even used the flash. The waitress trotted over and examined us dubiously. When the two of us get bored, anything might happen.

“I’ll see what’s holding up your order,” she said, and fled to the kitchen. We continued to amuse ourself, and speculated.

Some long time later, she returned with the food.

“I noticed,” I had to say, “that our knives are magnetized. Look….” I demonstrated. “Is that normal around here?”

She was evasive. Maybe someone had mentioned it, once. She comped our meals because of the long wait. That was nice.

But I went home and looked up magnetic tableware on the Internet. Oh my.

I learned that some formulations of stainless steel include iron and thus can be magnetized. Restaurant tableware is commonly made of stainless that contains iron.

As for how it happened… when the busboy clears your table, he takes the dirty dishes to the scullery and scrapes the debris of your meal off the plate and into a garage can. If he’s in a hurry, a knife or fork may slide into the trash, too. And they cost money.

So cost-conscious restaurants put a chute lined with magnets on top of the garbage can. The magnets will stop any tableware that might otherwise fall into the trash. Eventually, some dishwasher retrieves it.

If the busboys are careless enough often enough, a restaurant’s tableware can become magnetic. Magnetic knives are most often reported, probably because they have more mass than forks or spoons.

Restaurants have every reason to stay mum about this arrangement. Even if she did know, our waitress was never going to say, “Oh, yes, that’s because our tableware routinely ends up in the garbage can, where we retrieve it with powerful magnets. But don’t worry, it’s been well-washed! Are you enjoying your Eggs Benedict?”

Well… maybe not as much as I was. But I’ll live.

And if you have time on your hands in a very nice restaurant, you might consider finding out what your table knife is capable of. Or, you can keep your illusions. They make the food taste better.

I’m agnostic on the subject of Supreme Beings. One may exist. One may not. You can’t “prove” either proposition unless you turn off part of your brain – popular option though that has been.

Despite this uncertainty, I attend church. God doesn’t have to exist to be important.

But I’m a complete atheist when it comes to the Cult of the Baby.

You know what I mean. Some parents – and they’re rarely poor – project all their anxiety about life onto their child: Little Numkins must be actively nurtured and protected in every way: only organic food, only private schools, only rigidly-scheduled after-school activities, and on and on.

The Cult is strong in Santa Cruz, particularly in the neighborhoods where live the high-tech meritocrats and scholastic brahmins. We’ve had a couple of vivid crimes in Santa Cruz lately, and every time the cultists cry: “Our children aren’t safe!”

But unless your two-year-old likes to loiter outside the Red Room bar at 1:30 on a Saturday morning and argue with Watsonville gang-bangers, Little Numkins has little to worry about. Ditto your ten-year-old sitting alone in the dead of night at an isolated bus stop in a deserted industrial neighborhood, with a laptop in one hand.

So I look somewhat askance at the eight- or twelve-wheeled infant limos cruising the aisles at New Leaf Market where the parents plunk down a couple of hundred bucks for two bags of organic groceries.

Yes, I’m old; I’ve joined the Old Scouts. I’m working on my Grumpiness Badge. It’ll go next to my Ukelele Achievement pin.

But I couldn’t help but feel for the woman pushing the the tandem baby carriage into line behind me at the checkout counter. It held two identical, pink-cheeked tots of no small weight. I couldn’t tell you what sex they were; to me, at that age, they all look like Hello Kitty.

And the mother wore simple, casual clothing that my Santa Cruz eyes saw had cost a lot of money; her teeth were even and white, her hair glowed, Her skin gleamed with a lifetime of care and good health. Bare delts bulged competently with the strain of pushing 100 pounds of child and gear sideways, so that her carriage would fit into the narrow passage between check stands.

She had a lot going for her. But I looked into those eyes and saw exhaustion, and whelming terror. “BABY!” the eyes shouted “BABY! BABY! BABY! BABY!” Parenthood hit her between the eyes like a ball peen hammer. It was demanding, vast, never-ending, and paid poorly. It blotted out the rest of the world. And all she knew to do right now, it seemed to me, was keep putting one foot in front of the other. Heroes make their reputations on little more than that.

So perhaps at that point I felt more kindly toward the Cult. And when a clerk stepped up to the empty check-out stand next door and called out, “NEXT IN LINE, PUH-LEEZE,” I told the young mother to go in my place. She thanked me and arduously turned the heavy carriage in its own circumference. It was painful to watch: not a three-point turn. More like five or six.

And just as the nose wheel approached the check stand, a pickle-faced man zipped in front of her and dumped a pile of groceries on the counter. He assiduously avoided looking at the young mother. She sighed: all that work, and nothing gained. But she kept silent.

Now, my wife can lecture persuasively on the aberrant behavior of males in supermarkets. She says they grow panicky among the aisles and racks, and aim to escape with their finds as quickly as possible. I see the truth in this; and it’s also possible that, on a bad day, I might do the same as the pickle-faced man.

But the elderly gentleman with his pickle face had taken self-absorption to a high plateau that even the Cult of the Baby, in the desperation of its acolytes, might never approach.

“God,” I prayed fervently to the being who might or might not be there, “let that man never be me. Cult of the Baby notwithstanding.”

You need something to do with emotions like that, when they come. A supreme being’s as good a place to put them as any. Even if not real. Staring at a wall and counting your breaths works, too; but it can be hard to find a good wall when you need one.

As for the Cult of the Baby, I’ll reclass it as a temporary insanity that is necessary for the continuance of the race, at least in this weird and disconnected time when all the aunts and sisters and grandmothers that once helped new mothers are scattered across thousands of expensive miles and immersed in their own troubles. And when you really can’t trust what the multinationals are putting in the baby food, and when husbands still don’t pick up their share of the load, promise though they might.

And when the Cultists cry, “Our children aren’t safe!” I’ll answer silently to myself, no, but they never were and never will be, not beyond all possible risk. But bless you all anyway.

We’ve had a cold winter here in town – colder than we’re used to, at least. The thermometer had its hands full pushing above 50 degrees, and each night slunk back to the low 30s at the slightest excuse.

Yes, we’re weather wimps here. But it’s Central California; we’re not set up for cold. We were promised mild weather year-round. If winter’s going to be this grim from now on, I want a $100K refund on my house for breach of contract.

But last Friday the gods smiled on Santa Cruz. They brightened the sun, softened the air, and brought the swimsuit temperatures back for the weekend. It’s a pity to stay indoors on a day like that.

So I didn’t. I walked downtown Santa Cruz and the West Side. Away from the commercial strip, this neighborhoods are little slices of idealized Americana. Big trees, quiet streets, pleasant houses of various ages and conditions—no two of them very alike.

And oxalis. Lots and lots of bright yellow oxalis pes-caprae, aka Bermuda buttercup, buttercup oxalis, English weed, yellow sorrel, African wood-sorrel, sourgrass, and a dozen other names. Oxalis—what everybody calls it in these parts—is an invasive South African perennial that was brought to other countries as an ornamental plant.

If the climate is anything like South Africa’s in its new home, oxalis jumps the fence—literally—and becomes part of the local ecosystem. And as far as climate is concerned, South Africa and California are twins separated at birth.

That’s how oxalis came to be Santa Cruz’ favorite weed—or at least the most noticeable. It’s bright and pretty and everywhere, whether you like it or not. Some do like it; others, not.

Oxalis pes-caprae is an attractive, clumpy plant with dappled, clover-shaped leaves and bright yellow flowers. It’s soft to the touch, attractive, and inoffensive in every way. It blends in well with other flowers and adds a dash of color to green grass and foliage. Sometimes more than a dash.

And oxalis is fragile. The whole clump attaches to the ground by a single stem, which snaps off easily. So when you’ve had enough of the oxalis—or more than enough—it’s quite easy to clear it down to ground level with your bare hands.

Gone. Done. No more. Until next year, when it comes back. Oxalis always comes back.

Sure, you can clear a whole yard of oxalis in about twenty minutes by the grab-and-snap method. And if you have chickens, they’ll eat it down the ground for you in no time. Chickens lust for oxalis in a serious fashion.

But the only way to remove oxalis permanently is to carefully dig out each plant, leaving behind none of the the too-small-to-see-clearly oxalis bulbs. Not only is that a lot more work, it’s almost impossible to get all the bulbs.

And most people kind of like oxalis; so they say, the hell with an orderly garden, and let oxalis come and visit for a few months. And the great thing about oxalis is that its beauty makes even a messy yard look like, just maybe, you meant it to look like that.

Not every Santa Cruzan welcomes oxalis’ disorderly presence. These are people who like their garden “just so” and don’t want unwanted visitors disrupting their carefully arranged botanical effect. They tend to have gardens that disdain spontaneity.

I knew a guy who hated oxalis so much that he carefully dug each oxalis plant out of his backyard as soon as it came up. It took years but he finally had an oxalis-free backyard. He was incredibly proud.

And it wasn’t even really his backyard; he was a renter. But he was into having a controlled, “perfect” garden, and people who are into control tend to hate our gorgeous gatecrasher. Oxalis is about the beauty that can come from letting go of control.

Oxalis is also a promise of renewal. It blossoms in the winter, when most flowering plants are dormant even here in Paradise. At the Trescony Park community gardens, for example, most of the gardeners let their plots go fallow for the winter. And so oxalis steps in to fill the empty gardens and reminds us what spring will be like when the other flowers bloom.

Oxalis fills the neglected spaces of old Santa Cruz; the abandoned side yards, the anonymous strips of ground between fence and sidewalk or sidewalk and street. These spaces should be drab and mundane, but oxalis makes them beautiful.

What do we have to learn from oxalis? There’s a Buddhist teaching story in here somewhere. We get our share of weeds here in Santa Cruz, and many of them we homeowners must battle like invading armies. Blackberry, thistle, stinging nettle: they’ll take over your yard just like oxalis, but they’ll do it with spikes, thorns, and toxins. You’ve got to kill them, because if they take control you might never get it back.

But oxalis is no threat; we know we can get rid of it any time we want to—for a while, at least. And it’s pretty. So mostly the oxalis stays: an uninvited guest, true, but one who only takes what isn’t wanted and always offers presents in return.

Some time back my wife and I went down to the locally-owned supermarket in our locally-purchased car. We bought locally-baked bread and locally-grown broccoli. We even bought locally- (okay, regionally) produced ice cream. And finally, locally-produced eggs.

The egg department proved to be a bit – embarrassing.

Somewhere in the bowels of the packing line at the local egg farm, a rogue machine had ripped the end off a carton of one dozen Grade AA large white eggs. The carton continued on course down the line where a machine sprayed an sell-by date – not on the cardboard carton, but directly on one of the exposed eggs.

The carton proceeded routinely into a cardboard box, onto a truck and to the locally-owned supermarket, where an employee put it in the egg cooler without looking at it.

I had to have a picture. As you have seen.

And a copy of the pic was sent in an email to the egg farm itself. I thought they should know; perhaps improve their process. You know.

I’ve yet to hear back. It’s been, oh, a year now. I’ve complained about a couple of other things as well.  Nada.

I do believe in “buying local.” It’s a big deal in Santa Cruz, where good jobs are not so common for the common folks. This particular outfit makes good eggs – no question. But if you don’t check the carton for broken ones, you’re a damned fool.

I need a reality check here, people: is it normal to expect a broken egg – or two – in every other carton of eggs? I had a life before I came here to Santa Cruz County, and I don’t remember throwing out nearly as many eggs back in San Francisco, or San Jose, or Petropolis, or any damned place as I do here. Locally Owned Egg Farm Inc. has turned me into an assiduous eggshell checker.

I once asked a supermarket stocker what was up with all the broken eggs, and he allowed that the Locally Owned Egg Farm truck could stand to be, oh, just a tiny bit gentler with the eggs when they made delivery. I had visions of a lumper standing on the tailgate of a speeding egg truck, hoisting a crate of Grade AA Large overhead and screaming “CATCH!”

Supporting local business is good. But there’s a difference between “support” and “enabling.”

Like most people, my wife Rhumba and I have thousands of digital snaps that we’ve never printed.  But she finally decided to print a few to put on the wall, and chose a home-town online photo-print service out of loyalty.  But it required her to download an app to her computer.  And then the app didn’t work.  The company’s customer support rep offered to walk her through it, but Rhumba didn’t see why she should have to install the company’s app just to have two or three pictures printed.  The rep said she would bring those ideas to management.

Should I be loyal to local car dealers? When I have yet to find a particularly honest one?   Or to locally-owned retail stores that don’t have what I want – and don’t much care.  There are plenty of good ones, but plenty of the other kind, too.

In my fantasy world, if we want to get serious about this “shop local” thing, bad local businesses should be shamed. Their owners should be snubbed at the surf breaks and not allowed their spot in the rotation. The Chamber of Commerce should eject them from meetings but keep their dues money. Baristas would never make their lattes quite hot enough. Small groups of poorly-paid Latino service workers would follow them around and shout condemnations at them in the Spanish that most of them never bother to learn. Charities would return their donations.

Yeah. That would be nice. Or, you could just not buy their stuff. Change the slogan from “Buy Local” to “Buy Local, But Don’t Be a Tool.” It might be a hard sell down at the Chamber of Commerce. But it’s worth a try.

Addendum, 3/17/2013: One of my favorite local businesses is calling it quits. Farmer’s Exchange, purveyors of quality furniture and home furnishings for many years, is no more.  No tragedy here, no business reversals: just older age, and furniture that seems to get heavier by the year.  

We will miss the women of Farmer’s Exchange, who always went above and beyond on all our requests.  If every local business had the ethic of Farmer’s Exchange, “Amazon” would be nothing but a river in South America.

Many years ago, the wife and I declared ourselves married without benefit of license. We had procured a house. We had introduced each other’s cats to one another.

But we truly knew that we were married when we drove to Sears to buy a refrigerator.

As the huge SEARS sign loomed in the distance, our eyes locked for a moment. “This is serious, isn’t it?” I asked her. She agreed; she felt it, too. We were at the point of no return on this marriage thing: buying a major appliance together. At Sears, no less, the holy altar of domestic life in America, “Where America shops.” The preliminaries was over. It was time to get serious and make a home.

Years later we did marry legally, with license and ceremony. And yet the ceremony wasn’t half as affecting as the sight of that Sears sign swelling ever larger in the windshield.

We entered the store and waded through the muzak toward Major Appliances and a natty crew of salesmen. Neat polyester suits, wire-rimmed glasses, blow-dried hair, white teeth: you could still make good money at Sears in those days. We were corralled by an elderly woman with orange hair, a neat suit, and a name tag that read:

MARGE
BRANDMASTER

Brandmaster? We had no idea what that meant, but it sounded impressive. And so did the Brandmaster. She efficiently gathered our requirements and led us directly to several suitable machines. I found out later that the Brandmaster had worked at that Sears store for as long as anyone could remember.

Almost before we knew it, the Brandmaster had the sale. We purchased a sleek, white ‘fridge at a price we could afford – a Kenmore, as luck would have it – and were politely sent home with a stack of pink receipts and an appointment time when a gray Sears truck would make delivery. Burly men in gray uniforms would wheel the fridge into place as if it were made of styrofoam. It would serve us faithfully for many years.

Did we get the lowest possible price? I have no idea. But we got a reliable fridge with the features that we needed. And the whole process was efficient, painless, and managed by people who knew what they were doing. For years we spoke in solemn tones about “going to see the Brandmaster” whenever we needed something from Sears.

Time passed, and a lot of it. We purchased other appliances at Sears. Yet as the years went by it became obvious that Sears was no longer the store it had been. America was shopping elsewhere.

But when Rhumba decided that we needed a new vacuum cleaner last week, there was really only one place to go. Sears still had the best selection.

But everything else had changed. Gone were the blow-dried sales vets of yesteryear; our salespeople were two post-high-school women dressed in leggings and hoodies. “Can we help you?” they asked. But they couldn’t. They couldn’t tell us anything about the machines except what was on the display placards. “What are people buying?” I asked in frustration, and the woman named three brands: the two which advertise most heavily on TV, and then the cheapest. No help there.

So we spent 90 minutes looking at every brand and every type of vacuum cleaner under the sun. We looked at bagged machines, bagless machines, uprights, canisters, sticks, convertibles. We looked at machines with attachments, and without. We talked out our needs, and whether each machine would meet them. We lifted the vacuums, wheeled them around and tried them out.

It was a forced march. The salesclerk drifted by at one point to ask, “Are you gonna buy today?” “Eventually,” I answered tersely. She went away. But what is Sears paying her? Eight bucks an hour and a tiny commission?

Eventually we settled on a simple, lightweight, bagged upright that sucks like a hurricane. This particular brand is pitched on TV by the company’s founder, a growly old man who swears that he’ll gut himself on your front lawn if you aren’t completely satisfied. Or something like that. And satisfied we have been. Our rugs and floors turned several shades lighter after just one or two passes by the mighty upright.

Did we get the best possible price? Hell no. Did we get good service? Hell, no. We had to do all the work. Effortless it was not. The only thing Sears offered was a chance to get our hands on the machines; other than that, Amazon would have been a better deal. At Sears the Brandmaster has left the building, and with her left knowledge, service, and support: all the things that Sears really used to sell, no matter what exactly was in your hands when you walked out the door. I don’t see Sears surviving for many more years.

And you have to ask: if the salesmen aren’t paid a living wage anymore, and little service is offered, and the prices aren’t the lowest – where’s all the money going? Ask that about vacuum cleaners, about telephone and cable TV service, about health care, and prescription drug prices, and even the price of a snazzy Apple laptop made by people earning a dollar or two an hour.

I leave that question open. I think you know. And I think America ought to shop somewhere else now.

But where?