All Things Possible

By Eliza Sarah Graham

Bobbie Sanders and her family live what some might call an idyllic life in Newport Beach, California. Happily married with two fairly normal teenagers, Bobbie confronts lifes challenges with faith, humor, and humility.

But life as Bobbie has come to know it is in flux. Her kill them with kindness attitude hits a wall when the irascible Mr. Ragoni moves in next door and rebuffs all her efforts to win him over. Its just the first sign of the seismic changes that threaten Bobbies sense of security. Her husband, Bud, is going through a midlife crisis; her daughter, Pamela, is leaving convention and a fianc behind for new horizons in Japan; and her sixteen-year-old son, Cole, shocks them all by befriending Mr. Ragoni to potentially disastrous effect.

In All Things Possible, Bobbies goodnessand her faithare challenged to the core when real tragedy occurs, and she is forced to question the divine promise that God will not give her more than she can handle.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Apr 17, 2013
• ISBN: 9781452572437

Eliza Sarah Graham

Eliza Sarah Graham is a retired marriage and family therapist and the author of nine novels. Drawing on her psychology background and extensive world travels, Eliza explores the complicated, ambivalent emotional and spiritual lives of women. Growth through lifes challenges and intergenerational dynamics are her hallmark themes. Eliza lives in Newport Beach, California, with her husband.

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

ALL THINGS

POSSIBLE

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For Greg,

The one in the middle where all the good stuff is.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to thank Rebecca Heyman for her wise counsel and editing of All Things Possible.

The wonderful staff at Balboa Press is to be thanked for their patience and guidance with a focus on positivity.

Dreamstime always provides beautiful images for my book covers and they make it easy.

My husband, children and grandchildren are the best of anything I’ve ever done and my thanks always goes to them first and foremost.

ONE

Once in awhile when my car comes over the hill into Newport Beach and I get my first view of the ocean unfurling like a vast and exquisite diorama, I say to myself, Bobbie, old girl, you are the luckiest woman alive.

On other days when April’s dreariness turns into May gray, and will surely be followed by June gloom, I wish I lived in Hawaii.

The best time of year is from October through January. That’s when the horizon is seamless and the ocean goes and goes until it falls off the lip of the earth. Sunsets begin with soft brushed tones of gentle rose and baby blue, but as the sun sinks lower and lower, all those colors deepen into crimson with bursts of yellow so intense, they’re blinding. The eye can barely take it in, yet it’s impossible to look away. These are the kind of sunsets I suspect the first peoples worshipped, because surely a source more powerful than us creates them.

Summer is less predictable. It ought to be hot and sunny every day, but more likely we’ll have three perfect days swallowed by a thick and ominous fog. It rolls up in huge billowing walls of gray, a vision of Armageddon, consuming all in its path like God’s own wrath.

The trade-off is the pelicans that migrate in large numbers at the first signs of summer and glide like Baryshnikov across the sky. Each season has a personality and mood of its own, and as the sun reappears and the fog lifts, the pelicans soar and so do my spirits.

It’s more than the pure beauty of the sky and the ocean that entices me. It’s even more than the laidback lifestyles I see everywhere. My husband, Bud, nails it when he says, It feels like nothing bad could ever happen here. By here, he means our small pocket set just outside the sea of humanity coming from the north, a sea full of anger and violence, of gangs and barred windows, where no one is safe after dark. It’s an illusion, he says, but one I can buy into.

Even Cliff, the manager of the wholesale nursery, says with a toothy grin, What a great place to live. Aren’t we the lucky ones?

He always wears a cabana hat and khaki rubber boots and drags a python of a hose behind him. The spray fans out over hot pink begonias and orange and yellow ranunculus, creating a double rainbow. Luckiest in the world—I agree.

I don’t think of it as luck, though. I think of it as a choice, one Bud and I made many years ago, not only for us, but for our son and daughter.

Great place to raise kids, Bud said then, and I thought he’d read my mind.

It’s also near my mother. When she retired from being a high school music teacher, she sold the house she and Dad had paid off and bought into a retirement center with all the bells and whistles. When I asked exactly what bells and whistles she was referring to, she said, Tennis, golf, swimming pool, poker nights, yoga and travel groups. She was quick to add, But I’ll keep on teaching children piano. I’d never give that up. They keep me young.

Saturdays are the days when I see both Cliff and my mother. This is Mom’s and my day to run errands together and because Bud orders many of his supplies from Cliff, Mom and I take the opportunity to breathe in the beauty of the seasons while we lug fifty-pound bags of decorative rocks or redwood chips into the Jeep for Bud.

On alternate Saturdays we go to the farmer’s market in Corona Del Mar. Mom reflects on a time when shopping was always like this, with stalls of fresh vegetables and flowers, where everyone carries a canvas bag and fills it with fresh produce. Not like our supermarkets today, she says. It’s brief, this leisurely, countrified pace. The clock tower on the corner plays a song on the hour and when it hits noon, all the stalls begin to shut down. We grab armloads of fresh flowers and call it a day.

Our reward is lunch out with a glass of wine.

Sitting at a tall table at the Gulf Stream Restaurant with our feet dangling, Mom orders what she always orders. Roasted chicken with that rice salad thing you make.

I’ll have the same, I say.

You have mashed potatoes today?

Mom asks this every week and every week for the last year the patient server says, No, I’m sorry. Only at night.

Mom always retorts, Well, it’s night somewhere, and we all laugh and get a refill for our wine.

There is something comforting about this ritual, even the banter. If the server suddenly said, Why yes, we do have the mashed potatoes, it would throw off our whole routine.

So, Mom begins, what has your week been like?

I groan. You remember that client I told you about with the old house in San Clemente near the beach?

The rich divorcée?

That’s the one. Well, with a little work her home could be something for Architectural Digest. It’s authentic Spanish, and cute as can be. I worked a hundred hours pulling fabrics and furniture concepts for her and you know what she said?

Mom shakes her head, smiling. What’s that?

She wants a more modern look. Like with glass and stainless steel. I want to shoot her or myself.

You love it. You’ll figure it out. I wish I had your eye for design.

She’s right. She has no eye at all. She still has the furniture I grew up with, jammed into her small condo at the retirement center.

What about Bud, my real child?

My mother adored my husband from the day they met. He pandered to her vanity when he asked her advice about marrying me. Plenty of fish in the sea, she told him, and he laughed, thinking she was joking.

I wish you wouldn’t favor him so blatantly. I laugh. He’s fine. A little bored I think, but that’s normal at his age, right?

Men didn’t have midlife crises in my era. They just went fishing.

The server sets our plates in front of us and then from behind her back she reveals a small bowl of mashed potatoes.

Don’t tell anyone. I had the chef make you some special.

So much for rituals.

Eat up. I’ve got a golf date at three, Mom says, and I’m at once glad and sad that my mother has a full life of her own and doesn’t need me at all.

As I turn into our driveway I wave to our new neighbor, Mr. Albert Ragoni. I always wave to him and he never acknowledges it. Kill him with kindness, is my mother’s advice. I can flip to page three of her book of wisdoms. Growing up she’d say things like, You’ll catch more bees with honey than vinegar. Or, Be kind to unkind people. They need it most. But to date, Mr. Ragoni is immune to my neighborly efforts, even the plate of cookies I delivered the day he moved in. He mumbled thanks and shut his door.

Bud says a lot of old men are like that—unsociable. I’ve never been able to resist trying to win over difficult people. Mom says I was like this as a child. You were the giving-est girl. You gave your pippins to that sour faced friend of yours in third grade. You gave the necklace your grandmother gave you to that wild child neighbor girl who tormented you day in and day out and when I went to retrieve it, she stuck her tongue out at me.

I guess giving cookies to an irascible neighbor isn’t too far from what I’ve done all my life.

Anyone home? I call into the void of what used to be a lively house, but no one answers. The kids are out with friends, Bud must be working. I can nap guilt-free. It seems like I could nap every day now if I want to. The only project on my plate is Wendy Sullivan’s, which I avoid in the most obvious ways. Anything is better than sitting down with her designs again and coming up with something alien to my spirit. Glass and stainless steel? Impossible.

Lying on the bed I look up at our bedroom ceiling and play with ideas in my head. I could mask the starkness of Wendy’s house with thick Persian rugs and plush fabric prints in black with reds, oranges and yellows in the foreground. I could tuck the insisted-upon acrylic console table behind the couch, drape a tapestry runner across it, and place a black enamel lamp on it along with some greenery, which would mask the chill of the materials.

The house itself is a jewel box of original arches with two steps down to the living room from the red tiled foyer, and it has low ceilings and deep set windows with iron work on the outside. If Wendy would just let me follow that theme, she’d see what I mean, but instead she stands toe to toe with me and says, Roberta, I know this is your field but it’s my house.

As I watch the fan whir above me, it’s clear that I’m dependent upon the likes of Wendy because the economy is so deep in the tank that it will take submersible diving gear to bring it back up. My resource businesses have dropped like flies, too, this last couple of years. I can’t get drapery material that I trust because the entire design center closed out in November. Can’t get the construction crew I use because contractors are the worst hit. Nothing is as easy as it used to be, at least not in Orange County or Los Angeles.

Honey, I’m home. Bud’s voice twines up the winding staircase from the kitchen and I hear the refrigerator door open and slam shut. Bud says it’s acoustics; I say it’s a lack of insulation.

When I join him, he’s leaning over the sink as close to the window as he can get. He’s got on the plaid Bermuda shorts I like, and a deep blue golf shirt. He’s also wearing his weather-worn boat shoes with no socks, which he refuses to replace. I just got these broken in, he protests.

What are you looking at? I rub his back and peer out the window with him.

That guy’s nuts. Look. He steps aside and gives me his spot.

What? I tip up on my toes so I can see over the wall between our properties. Is he putting out bird feeders? That’s nice.

It’s not bird feeders, Bud nudges me out of the way and presses closer to the window. It’s industrial. Looks like an ammunition box on one end.

Like the guys at the market have for their charity contributions?

Yeah, like that. Weird. He’s a crackpot.

"Maybe not. Maybe he’s building bird houses."

Bud dismisses me with a look and strolls into the den. You get my rocks?

In the back of the Jeep. Why don’t you have Cliff deliver? My car’s not big enough for all you need.

Then what would you do for fun? He wraps an arm around me as we sit on the couch. Where are the kids?

With friends. We can have leftovers.

Macaroni is better fried anyway. You know what you should do? Open a restaurant and only offer fried macaroni. I bet you’d do great. He smiles that wide grin of his and his green eyes take on the blue reflected from his shirt.

"Why don’t you open a restaurant and fry macaroni? You’re the better business person."

Wendy bothering you again?

The man can read minds. Don’t suppose I could quit.

Sure. Quit. He throws his brown legs out and crosses his feet on the coffee table. I say no one should do anything they don’t want to do.

Really? Since when?

Today.

What happened today?

Nothing special. I was doing the drawings for the Gilbert’s back yard. You know the one, with the tiers and pool?

Yes. The design you’re doing is gorgeous.

That’s the thing, hon. I don’t think it’s gorgeous. I think it looks like everything else I’ve been doing for the last ten years.

Burnout. I run my hand through his hair. It’s still thick brown with a little gray at his temples. Maybe we need a vacation.

Not this time of year. Busiest time. You know that. He looks at me, I nod, and he says, My heart’s not into it anymore. That’s all. I need something with more meaning.

Pam’s still got three years of college left and Cole’s graduating high school next summer. What could have more meaning?

Maybe they could support us for a change and we could buy a VW Van and just drive.

I shake off the shivers running up my back. You’re just tired and I’m just tired. Some day when we’re old and gray we can hop in a van and drive across the country. Right now, I’ve got some macaroni to fry.

I tap his leg and rise, leaving him staring out the window into the back yard, his mind far away. I don’t even think he heard what I said.

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"Konnichiwa. Ogenki desu ka?"

And what is that supposed to mean, my darling daughter, and how did you get so tall all of a sudden?

Pam cuts a section of pear. It means, ‘Hello. How are you?’

How do I say, ‘I’m fine’?

"Daijoubu. That means something like ‘I’m okay.’ Close enough."

I’m impressed. I hand her a napkin as the pear juices drip down her chin. Why is it you’re taking Japanese? I know you told me but I don’t remember.

She steadies her gaze at me with a practiced patience, much like her father does at times. Because I’m learning International Business and I plan on negotiating with the Japanese one day.

Like I said, impressive. Is Reed joining us for church today?

No. He’ll be by after dinner though. You like him, right?

Right. I slice the pears, oranges and apples and toss them into a bowl.

Because I think he’s going to pop the question.

Please don’t tell me that. I turn to look at her. She told me that. Honey, you’re only nineteen.

Almost twenty, Mom. Gramma married at twenty.

In 1958. Not in the twenty-first century with a career ahead of her and plans to travel to Japan of all places. How do I say, ‘Wise woman wait to marry till she smart’?

That’s not funny, Mom. You said you like Reed.

I will like Reed in five years when you marry him as well. I hand her the bowl to put in the refrigerator. For now, I’ll like him a whole lot better if he doesn’t pop the question.

Who? Pop what question?

Oh, good, you’re up. You’re tall, too. Was it only yesterday …

Stop, Mom, stop. Not again. Cole bounces the basketball on the kitchen counter. Pop what question?

Reed. Marriage. Mom says no.

She’s right, sis. You’re too young to get married, but can I have your room when you do?

She’s not, I quip.

I might, Pam says, leaving Cole and me alone.

She won’t. Don’t worry. She told me she doesn’t think she’ll ever get married. She just wants a baby.

Cole! That is not helpful. I laugh. He laughs. Can you call your dad? It’s time for church.

As we pull out of the driveway, I wave to Mr. Ragoni.

Why does he have to wear a wife beater shirt? Bud says, looking back as we drive past his house.

That’s an awful name. Who thought that up? I ask.

Was it Brando? Stel…la. Bud looks over at me. You saw the movie.

I did but he didn’t sound like that. So you think that’s where the name came from?

What’s the old dude doing out there anyway? Cole bounces his ball against the back of my seat.

Birdhouses.

An armory, Bud corrects.

Eyesore, Pam joins in.

I think we should pray for him today. If we all pray, he’ll feel it, I say.

Hope springs eternal, Bud smiles at me. I may just pray he gets a better aesthetic.

I’ll pray he lets me drive that old Chevy truck out front, Cole follows.

I’m praying that he wears more clothes in public, Pam says.

I smile. And I’m praying that the poor man puts down his guard and lets us be good neighbors to each other.

The day is brilliant and too nice to be indoors. Bud parks the car and both Cole and Pam couple up with friends and head toward their building for their own church service, no doubt accompanied by barefoot guitarists and rock hymns.

I wait at the curb for Bud and it strikes me that our church has gotten awfully popular of late. Media church is what Mom calls it. "Who ever thought having television screens in a church was spiritual? I’ll stick to my little old fashioned church and minister who talks from the Bible."

She visited once when we first started. It just happened to be the day when we had a concert and everyone was standing and rocking back and forth. I felt like I was back in my college musicals. Even Mom got into it as her head twisted and turned to see all the singers and the large screens on both sides of the stage.

Later she said, "Well, I felt like I was singing in Oklahoma but I can see how these changes are needed to entice new worshipers. Whatever floats your boat."

I laughed then and loved having her beside me in church again, but once was enough, she said.

Whatever floats your boat. Too cute.

Bud hunkers down to prayer before everyone’s seated. I look away, wave to some friends, and check the program. The theme is Thoreau, not Biblical. It is not enough to be busy. The question is, what are we busy about? I look over at Bud; his head’s leaning on his clutched hands. Perfect timing.

I can never concentrate on prayer in church with all the pressure to perform. When I was little I used to silently say, Excuse me, God, I know you’re busy with other people with bigger problems than I have, but I could use your help about now. When I told my mother she laughed and said, Offer him a pippin. Later she explained that I was as worthy of God’s ear as anyone and I never had to feel I was selfishly taking up His time.

The minister, Howard, is dressed in short sleeves and dungarees as usual, another thing Mom can’t quite get a handle on. Where’s his robe? she’d whispered to me.

"He