Castle of Creativity : Mary Foster and her son Alan make magic that goes beyond interior design in their Santa Ana home.
SANTA ANA--In the years of doing this column, I’ve learned to respect the power of people’s front doors. Even the flimsiest pine and Masonite ones seem able to safeguard from the suburban drabness outside the fragile, separate realities created by those living inside.
Some are overtly weird, the homes of people who have based their lives on Dungeons and Dragons, collecting ventriloquist dummies or deifying Vic Morrow. Others might be a gentler shift from the norm, yet those can be the most startling, creating a subtle sense that you’ve stepped into another world.
That’s the feeling I had entering Mary and Alan Foster’s Santa Ana home. The 57-year-old and her 22-year-old son have created a wonderland of design in their cozy rented circa-1920s house. Like only a handful of places I’ve been, their house felt faintly magical, as if a special hand had passed over every aspect of it.
Everything, from a quantity of uniquely decorated Christmas trees to napkin rings made with ears of purplish Indian corn, has been given a distinctive twist or flourish, and each seems as if it has been set in its perfect place amid the antique “early grandmother to early garage sale” furnishings. One felt no less certain that a few months hence, the entire place will have changed, and will be no less perfect.
It doesn’t surprise, then, that its co-creator Mary Foster has a high regard for the places people keep apart from the life outside.
“This is your world; it’s your sovereignty. This is where you live . This is the real person. Everything else is just window dressing,” Foster says.
She is a small, cheerful woman. Alan is smaller, and even more cheerful. Since her marriage dissolved 12 years ago, Foster has singly cared for Alan, whose Down’s syndrome and juvenile diabetes require 24-hour care. They will tell you that they are quite a team.
Rather than have Alan institutionalized or in a program, Foster is his constant companion. She receives a small income from a state in-home supportive services program and gets by doing a bit of work as a notary public. Sometimes she helps prepare for weddings, and, when pressed, makes a Victorian wedding cake decorated with hundreds of tiny pastry roses. The two are also aided by some very loyal friends and family, such as Foster’s older son, David, who gave them a washer and dryer last year, and a friend who fixed their plumbing for Christmas.
She and Alan spend much of their day working on the design projects in which their house abounds. Christmas trees are reinvented with dried flowers, costume jewelry, holly and decorated toy-sized Victorian hats. There is a wall hanging made from a sled they saved from a local demolished house; it’s adorned with twisted sticks, pine cones, toy birds and an old Pinocchio marionette. A sad Emmett Kelly dummy sits in a wagon astride a bale of hay, with an autumnal flow of curly willow and Hawaiian protea bursting behind him.
Although it is now well past Christmas, tables hold festive centerpieces and place settings, while the fireplace plays host to a scene Alan created with evergreen branches, elves busily working on toys and an approving Santa looking on.
“Santa Claus loves the elves,” Alan explained with a bemused, musical voice. “The elves do like making dolls and assembling scenery, so Santa can relax.” He has a few other solo works in the house, but his pride and joy is the train room, which is nearly filled with a platform holding an electric trolley car course and its surrounding winter scene created by the pair. Covered with flecks and drifts of plastic snow, it is a holiday vision, with even the six handmade dollhouses teeming with interior detail.
The Fosters don’t sit idle when Christmas is past: If there aren’t holidays to celebrate, Mary and Alan recognize the seasons with household designs. They also make items to sell at a gift show, open to friends, that they hold in their home each November. They usually make $100 to $300 that way.
They already have drawers stuffed with the raw materials, such as a bag of autumn leaves brought from Wisconsin by a friend. Foster lets the two evergreen shrubs in her yard grow wild, so she’ll have branches when they need them for projects.
“I love Mother Nature, so everything that I can bring in comes into the house. Flowers, leaves, bare branches, sticks, you name it,” she said.
The pair also undertake projects such as re-tiling, wallpapering and painting the house, the latter in a blue-gray hue Alan chose.
On his own, Alan’s favorite things are poring through Architectural Digest and watching “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” He likes all the characters best, he says, including the vile Borg.
“We don’t participate in structured education and structured this and that. It wasn’t for us,” Foster said. “It was much better for us to go it alone and do more and see more and be more. We work until we feel like we don’t want to any more, and then we quit. Then if we can’t sleep and want to do some more, one of us gets the other one and we get up and do something.”
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When she had Alan 22 years ago, Foster says doctors advised her to have him institutionalized immediately and not to form a bond to him because he would likely die within a year. They wouldn’t bring him to her room, so she got up to look at him through the nursery window. She was appalled to see what she regarded as unnecessary tests being conducted on him, and raised a fuss, insisting on taking him home.
She says she didn’t have an instant’s qualm about flying in the face of expert advice. Having worked as a nurse, she had some knowledge of medicine.
“But how did I know ? I can’t give you an answer to that. But when a mother looks at a new baby and she loves that baby more than anything in the world, and that baby says, ‘Oh, gosh, there’s that pair of arms I’ve been waiting for,’ you know . They said, ‘Don’t become too attached.’ Well, too late .
“In life one has to make choices, and why would I choose to desert an entity that I gave birth to? It could have six heads, but it would still deserve dignity, food, parents, a home. When I saw him in the nursery being used as a guinea pig, that instantaneously made me decide that for the rest of my life, and his, that he would have the quality care and quality home and quality life that every child is entitled to no matter what.
“I took Alan home, and from then on it was our partnership.”
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He has discovered to have diabetes at 10 months, when he went into a coma for three days. Since then, his health has demanded constant vigilance, requiring several blood tests and shots a day. He has had other problems as well, such as hypothyroidism and an incident of his immune system shutting down two years ago.
Like many with Down’s syndrome, Alan could teach the rest of us a few things about being personable and sweet-natured. As a result, he’s made a lot of friends.
“We’ve met wonderful, wonderful people,” Foster said. “Alan picks his own friends, and I never know what shape or size or age they’ll be. His latest acquisition is a 65-year-old man we met at Pop’s Cafe, and the two of them have become great buddies. Here we are eating ham and eggs and this very nice man puts his arm around him and says, ‘Hi, buddy, what’s your name?’ ”
As is always the case with people who are different, not all the reactions are so pleasant. When they were dining out once last year, a waiter pointed to Alan and asked Foster, “What does it want to drink?” He and the management quickly learned that she isn’t always as good-natured as her son.
“You can’t be shy,” she says. “You have to be fair and you have to be honest, and you have to be as compassionate for the ignorance of that other person as you can be, but you must draw the line at the aggressive pursuit of that behavior from that person. So we do that when it’s necessary.”
Foster says she and Alan take such occurrences and his health difficulties in stride.
“It has not been easy, but I’ve got to tell you, nothing that’s fun is. If you see humor in everything, you might make it,” she said.
Where others might see a burden, she sees a rare freedom.
“We have what you see in this house, and we’re happy with that. And we have the inner peace of knowing that if we don’t choose to do something, we don’t have to. We can take a walk if we want, and don’t have to answer to anybody as to what time we get back. Or, if we decide to get up at 2 in the morning and go down and watch the moon over the ocean, that’s fine.
“It’s freedom, it’s sovereignty, and that comes from doing things our own way. Consequently, Alan is healthier, happier, well-adjusted and would surprise you with what he can do.”
At present, Alan understands more from the pictures in his architectural magazines and books than he does from the text. Foster hopes to help develop his reading and math skills this year, since he recently has shown a greater interest. She says he’s learned a great deal from the crafts projects they tackle.
“I think the whole idea in learning is you should enjoy how you learn. You do learn doing these things, believe it or not, all about wood, and finishing, depth and perception, color, shape and design, all kinds of things. This is the learning Alan gets in so his own ideas can come out. Like all the things in his bedroom, I said, ‘Here, you do it,’ and he did.
“Many of these kids would not be allowed to plug in an electric plug, not allowed to have all these things to work with. He can and does, and then he gets to see how people enjoy it.”
