Maybe It's Dusk

“Death does not puzzle me. Life does. Existence does. Consciousness of existence does. And that is why at the age of 60 I must peer back, sift through what is left or what is remembered and try to make some sense of it. Try to draw my life, try to decide who I’ve been. ”

I barely knew her. A mother, daughter, sister, teacher, and beloved friend to many, Janis Key passed away in December 2014 at the age of 64  due to complications from her long fight against rheumatoid arthritis. I met her just once, a couple of years ago, but she had a certain presence: strength and gentleness in equal parts. I remember her sitting straight-postured in a wheelchair, quietly attentive, intelligent, and kind. I never saw her after that. 

But then, just a few days ago, someone showed me these beautiful words that she had written, a testimonial to grace and equanimity in the face of death, and they touched my heart, and I knew they belonged here in this place where stories and life lessons are gathered and shared:  

GOING HOME

First she gathered the grandmothers: the one with the embracing arms, the one she never met and the step-grandmother who taught her to read. Then the huge, quiet grandfather but not the other one who left so few traces, although he seemed ever-present in her childhood. Of course the solid father and the fragile mother.  An older brother and baby sister. She was going home.

She’s gathering the external. Fading photographs and brittle letters. She’ll transfer them to the internal. Memories and feelings.  Accuracy is not the goal. She’s trying to make sense of what arises as she squints back. She is trying to get home before it is too late. It is already late.

Maybe it’s dusk. Age is measured in so many ways. Years and months are counted. That’s one way. By that measure I’m 60, hardly old they tell me. My body, however, must be 90 or thereabouts. Older probably. My body is my responsibility, but it is not me. I refuse to claim ownership of it or dominion. I lug its ubiquitous bulk but possess neither love, nor hatred for it. Not even pity. It is my duty, that is all. I calculate my age by the rich furnishings of the home I’m reconstructing. I consider the love, for instance. How many years is that worth?  How old is someone who has collected this much? This much wonder and awe? This much agony? These people? This much ecstasy and this much pain?  It must be dusk. I must be nearly 100.  I’ve nearly lived too long.

She places the photo of the grandmother who died so young, leaving four children, close to the photo of the sad little girl who grew up and became a mother of her own. She slides the photo of herself aged three next to them. And the loving grandmother as a young telephone operator. A wedding photo of her sister. Only women on the dresser top. That is plenty. Don’t rush they tell her. There is plenty of time. She knows there is not plenty of time.

I’ve been growing older since I was born.  I’ve been growing old. I’ve never slowed nor wavered. Steadily traveling. Really, we’re all only waiting. Really, we’re all only going in one direction, heading in the same direction, toward our ends. I’m trying to time it right. I’m trying to last until I get home.

Here is the grandfather whose large body takes up the entire photograph. His heart was that big too. His quiet wisdom, although he only managed to get through sixth grade, steadied her when she shook with doubt. Here he is on the book shelf next to the dresser. She places her father, not as large, but as kind and wiser perhaps, beside his father, her grandfather. Word for word, she remembers his guidance. Don’t judge a man by his successes but by how he handles his failures. Don’t judge a man until you understand the burden he carries. And most importantly, Love everyone, even fatheads. The book case stood in his law office for years. His office was home too. The men.   

I’m trying to get it right. And I’m trying to explain or justify something but I’m not sure yet what that is. Or why. Why can’t I just slip out? What exactly must I explain?

There’s nothing wrong about being alone, nothing sad. Maybe because for me it’s solitude, not loneliness. Maybe because I’ve had so much practice. Maybe because I’ve developed so much patience.

Two she never met. The tiny baby girl whose ummbilical cord strangled her on her way.  An accident. A tragedy. The grandmother whose brain hemorrhaged and was carried to the hospital never to return to her tea cooling on the kitchen table. An accident. A tragedy. The two she never met. The baby, a six pound swaddled angel. The fine long finger nails, the thick black hair. The grandmother’s loving letters about her four darling children. The purple ink. The artistic penmanship. Those who remained called her an angel. Two angels she never met. Two tragedies. She has carried them and kept them close all of these years. She has moved them into her new home.

Shasta daisies bloomed along the back fence. The swing set was in the corner by the alley. I spent hours on the cool grass, in the middle of the back yard, staring at the stars. Still and dark Colorado nights. The place to contemplate. Sometimes I could hear Mr. Niederhut whistle for his boys to get home on the double. Or I could hear the Crane’s dog bark down the street.  On some nights I could hear my mother finishing up the dishes, the kitchen light casting a faint glow across the yard. And on my back I identified planets and watched for shooting stars.

I’ve died before. Grief smothered me.

She asked for a hummingbird feeder outside her bedroom window. Her son-in-law surprised her with one on a Saturday morning. Now she can rest in bed to support her neck and watch the hummingbirds gorge and fight for territory, A tulip tree the next block over is green all year round. She contemplates her old life as a hummingbird: flitting to the classroom, then to meetings, then to pick up her daughter then home to fix a meal, then to drop her daughter at dance lessons, then to the grocery store, then to pick her daughter up, then home to grade essays, then to her daughter’s side to help her with homework, then. . .a few years ago she ceased being a hummingbird. Soon she will cease being.

A new friend recently insisted, tell me your life.

I looked around the tidy, new home. The photo of a man in a WWI uniform. A blue plate, purchased in Boston to honor a tiny new angel. A pencil drawing of a chaotic corner of another home in Boulder a thousand miles and forty years away. A color-tipped photo of a rosy-cheeked young girl, eyes downcast, lost. A black and white snapshot of me, blushing and holding a ribbon after my first 10K, first in my category, the sole entrant.  My red weaving.  The red and green quillt given to me and my then-husband for our first Christmas, pieced by his great grandmother. Floor to ceiling bookshelf filled with literature I still think about.  A graceful young woman en pointe, my daughter.

Which one, I asked?   

She slides several packets of letters onto a shelf in the closet. One day she will read them. They have been bundled in ribbon for more than thirty years, since they were packed in the car and moved from one coast to another.

Thirty one years ago on this day in October I had to find a safe place for my daughter who could not stay, and so I invented heaven. Or accepted its ready-made version, because I was rushed. My baby had to be comforted and swaddled. My mother and my three grandmothers could sing lullabies and rock her, and feed her and hold her and hold her and hold her. The idea of heaven was so perposterous to me until I was desperate for it. Hell, a crazier idea, one I’ll never have need of.

She has placed them beside each other, her mother’s Bible and her own, on one bookshelf. Her Bible was an award for perfect attendance at Sunday school. She loved Sunday school and church. She learned to genuflect properly and cross herself carefully. She felt God’s presence nearly as mysteriously as she felt the presence of the holy ghost. She read the King James version and her Bible now looks worn, read, handled. But she has no memory of reading it. She can’t cite a single verse. She thinks Genesis a ridiculous story. She’ll tell you to be resposible for your own sins and not hand them over to Jesus.  Yet she loves him, and because she loves him would never ask him to burden himself with her sins. Her sins are hers to keep.  She has the two Bibles. And she has her mother’s Shakespeare and her own. Hers well worn. And she can quote to you from it.

I have been saved so many times and by so many people.

Stories have a way of getting told again and again until they become the truth. Again and again I was told the terribly sad story of my mother returning me, six weeks old, to the hospital. I had cried all night long, refused a bottle, and had a dangerously high fever. My grandmother swaddled me tightly and placed me in a basket. Take her now, she insisted to my mother, and I’ll stay here with Greg. My mother returned, hours later with an empty basket. Everyone cried. My grandmother, my grandfather, my brother and my mother whose husband was fighting in Korea and probably didn’t even know he had a baby girl. A letter took so long to arrive behind the lines. I have the letter now, 60 years later. Written by my aunt. Dear Earl, You are the father of a beautiful baby girl. She is small. Six pounds. Jeannie is doing well. Greg is lively. Love, Carol. The empty basket story. This story probably was true. Certainly, someone cried every time it was told.

I am not puzzled by death. I am not afraid to cease being. In this form, I did not exist before I was born. I don’t mind returning to that state, non-existence. Death does not puzzle me.  Life does. Existence does. Consciousness of existence does. And that is why at the age of 60 I must peer back, sift through what is left or what is remembered and try to make some sense of it. Try to draw my life, try to decide who I’ve been.  

They ask me, but isn’t it unsettling, the thought of what you’ll miss? No. I wonder, every so often, how my great grandchildren, should I have any, will live. Who will they become? But I have left the party early many times and never regretted it. I’m content with what I have; I’m not greedy for more and more experiences.

In junior high school she was taught how to draw perspective. Draw the horizon. Place the vanishing point on the horizon. Draw the scene to the vanishing point. And she drew western ghost towns and modern cities and her neighborhood and orchards of fruit trees from the viewer’s point of view back to the vanishing point. She entered her drawings knowing she could travel toward the vanishing point but never reach it. The vanishing point was imaginary; it had no width. She could travel forever into the drawing. But now she sees something, an object perhaps, at the vanishing point. It no longer forever recedes in the distance.

Treebeard's Gift

Yesterday I drove up into the mountains above Santa Barbara to see my old friends Marc and Julie. My purpose (or so I thought) was to interview Marc, otherwise known as Treebeard, for this very website, but it turned into an informal visit, which was actually even better.

Although retired from an illustrious career as a teacher, Treebeard is a busy man, fully immersed in an ongoing labor of love. He explores the backcountry near his house each day, zooming into an often unseen universe of insects and plants, documenting these for posterity in an extraordinary online archive of photographs.

We looked through a few images together at his computer: butterflies, a multitude of mushrooms, myriad forms of life both weird and gorgeous. There's the transparent shed skin of a spider, a katydid nymph, a shiny new oak apple gall, the tiny sporangia of slime molds growing on a fallen branch of Coast Live Oak. There's a Sara Orangetip on Bitter Gooseberry, a mating pair of Western Boxelder Bugs, and the pale blue flowers of Native Greenbark Ceanothus.

"Beautifully intricate," Treebeard has written of the latter, "like little origami boxes."

That's the poet in him. He's a talented and patient photographer, and the images are beautiful, but each is also accompanied by an illuminating caption that is explanatory and often lovely. He presents the scientific and common names, fascinating facts and observations, and some journal-like comments about the specifics of the day, all shared with eloquence and clarity. His sense of wonder is palpable.

Worrisome changes loom, globally and locally. Around here it's been too dry, eerily warm, seasons askew, repercussions yet unknown. But there's so much life happening, so many miraculous things unfolding.

And some folks look up at the heavens, pondering distant galaxies. My friend Treebeard explores a different infinity. He peers into the micro-cosmos...quietly observing, recording, and archiving.

"For all we know, some of these things may be happening for the last time," he muses, hoping that's not true. "But I'm documenting as much as I can."

Here is the link to Treebeard’s photos, an extraordinary gift to all of us.

A Candy Store and A Chopped-Up Piano

My mother passed away earlier this year, a fact that still shocks and unmoors me. She was 91 years old, and had become increasingly unsteady and bewildered, but her resilient old body knew only to keep going and somehow it seemed she always was and always would be.  Communication was difficult, primarily because of her deafness, and I used to write her notes, although eventually even those were hard for her to follow. So you can imagine my surprise when I recently discovered an audiotape I made of a conversation I had with her a decade ago. It’s a poor quality recording with a distracting background hum, but it’s startling to hear her voice again, loud and clear as it used to be, with its almost comical New York accent.

Even then, she had obviously forgotten many details, and my own prompts and responses during the recording are unfortunately intrusive, despite my good intentions, but at times she did launch into lucid little narratives, and they are fascinating and touching. I wonder now why these fragments of her long life lingered in memory with such clarity while others blurred and vanished entirely, and I'd like to share a few.

She talks about her ill-fated musical aspirations:

I had a piano in Corona in the room in back of the store. We had the store, remember. It was an old upright, a nice piano, and I wasn’t playing it yet. I just had a couple of lessons. And you know, my mother, she chopped it up for firewood. I cried. I says, “Why, Mother?” She said, “We need the wood for fire.” I lived in a cold flat. It was a cold flat in back of the store. She had someone come and chop it up...Oh, I felt so bad. But we were poor, you know. And we needed the firewood."

When I remind her that she used to be a good singer, she recounts a story I remember her telling me when I was a little girl:

"Yeah. I went to a studio to test my voice. My mother took me. We went on the train. We had to go to Brooklyn. We went to the studio and they told me to sing a song. Do you know that I wouldn’t open up my mouth?! I was so shy. The man told my mother. 'She’s not ready yet. Take her home.'”

It must have been a terrible disappointment for both of them. A lost voice, a lost opportunity. I wondered how her mother reacted:

"She wasn’t mad. She was a good mother. May she rest in peace. She was a good mother, my adoptive mother."

There are lots of memories about the candy store her parents ran when she was a child in Corona, Queens:

"We had candies for a penny, and we had candies for a nickel. My favorite candy bar was the Wow. It was a nickel. It was a big bar with marshmallow. I loved it….Besides candy, they sold nuts, salty seeds, Indian nuts, and what do you call the other seeds? Pumpkin seeds. We had big jars and you scooped them out. I think it was like a penny a cup or two cents a cup. Yeah, we had that candy store for a while. I lived in back of the store. We had four rooms in the back and we lived there. We lived upstairs too for awhile. But we moved down. The janitors were the Picklers."

 "And I had a friend there that used to come. Her name was Mildred Piantanida. She used to come for her Coke. She loved her Coca Cola. And cigarettes. We sold cigarettes, you know. And she would sit and talk with me. Her name was Mildred Piantanida. She passed away a long time ago. She was quite young. She had two sons, two boys, and her husband was Italian. Piantanida. Oh, she was a nice lady. She was my friend. She gave me a lot of business, you know. Yeah, she was older than me. And I moved away. And then I heard when she had passed away. She was sick. I never forget her. She was very nice."

Speaking of a job she held in Manhattan’s Garment District in the 1940s, my mother seems proud:  

"I worked for Kolmer Marcus in New York. One day George Raft came in for his coat. I filled out the slip. They sold men’s suits and coats. Expensive…Daddy couldn’t afford a suit there." 

But speaking of Daddy:

"You know where I met Daddy? At a dance. With my girlfriend Sylvia. That’s where I met him. I met him at The Manhattan Center. It was a dance hall...he came over, and he swept me off my feet."

"Then I got married and I moved into the house where he was living. His mother was a sick lady. She had that illness. Multiple sclerosis. I met her, she met me. She took a liking to me. They used to have a lady come in and take care of her. She passed away in the hospital. She was young too. I remember. I didn’t go to the funeral. And then when Daddy came back I said, “Oh, I’m so sorry.” I felt bad. He handled it fine. He was strong."

There are more meanderings on the tape, mostly bits and pieces prompted by my specific questions and hints, and I recognize that there are mistakes and points of confusion, but I am so glad I made this effort to record her when I did.

This is all I have now of my mother’s voice, which would otherwise be lost for all of time.  

And her memories seem like glimmers from a different era, still shining here like dewdrops, small occurrences that helped to shape a life now ended.

This is why oral histories matter. This is why The Living Stories Collective exists, and we hope it continues. 

Listening to My Father's Voice

My father's voice is pressed onto a little disc recorded about seventy years ago when he was stationed with the 145th Signal Company of the 5th Armored Division at Camp Cooke, California, located in northern Santa Barbara County between Lompoc and Santa Maria. He drove a half–tractor and operated a radio in his army days, but he never saw combat, and at some point he landed himself a desk job at the base working for The Camp Cooke Clarion, writing various articles, poems, and book reviews. I saw a snapshot of his office once, complete with water cooler, Northern Pacific calendar, and the plain round face of a wall clock that read twenty to eleven. 

One of his stories, called “The Moment”, was dramatically enacted at the service club, another, a touching wartime Father’s Day tribute, was picked up by a couple of "real" newspapers. But for me the most memorable piece was about Zombie, the beloved wire-haired terrier of Camp Cooke's Buzzer Company canine corps. It's an article that was cut out and cherished by at least one anonymous reader, and I know this because I found it decades later in the files at the Lompoc Historical Society.

But most of what I know about my father's time at Camp Cooke was gleaned from photographs and clippings he kept in a handsome leather album, with captions and commentaries written in ink along the bottom borders.  As a child growing up in 1950’s New York, I was fascinated by all this. World War II had ended just a decade earlier, and the raucous city was still good-hearted and full of postwar optimism. But there was something compelling, elusive, and already historical about those black and white photos of stark new barracks on dusty fields, jeep convoys along desolate hills, and my father in uniform, dark and handsome, gleaming with dreams, a familiar stranger. “It was beautiful country,” he told me once, referring to that Santa Barbara land. “I always wished I could return.” It seems so serendipitous that I live here now, perhaps fulfilling his dream by proxy.

And yet at the time, of course, he was eager to go back home, and on one momentous day he went into the nearby town of Lompoc to see about booking railroad tickets east.  Afterwards, he stopped at the USO facility with some buddies and made a little record to mail home. It eventually went west again and now resides with me. 

"This message will announce my homecoming verbally," he says. "I will be home around January 5. Until that date, I can hardly wait." He goes on to make jokes about KP duty, sends his love, and adds, "We're having a heck of a time trying to get tickets for a steam liner. By ten o'clock we will know whether we have succeeded..."

When he discovers he has more time on the record, he sings "My Old Kentucky Home", and maybe it's an odd choice for a New York boy, but that fundamental yearning for home resonates. 

The actual record requires a phonograph that can be played at 78 rpm., so I didn't hear it for many years, but one day my dear friend and colleague Marc Kummel (aka Treebeard) played it for me on his old-fashioned Victrola. There I am below, after listening for the first time. 

Treebeard made me a CD of the record, which I downloaded onto my computer, and henceforth whenever I have had the whim to hear my father's voice speaking and singing across the decades, the wonders of technology have allowed it.  And now I am sharing it here too, on this living archive of voices and stories, because I want my father to be a part of it.  

So have a listen, and don't mind the scratchiness at the start...that just adds to the magic:

We never stop missing the ones we have loved.

Living In the Realm of Anything's Possible

Jim Brady has been teaching children and leading journeys with them for about forty years, and he's traveled with students all over the globe with a company called Educational Safaris, which he started in 1982. He was one of the founders of Dunn Middle School, has been with Santa Barbara Middle School for twenty years, and has been involved with the Rio Beni Health Project in Bolivia, begun by the late Dr. Lou Netzer. He served on the Leadership Council and Accreditation team of the Association for Experiential Education and worked as an educator in Thailand on a State Department refugee training program. And that’s just the stuff he might put on his resumé, if he ever had to do one. He’s also a family man, surfer, cyclist, songwriter, and musician.

And it’s a good thing he’s an old friend of mine, because most of the audio recording of the interview I did with him on November 13, 2014 was destroyed by a technological malfunction. I was mortified, but he was as understanding as only a friend can be. “Everything is ephemeral,” he said. “We can think of that recording as a Buddhist sand mandala, there for a moment, then gone.”

Very Zen. We even have a vague plan to regroup and try again.  But in the meantime, until I can present a full interview with Jim, here’s a glimpse I've crafted using salvaged excerpts from the Lost Tapes.

Jim was born in 1951 in Santa Barbara, an admittedly lucky place to start out. His love of travel, camping, and the great outdoors began with boyhood Sierra trips:

“My father would take us out of school twice a year, autumn and spring, and we'd go to Yosemite and hike. Then when I turned sixteen, we started going by ourselves. I was the oldest, and supposedly in charge. We'd drive all night across the desert and figure it out from there."

"I had no idea what we were doing, really. No tent, no stove. It was just the boys, and it was a dream. By the time we got back home, we felt like we’d been to the end of the world. First thing we'd do after we got home was get to the beach, surf, and start planning right away for the next trip. We did those trips for three years in a row: we would go to the Sierras, park the car in Camp 5 in Yosemite Valley, hitchhike to the trailhead, and then hike back a hundred miles or so.”

“I also read a book that influenced me early on. It was Colin Fletcher’s Thousand Mile Summer, where he hiked from the Mojave Desert up to Oregon. He may have started in Mexico.  Just walking, sort of to find himself, and he went through a place called Silver Canyon, a creek up in Alpine County. Of course by 1968 and ’69, we figured the Sierras were way too crowded, and we felt Yosemite Valley was out of control, so we started going further north. So we went up to Alpine County, which was the least populated place in California. We would go off-trail, up canyon and down, and along the creeks. So those early trips led to way bigger trips.”

And then, there were those golden Hollister Ranch days:

“In the summer of ’67, before we went to the mountains, my dad said, ‘Hey, wanna go up to Hollister? I’m meeting my friend J.J.’ So we drove into Hollister Ranch, hopped in a jeep, and went everywhere, up and down and around and about, and clear to Cojo Creek on roads that you can now barely recognize as old footpaths.”

“At that time Hollisters were looking at selling, and what were they gonna do with it? My dad really didn’t want to see it bought up by the private group and made into some big campground. At that time his idea was that it should be made into a state or national park. Thankfully neither of those actually happened. But for better or worse, he wanted it preserved. That was his interest. He knew it was unique.”

“So after that cruise in the jeep, I was noticing the beaches, ‘cause this place was in our surfing realm–The Ranch–or we just called it Hollister, and my dad said, ‘You boys wanna go up there regularly?’ Oh, yeah! So we got this little card. My brother in Australia still has it. It’s a little handwritten card that says, ‘Let the Brady brothers in.’ So we would get there super early in the morning and wait for Jim the guard to sober up as much as possible and open up the gate.  Choirs of angels when the gate opened! And that was the summer of ’67.”

"Those were some pretty special years.  During my junior and senior years of high school. I played tennis, read books, and went surfing at the Ranch as much as possible. We all had jobs in those days too. I worked two or three nights a week and we were at the Ranch as much as possible, which basically meant just go, see you later, and be home sometime around sunset. That was pretty much the rules. We thoroughly thrashed the '59 Ford Country Squire station wagon that we had; it got stuck on the beach, stuck in the mud for two days at Rights and Lefts. Adventuresome days. I remember standing on a cliff, in southeast raging winds, and thinking, 'Oh, my God!' That beginning, when you’re sixteen or seventeen, and… “Am I gonna be looking back on this, like it’s something that happened during that long ago time? Or can I actually live like this? I knew I wanted to live someplace that was by the ocean.”

 Jim has succeeded in living near the ocean, and with access to the mountains and backcountry too, but there were plenty of detours along the way.

“I went away to college like I was supposed to, for one year to University of Santa Clara. ’69, ’70. An insane time to go away to college. And about halfway through that year, I said, ‘No. I should not be here. It’s not working for me.” But I felt I was destined to go to college, I felt I was maybe going to be a lawyer or something. So I came back to City College and thrived. Loved it. Had really good classes. Worked where Brophy’s is now, and shared an apartment, part of a house downtown, with two of my buddies. The combined rent was 75 bucks, so $25 a month paid the rent. By this time I had a VW bus and split my time playing tennis for the team, going to school, working, going to the Ranch as much as possible, and to Rincon.”

“And I'm also wonderin' what the heck I’m doing, ‘cause it kinda felt like I ought to think about something here. Then I had a conversation…no, I had listening session…with one of my high school teachers who taught me a philosophy class, Why Man Creates, kind of a gender-specific title in those days, but it was a philosophy class, the big ideas…and this teacher, who was a full academic, told me, ‘Jim, you don’t really have to go to school all the time.’ I said, ‘I don’t?’ Really? He said, ‘I can see you have no idea yet. Just don’t go. Work for a while. Travel. Study. Read. Figure it out.’”

Good advice.

“So after City College, when I had my AA, I was gonna not go to school. Trouble is this was the height of Vietnam. My student deferment was gonna give out.”

Like all the American men of my generation, Jim remembers his draft number:

“Number 40. Four-o. Oh yeah. I remember the night in the dormitory at University of Santa Clara when those numbers came out, and you could hear guys go, “SHIT!” from their rooms as they were announcing these, pulling numbered balls out of a round thing,  like it was a game show. I remember the night. So I was number 40. The moment I left school, I was gonna lose that deferment.”

"So I’m still in school and I recognize by this time it was mostly guys of color, the poor folks, that were going to Vietnam and it was white guys were still in school, and I knew that wasn't right, but I wasn’t sure what to do. I’m like, ‘Oh no! I might get drafted!’ so I went for a road trip with my girlfriend at the time, up the coast in my VW bus, surfing, going to beaches, went to Humboldt, trying to figure out if I could go to school there. I wound up at Cal State Bakersfield, in its second quarter open…they were takin’ anybody…and I went and lived out in the San Joaquin Valley for three months, close to the Sierras. I had no idea what I was doing.”

“So I was there taking classes and working, or I would drive home, go to the Ranch…we’re just about losing our pass right about this time, but Hollisters, MGIC and Macco and all that was going on, so we still could kinda get in. And I still had no idea what I was doing, but I took a philosophy course at Bakersfield, and I thought, 'I kinda like this thinking stuff.' I was about as good at it as I was a surfer, which was, well, not great, but okay. But I knew what I loved.”

“I knew what I didn't love too, and I didn’t love living in Bakersfield. That was nuts. It was this little community south of Bakersfield, just a little four-way crossroads out on Highway 99. By now I realized it was time for me to not go to school.”

“I went back to Santa Barbara and I filed for my Conscientious Objector status. Wrote all that up, submitted it, and right about this time, was surfing Rincon a lot, December ’71 maybe. I think we’d lost our Hollister let-the-Brady-boys-in pass by this time, so we were mostly surfing Rincon, and the place we’d go a lot after surfing Rincon was my friend Scott Coffman’s parents’ house.  He had this one sister. I didn’t know her, but we had gone to high school together for two years. So one day, after surfing, we arrived at the house–Scott’s mother, Mary Alice, would cook breakfast for anybody that showed up–so one morning I showed up for breakfast, and I’m standing there, still dripping, and there was this beautiful young girl, my age, standing there in her nightgown by the heater, and it was Robin. So that is the moment. It was love. And now we’ve been together…whatever that’s been…43 years.”

“Meanwhile, my brother Tim and I had this plan, and then Scott joined us. We were outta here! We were gonna save some money and then go surf Europe. My C.O. status was still pending. Never heard. And I had no idea, but I had lost my student deferment. It was a real transitional time in the draft department.”

“Basically, we saved just enough money. $800 is what I saved. And we had a leather business, Robin’s brother and myself, called Little Drake’s Leathercraft, in Carpinteria, made purses and belts and flip-flops and stuff like that, and kinda sorta barely made enough money. And the three of us boys left…I was 21…Tim was 17 or 18, and Scott was about 18 or 19, and Robin needed to work for a couple of more months, save some money, and then she was gonna join us. That’s as far as the plan went.  So the three of us flew with five surfboards to Amsterdam. In those days you put the surfboards in cardboard and hope for the best. You had to ship ‘em air freight, hope for the best, and go pick ‘em up some other place at the airport in Amsterdam. “

“Amsterdam. That’s a long ways from surfing. But the ticket was cheap. And we wound up there, bought a VW bus made into some sort of a camper, an old Dutch plumbing van, and drove south to France. We had hand-drawn maps. Some of our buddies from the Ranch, like Paul Kemnitzer, had been over to France the year before that, so we had one map book that was kinda like vintage World War II, and a bunch of hand-drawn maps showing where to turn to go find this or that place. That trip took us to northern Spain, France, the Basque country, through the Pyrenees, and Italy, where I visited my sister, who was living in Florence at the time. We arrived in Florence in our VW bus with five surfboards inside and on top, and we were stunned by the artwork and the culture there. From Florence, back across central Spain, up through eastern and western Spain, then into Portugal. Then Robin flew into Lisbon and we all hopped on the boat with the VW and went to North Africa, Morocco, and spent the winter down there. Again, we had a couple of hand-drawn maps as to where to go. It was real adventure.”

“I called home while we were in Morocco. In those days, it was like the old French phone system. You make a reservation, and they tell you to come back at 2 o’clock, and you go and pay your money, and you get this crackly phone connection.  So I say, 'Hey, Pops!' And he goes, 'Who’s this?' I say, ‘It’s me!’ And he goes, ‘Who?’ ‘It’s me!’ So I go, ‘Is Tim there?’ He gets Tim. Turns out my dad didn’t wanna talk to me because he’d gotten my draft notice, and he had told the draft guys he didn’t know where I was, but he had sent off my induction notice to the American Express office in Rabat, I think, which he dutifully remembered we had told him had closed. So he had done what he had to do. He had sent off this thing that I never got. But things were a little weird then. He was not convinced.  He said, ‘Well, they could be keeping track of who I’m talking to. You never know. Play it safe.’

“So that was strange. I was 21 years old.  My C.O. had obviously been rejected, and I had been asked to report for some sort of hearing, never got that, and then they just gave me my 1A. For a little while, I thought, ‘Am I gonna be one of those guys who lives in Morocco for the rest of my life? Where you can’t go home? Am I against the law now?’ It was a very strange feeling.”

In Morocco they shared a house with two Hawaiians and a couple from L.A. Across the street lived a group of Australians, the most fun, crazed neighbors you could ask for. "So there was the Yank house and the Australian house in this one town. That was it. We surfed there for a month, then headed southwards towards the desert and some place we'd heard about called Anchor Point. We camped there for a month."

Eventually there came the long unmemorable drive back through Europe, and a flight from Amsterdam back to California. He had been gone for seven months. .

“When I got back home, coming through customs, I thought, ‘This should be interesting.’ I had no idea what was gonna happen, and nothing did. They just stamped the passport and back we came. So it turns out, I was eligible, 1A, and if you were eligible, and weren’t called, like if you had a higher number, you could just go ahead and be eligible for a year, and if you weren’t called you were put in a holding category, and with number 40, well, I would have been nailed. But the draft had been slowing down. Remember that headline? Nixon and Kissinger: Peace Is At Hand. It turns out I went into 1A, eligible to be drafted, in December, and in January, since I hadn’t been called, it flipped me into a holding category. So I got this little H card in the mail months and months after I got back home. H for holding category, until you’re 35, or whatever it is, which was weird. It just felt strange. I felt that I had ducked it, and I didn’t like that, but on the other hand, I was just glad I didn’t have to go.”

Now it was time to go back to school at UCSB, surf, start a gardening business, rent a little trailer with Robin on La Cumbre Road, and discover his love for teaching. But Jim’s passion for travel had been unleashed.

“The floodgates were open. We were ready. We recognized that there was a whole lot possible beyond what looks possible.” 

Alas, lost until the retake is the audio of Jim telling me about his and Robin’s next three-year journey, back to northern Spain, a winter working in Cornwall...and two years in Kenya, the Seychelles, South Africa. Lost for now are Jim’s colorful first impressions of steamy Mombasa, as surreal and exotic as the cantina scene from Star Wars. Lost until later is the story of how Jim and Robin ended up teaching in East Africa and joining the Peace Corps there. Not to mention Jim's years of adventure traveling with kids, his lifelong love of music, and working with families and children from Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia in the refugee camps of Thailand.

Even without audio or transcript, though, I do remember what Jim said when I asked what gives him hope. He told me that he remembers seeing people in Kenya from the Luo tribe. The idea that someone descended from this group would one day become President of the United States, Barack Obama, well...that would have been utterly unimaginable then. But it happened. Fantastic and impossible things do happen. And there’s a lot of hope in that.

“I live in the realm of anything’s possible,” said Jim.  

He means it.

Annie's Quest

Since you can’t fix everything, you finally have to pick one thing and begin. Even if it’s a big thing that seems seems insoluble, you act as if it isn’t. You imagine how it could be.  And if it requires a million tasks, you try tackling one of the million. You do your best. That's why I want you to meet Annie Rothschild, whose commitment to reducing the daunting problem of plastic pollution is earnest and inspiring. It's time for a glimpse of someone young and idealistic, still at the start of her journey, but thinking long term, little by little, and not losing faith.

1

Annie Rothschild would like her pregnancy to be an environmentally conscious journey. She has long been concerned about the harmful effects of plastic on the planet and human health, but impending parenthood has intensified her sense of mission.  Expecting a baby does that. You feel vested in the future in a profoundly personal way. You want with all your heart to set good forces in motion. 

Annie is a musician who plays upright bass for a band called Nocona (“Americana rock and roll music”) and has also worked for about ten years as a wardrobe specialist and makeup artist for film, television, and photo shoots. In other words, her life is hectic, and she readily admits that her pregnancy, which occurred while she and her fiancé were still in the midst of planning their October wedding, was an accident. “It’s very exciting but we definitely got thrown off course a bit,” she says. “And here I am now interviewing midwives and trying to figure out what we’ll need for the baby, and trying to do it plastic-free.”

How does one do it plastic-free? Annie is actively involved with an organization called Plastic Pollution Coalition and hopes to find some answers to share with others.  She knows it won’t be easy.  “Once you open your eyes and see the plastic all around you, it’s overwhelming,” she admits. “It’s in every grocery store, all the beauty products, all the toys and baby stuff. It’s everywhere.”

“And the truth is that people don’t know how bad plastic is. It’s such a lightweight, clear, seemingly easily disposable item that it seems like it doesn’t have a heavy environmental impact, but it’s the opposite.  So through organizations like the Plastic Pollution Coalition that I’m a part of, we’re trying to educate people, and we’re also just trying to figure things out and come up with alternatives, and I want to be involved and help out. It’s become a passion of mine, and it’s never going away. I’m obsessed, basically. Hopefully in a healthy way.”

Annie may be obsessed, but she’s not naïve. “Even for someone like myself, I’ve tried so hard never to buy it, and I generally don’t, but sometimes you’re stuck in some kind of situation…” She laughs. “I feel like I’m confessing. But immediately eradicating plastic from your life would be very difficult. Maybe the key is to just try to do a little bit better than you did yesterday. Yeah, even a little bit better is still great.” 

If we resolve to do a little bit better, starting wherever we happen to be, then little by little, who knows what we can achieve? One of the first opportunities Annie perceived was to bridge the music community and the environmental community. At the Bonnaroo music festival in Tennessee, she helped develop a pilot project called Plastic Free Touring (more about that in another post) that demonstrated how musicians could reduce their plastic footprint on the road, and it’s making a difference. 

The idea is to look around in your own life and see what spheres of influence you have, what connections you can make, what platforms you can use.  Whether within schools, offices, or community organizations, it may come as a surprise to realize how much you can help shape an event and gradually change a culture.  

Our own individual habits are of course crucial as well.  Annie intends to make careful choices throughout her pregnancy and into parenting that are consistent with her knowledge, values, and passion. She’s just beginning, and she’s humble about it, and she would love to hear about the experiences of others.

“So far I have one tangible thing I can talk about,” she says. “Cravings for food. I have to say I’ve eaten more food from plastic since I’ve been pregnant than I had for the prior two years. It’s because I crave dairy, in particular, organic, plain cold yogurt…I need this yogurt! I finally found an awesome yogurt packaged in glass that they sell in only one place I know of in San Francisco. The brand is St. Benoit, and it’s heavenly.”

“Another thought I’ve had is to reach out and try to engage actual manufacturers. Start a real conversation. I know that’s kind of a big thing, but what are they thinking? I’d really like to know. Like, what’s up with the plastic baby bottles and plastic nipples? It’s a shocker that those are even being made anymore.  And pacifiers. Is that plastic our babies are sucking on? What are we sticking in their mouths?  I just want to know. I just want to find out what alternatives we have.” 

Annie is determined to delve into this more fully after her wedding, which, by the way, will be a plastic-free event, and that’s been an adventure in itself. (”They all looked at me like I stepped off the moon when I said I’m not having plastic. No plastic cups, no plastic straws, steel cups for everybody!”)

“I’m excited to be on this voyage,” Annie says. But this is a journey of learning, as much about asking questions as giving advice, and she hopes there are other parents and parents-to-be who will travel with her.

2

Annie’s awareness of plastic pollution and its health and environmental impacts developed gradually. “About four years ago a friend of mine mentioned something about not wanting to buy plastic,” she explains. “At first I didn’t get it, but it was like a seed was planted. You just start noticing all the little things, all the to-go cups, all the straws, the plastic bags everywhere. I started feeling guilty…just throwing all that stuff away gave me a weird feeling of guilt. So it was like a seed had been planted, and that seed grew into a garden, a whole ecosystem.”

Impending motherhood has only deepened Annie’s concern and commitment. She has gone from wedding mode into baby world faster than she ever envisioned, but even in the midst of all the planning, preparation, and major life changes, her resolve to keep plastics out of the picture remains as unshakeable as ever.

“Maybe part of it is based on fear,” she admits. “I’m genuinely nervous about what my child’s exposure to plastic will be. Our baby is not going be drinking out of plastic bottles and things like that, but it’s also challenging to find household furnishings without toxic chemicals, and non-plastic toys.”

Even as we speak, a baby shower is being organized for Annie, and she has discovered she’s uncomfortable about telling well-meaning friends what they should and should not give. It conflicts with an old fashioned sense of etiquette that she attributes to her Southern upbringing.

“I aspire to be gracious,” she says. “These are friends and family who are coming from a loving place. They want to stock our house with presents and things, and it’s generous of them, and I don’t want to seem rude or ungrateful.”

So how does one get the message across without sounding pious or preachy or unappreciative?

“I’m glad we’re talking about this,” Annie says, thoughtfully. “I have to be soft, but strong. Maybe if I can just add it onto the registry or invitation, No Plastics Please, it wouldn’t sound too abrasive, but sends an honest message about my values. I see this as an opportunity to strengthen our commitment, not stray from it. This is who we are, and this is how we feel about things, and we want to incorporate these ideals into this next phase of our lives, including our new family member.”

One hopes that friends would understand and respect that, and it’s possible we’re overthinking this. But in fact, we’ve wandered into a bigger forest, bumping against the same basic question: how do we constructively communicate our concerns about plastic pollution to others in the multiple moments of every day when the issue rears its head?

3

Sometimes we feel embarrassed and awkward about championing even knowledge-based values that concern us all.  We don’t want to appear to be proselytizing or pontificating, we don’t want to seem heavy-handed and self-righteous, we just want to be reasonably affable and on our way. 

But we live in a world where everyday transactions involve the proffering of plastic, and once you are aware of the consequences of this unmitigated generation of trash, it’s hard to remain silent. Do we just say no to the plastic, or do we add a little information? How can we effectively communicate when these moments arise?

Annie has concluded that it’s all about tone, and finding the right tone is one of the struggles in working for any cause, not just combating plastic pollution. “If it’s holier-than-thou, it isn’t going anywhere,” she points out.

She’s right.  No one likes to feel scolded. We need to implicitly acknowledge common foibles as well as common interests, and we must set an example with our behavior rather than preaching. The specifics may depend on a quick assessment of each situation.

Annie has plenty of anecdotes to share. There was the time she spent two hours in a store shopping for ribbon to be used for various wedding-related purposes, brought armfuls to the counter for check-out, and was helped by a pleasant woman in her seventies.  After ringing up the order, she promptly began putting the ribbons into plastic bags, which of course Annie didn’t want.

“Oh, it’s okay,” said the woman. “These are biodegradable.”

Annie examined one of the bags more closely. “This is not biodegradable,” she said. “They’re lying to you.”

The woman’s response: “It doesn’t matter anyway.”

Ouch.

“She threw down the gauntlet there,” says Annie. “I told her, ‘It does matter! It does.’ But did that have any effect on her? Probably not.”

“These kinds of moments present themselves all the time,” she continues. “Like at the airport, a woman at the concessions stand asking me if I want a bottle of water, and I said, ‘No thank you, and you shouldn’t be drinking this either, for these reasons.’ She looked at me blankly. She was just doing her job. She meant well.”

“Even with my parents,” Annie continues. “They understand the problem. But they think, how are you going to do anything about it? The world’s going to hell anyway.”

That’s deflating and not much to work with, but it’s also an understandable response. We all feel overwhelmed and discouraged sometimes.  And that’s all the more reason to act with integrity, try to adhere to our convictions, and maintain a degree of optimism, which is a life-giving force.

As for educating others, such as those we encounter in plastic-transactions, you have to quickly decide in each situation if it’s a potentially meaningful chance to be instructive. Often it is not. Avoid getting upset or frustrated or condescending. 

“It’s such a fine line, even in talking about environmental stuff, where you don’t make that person the bad guy,” says Annie. “I just don’t think people are very educated about it. We’ve gotten into this norm, where we use all this plastic stuff, and people don’t think about it or realize it’s a massive problem. But I actually do believe that deep down in some level of people’s consciousness they know it’s not good, and they feel bad about it, or guilty. It’s a huge waste management crisis, actually, and it’s not sustainable.”

Annie has developed some handy, informative talking points. But she also recognizes that in most situations, the best way to decline a plastic bag, cup, straw, or whatever, is a simple, “No, thank you. I’m trying not to use plastic.”

With that response, you’re setting an example, not telling someone else what to do. Furthermore, if it elicits the question “why?” that gives you an opportunity to explain, and if it elicits some understanding that was already there, you have reinforced the message.  If it garners only cluelessness, don’t get too upset. The tide will turn, little by little.

And that brings us to another important message. We’re taking on a huge job here, and we cannot expect immediate success. The point is to do a little better each day.  As with all environmental problems, significant legislative action and economic policy will be necessary, as well as compromise, sacrifice, and innovation, and progress will likely be slower than we wish, but we can start in our own lives right now. Here’s the question we can ask ourselves: Am I doing a little better today than yesterday?

Don't Dwell On It

Lucy is one of the residents at the assisted living facility where my mother lives. I’ve always been impressed by her cheerfulness and good nature, and yesterday I had a chance to sit and chat with her for a few minutes. It turns out she grew up just a few miles away, in Irvine, which was then an unincorporated area of Orange County.

"I had a horse named Dolly," she told me. "She was a pinto mare. Oh, I loved that horse! We rode all over the bean fields. We were in a parade once."

Lucy met Steve, the love of her life, while they were still in high school. Her mother insisted that Lucy graduate from high school before she she started thinking about getting married.

"So I graduated from high school," Lucy says with a smile, "and Steve and I got married right after that.  He was a sweetheart. He brought me gold hearts...a necklace..."

Steve and Lucy had a long, happy marriage until his death from cancer not too long ago, and that's how Lucy came to be living here, facing the holidays without him, missing him every day. 

I think adjusting to the death of a spouse is surely one of the most difficult chapters of life. But despite her sadness, Lucy somehow manages to be pleasant and kind to everyone around her. I ask her if she has any advice to share with others facing life after the loss of a husband or wife. Here's what she told me:

"Get a job if you can. You have to keep your mind occupied. You can't change what is. Don't dwell on it. There is a life afterwards, and you live it."

"But you know what?" she adds wistfully. "We were lucky. My husband and I had all those years together. Even now, I always feel that he's looking after me. So I have that."

 

We Learned What Was Important

“When you have five brothers, you’ve got to compete," said Betty. "If they jumped, I jumped higher.” My friend Kam and I were sitting with her at the kitchen table in her little stucco house, getting to know her as part of research we were doing about the people and history of Guadalupe. She brought out an array of old photographs and albums, yellowed newspaper clippings, and various artifacts and memorabilia, including her own childhood report cards.

Betty was born in Paris...Paris, Texas, that is....in 1926.  Her father left for California in 1943 in search of work and was employed by the Southern Pacific Railroad in Guadalupe. The family joined him in June, 1944, traveling west by train, and Betty promptly found a job in the payroll office of a produce packing company called the California Vegetable Growers. That same year she joined The Rock-etts, Guadalupe's champion all-girls' softball team. (She is standing, second from the left, in the photo above.) Betty met her future husband, Everett, also a softball player, at one of the games, and they married in 1945.

But when I asked her if she had any special softball memories, her eyes filled with tears. “When I was in third grade,” she said, “my daddy came to one of the games at my grammar school to watch me play.”

Isn't it funny, what ends up mattering so much? (Take note.)

Betty's love for softball had started in earnest that year, and she remembers feeling important and encouraged that her father, a busy, proud, hardworking man, had shown his support in this way.

"We didn't have money," said Betty, "but we had each other, and we learned what was important. Caring about people. Taking care of people."

Betty’s husband Everett worked for the California Vegetable Growers also, driving a long-line truck to Los Angeles. After their two children were born, Betty took on other jobs, including a 15-year stint as a clerk and bookkeeper in the hardware store. Everett passed away in 1986, but Betty managed to stay busy, married again, and has traveled all over the world.

I was touched by Betty's kindness, patience, and willingness to share, although I think that's just the way she tries to live her life. In fact, she showed us an old Quaker motto that was tucked into her scrapbook, and said it sums up everything:

“I expect to pass through this world but once. Any good therefore that I can do, or any kindness or abilities that I can show to any fellow creature, let me do it now. Let me not defer it or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.”

The Greatest Generation

It was a Sunday morning brunch of pancakes and coffee in a house on a hill in Gaviota, and Jack and Barbara, both in their 90s, were reminiscing a bit. Here's what they were telling me at this particular moment:

Barbara: When I first started teaching, my salary was $1300...for the year. That seemed pretty good.

Jack: I was off fightin’ a war.

Barbara: I had about 42 second graders in my class. I spent most of the time pulling boys apart, trying to keep them from beating each other up. But it’s true, money was worth more then.

Jack: You put enough aside for us to buy that Chevy when I got home.

Barbara: Used. A 1941, I think. 

Jack:  Yup, a '41 Chevy. That was a good car. 

There were lot of stories here, a lot of humor, a lot of strength...and I wish I had written more down. But there were also great-grandchildren running around and climbing on laps, and a clatter of dishes and kitchen sounds, and the happy chaos of conversation and laughter. Sometimes the best we can do is be present and appreciate. A year or so later, Barbara passed away. She and Jack were just shy of their 72nd wedding anniversary.

I Get Ticked Off. It's More Useful.

Meet Dr. Art Hicks,  an educator, human-rights advocate, and community icon in Lompoc, California, where he and his wife Edith make their home. He grew up in segregated Georgia during the days of lynchings and the Ku Klux Klan and went on to see two of his grandchildren graduate from Harvard. He's served his community in many capacities, received a belated Congressional Medal of Honor for his service as a Tuskegee Airman during World War II, and attended the Inauguration of President Obama, a day once beyond all imagining. I asked him if he ever gets discouraged in the face of injustice. Here's his memorable reply: “I never get discouraged. I get ticked off. It's more useful.”

Born in 1922 in the heart of segregated Dixie, Art Hicks faced the ugly realities of institutionalized racism right from childhood. “Even as kids, we understood,” he has said, “and in case we didn’t, they reminded us by throwing rocks through the window.”  

He learned to live with anger. “But it was anger that had to be subdued,” he said, “and you felt a constant frustration. Once in awhile you had to express it, but mostly you kept it inside and you learned how to survive, and how to maintain one’s mentality.” 

 In 1940, he noticed an advertisement in an Atlanta post office for an aircraft mechanic program run by the federal War Training Service. He applied, was accepted, and was directed to come to a school in Memphis. He bought a one-way bus ticket with the earnings from his jobs as a janitor and porter. “But when I got there I was told, ‘You’re in the wrong place. This is for white boys!’ It was January, and it was cold, and I had used up all my money on bus fare. They said I would have to go to Tuskegee.”

“The problem is: how do I get there? I don't have any money. It was suggested that I go to a traveler's aid society, and there I was given the address of an elderly couple. Most hotels didn't lend themselves to black people in those days, especially in the South, so I stayed with this couple and worked as a bus boy to earn the money, and then I went on to Tuskegee. So that's the start of my education.”

The Tuskegee Airmen were the first African-American aviators in the United States armed forces,  and they served with distinction during World War II. “Blacks were considered incapable of learning complex material, incapable of flying a plane, incapable of carrying out military missions,” explained Art. “But in World War II the nation was hurting for pilots and other technical types of skills, and it was a chance to convince the War Department and President Roosevelt to open up these opportunities for blacks.”

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt played a role in this: “She had been informed about this training program and went down to Tuskegee in 1941 and said, ‘I’m gonna ride with one of those pilots.’ The Secret Service almost fell apart. The wife of the President of the United States is gonna get in a plane flown by a Negro pilot! It was unheard of at the time. Chief Anderson, held in high regard by all of us, was the pilot, and he gave Mrs. Roosevelt an orientation ride around the area. She came back and said, ‘Well, he flies all right as far as I’m concerned.’ And sure enough, the program became the beginning of a permanent practice in the military. In World War II our skills were such that in escorting bombers deep into Germany, we never lost a single bomber while they were under our escort.” 

"My first solo flight was the most exciting thing I've ever done," he told us. "I was about twenty years old in a little yellow plane called a Piper Cub. And to understand where I came from, what I had accomplished, and what hopes I had achieved...oh, it was indescribable." 

"But many black men came back after serving their country only to be refused service at the lunch counters in their own hometowns.”

Art Hicks has always been small in stature––five and a half feet tall, and thin––but he has a big kind of courage and speaks out clearly when he sees unfairness. He served in the military for 28 years working on airplane maintenance and missile guidance, and he confronted plenty of discrimination, even on the bases, and chose not to remain silent on the subject. He taught for thirteen years at Cabrillo High School, earned a Master’s degree at Cal Poly, and was honored with a doctoral degree from Tuskegee University for community service. In 2009 he traveled to Washington, D.C. to watch the Inauguration of the first African-American President. 

His life has been about redefining what seems likely and even possible. "I was exposed to despicable things early in life when I could do nothing about them," he said. "But I found much satisfaction after I discovered that I could take action and help create positive changes. We need to find it within ourselves to contribute to the whole, and we can most effectively do that by first making the best possible contribution to our own selves: through education, questioning, and personal growth. Then, stay on the path that leads to your goal. In fact, head for a goal that is so far out of reach you cannot even imagine what it is.”

Bright Lights and Bragging Rights

This is Johnny Perry: musician, raconteur, unofficial historian, and proprietor of the NAPA auto parts store (which also doubles as a museum of local artifacts) on the main drag of Guadalupe. Walk around and behold not just a good supply of auto parts, but an 1840 adobe brick, old photos, posters and bumper stickers, even the plaster paw of a Sphinx from Cecile B. DeMilles' 1923 production of The Ten Commandments. Of course the best attraction is Johnny himself, still handsome and dapper at 74, and a veritable fount of information about life in Guadalupe, especially the good times. 

There’s a photograph of a teen-aged Johnny wearing a striped serape and playing the sax alongside three other musicians at a Mexican Independence Day parade in the 1950s. “These celebrations pre-dated Santa Barbara’s Old Spanish Days,” he tells us, adding that they were so big folks would miss work the next day. He revisits the photograph, noting the name of the woman watching from the curb and that of a young sombrero-wearing boy in the foreground. He  points out that the musicians are standing on the bed of a 1928 Chevy pick-up, and recalls that the song they are playing is probably Celito Lindo. He has that kind of memory for detail.

Johnny’s fondness for music goes back to his boyhood days at the family ranch at Oso Flaco, in particular to a record he heard being played there. “Over and over it was Doris Day and Sentimental Journey. Tenor sax. So I thought: I’ll learn that.”

And he did. From the school band in 4th grade, he parlayed his talents to playing at dances, eventually becoming part of a band called The Biscaynes, who opened for Jan and Dean in Pismo Beach and were the lead band at the Beach Boys' first concert on June 2, 1966.

In a display case at the store there's a 45 rpm vinyl record of the Biscaynes’ biggest hit, Church Key, and Johnny’s son Eric turns on his computer, finds a sound clip, and hits play. So there we are in this auto parts store surrounded by old movie memorabilia, fading photos, curios and figurines, and suddenly the air fills with a classic surf tune of the early 60s--guitar, drum, organ, and Johhny’s sax in an arrangement so lively, you want to dance...or drive along the California coast...or simply stand there grinning. (What can I say? It's one of those "I love my life" moments.)

“We never made no money at all,” says Johnny. “…just bright lights and braggin’ rights.”

And wonderful memories too. To hear Johnny tell it, Guadalupe was a place for dancing and partying all night long, and he was happy to participate. “In one place was western music,” he recalls, “over there was Russian, down the street around the corner they had mariachis. Those three blocks...people walkin' back and forth...then everybody closed at two, and they’d go an' fill up all the restaurants...People would come from Santa Maria, Lompoc, Arroyo Grande…”

I interrupt for a quick backtrack. “So you mean 2 a.m.? People were going to the restaurants at 2 a.m.?”

“Oh yeah,” says Johnny. “You get hungry after dancing all night. People would be leaving the restaurants at 3 a.m., 4 a.m. We used to play the Rose Garden in Pismo, and we got our pay…I dunno…twenty bucks, something like that…well, most of it went for breakfast right after. Then you go home and give your wife ten dollars.”

Johnny’s shop is housed in the old Druid Temple building. (“It’s a good thing I own it,” he says, “’cause I couldn’t afford the rent.”) In addition to serving as the lodge for Druid business, the upstairs area at one time was used for Mexican rosaries and wakes, where people would take shifts sitting with the deceased, praying, and drinking Tequila. It was a tough job carrying a coffin up and down those stairs, especially post-Tequila, and Johnny early on decided he would discontinue that use of the building.  

Back here at ground level, where the auto parts shop/museum is, there was at one time a post office, whose mail slots and signs (DROPS, MONEY ORDERS, STAMPS) are still preserved in one corner of the store. Later, briefly and incongruously, the place served as a skating rink from which Johnny says he was once kicked out for having too much fun and elbowing another skater. 

A block or two down, you’d hear music coming out of the Vet’s Hall, where dances were held. (“Girls would be on one side, guys on the other…”) And across the street, there was the theater, open 7 days a week, and a genuine melting pot experience. “Weekends, Monday, and Wednesday, they’d show American movies,” Johnny recalls. “Tuesday and Thursday, it was Mexican, and on Fridays it would be Japanese, Filipino or Chinese. We even liked to go to those because it was fun to hear the way they talked. Then we’d run over to Snappy Lunch and have our cheeseburger and fries.”

Kids today, upon hearing about the rink, the theater, the dances, and the seemingly nonstop fun sometimes ask Johnny, ‘Why don’t we have stuff like this anymore?”

It’s a good question.

The Lady of El Chorro

In 1937, Baine Isaacson brought his young bride Esther to El Chorro Ranch on Highway 1 just outside of Lompoc, a tract of hills and oaks once part of the original Rancho San Julian land grant. 75 years later, El Chorro remains a working cattle ranch, and Esther Isaacson recently celebrated her 100th birthday, a steadfast presence in these sometimes wobbly times. A few years ago, I walked down a dirt road and climbed the wooden steps to the back porch of the old house and found her sitting in the sunlight, gracious and chatty. She recalled her less-than-romantic first look at the place:

“We had an awful lot of rain that year, tremendous rainfall. I stood before a plowed field and all I could see was the top of a brand new tractor that was buried down in the mud with just the smokestack sticking out. Baine had just gotten this tractor. He hadn’t even seen it yet. He said, ‘Well, I have some great potatoes. You’re gonna have to cook us dinner.’ And he just left me. There was a kerosene stove, but I didn’t know how to work it. I didn’t know how to do anything! I didn’t know whether to weep or to laugh. Baine returned a few hours later, and he was mud from top to bottom.”

 Esther had been a teacher in Solvang and the daughter of one of the town’s original Danish settlers. “They were pioneers who came from Denmark to build a colony,” she explained. “My father, Anton Ibsen, was a carpenter and he came there in 1910 to build the college. When he first arrived, it was all men. If you were to be married you had to build a house for your wife before you married her. My father was so busy that he asked my mother not to come right away, but she didn’t get the letter in time. She came down by railroad from Seattle to San Luis Obispo wearing a beige suit and carrying a little white dog and a potted plant, and that’s all she really had. Of course he wasn’t there to meet her when she arrived. She finally got someone to lock her in the baggage room for the night.”

 “When my father did show up, instead of talking to her, he had a long list of errands. People wanted things. They wanted medicine, they wanted aprons, they wanted hose and hats, and all the other things they couldn’t get. He had to fill everybody’s longing. Thirteen women wanted hats! He’d try each one on and say, ‘This would be Mrs. Jensen…’ and ‘This would be Mrs. Larsen…’By this time my mother wondered, ‘What kind of person am I going to?’“

 “The only way to communicate with the older people in those days was in Danish, but I also spoke English and learned to read it very early -- it was absolutely necessary in order to read the captions of the silent movies! I was an expert at five, and the ones who couldn’t read always wanted to sit by me in the theater. There was a boy who played piano during the movie, and if it got too exciting, he would forget to play, and then there’d be no sound at all.”

Esther attended Atterdag College, which no longer exists. (“I can’t even prove I’ve been educated,” she jokes.) She loved being a teacher and living in town. For fun, young people went square dancing or got together for volleyball, badminton, and tennis, and it was at one of these social events that she happened to meet Baine. “I was never going to be a rancher’s wife,” she said. “That would be the living end!”  But love derailed her, as love sometimes does, and she gamely set out for her new life in the country, learning as she went along.

“We didn’t have a truck or a car,” she said “and it was a long way to Lompoc. We grew vegetables, corn, potatoes…the essentials. It was very different and rather alone, so we made good friends, and our ranch became a place where people came to visit and sometimes stay for a week or two. We had soldiers here, and famous cowboys.”

During the war, the house was darkened at night with drawn shades and blackout curtains. In the 1950s, when Vandenburg started launching missiles, there were strange explosions in the sky, exciting to the kids. “We raised an awful lot of children here, not just our own three sons,” said Esther, recalling treasure hunts, kite flying, and even a miniature steam railroad. 

 Esther expressed pride in her family and in the fact that El Chorro remains a working cattle ranch, recalling how Baine’s long-ago vision and community involvement helped preserve the area for agriculture and keep it free of billboards and development. Today El Chorro is permanently protected by an agricultural easement.  Remembering how our Gaviota Writers’ Group used to meet here by a great old oak on a hilltop meadow, I asked Esther if she had a particular favorite spot on the ranch. She looked momentarily baffled by the question.

 “The whole place is special to me,” she said, and I realized it should have been obvious. "It's a privilege to be here." 

Maybe Once In A Lifetime Chance

Recently, when my colleague Kam and I were in Guadalupe, California taking pictures and talking to people, we had the honor of meeting Mr. Harry Masatani, one of the town's esteemed citizens. Mr. Masatani ("Call me Harry") still runs Masatani's  Market on Guadalupe Street with his wife and sons, and he welcomed us into his home as though we were old friends. He was born in Santa Maria in 1926 to a Japanese immigrant father and a mother who'd been born to Japanese parents in Honolulu, and he enjoyed a nice American childhood right here in Guadalupe. Then one day in 1941 everything suddenly changed. In his words:

"Wartime. Japanese. You know what happened to us? I got locked up. On December 6, we are Japanese Americans...you know? December 8, we are classified as enemy aliens. The very next day after December 7, we’re enemy aliens…huh? How 'bout that? Not Americans anymore. FBI came and picked up all the heads of the household, all the men, so just the women and children are left. And shortly after that came the order to evacuate the West coast. So they rounded us up."

Harry told this sad tale without a trace of bitterness as he sat on a sofa in the parlor of his house. Behind him was a red and white blanket adorned with a banner: City of Guadalupe, Est. 1840, Inc. 1946 and three illustrated highlights: the jail house, the city hall, and the fire department.

"That old man you saw sitting there at the desk today [at the American Legion Hall], that's my friend Bindo. He was in the army then, and when the army came to round up the Japanese, he was one of the guards. Can you believe that? Now we’re like brothers. We’re like brothers."

He told us more stories...stories about hard work, service to country, forgiveness and friendship, a bullet through a window in a wallpapered room, and enduring ties to community. Suffice it to say Harry Masatani is someone who could have remained angry but is kind and generous instead. He's a man with a twinkle in his eye, someone with the sort of wisdom that includes a sense of humor. It was memorable and humbling to talk to him.

He taught me a little lesson, too. He led Kam and me up two flights of stairs to the attic of his old Victorian house, then pointed to a narrow doorway which opened onto a ladder to an opening in the roof. From there, you  lift yourself to get onto the widow's walk overlooking Guadalupe, visibility way out to the dunes. Kam of course went up the ladder without hesitation, slid open the hatch, and emerged out onto the roof. I started up and then got scared...to be honest, I'm just leery of heights...and I was already worrying about getting back down afterwards, trying to picture how I'd lower myself through the opening and backwards down the ladder. Yes, I realize I was overthinking it, but I was just afraid, so I simply gave up and stepped back down into the attic where Harry was waiting for us.

But Harry wouldn't let me get away with giving up. "Maybe once in a lifetime chance," he said. "You'll be happier if you go up there."

I went. And of course he was right.

The Salute

We were sitting in the coffee shop in Lompoc when our old friend Dick Jacoby wandered in.  I love running into Dick–he always has a twinkle in his eye and a story to share.

Somehow we got on the subject of Dick's army years. He joined when he was 17, and at the age of 18 he was stationed in Japan, during the Allied occupation. General Douglas MacArthur was the Supreme Commander during this remarkable period of recovery and transition for the defeated nation. He established his General Headquarters in the Dai Ichi Insurance Building in central Tokyo whose higher floors overlooked the Imperial Palace, and he traveled along a broad boulevard in a black 1941 Cadillac limousine flanked by military police motorcycles. Dick was there.

"When MacArthur came out of his headquarters, all of Tokyo stood still," Dick told us. "He was really a big deal. He had five stars on each shoulder and he had kind of a crushed hat and a corn cob pipe and he'd come out of his headquarters in the afternoon and everything in Tokyo would stop..."

At this point, Dick got distracted. It's a busy coffee shop, after all, and he knows a lot of people. "Hey, there's Bob, my good friend!" said Dick.

"Are you bothering these young, good-looking women?" said Bob. "Well, ladies, I can repeat that story as well as he can. Probably better, I've heard it so many times.  Dick forgot to mention that MacArthur was wearing dark glasses."

"There's always a critic," said Dick, proceeding.

"Anyway, as I was saying, when MacArthur came out of his headquarters and got in his car, his guards on either side of the car saluted him very formally, and everything in Tokyo stopped in the middle of the day. The lights all turned red, all the traffic stopped, all the people were stopped on the sidewalk. Then his car takes off and heads toward the Imperial Palace."

"Yeah, I've told this story a few times," Dick admitted. "But on this day I was the only person standing there on the road near the Imperial Palace. I was the only person there! And I was standing dead still. And I'm thinking that there's a five-star general coming, and his car came down the street, and he was alone in the car, and I was alone on the sidewalk, and I saluted him. I figured it was the thing to do. And he took his pipe out of his mouth and he returned my salute. So I made General MacArthur salute me. And I made him take his pipe out of his mouth.  I was 18."

"May I take your picture?" I asked Dick. I was already thinking that this was a blog post.

"Yeah, go ahead. You can be like those newspaper photographers who always take two in case the first one comes out good."

Dick knows about this because he ran for City Council back in the 1960s. One of the newspapers printed a photo of him with a shadow under his nose that made him look just like Hitler. He was advised to go around the neighborhood, knock on doors, introduce himself, win some hearts. It was not a practice he relished. He knocked at one door, waited a while, and there was no answer. He figured he'd leave, almost relieved.

"You gotta do these things," his friend had advised.

"So I stayed there," said Dick, "and I kept knocking and finally this old guy came and opened the door and said, 'Oh, you're the guy that's running against my son!' God, I wanted to go home immediately. Can you imagine?"

"Did you win?" Cornelia wondered.

"I did. I won. But it wasn't because of successful campaigning."

"May I take that one more picture?" I asked.

"Go ahead," said Dick.

Afterwards, I had a hard time choosing which to use. They both looked good to me.

Still True

It was a rainy February day in a still-new millennium, and the middle school students enrolled in our oral history and philanthropy electives were arriving at my house in vans to interview my neighbor Jackson Browne. The Gaviota hills were green, the light was silvery, and there was the sound of rain in gentle percussion. "Maybe the most renewing thing is to be by myself up here," Jackson mused, "and to spend a few days just thinking. A friend of mine had a phrase for it.  She said it's called leaning up against the cheek of God."

I'd never thought of it that way, but it did seem fitting for the way the sky held us, the tenderness of being here, the sense of nearness to what matters. “I bought a parcel here in 1978,” Jackson told us. “My business manager advised me not to. From his point of view, the idea was to invest, to build. He said, ‘You can’t just run out and buy something that’s only gonna sit there.’ I said, ‘Watch.’ It’s a great investment, in my opinion. Even when I was younger, I thought it would be great to go out and buy land and not do anything with it, because so much of the land is being developed. I thought ‘I’m gonna buy some land that no one will ever do anything with,’ and I found that people were basically doing that here––restricting its uses so it would stay in its natural state. It’s great…more than being neighbors, the people up here at the Ranch share a similar philosophy.”

“As a matter of fact,” he continued, “my grandfather and my dad used to camp in Gaviota Canyon… so when my dad saw where the Ranch was, and where I bought, he said, ‘This is where my father and I used to camp,’ and he told me that when he was about twelve years old, he called that area by the state park ‘Browne’s Pass’. So I have some family history of loving this part of the country, and I’d say the Ranch is my favorite place––it’s where I want to be an old guy surrounded by my kids and their kids.”

Someone asked Jackson if he was religious. “I’m not a member of an organized religion or faith…but the truth is, I am religious. I think I practice a kind of religion...the closest thing I belong to that’s like a church is a group of friends that over the course of twenty or thirty years have probably done hundreds and hundreds of benefit performances to raise funds for a variety of causes. There’s no name for us. We call ourselves ‘the usual suspects’ or funny names like ‘the bleeding hearts’ — we know about each other because we’re always asking each other to do things.”

"A friend of mine (Fred Martin) is director of the gospel choir at a high school in Los Angeles," he said. "He lets me come, and I love this music. They’re definitely singing the praises of God. But one time Fred wanted me to sing in church with them, and I said, ‘I’d be very happy to. I’d like to, but you know, Fred, I’m not really a Christian exactly.’ He goes, ‘That’s okay. That’s all right.’ So he gets me up there in front of the church, and I’m wearing a suit to perform one of the songs I perform with the choir, and he says, ‘Now Brother Jackson here says he’s not a Christian.’ There’s a big silence. Then he says, ’Yet!’ Everybody applauded."

"As a matter of fact," said Jackson,  "if you could ever get Fred Martin and his kids to come to your school, any way to make it happen, I would try to help.” Glancing over at my colleagues Linda Smith and Lynne Castellanos, I saw the same spark in their eyes, and I knew that bringing the gospel choir to our school would be our next special project.

Meanwhile, I hoped that the kids were picking up on all this, the idea of a circle of friends who do things for others, the activist approach, finding ways to be constructively and compassionately alive in the world. And while Jackson’s life is admittedly extraordinary, he warned us not to underrate our own: “When you think about it, probably more than half of what’s on television is selling you some notion that there are some beautiful people someplace, and you can find out about them, and you can be like them if you tune in, and buy stuff that they buy, or go where they go…That’s all crap. That’s complete and utter crap. That’s to say that their lives are more valuable than yours.” 

He urged the students to develop a sense of what is right and wrong and real, and never to underestimate what they might accomplish. “As much as I love the world,” he said, “there are fights out there. There are some fights that are coming your way. Don’t back down from what you know is right…and in the end, you are the one to decide.”

We talked for a good two hours.  Now the light had dimmed, the rain continued, and it suddenly felt late. It was time to get the kids in the vans and back to campus. They descended the steps laughing and chatting and colorful as confetti, all that wonderful middle school energy…and I wonder, more than a decade later, how much they remember of their afternoon with Jackson Browne, whether they hear his songs differently, or if they have incorporated any of his advice into their thinking long term. You never know what sticks.

If you'd like to read the Jackson Browne interview, "Even More True Now" in its entirety go to this link.

_____
But there was still the matter of the gospel choir.  It wasn't easy, but a concert was arranged, and one morning the following May, a bus set out from South Central Los Angeles to the Santa Ynez Valley with Fred Martin, the Washington Preparatory High School gospel singers, and an assortment of instruments and equipment on board. St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Los Olivos, with Father Stacey at the helm, had agreed to be the venue for an evening performance, but first there came an impromptu noon concert on the Dunn School campus, and no one who was there will ever forget it.

Fred charmed everyone, and the voices of the singers, among whom I particularly remember Chavonne Morris and Alethea Mills, were somehow both angelic and electrifying. They performed a bit of R & B and Motown, but mostly it was good old-fashioned gospel, and the spirit infused us all. Everyone––students, teachers, staff, even the little children who had come by from the nearby Family School––were clapping and dancing and singing along, making a joyful noise. 

The magic resumed at the church later, and the house of God was a full one that night, and it seemed to me the building might have lifted off the ground. Friendships began, and all of us were giddy, and in my heart I felt a sense that really anything was possible. Was there a moon? I only know that there was light, and there was love: pure, uncomplicated, and inclusive. Jackson Browne was at the back of the church, smiling. Afterwards he drove back to Gaviota, where I imagine he leaned up against the cheek of God.