Tag: Corte Madera Canyon Mill Valley

Itsie’s Table

By Anita Garner

When this year’s Vermont Country Store Christmas catalog arrived, I saw this page and thought of Itsie.

Italo Luigi Orlandi lived one canyon over from me in Mill Valley, California in a huge house on a hill.  In his 80s he was still sprinting up four flights of stairs from the steep driveway in the redwoods to his kitchen door.

Itsie loved oilcloth and always had one covering his old kitchen table.  He sat with a visitor sharing instant coffee from chipped cups (“No need for a fancy coffee maker. It’s just me here. I know how to boil water.”) One of his hands was always in motion soothing the tablecloth while he talked.  The oilcloth was frayed, nearly bare in places.  It had already been turned and turned again so there were no more fresh surfaces to see.

He’d recently given up driving his big blue van around town, quit driving voluntarily, said it was the responsible thing to do since his vision wasn’t what it should be.  I drove him places and had the pleasure of his company and his stories from decades spent buying property all around us.

He finally agreed he needed a new table covering. I mentioned some nice ones in the Vermont Country Store catalog.  Plenty of patterns and colors to choose from.  “How much?”  I said their prices are reasonable and their dry goods are impeccable.  I’ve been ordering from them for years.

Before any more tablecloth talk, let me show you the home where this old kitchen table and worn oilcloth resided.

Itsie lived alone in this enormous home in Corte Madera Canyon

No he wasn’t going to pay for a finished tablecloth. He’d rather buy from a bolt at the yard goods store and have it cut to the right size.  I pointed out that ready-made oilcloths last for years and have a nice backing, but he insisted we go to Joann Fabrics in Corte Madera.  That way we could stop at Safeway on the way and get him a can of soup too.  A few minutes later at the fabric store he chose a new pattern.  He had his exact table measurement with him. I insisted on a bit extra for overlap so it would drape.

His eyes lit up at all the new patterns. I tried to talk him into getting two cut to size so he could switch them around.  “Nobody needs more than one tablecloth.” But oh how he loved the new one!  He ran up the stairs ahead of me, eager to put it in place.

Then he immediately took it off the table and trimmed it so it barely covered the edge, removing the overlap.  He liked to save scraps and in this case I watched him create scraps on purpose. Scant as these oilcloth strips were, he’d find some use for them, he said. He was a handyman at heart with a huge attic and a full-floor workshop, both kept orderly and organized, down to the last scrap of whatever he’d saved. He knew where to find everything and everything would be used eventually.

Itsie lingered at the bottom of his steep drive, trimming plants, waiting for neighbors to come by.  It was his habit to invite them upstairs for a cup of coffee.  He’d soon be telling the story about the morning spent choosing a new tablecloth, including specifics about how much money a person could save having oilcloth cut to measure like his.

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Earthquake Anniversary – Remembering The Little Things

By Anita Garner

Italo ”Itsie” Orlandi in his workshop, Mill Valley, CA

It was Martin Luther King Jr. Day, 1994 at 4:31 AM. when the Northridge earthquake changed our lives. I was awake and had just taken a few steps down the hall to work on a writing deadline when I was knocked to the floor. I’ve never been able to adequately describe the sound. The closest would be a train roaring through the house.

My condo on Valleyheart Drive in Studio City slid off its foundation, taking wires and plumbing and appliances with it, spewing furniture and the contents of cupboards and shelves over every surface.

Neighbors ran door to door shutting off gas lines, yelling inside to find out if we were trapped.  My front door was jammed. Men forced it open and when they saw I was okay they asked if I had anything they could use to break some glass to rescue my next door neighbor.  Bridget was screaming that she couldn’t get out. One helper directed his flashlight into my dark living room and located my chunky redwood bench. They used it to batter through Bridget’s sliding glass door. The last time I saw her, they were lifting her away from the broken glass and walking her out to the street.  I heard she moved back to France.

People gathered on the sidewalk and wrapped blankets around the ones who weren’t fully dressed.  I slept in a tee shirt and leggings and found sneakers just inside my front door.  Many were not so lucky.  Not everyone had shoes and the ground was already deep in debris.  Glass was everywhere.  The Valley filled up with sirens and random explosions. A building on one side of mine had very little damage while the building on the other side, a high rise, was seriously off kilter.  Neighbors rushed to carry injured residents down flights of stairs, securing them to straight back chairs for the journey to the sidewalk to await ambulances.

It’s 27 years later and the details are still shocking. Everyone lost something.  Some lost everything.  Reports said if it hadn’t been a holiday, if it hadn’t been before dawn, more people would have been out and about and more would have died.

Before the quake I was a collector of antique glassware, vintage goblets with slender stems and designs etched long ago in deep colors, elaborate depression glass table settings, Baccarat candlesticks, old lamps with delicate bases.  When I fell to the floor that morning I crawled to the living room, reaching for the built-in bar to hold onto.  As I approached, my brilliant glassware on shelves above the bar turned into projectiles, forcing tiny shards into my skin. For weeks I picked out colorful bits.  There’s a green one, now a purple one.  Much of what I owned and lived with and  loved broke, slivered, exploded, splintered, cracked, ripped, or shook to pieces.  A huge antique armoire fell across the bed I had just vacated.  I didn’t know that until a FEMA walk-through later.

After the house was red-tagged, when we were no longer allowed in because the ground kept shifting, I bought a few things, a set of dishes, a coffee maker, I don’t remember what all because replacing things was simply a reaction to loss and not a wish to own and preserve possessions. I have no desire to collect fragile things anymore and I’m wary of antiques.  You fall in love with them and they can break your heart

Now I’m drawn to rustic furnishings and pride of place goes to the short, stubby, redwood bench.  It was already old when I bought it in the 80s at Dowd’s Barn in Mill Valley. When I moved south  to do a radio show in Los Angeles, the bench came too.  After the quake, when I returned to Mill Valley, I lived a few minutes away from dear friend, Itsie.  A quick walk from my cottage in Blithedale Canyon took me over the Corte Madera Creek bridge to his hilltop home in the neighboring canyon.  Itsie’s house was built in the redwoods in the early 1900’s with multiple levels, including a fully equipped workshop on the bottom floor. He noticed my little bench was wobbly and took it home with him. The supports you see below the bench in the picture above were added from Itsie’s stash of redwood.

The conscious mind makes note of this anniversary every year then moves along but the subconscious still startles me awake during thunderstorms or when a truck rumbles by on a normally quiet street.  If one day the sound of a train roars through the living room and the floor moves so violently I can’t stand, if something like that happens again in my lifetime and I have to start over, I’ll begin with this bench.

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