Ethnic Catholicism

 

 

Conservative commentator Ross Douthat, who writes opinion pieces for the New York Times largely about Catholicism, once saw fit to tell us in print, in an op-ed I have not succeeded in finding, that his loyalty lies firstly with the Church. Loyalty to the United States comes second. I am mystified as to a) why he seems to think Catholic issues are somehow important to the news-reading public and b) how a person whose confessed loyalty is only secondarily to our polity should have any role at all in the opinion forming media, but I am willing to let those concerns go for now. Here's the thing: such talk hurts Catholics.

I carry no torch for the Church. I can candidly state my views towards it in pithy, Anglo-Saxon terms that you, the reader, really don't need to hear. Fact is, I am the descendant of Italian and Irish immigrants for whom the Catholic faith was a part of their ethnos. Anyone who knew me in the rash days of college would be amazed to hear it, but I am an ethnic Christian, descended from one quarter Catholic “stock”. At any rate, biblical stories about weird-beard folks in djellabas with names like Absalom and Uriah are not something I can identify with. I don't follow any of their fairy tales: it is a matter of identity.

It is this identity that Mr. Douthat puts in jeopardy when placing his Catholicism anywhere near the level of his patriotism. Catholics, like Jews, have been subject to a spectrum of discrimination ranging from insults to violence based on the perception of their split loyalty. In the case of Catholicism, this appears in part based on the very state-like structure of the Church-- a church that does in fact originate in its very own micro-state, the Vatican.

In the basic Know-Nothing scheme of 19^th century American xenophobia, Romanism-- an epithet for Catholicism-- was used similarly to how Communism is used today by the American extreme right. As Republicans today sometimes identify basic capital-D Democratic ideas as Communist if ever so slightly left of center, so too did old-time American nativists tar more liberal politicians as “Romanist” if their views did not sufficiently serve to oppress American Catholics.

The Ku Klux Klan also grouped Catholics with Jews. I'll choose this moment to mention that the United States' only Catholic president before Joe Biden was shot to death in a Southern city.

My Catholic ancestors are not hard to find. They rest in the (self-?)segregated Catholic cemetery of Oakland, California, a burial ground dwarfed by the nearby Mountain View Cemetery. A ten-foot tall obelisk announces the surname of one of the first people buried there, Cerini, a name recycled as my mother's given name.

As they lie separated from the "general population" in death, their grave mirrors another kind of social disadvantage they would have experienced in life. There are eleven bodies buried there, just as poor Catholics lived in overcrowded residential conditions, bearing at least 3 different surnames, both Italian and Irish, 2 of them are misspelled in cemetery records, reflecting a kind of bureaucratic apathy.

They are all dead. My connection with them is not. This connects me, in turn, to living Catholics-- to living Catholicism. Whatever discrimination they might have suffered in life cannot be justified as applying to the millions of Catholics I share the United States with.

I have no social connection to any more than a handful of modern, live Catholics. I have only an inkling of who among my friends “actually believes this stuff”, to quote my friends' most effective line against the Jehovah's Witnesses who plagued their porch for a time. My suspected Catholic friends probably just understand that no advocacy of any kind is asked for. Conversely, perhaps my aforementioned strong anticlerical views that I was not polite enough to keep under wraps as a hotheaded adolescent keep them silent.

The few I know-- and the many I don't-- share the ethnic identity of my grandfather's entire family. I have no desire to see them suffer socially for the expression of an opinion writer's divisive claims.

Call me by my Name

  A Guide for Adults in Schools

Piet Bess

School is big and scary. Adults will ask kids to do strange things, and sometimes they will tell them what their name is, even to the point of calling them names they have never heard before. We, as adults, owe it to our students to use their given name, to pronounce it as well as we can with English sounds, and to help the child find their way to using it in writing, and, in very few years, adding their family name to it to make their full name.

 

Notice I did not use the phrases “first name” and “last name”. These common terms lead to confusion for all-- for students, for adults, and for institutions. Here’s what I have found.

Not everywhere do first names come first. The convention in Asian countries including Japan, Korea, and China put family names (so-called last names) first, the way English language conventions list names for easy alphabetization. They do not use a comma as we do. They don’t write Smith, John, but rather just Smith John. I do hear a pause in the Korean dramas I watch: Smith… John, but that may just be me. A failure to heed this convention led the director of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, to address Kim Jong Un as “Mr. Un” a few years back. (If you have something clever to say about military intelligence at this point,  I’ll let you say it to yourself. I know I did.) Mr. Mike might have taken heed of the fact that North Korea had been led by 2 previous Kims, Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. We have students from Korean families at our school. I assume that all of them, along with our students from Chinese language families, use the Jong Un Kim form dictated by our conventions. Except when entered on forms as Kim, Jong Un.

Asia may seem far away linguistically, though close in immigration terms and neighboring our country across the water. There is a country in Eastern Europe that might seem culturally closer to other European-Americans, as numbers of immigrants came to the USA from there in the 1800s. I confess it is the linguistically most distant European language from English: Hungarian. This society uses the Smith John form. So we would be talking about Orban Viktor. (I apologize for the use of dictators as examples.) At any rate, here we are with 2 regions where the first name and last name nomenclature breaks down: Eastern Europe and East Asia.

Now, given the fact that German immigrants constituted an immense plurality of European immigrants to the USA in the 1800s, their naming conventions should be like ours. Still and all, I have experienced firsthand culture clash between my name and Germans still in Germany. My full name is Piet Culpeper Bess. At the German border, I was asked if Culpeper was Vornamen or Nachnamen-- first name or surname. “Es ist ein Mittlelnamen,” I scoffed. My direct translation of “middle name” into German may not have answered his question. It might have been easier if each of us had used a phrase like “given name”. A miscommunication between us arose, even though we could be said to be coming from very closely connected cultures, with my being a fluent German-speaking descendant of German immigrants long ago.

Let’s come closer to home. Spanish naming conventions should be familiar to us because of the presence of so many Spanish speaking members of our society, but often we struggle with this as an English-dominant  culture. Let me first state that I do not share the opinion of many that there is an English version of a person’s name. I do not think that Dah-VEED should be known as DAY-vəd. I may be less strict on this if it appears that the student does not viably speak Spanish. I try to use the name the student gives me, but in the case of David, he told me his family name was Rouis. I draw the line there. Ruíz is not ROO-iss, but Roo-EECE (This is an oversimplification. It would be more linguistically correct to say RWEECE, but Roo-EECE is good enough for an English speaker’s approximation.)

But back to family names. The basic naming convention in Spanish is personal name, family name of father, family name of mother. (This is such as I understand: I think there is about as much to know about family name conventions in Spanish language conventions as they would have you know about stressed syllable conventions!) So, Eduardo García Hernández’s main family name is the patronym García. This can cause problems. When I asked his subsequent teacher about him they said they had an Eduardo Hernández. (It would be really nice if we would all say Air-NON-dess instead of Her-NAN-dezz!) This reliance on the name-that-comes-last is a source of confusion. If there are 2 family names, you may use only the first one if you wish, without, as far as I understand, any negative connotation, unless there is emotional baggage about the father and the child does not want to use their name. (This is a true story in the case of 2 students I will not name, who appear to be disinterested in their fathers.) Students can also be unclear on the nature of their 2 family names. I had to disabuse one young Miss Gutiérrez Gómez  of the misconception that  Gutiérrez was her  "middle name".

Families may wish to hold on to that second family name. Perhaps that is the reason they hyphenate the 2 family names: Eduardo García-Hernández. With this, they use northern European convention to force both names to be recognized on forms and in use as one name. This is great! As far as I know, both Eduardo García-Hernández and Roxanne Lundin-Crittenden, a friend and former garden teacher in my school district,  can be addressed as Eduardo García and Roxanne Crittenden respectively without insult. In fact, Roxanne, a wonderfully incisive thinker, referred to her moniker as “one of those… annoying hyphenated names”. Roxanne may have been referring to the logistics of a long name, or perhaps to the use of such names among the upper middle class.

Incidentally, 2 online resources used by our students at my school display this kind of error. They list students by the name that comes last, rather than by their main family name, their patronym. This is annoying because, a) it puts them in a different order than our roll sheet, and b) it displays cultural insensitivity or ignorance. The hyphen removes the error! Both names occupy one field. This is an issue with coding as well as with culture.

Here is what usually happens when I ask students what their family name (singular) is. Instead of García, or similar, they write Aurora and Juan, or sometimes “mommy, daddy, Cecilia. They have not heard the phrase “family name” before and instead write all the names (plural) of the people in their family. If more of us would use the phrase, it might be easier for students to understand it.

Some cultures have members who only use one name. This includes, to my limited knowledge, Indonesia, smaller island states in the Pacific from which my school has students, and, Afghanistan. Incidentally, Burmese uses 3 names, usually, but all of them are unique: there is no one of their names that is shared among all or most family members. Our bureaucratic system, including the State Department states, “The visa will be issued as follows: Given Name: FNU; Surname: [John]”. FNU is an abbreviation used by the Federal government and our school system to mean “first name unknown”. Note that they use “given name” and the slightly more accepting “surname”, which, though it does mean the name that comes afterwards, is not so barefaced as “last name”. 

IF YOU HAVE A STUDENT IN YOUR CLASS LISTED AS FNU, PLEASE DO NOT CALL THEM “FNU”.

Here is an example of how alienating it can be. I asked a student what their name was and they said “Bnu”. They were listed as FNU on the roll sheet. I looked up the student’s language and found that their language does not contain an F sound. Here the student thinks that the school has the privilege of naming them--  we do not!!-- and is attempting to say the word the school says is their name. This is sadder than Dayvid Rouis’s case. FNU is not a name. It is a misnomer. In fact the family name is missing: we should say LNU. The child’s name is the other name besides FNU. Please use the student’s name in every case. After all, we would hardly deadname a trans student. That would be just as rude. To “deadname” someone means to use and/or insist on using their often heavily gendered birth-name despite their demonstrated desire to express their self-perceived gender. Henry would hardly want to be addressed as Anabelle. If you doubt this, put on the typical clothing of the opposite gender and go shopping for groceries. You will probably not be comfortable. Neither is Henry comfortable with their deadname.

I noted a method Spanish-speaking families can use to retain their student’s matronym: using an English-convention hyphen. There are 2 other things students can do to hold on to the features of their names. Sadly, bureaucratic systems will continue to obliterate the accented vowels and the Ñ. I ask that students with characters in their names not recognized on computerized forms use them every time in writing. Often, I need to use Wikipedia (wikipedia.es for Spanish-language content about people from Hispanic culture)  to look for famous people. Yanez is just not the same as Yáñez: one would say yon-ESS, the other, correctly, YON-yess. (Again, I am using approximate pronunciation to cater to English speakers, on the model of BBC radio’s effort to say all the sounds of a word in such a way as to approximate its sounds using English sounds.)

The Ñ case is fairly clear. The student may tell you that it is Yáñez, or you may ask their family, or you may use Wikipedia.es. The case of accent marks is a little more complicated. First of all, I have a real example from my friend David Cooper. On the first day of a Spanish 1 class at Shasta College in Redding, he called roll. When he came to a student whose family name was Pérez, she loudly and angrily corrected him: “It’s Per-REZZ”. It would stand to reason that her family had been in the English-dominant culture for long enough not only to assimilate, but also to forget their name’s pronunciation, PED-ess. They are not alone: I was taken aback when Kamala Harris announced that her running mate would be Tim Walls. His name, Walz, clearly should be pronounced Valtz, being as it is spelled in German. Here is what Spanish-speaking students can do to hold on to their accent marks.

First of all there is a matter of nomenclature. In García, the “accent” is on the Í, but in David the accented syllable is the the I. David does not need an accent mark because syllables ending in -D, -L, -Z, or -R do not need one. So, rather than saying the accent is on the I in David, we would have to say that -VEED is the “stressed syllable”.

While García has an accent on the Í, it has both an accent and an accent mark, I find it best to use the phrase “accent mark”. Oddly, this can also confuse students. When I asked a young Ms. García, a second grader, to put an accent mark on the I, she dutifully crossed it out. She heard that I wanted her to “put an X on” the letter. Along with “Bnu”, and Dayvid Rouis, she found it acceptable to comply with the bizarre requests teachers make of students. Her reaction shows that she was not accustomed to writing the Spanish language characters of her name. 

So, to recap: first name and last name are confusing, and should, in my reasoned opinion, be replaced by given name or personal name, and family name. Students should understand that the reason they have a family name is that other members of their families have the same name. Students can retain the orthography of their names by enforcing the orthography of accent marks and the Ñ. And teachers must respect their students’ names as their parents named them.

I Wish I Were a Real...

 Me: i wish i were a real-for-sure survivalist. Got them cool gunz and stuff. Got them cool bug-out 4x4s and, presumably, a groovy fortified compound to bug out to.

Other folks: you just happen to have tie downs to rig our blown-apart rooftop cargo box 50 miles out of Bunghole, Utah?

You just happen to have goretex socks for a friend getting soaked in the rain? You can light these candles even though you don't smoke? You have pliers? You were carrying a saw? You got ibuprofen AND claritin? You can put out this fire with your thermos of tea? Now, let go of the bleeding bicyclist's underarm, paramedics are here.

Every PE teacher I ever had: physical activity is great! Get naked with a bunch of sociopaths in a smelly locker room and wear awful clothing and play silly games against the bullies. Then, maybe, someday you can be like me!

Me: Fine, then, I hate this thing you call physical activity.

 

Now, fuck off. I'm going to ride my bike 50 miles in 90 degree heat for kicks. I'm gonna haul 2 pissy teenagers against the tide in kayaks. I'm gonna walk clear across town after midnight. I'm gonna swim way on out in the bay for kicks. I'm going to carry my gear dozens of miles overnight in the mountains. But go to hell with your "physical activity". Schmucks.

Me: I wish I were a real-for-sure artist. I'm ok with "not being able to draw well", but artists just have this amazing will to create. Dang.

Also me: i gotta finally get the collar attached to this workshirt so i can get started on these waxed cotton jeans. Is that even allowed? Dang, and i gotta spray my fruitpicker brown 'cause I'm not really supposed to be on that land where the pomegranates hang over the fence. And i gotta press em to add to cider I'm brewing. And set some aside to make cocktails. Good thing i had that mt. bike built up from a thrift store find to recon the pomegranates. Am i ever gonna get that jelly made from the pressings of the cider? And the wine? Anyway, what kind of 70s font do i put on the label for the champagne I'm capping with plain old bottlecaps? And why wont the rosé i got for free stop fermenting? Still, I wish i was a real-for-sure artist.

Me: I wish I were a real-for-sure anarchist. Got them cool black outfits w/ matching baklavas. Do them cool chants at demos. Punchin’ nazzies an’ stuff. Got all their affinity groups an’ such. 

Also me: nobody told me to have my students recite the flag oath. “Did you ask another student before you asked me?” Rip all the drapes off, open it up to the sky!  Set up your meeting w a few central chairs up front and theater seating for the audience? No worries, I’ll just tear into that and eff up your arrangement. Never will i sit enthroned on one side of the teacher desk while supplicants sit on the other. As a matter of fact, let’s just lay that desk against the wall, hence making it unusable as a fortress of authority. 

Sorry, I already don’t patronize Brand X: cain’t really boycott what you never buy anyway. Yes, i always carry my knife since age 10, except on airplanes, in nightclubs, and in the courthouse. No church. Bonus points: Buddhism is a-theist, if not atheist. No, i ain’ goin’ anywhere near _their_ temple either. Communism is good! Tankies suck. No, i ain’t goin’ to a stadium anytime soon. ‘Specially not for a concert. Music is better in a warehouse. Yes, i’ve read that fascist tract. No, i didn’t get any on me. No, i’m not a capital D Democrat, i just vote no on the GOP. Yes— I’m a conservative. Same relationship for 40 years. Same car for 30. Compost, recycle, reuse, scavenge. 

Fake News

 There is an all-seeing overlord in the sky.

People don't die, they go to a better place.

Tooth fairy. Santa Claus. 'Nuff said.

The government will protect you. That's its job. After all, governments don't, say, incinerate 10s of thousands of people in their homes. 

Unless they're Bad people.

English folks came to North America to spread happiness just like the happiness they had in Britain.

They came to spread their religion because it helps people to be their best selves, and happier.

There weren't any people in North America, really.

Good thing the English could have Africans work for them.

You can be English, too! Even if your name is McCarty. Or Cerini. Or Wellendorf. That's practically the whole world!

Sorry. Slavery was bad. Now Black people are free!

WWI was necessary because a submarine sank our arms shipment that had passengers on it. And because their enemies spoke English.

WWII was necessary. It has nothing at all to do with how amazingly profitable it was. Anyway, the Japanese bombed Hawai'i, a country that just decided to give itself to us. 

Of course, Japanese people had to go to camps. The fact that we did not gas  them shows how charitable we are. Obviously they were spies. Just look at them!

Oswald was just one of those things. Oh, well.

Vietnam. Where shall I even begin?

Good thing English is such a logical language. No wonder everybody speaks it. Mexicans must have some kind of hangup, speaking Spanish.

Sadaam Hussein bombed the World Trade Center. After all, he's Muslim and the hijackers were, too. Just like the people who held our CIA agents hostage for almost a year in Tehran, so it's no surprise. They're probably just really easy to anger. Maybe it's the oil. Whatever.

Police officers are paid to protect us.

Good thing we have so many guns. They are really useful. Imagine if we didn't have any guns. We would be as messed up as Japan!

We live in a democracy. We can vote for any party we want.

We vote for the president!

I feel safer just thinking of nuclear deterrence.

Homeless people want to live like that.

We are free. 

You know who you are.

You don' eat what I eat.

You don' smell like I smell.

You don' drive what I drive.

You don' listen to what I listen to.

You don' think like I think.

You don' relax like I relax.

You don' dance like I dance.

You don' drink what I drink.

You don' treasure what I treasure.

You don' talk like I talk.

You don' seek what I seek.

You don' smoke what I smoke.

You don' buy what I buy.

You don' live like I live.

You don' ride what I ride.

You don' write like I write.

You don' see like I see.

You don' care about what I care about.

You don' swim like I swim.

You don' walk like I walk.

You don' value what I value.

You don' watch what I watch.

You don' love like I love.

You don' cook like I cook.

You don' mourn like I mourn.

You don' wash like I wash.

You don' go where I go.

You don' read what I read.

You don' shop where I shop.

You don' play like I play.

You don' create like I create.

You don' breathe like I breathe.

You don' fight what I fight.

You don' even know who you are, do you?

The Epitaph of the Black Prince

The epitaph of the Black Prince, a military leader in English history who died of dysentery in the Middle Ages. It is not original, and I haven't found the source. I think it may have been updated a bit, linguistically, here. Particularly the phrase "now a poor caitiff am I" resonates with me. Caitiff is an archaic term for "captive", and I think it captures the sense a person has of imprisonment, not by an enemy, but by the disability or death of their "corps".

 

Who so thou be that passeth by,
Where these corps entombed lie:
Understand what I shall say
As at this time speak I may.
 
Such as thou art, some time was I,
Such as I am , such shalt thou be.
I little thought on the hour of death
So long as I enjoyed breath.
 
Great riches here I did possess
Whereof I made great nobleness.
I had gold, silver, wardrobes and
Great treasure, horses,houses, land.
 
But now a caitiff poor am I
Deep in the ground, lo here I lie
My beauty great is all quite gone,
My flesh is wasted to the bone.
 
My house is narrow now and throng,
Nothing but Truth comes from my tongue:
And if ye should see me this day
I do not think but ye would say
That I had never been a man;
So much altered now I am
 
For God’s sake pray to the heavenly King
That he my soul to heaven would bring,
All they that pray and make accord
For me until my God and Lord:
God place him in his Paradise,
Wherein no wretched caitiff lies.

Memoriam of my Mother

 

Cerini Bess died on June 22nd, 2023 after a years-long struggle with dementia. 

She was 86. She leaves 2 sons, Tim Bess and Piet Bess and grandchildren Nigel Bess 

and Delphina Wedell along with nieces Anne Anderson, Catherine Creely-Hodges, 

Elizabeth Creely, and Emily Creely and nephew James Creely, close to her because of

her lifelong relationship with her brother Christopher “Kit” Creely, who died in 2007.

 

Cerini was born in Los Angeles, a couple days before Christmas on December 20th, 1936. 

She complained that this meant she only received one gift for both occasions. She grew up 

in the middle of the Great Depression, the daughter of bookstore owners Bunster Creely and 

Virginia (Wellendorf) Creely. They lived in South Pasadena as a young couple. Bunster 

joined Virginia's family’s business, the Holmes Book Company, and later opened the Abbey

 Bookstore on Los Angeles' famed Bookstore Row.

 

Cerini and her brother Kit were very close despite their eight-year difference in age. 

She talked about how her brother cared for her, and how she would constantly tag along 

after him and his friends. One of her favorite stories was about when he mischievously gave 

her a chile, then watched in horror as a single tear rolled down her cheek. He carried her 

around on his shoulders for the rest of that day, as she described it.

 

In her early childhood, Cerini lived in Altadena, on Arroyo Ave where the 210 freeway

runs now. Her mother sought out a school there that 

was not almost all white, and she hiked in the nearby hills with her friend Freddie Pigg. 

After moving to Newport Beach in 1946 with her parents, Cerini lived on Balboa Island 

in one of the area's early beach shacks. Her mother, “Diddie” divided bedrooms from 

common areas using rattan blinds. Cerini attended Newport Elementary school where 

she played on the beach, and gained her lifelong love of the ocean. These days, the playground 

is on the beach. Back then, the beach was the playground. Cerini told of how she did well in all 

subjects except recess. She propagated her schooldays attitude in raising her sons. “It’s not a

prison,” she said, “Leave whenever you want”, and, “Keep on hitting them until they start 

crying and stop fighting.”

At that time, people lived on Balboa not only because it was pretty, but also to make a living. Cerini 

had memories of the small fishing community that existed in Newport beach, before the wide-spread 

development of the fifties and sixties. She sometimes borrowed a dory belonging to a local fisherman. 

The boat was indescribably heavy, but the man would push it with, as she told it, one huge hand down 

the sand and into the surf. She and a boy she knew would paddle it around in what I understand to be 

the ocean off Balboa peninsula, rather than the calmer waters of Newport Bay.

 

As a teenager, when her parents lived inland on Irvine Avenue, she attended Newport Harbor 

High School. In a photo of the entire class lined up there, she is one of the few girls with raven hair.

One of her favorite stories in later years is about how an owner of a stable near her home would let Cerini 

and her friend Mary Lee borrow her horses to exercise them. They explored  the extensive lands of the 

Irvine Ranch, consolidated in the 1860s from 3 Spanish land grants. One favorite destination was "Shark 

Island", which may be the same as Harbor Island near Pacific Coast Highway. Cerini and her friends 

would swim the horses out to the sandbar. Now it is connected to the mainland and covered side to side 

in houses with their own boat docks.

 

Cerini also spent some time living with her maternal grandmother Mabel nee Holmes on the high-status 

Longridge Road in Oakland. Mabel, or “Ma”, as she is still known to her family, was a formidable woman 

with a high temperament, a loving grandmother who helped raise Cerini.

 

Ma had pet names for her grandchildren: Impy for Kit and Dweetsy for his little sister, which Cerini  

confided in her last years, after keeping it to herself all her life. The economic contrast between Diddie’s 

and Ma’s households may give some clue to why Cerini lived in Northern California for a while, or it 

may indicate other difficulties in her parents’ household.

 

Parts of the  family lived in the San Francisco Bay Area and others in the greater Los Angeles area. 

They have driven between the two on Highway 101 for easily more than 100 years. Cerini spent nearly 

20 years at the end of her life living at the middle of that road, in Pismo Beach, finding a connection with 

the Pacific first established in Newport. In her last years of life, she remarked on the landmark this rock, 

in Pismo, had provided through her whole life. It stands smack dab (a favorite phrase of hers) in the 

middle of the 101.

        After high school, Cerini enrolled at Orange Coast College, the local community college, and then transferred 

        to UC Berkeley. Her mother had lived in Berkeley, and had attended the university until Kit’s birth intervened. 

        Cerini was a member of Delta Zeta sorority, and remained in contact with several of her sisters into later life. 

        While at Cal, 

        she also started working as a ticket agent at TWA, and, in an early instance of remote learning, passed 

a history class there without the professor knowing who she was. Her free flights allowed her to be present 

to take the exam, but she had arranged with others to share their notes while she was away, and the instructor 

was left asking the class who this Cerini Creely was who had turned in an excellent final assignment. 

It was at Cal that Cerini met Dave Bess. As she told it, when they went out on one of their first dates 

on a Friday during Lent, he was relieved that she ordered a hamburger. He does not corroborate the 

story. Her name indicated that her family was Irish, and if she had been Catholic, then meat would 

have been forbidden. As it turned out, it was her grandmother’s Episcopalian affiliation that she had 

settled on. Bunny, her father, who attended mass all his life, had been excommunicated for marrying 

a Protestant.

 

After college, Cerini did a  walkabout, touring England, Germany, Italy and other European countries 

on bicycles and trains, crossing the Atlantic on a ship. This gap year is a tradition that subsequent 

generations have carried on. She prized her memories of nice German boys at the youth hostel 

stripping to their Lederhosen and taking sponge baths while her American companions remained 

sweaty and smelly because there was no shower. She gained access to her friend’s Italian relatives’ 

kitchens connecting to her great grandfather’s heritage. He was Francisco Cerini, a Florence 

native who had immigrated to San Francisco in the 1850s. His surname was the source of Cerini's given

name, which she shared with at least one other family member. 

 

Cerini married Dave in California while he was in the Navy, and they drove cross-country to Athens 

GA where he was stationed. She followed him to Japan to his destroyer’s home port. In a significant 

departure from common practice, they lived “on the economy”, or off base. This was out of the 

ordinary not only because it was a decade and a half after WWII, but also because of cultural attitudes 

among military families.

 

Cerini worked hard on learning Japanese, and read extensively about the culture and history of the 

place, still evidenced by her bookshelf today. Living in a traditional house with walls she described 

as made of rice-paper, they furnished it with antiques they bought locally. These antiques still 

furnish their homes. When a typhoon approached, Dave’s ship went to sea to avoid damage in port, 

and Cerini hunkered down as much as one could in such a lightweight dwelling. Interested in what 

exactly a typhoon was, she was taken aback to find it equated in the dictionary with a hurricane, 

not part of her experience in California, but a concept that really made her sit up and take notice!

 

The Navy took David to Bremerton WA, and then to Oxnard CA.  During David’s last few months 

in the Navy in Southern California, she gave birth to Peter (later Piet). In both places, they lived on 

or near the water: in Washington, they could even go clamming for their dinner in the front yard! 

After David’s discharge, around the time Timothy was born, his work took them to Los Angeles, 

and then to Berkeley again, where he studied for his Master’s degree at Cal. He started teaching at 

Cal Poly Pomona, close to her brother’s young family in Costa Mesa.

 

Cerini’s prodigious energies went into childrearing and running a household. She and David bought 

a 1906 Craftsman style house on Kingsley Avenue in Pomona with a modern 1970s linoleum 

kitchen and a laundry chute from the upper floors. They painted the kitchen cabinets broadly in 

bold colors, and entertained in a living room with a plate glass front window, hardwood floors, 

built-in varnished wood cabinets with leaded glass doors, and an immense “oriental” style rug. 

A large Marimekko print greeted guests, and the cane backed couch’s cushions were re-upholstered 

in lime-green wet-look vinyl. Beautiful mid-century "architects" chairs were positioned in the living 

room, in front of the fireplace, and a gorgeous wooden surround in the formal dining room was the 

site of many family dinners. 

 

The interior of 695 Kingsley: a formal dinner setting with 1970s aesthetics visible in 

the tablecloth and chair seat covers.

 

The house was regarded by her nieces and nephews as a grand place, who explored every square inch 

of it, although they mostly avoided the back stairs and cellar, as these were considered to be spooky 

and possibly haunted.

The family vehicle was a 1972 Volkswagen Westfalia camper. This served not only as a camper in 

its own right, but also as a way to go backpacking, the 1970s fad based on new, lightweight gear. 

They started with well-equipped, Sierra Club standard, 10-essentials day hikes, and then progressed 

to real backpacking trips in the High Sierras. Goose-down sleeping bags were usually the only thing 

bought new-- the rest of the large items she found thrift shopping, something she indulged in all her 

life and passed on to Piet. She found Boy Scout troops for the children based on their focus on 

backpacking, not car-camping.

 

In the Pomona house, she raised not only her 2 sons, but also, at various times, foster sons George 

Berletich and Kenneth Herrera, now known as Philip Henley. Her nieces and nephews were 

sometimes in her care, sometimes to attend  swim lessons, which looms large in her nephew 

James’s memory. She showed him at about kindergarten age that he could swim to her arms 

unaided in the cold, overcast summer morning waters of the Chaffey High School pool. She 

regarded swimming as a crucial life skill, not surprising for someone who had grown up on 

the beach. Her sons also took mandatory swim-lessons in the summers.

 

While raising her sons to become dyed in the wool swimmers had mixed success, another 

important life skill, bicycling, stuck with her sons, one of whom raced mountain bikes and 

the other who commutes on a bike. She raised them to get out in traffic and ride according to 

the rules that apply to cars. In about 1970, she took both sons, along with a somewhat nervous 

foster son George, to Santa Barbara on bikes. Tim, 7, only had one gear and a coaster brake. 

The others had 3 speeds. She admonished her sons not foolishly to buy bicycles new: there 

were plenty of good bikes out there in thrift shops. Often, a coat of spraypaint was all that 

was needed.

From front: Tim, Peter, worried looking George, Cerini

 

Luggage on the trip was canvas suitcases bungeed to luggage racks. The route west of Newhall 

led up oil company access roads. She probably wasn’t supposed to be there, but her map showed 

a road, so she took it.  It became clear that this was a dead end, so she had the boys lift their 

baggage and then their bikes over a barbed wire fence. So far, so good, but the route north to 

the highway crossed a motorcycle park. The riders there found it amusing to say the least to see 

a family of cyclists pushing heavily laden bikes through the sand as they buzzed past. This episode 

demonstrates an obstinate, anarchic aspect of Cerini’s personality that she has successfully passed 

on to at least one of her sons, and nieces Elizabeth and Emily.

 

About the time Cerini’s sons were in junior high school, as it used to be called, she took on the 

daunting task of becoming a lawyer, following in her grandfather James Creely and uncle Frank 

Creely’s footsteps. She studied at LaVerne College’s law school, and edited the law review there. 

The children were left in the law library to do their homework, and sent to Del Taco to buy dinner. 

She passed the Bar Exam in 1976: Dave had taken the boys to the Montreal Olympics and the 

bicentennial celebrations in New England to get them out of her hair, and she rejoined them for the 

return trip.

 

For the first time since starting a family, Cerini took a job outside the home at a law firm in Covina, 

connecting to the scouting leaders whose troop she would send Peter and Tim to. Around this time 

of increasing independence, she  separated and later divorced from Dave. Cerini stayed in the house 

in Pomona as the boys finished high school.

 

It was at this point that Cerini re-connected with her Christian faith, and began to participate in a 

singles group at an evangelical church. Here she established some of the stronger friendships of 

her later life with women who were staunchly Christian and found themselves in search of a partner. 

While these relationships, and shared worship, nourished her soul, she remained single.

Cerini, 2nd from L, with her singles group friends. 

Their fashion sense is notable. 

 

Cerini left the Covina firm to start her own practice, focusing on cases relating to family law, but 

she found she didn’t generally enjoy the company of attorneys. She went to work for Jet Propulsion 

Laboratory in Pasadena in contract administration. She was thrilled to be involved in JPL’s space 

exploration projects, sometimes witnessing momentous successes live with the other employees 

and collecting souvenirs of NASA projects.

 

Cerini stayed at JPL until she was nearly 70. She had invested in rental properties in Arroyo Grande, 

near Pismo Beach, often staying there in local motels amid the tang of the salt air and the sound 

of the surf. With Diddie’s death in her 90s, Cerini was able to buy a small mid-century house 

about 200 yards from the sea bluff in Shell Beach, part of Pismo where she lived out almost 20 

years, attending Oak Park Christian Church in neighboring Grover Beach.

 

While continuing to visit thrift stores, Cerini also used this time to return to her youthful wanderlust, 

stocking her Lexus with Triple-A maps of California from Temecula to Berkeley, through the landscape 

she knew best: grassy hills, dotted with live oaks on one side and the pacific ocean on the other. These two 

landscapes lay on either side of her through the window of her car as she drove through the central coast.

Cerini remained a voracious reader through this time, her tastes running toward spy thrillers, and 

engaged actively with the stock market, making notes in the margins of newspapers and magazines, 

and staying on top of her personal finances. Sadly, dementia made all this more difficult, and in 2020 

it was so hard for her to organize her life that she agreed to live with Tim in Rancho Cucamonga, 

alternating between watching TV and enjoying the vista of sky and trees on his patio. A fall sent 

her to a convalescent home near Tim’s house where he was able to supervise her care for 2 more 

years before death took her.

 

In conclusion, in Elizabeth Creely's writing voice: She was a major influence in the culture of her family, and passed on a deep appreciation of all of 

California's landscapes, a belief in the power of the ocean, a reverence of horses, and a veneration 

of books and the importance of literacy.

 

Coda, December 2025: When I went to the office of California Properties in Arroyo Grande, I informed

of the reason for me visit, to give my contact information for the disposition of Cerini's properties. The

woman there exclaimed happily that she thought I looked familiar, that I bore a strong resemblance to  Cerini.

She spoke of how nice my mother was, though she was quick to follow with the fact that she was also 

"stern". It was good to connect to Cerini's mother this way.