Jan

12

In memory, Alba spoke French to her cats, Spanish to the dogs, and English to me. She spoke to me out at her remote property because I was educated and had seen a hundred dollar bill, unlike our desert rat peers.

Alba was born in Managua, Nicaragua tremendously premature. She was a cherub in dancing tights at age 7, pictures showing a resemblance and charm to Shirley Temple. Her father before she was ten took her frequently to the city skid row with coins, and later she went alone, to give them to the needy. Dad was a multi-millionaire hardware man with businesses around the world including Europe. Alba wanted to become a nun, but dad ordered her to University of Pennsylvania to study accounting in order to control the family business. She graduated with honors and, at 4' 11" in the college yearbook is the star of the basketball team. She then handled the hardware business records, got a CPA in Nicaragua, and I saw pictures of her in mink stoles in the Caribbean, Mediterranean, and other exotic places on business or pleasure. Then tragedy struck when her beloved father was murdered in Europe. Alba took over the business, but was actually freed to pursue the nunnery, if she could find one to accept her. She gave the business away, and moved to San Francisco, where she was a popular character on the wharf fishing for sailors. She was involved in a head-on collision and would let you stick your fingers in the in the depressions in her head, where she was laid up in bed, comatose for a while, then immobile, and then recovered to become the old Alba again. Raring to go at the nunnery, one after another turned her away, until she threw up her hands to one sister in the archway, and said, 'The hell with you!' She bought a battered blue Ford van and plied the back roads of southern California until she found remote Sand Valley in about 1995, at the age of about 60 - eight miles down the road from my Rancho Scorpion.

Alba was a good neighbor in that we visited bi-annually when we happened to bump into each other on supply runs to town. She fretted over me, often dowsing me with holy water from the Lourdes. She kept her toenails and teeth as they fell out in an accountant file, and a daily record of the temperature for years and years, as the 1' outdoor thermometer in her front yard spun an extra revolution in the summer to register 180F. She chased rattlesnakes with a broomstick, and used no solar, propane or firewood. Her cooking was setting a Cup-of-Soup or the like in the sun to warm. She had no bad habits, except an underground crypt filled with her deceased pets - hundreds of dogs and cats over the years - that were desiccated to remain as if petrified. It was like Twilight Zone going down there and petting them. Alba had a Dog Street of a dozen mongrels, and a 40' trailer full of cats. I would walk down the Street and practically get licked to death, but entering the Cat House was like going into the jungle. Feral cats perched on the cupboards, shelves, bookcases, and under the table and bed.

Once a month, Alba tied garlic around her ankles and walked eight miles through rattlesnake country to a county road to hitch to Blythe, CA for supplies. The snakes do not like garlic. One day Alba did not return, the dogs were set free, the cats escaped, I sealed up the crypt, emptied her toenails and teeth into my pocket, and as the wind now blows through her ramshackle camper I can still see her dancing and singing in the dirt track when the US Marines drove tanks past to practice war games, 'Thank you, Marines. Thank you for saving Managua!' 


Comments

Name

Email

Website

Speak your mind

1 Comment so far

  1. astro the dog on January 19, 2017 8:18 am

    ;;;; LOL my buddies//

Archives

Resources & Links

Search