Jeanie's Bed and No Breakfast

Poet and journalist Penelope Moffet joined other writers at a recent reading event celebrating the literary contributions of Peter Carr, whose art, writing, and activism was celebrated in "Peter Carr: Artist for Survival."  For "Peter Carr: Author for Survival," Moffet joined writers Mary Camarillo, Chris Davidson, Lorene Delany-Ullman, and Rafael Zepeda in reading both their own work and excerpts from Carr's Aliso Creek to an appreciative audience.  The event was both taped and filmed. We publish, below, an expanded version of Moffet's remarks and poems she shared, remembering Peter Carr but largely celebrating her long, close friendship with Carr's common-law wife, the legendary Laguna Beach activist Jeanie Bernstein. Carr and Bernstein (above, with daughter Shari) lived together in South Laguna for 17 years. Moffet's 1982 Los Angeles Times remembrance of Peter Carr was on display in the show "Peter Carr: Artist for Survival."

Jeanie’s Bed and No Breakfast

I met Peter Carr and Jeanie Bernstein in 1979-80 at some Alliance for Survival meetings during the year I lived in Laguna Beach. Jeanie was a fierce presence, while Peter seemed more approachable. An artist and writer himself, he quickly learned I wrote poetry as well as nonfiction, and he asked to see a poem. I showed him one. His response to the poem was warm and encouraging.

When I learned of Peter’s death at age 55 in February 1981, I was stunned. In early 1982, when the Peter Carr Peace Center was established at Cal State Long Beach, I researched and wrote an article about Peter and the peace center for the Los Angeles Times. The day after I turned in the story, I wrote “The Morning News.”

The Morning News

For Peter Carr

The morning after

I write your story

I wake in sorrow

mourning what I met

could not meet

the year before your

heart wild

you gone

World’s friend –

I wish I’d seized

the hand thrust out

the hand now bone

now more than flesh

sifting life from ashes –

phoenix flower

Shaman

you’ve been bouncing

through my dreams

The shade of you

the light of the wife

you never wed

You bring bulletins

of black ink seeping

to blot water

earth

sky

I put you to rest

I write of other things

but then in a.m. dark

you slide up again

great bear

loosed from your cave

(First published in The Webs We Weave: Orange County Poetry Anthology, 1986.)

While doing research for the Los Angeles Times story, I interviewed Jeanie at length, and after the article was published we became friends.

I have a fat folder of cards and letters I received from Jeanie over the years. One letter dated 7/8/88 concerns the writing of Joan Didion. Jeanie really, really disliked the novel The Book of Common Prayer, which I admired and had pressed upon her, so she wrote me a 5-page explication of her views:

Let me plead innocent of all attempt at objectivity or pretense of literary expertise. The woman is very, very skillful and she knows her audience well and she’s not writing for me. It’s fine if someone wants to write about cynics; I don’t want the writer to be one. I am a pessimist, but not a cynic. Arthur Miller wrote an interesting short essay once on the difference. A pessimist thinks that things will probably not turn out O.K. A cynic thinks people are no damned good. Didion thinks people are no damned good & she’s glad.

I’m an activist, Penelope, you know that. How can you expect me to read this woman without my hackles rising? I have children, for god’s sake!

Jeanie was my friend, my challenger and the Ideal Reader of my poetry for almost 30 years. Early in our friendship she was also my best hiking buddy, a robust and vigorous companion on many walks in Caspers Wilderness Park near San Juan Capistrano. Later, when arthritis made it impossible for her to move far or fast, she still wanted to breathe in sage smell, hear wild birds, and sit in the shelter of California oaks near the trails and ridges she once strode along.

Jeanie closely read, or made me read aloud to her at least three times, every poem I sent or brought to her, and her comments were precise and hugely helpful. She had a wonderful eye and ear. If she thought I was on a wrong course, she let me know very directly. It didn’t always change my writing in the way she would have preferred, but what she said always forced me to think harder about what I was doing. I showed her a lot of work. Once another writer asked her to read and comment on his poems but she told him No, she already had a poet.

I frequently stayed over for a night or two at “Jeanie’s Bed and No Breakfast,” the spacious South Laguna house filled with artifacts of Jeanie’s life and Peter’s art, where warm companionship and solitary dreaming time could intertwine. Jeanie liked having people around. She liked having a poet hanging out in the house and in the front and back gardens, where native plants mingled with lush migrants from other climates.

Here’s a poem written at Jeanie’s, prompted by how Peter’s sculptures sprang out from surprising places.

In Jeanie’s Front Yard as the Day and Year Die Down

For Jeanie Bernstein

In the twilight a small woman flies by my nose.

She thinks she’s a bird.

The birds, gone to sleep

or flown off,

don’t fight her brass nonsense.

But the others here know what they are:

the tin fetus splayed on its back,

the sad iron man astride whalebone,

the hand springing from tree flank

to grab at the dark, and light.

Too much eating the dusk

can make you wild.

The birds – or ghosts – wake up

shouting

In! In! Go back and go on.

(First published in Oxalis, Summer 1989.)

During the last year of her life, Jeanie left her upstairs bedroom for a hospital bed in her living room downstairs. By then she had many health problems, including a faltering heart. Friends and relatives often came to visit.

I learned of her death in October 2011 by email while I was visiting the painter Jane Culp, who lives in the desert near Anza, CA. Jane had just given me one of her big, gorgeous charcoal drawings. As I wrote an ekphrastic poem responding to Jane’s drawing, I felt I was also writing a poem for Jeanie, who loved oak groves and chaparral and wild creatures. However, the “she” in the poem is Ellen Dorland, a pianist who owned the property that became Dorland Mountain Arts near Temecula, CA, an artists’ retreat where I stayed many times until a fire took out the original buildings in May 2004. Jane stayed there often, too.

(First published in my book It Isn’t That They Mean to Kill You, Arroyo Seco Press, 2018.)

Sometime after Jeanie died I went for another walk at Caspers, thinking I might write something about her there. But what came instead was a mountain lion poem, as I sat in the crook of a sycamore that bent its trunk down to the ground, a tree I always visited on Caspers walks. The poem is not about Jeanie but contains, I hope, something of her fierce, world-loving spirit.

Bell Canyon

The mountain lion sees you

long before you never see her.

She is the ghost in the bushes

beyond the deer slow-stepping

then bounding across the meadow.

When you sit, awkwardly,

on the lap of your favorite

ground-hugging sycamore, she

is the cool wind brushing

the nape of your neck,

she has tasted you

and found you wanting

more than she will give

or take away.

(First published in It Isn’t That They Mean to Kill You.)

Jeanie was passionate, perceptive, funny and very loving. She didn’t tolerate bullshit. No one lived life more joyously, avidly, greedily (and if she were here, she might make me take out one of those adverbs) than Jeanie. She was a great appreciator. A lifelong activist, she had a capacity for pleasure that was matched by her rage against the cruelty, bigotry, willful stupidity and cupidity killing large portions of our world.

She never hesitated to express an opinion. She was a wonderful letter-writer. I will miss her as long as memory lasts.

Penelope Moffet lived in Orange County from 1968 to 1982. She is a graduate of El Dorado High School in Placentia and Cal State Fullerton and is the author of three chapbooks, most recently Cauldron of Hisses (Arroyo Seco Press, 2022). Her poems appear in many journals, including Sheila-Na-Gig, Calyx and Eclectica, and have been included in several anthologies. A Pushcart Prize nominee for a poem published in ONE ART in 2024, she lives in Culver City.