LAST WEEKEND November 9 - 13, 2012

BIRTHDAY GIRL EVIE  AND BIG SISTER GINNY

BATTLE ROYAL IN THE BOUNCY RING

PARENTS ENJOYING THEMSELVES

EVIE ON ONE OF THE SLIDES

Well, we're home again home again giggity gig.  My dad always said that as he pulled into the driveway.  It's from an old children's rhyme "To market to market to buy a fat pig.  Home again home again giggity gig."  We were in Virginia last weekend for our youngest granddaughter Evie's sixth birthday at The House of Bounce.

Started off Friday by getting up at 3AM in the morning so we could catch a 5AM flight out of our little northern California town of Chico.  If you don't get the early flight out the next flight isn't till noon and you miss most of the flights to the east coast out of San Francisco and we fly space available as retired United employees.  So, guess what I did?  We pulled up to the front of the tiny Chico Airport to unload our bags and I go "Where's my purse?"  You guessed it, I walked out with all kinds of stuff to load in the car and left my purse with my IDENTIFICATION at the house.  The TSA's (security) at the airport have a procedure to clear you for travel if you've lost your ID but even if they did that I had no ID to get me back to California so we went home getting back to the house about 6AM and Rod re-listed us for
the noontime flight out of Chico to connect with a flight that would get us into Washington Dulles at midnight so we went back to bed till 9AM.  We had no problems getting out of Chico on the noon flight and good luck getting on the first of the two chances to get out of San Francisco.  My daughter Robin was good enough to pick us up in the middle of the night.

Saturday morning was fun with Rick, Robin, Ginny, and Evie as Rod unpacked all the stuff we brought...a couple of different jars of olives (pimento, almond stuffed, garlic stuffed, big unpitted queens) and olive oil from the Olive Pit in Corning,  four big pomegranates we got from our nephew Robbie who had access to an orchard full  (checked at Giant Foods and they were $3.00 a piece), dry salami and two loaves of fresh sour dough french bread, and something my son-in-law Rick and my two granddaughters covet, a jar of pomegranate jelly made by my sister-in-law Barbara.  The Best!  With Tillamook cheddar cheese and Triscuits lunch Saturday was a feast!  Oh, I almost forgot,  Rod also brought with us a case of beer he got from the Sierra Nevada Brewery in Chico.  Tumbler, Rick liked it when they visited us last August.  The rest of Saturday was used to visit and get over jet lag since there's a three hour time difference between California and Virginia.

 On Sunday it's off to The House of Bounce for Evie's sixth birthday party.  This is the greatest place.  They have four huge blowup slides and a blowup bouncy ring in a huge wharehouse like facility.  They even have comfy couches and coffee and sodas for the parents who come.  It was fun to see Kelly and her son Ian who is about four days older than Evie, Sally and her son James and daughter Charlie, and Evie's kindergarten friends and old friends from Chesterbrooke Academy.  They serve pizza and sodas and birthday cake at the end and the birthday child sits on a throne while opening presents.  The kids sing Happy Birthday and always end the song with Cha Cha Cha.  Sunday evening we drove to Old Town Alexandria and parked by the Potomac for a great dinner at Rick and Robin's favorite restaurant the Fish Market .  I had shrimp and Rod had grilled sea bass.  Yum!

 I always love to go to Rick and Robin's because they have great computer service that's FAST!  No waiting and waiting for something to come up and I even got to see YouTube stuff I never get to see at home because dial up is so slow and the only thing we can get in the middle of nowhere.  Rick says I only come to see them to use their fast computer service.  Of course that's not true but I do go through withdrawal when we get back home.

Tuesday morning it's up again at 3AM to catch a 6AM flight out of Washington Dulles back to San Francisco.  We got to the airport at 4:15AM only to find that the first flight had cancelled.  We stood by for the next two flights, remember we're space available retired employees, but finally got on a flight that arrived in San Francisco about noontime.  We were happy to have exit row seats together with extra leg room.  It's rare to get first class anymore.  There wasn't another flight to Chico till almost 5PM so we had a long wait at San Francisco and we passed the time having a dinner and Rod got on the computer and I played Scrabble on my IPad and caught up on the FB news.  We were lucky to get on that 5PM flight and finally got home around 7PM.  EXHAUSTED!  3:00AM East Coast time is midnight California time so collapsing in bed at 8PM  I slept till 8AM this morning.

   

   



     

SOME THOUGHTS AND A QUOTE

How many of us grew up in a little town or village built on a railroad line, not built on a busy highway or heavily traveled road, but a two lane road that leads off into the heartland.....mountains, hills, flatland or by a river or stream... where our hearts and our memories yearn for and come back to us in dreams of home.

"All things share the same breath...the beast, the tree, the man, the air shares it's spirit with all the life it supports."  Chief of Seattle

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  WOW!  That was a lesson for me from the 1970's when I moved to San Francisco and found beauty comes in many forms....not just the Anglo idea of beauty I grew up with in Virginia.  Huge lush lips...asses the size of hams, skin color in every range from milk white to ebony or freckled, hair both curly curly or pin straight, eyes small to large, thick lashes/fine lashes.  OMG my husband as a young man was gorgeous in no way I was attracted to as a girl....thin, thin rock star thin with cruel eyes protecting a heart of gold.  Eye colors not blue or brown but green or the color of root beer Popsicles.  An artist like a photographer looks for the soul of the subject and the soul isn't always in the eyes.

When I think of those handwritten papers done in no. 2 pencil in grade school with my left had dragging across what I'd written and the perpetual pencil carbon smudge on my left hand and in the eighth grade finding out if I turned my paper the other way and wrote backhanded the smudge didn't happen anymore and my paper stayed clean.  Eighth grade when I developed my own cursive flair that has lasted till today although expediency and age has caused me to abandon some of my most flourishy capitals but the signature is still the same.  All because of my right sided brain.

I never questioned or thought of Mayberry and Andy Griffith's character Sheriff Andy Taylor as anyone or anything or anywhere that was false or made up or different because that was my childhood.  Mayberry was just a little further south than Fairfax, Virginia.  

DC STORIES

 From the Fall of '65 took the bus from the corner of Old Lee Highway and 236 through the Circle and Old Lee Highway all the way through Falls Church to DC with all the kids who took public transportation to O'Connell the only Catholic High School and all the Government workers....over Key Bridge to Georgetown and past the Circle to walk a couple blocks up 17th to the Corcoran School of Art in the Corcoran Gallery a block from the White House and next to the DAR. Drawing teacher was Mr. Schmutzart (sp after all these years) who was still there in the 1980's when my friend's daughter went to the Corcoran. Design teacher was Joan Carol who had been Carol Channing's college room mate and had great stories of New York and whose specialty was theater stage design.

Lunch was up 17th past a restaurant where Washington luminaries held tables can't remember the name but personalities like Art Buchwald and other Washington glitterati held daily sway. The doormen there made sure we art students didn't accidentally get in... to another restaurant that did allow us in with Petra Fischer whose mother was NATO and who had gone to school with Lucy Bains Johnson. Petra was beautiful but very small chested and did not like Lucy because when they were 11 or 12 Lucy said "why I've been wearing a Brawl (bra) since I was 10 years old" copying Petra's German accent copying Lucy's Texas accent....or the Campus Club a block or two away on the George Washingtron University Campus area for the most delicious hamburgers cooked over an open fire on rolls thick and wonderful... .it was here we took Kahlida Baeg when Indira Ghandi came to town and her entourage would pass by the Corcoran because she was Pakistani and her father was Assistant Ambassador and hated Indians..the two countries had been warring for centuries...in the Spring we would take bag lunches and eat in the park at the back entrance to the white house and tourists would take pictures of us.

Nightlife was the Crazy Horse on M, or an invitation to The Ambassador's birthday party at the Ghana Embassy, or Dupont Circle and the first of the Anti Viet Nam War propaganda I ever saw, and Miss Meekka and the other "ladies" (remember, Allan)...exciting to an 18 year old from Fairfax....but mostly the Campus Club for me and my pals and Matt Cain's Little Bit of Ireland for the soldiers we worked with at Woodies 7Corners from Arlington Hall.....or most especially The Journey Inn which was our home away from home the summer of 1966.

I loved DC.

Post Script:  My friend Ralph Cherry has let me know that the restaurant by the White House was the San Souci.

MENDOCINO

     In June for several years running Rod and I accompanied family on trips to Fort Bragg on the north California coast camping and fishing and abalone diving.  The first couple of years we came up from our South San Francisco home where we lived under the marine layer of clouds and fog and wind and were used to it but our relatives from the north Sacramento Valley came to the coast from temperatures in the hundreds and this was a great relief to them.

 We towed our twenty foot Grady White the John Frederick with us and took it out salmon fishing and had great fun taking our grandson and nephews out on the ocean.  I handled the wheel while Rod manned the downriggers and helped the boys.  If someone yelled "fish on!" you had to get out of the boy's way as they rushed the poles.  Rod would get the biggest kick out of this.  We used to take our Grandson with us all the time and he was a great sailor and never got seasick Rod says probably because young people don't know they're supposed to.  I used to love fishing the Mendocino coast because you only had to go out two miles to be in deep water.

ROD AND ROBBIE TAKING THE GIRLS OUT FOR A DIVE

 While we were salmon fishing others of our group were diving for abalone a sea mollusk that is absolutely delicious. They went out about a quarter of a mile and dove in about 10 to 15 feet of 48 degree water on a low tide over the rocks where the abalone grew wearing wet suits and flippers and snorkel gear and a weight belt to help them not be so buoyant.  An abalone knife for prying them loose from the rocks and a sack to put them in completed the rig.  Every time you see a picture of a sea otter lying on it's back opening a shell this is what they are feeding on.  When our nephew Robbie was young he used to swim out with an inner tube with a net strung over it  and he'd swim back and forth and dive with each of his kids.  The one thing you really had to be careful of is Great White Sharks as this is their domain.

BARBARA, BOBBI, AND ME WAITING ON THE BEACH

     After a couple of years we left the Grady White home and took the Zodiac a seventeen foot rubber boat that was Rod's first boat.  It could hold all the divers, their gear, and the catch at water level and was easy to dive from.  One time Rod decided to dive, too, as he did when he was a young man and went over the side after setting the anchor wearing the weight belt he used for gold dredging in the Feather River (which is another tale for another time) and the weight belt was too heavy and not adjusted for the ocean.  He started to go down and he would have never come up.  They would have found him drowned had not Robbie, a big strapping handsome boy not grabbed him and unbuckled the belt which promptly sank to the bottom.  Robbie helped Rod back in the boat and retrieved the weight belt for him and still got his limit of abalone.   All this while Bobbi, his wife and I are sunning ourselves on the beach and picking up shells and completely unaware of the drama.

THE BOYS BACK AT CAMP WITH THEIR CATCH

     Back at camp with their catch the guys all set to cleaning the abalone and taking mallets and pounding them till they are thin and tender for cooking.  You coat the steaks in egg and roll then in crushed cracker crumbs and salt and pepper and fry them up in olive oil about three minutes to a side.  With all the other things we've brought with us from gardens and our home kitchens we have a wonderful feast.  To let you know just how special abalone is Rod and I were a Duarte's in Pescadero and they had it on their menu.  Abalone Sandwich $45.00.

In the evening we sit around the campfire in warm jackets and talk and laugh and tell stories.  When the kids were real young they'd run around the campsite playing but as the years passed and they became teenagers and young adults they had their own great fire to sit around.  Mendocino and Fort Bragg have wonderful antique/novelty shops and restaurants for other distractions on a long weekend.  Halcyon Days.    

             

STORIES TO TELL WHEN YOUR OLD

     If you don't have experiences when your young how will you have stories to tell when your old:

     Like flying out of San Carlos CA in a little Cessna 150 heading out over the coastal hills to fly over Half Moon Bay and up the coast in the evening.  Flying over the Golden Gate Bridge on a clear night the cars on the bridge and the lights of San Francisco are twinkling and so beautiful.  I'm helping Rod watch for other air traffic as we don't want to fly into anything.  Over the San Francisco Bay across to Oakland to Livermore  and the Red Baron a "fly in" restaurant for dinner.  Cross winds and turbulence prevented us from putting the plane down and it almost felt like we were hovering there on the approach to the runway like a helicopter forever.  We've flown in here a number of times for dinner so tonight we head back across the Bay to San Carlos and end up having dinner at the restaurant in the Sheraton on the Peninsula.

     Like the time we were flying on  employee passes on United out of  Washington Dulles and we stood by but didn't get on any non-stop flights to San Francisco and our only hope was a direct flight through Denver.  There's non-stop flights and connecting flights which are two different planes and two different flight numbers... but there's also what we call direct flights which are flights that may make a stop but it's the same flight number and plane all the way to the destination.  There's also change of gauge flights that I might explain at some other time but they don't relate to this story.  Well, we stood by for the direct flight through Denver and got on and just before the plane landed they announced from the flight deck that this plane which was scheduled to go on to San Francisco after the Denver stop was going to Colorado Springs instead so they dumped all us standbys and paying passengers out at Denver.  There was only one flight left to San Francisco from Denver left that evening so we all hoped we would make it... Rod and I and all the other employee standbys who were hoping to get back to the Bay Area that night.  The plane that was going to San Francisco was coming from Seattle and the only passengers on the flight was the Denver Broncos who had played Seattle that day.  I don't know who won or what but we stood there watching all the Broncos deplane and they were HUGE.  The flight was delayed because the Broncos had trashed the plane and they had to clean up the mess.  It wasn't looking good for us because the flight was a full flight out of Denver and the gate agents advised all us standbys that there was a flight into San Jose we could probably all make and then we could carpool in cabs up to San Francisco Airport to pick up our cars.  Rod and I decided if we didn't get on we would try for the redeye out of Denver back to DC and arrive for the early non stops to San Francisco the next morning so we continued to stand by for the San Francisco flight while all the other standbys went for the San Jose flight.  It's a good thing we did because we were then the only standbys and we got on in First Class and finally made it home that night.      

     Like pulling into the dock at Pillar Point after salmon fishing all day on the Pacific ocean and Rod tells me to get in the bow of the Grady White to jump off and tie the boat to the dock as we pull in only there's someone on the pier I hand the rope off to and he holds the boat for Rod and ties her up.  I think I can step off the front over the rail and don't realize how high up I am so what I do is crawl over the rail and land flat on my back on the pier it's a wonder I didn't fall in the water.

     Like boat camping on Lake Shasta.  We're pulled into a cove and Rod has tied us up in the middle and we've stored everything in the cabin after dinner and blown up the air mattress to sleep in sleeping bags on the deck under the stars.  You feel so close to eternity because without city lights the stars in the night sky are so clear.  We've got a tape in the little TV we've brought with us and we're settling in in the dusk cause night falls real fast on the lake.  Our poles are still in the rod holders with the line pulled up and secured when we hear a jetski come into the cove and a female voice calling out "Oh fishermen, aren't you worried about your poles?"  When we hear this our heads pop up and we startle this poor girl and she heads out of the cove exclaiming "Oh, I'm so drunk".  Don't know what she expected.

     Like the next morning when Rod releases the ropes so we can pull into the bank to go up into the woods to do what everyone does in the morning after coffee and he pulls into the bank for me to step over the bow to jump down only as I go over my right heel catches and I'm hanging there with my hands clenching the rail and my arms stretched and my heel caught on the rail like a ballerina with the highest kick in the world and I'm yelling for him to push my heel off it's stuck and Rod's looking at me with huge eyes.  Finally he lifts my heel off the rail so I can drop down but when I come out of the woods back to the boat he's turned it around so I can step over the back into the boat. Whew.


     I just read this to Rod and he smiled and said "Hopeless" and I smiled and said that's what my family calls "Doing a Sandy".








           

THE CEDAR CHEST

Mom and Dad on their wedding day August 25, l945.

     When my Mom graduated from Fairfax High School at sixteen (soon to be seventeen on the Fourth of July 1944) she went to work for the Federal Government.  Her parents moved the family from The Pink House, and some of you will know what house I'm talking about but it wasn't pink then, in Clifton VA to Cameron Valley in Alexandria VA to housing built for the influx of workers who had come from all over the country to work for the war effort.  The war was World War II and her parents were already working at the Torpedo Plant.  The move to Alexandria was because gasoline was rationed and hard to come by.  With the money she earned working in her very first job she bought a bedroom set for herself and a cedar chest.

     The cedar chest was a hope chest.  In it she put the sheets and linens and treasures she was saving for her  marriage to her own true love.  That was my Dad who was her first cousin's pen pal.  When  Dad came to finally meet Mae he found she towered over him but Mom was just right.  This was okay with Mae because Dad introduced her to his friend Warren and they became a couple.  Dad and Mom and Mae and Warren were close friends all their lives.

My guest bedroom and the cedar chest.

     The cedar chest was always at the base of their bed but when my parents moved from the country on Popes Head Road into the Town of Fairfax in 1958 Mom put the cedar chest in the bedroom I shared with my sister Linda and we displayed our dolls and stuffed animals on top.  The cedar chest held treasured baby clothes, love letters, pictures and wedding portraits, and the little powder blue suit Mom was married in.  I could wear it when I was a freshman in high school and I did as a Halloween costume.  The skirt was short because styles were very short during WWII and it was a little snug.  I thought of myself as a kind of hillbilly Li'l Abner type character so I pulled my hair up and put a Minnie Pearl hat on my head with a flower sticking straight up.  Linda and I went trick-or-treating with Pat McGhee and Judy Norwood and Tina Meyers in Green Acres.  I think Pat's sister Deenie was with us.  We trick-or-treated at the house my parents eventually bought in 1965.  Tina's mom was supposed to drive us home but somehow there was a miss communication and we kids ended up walking home cutting through where they were building the new administrative building on University Drive.  It was scary.

     When United Airlines transferred my parents to San Francisco in 1966 the cedar chest stayed with Linda and eventually became her three boy's toy chest.  When she and her family moved to Phoenix AZ in 1979 she left it at my Grandmother's house on Popes Head Road in the basement where it stayed for years.  Dad retired from United Airlines in 1978 and Mom and Dad returned to Virginia to the house on Popes Head.  In 1994 when Rod and I became engaged after dating cross country for four years I transferred from United Air Lines Washington Reservation Center to  the San Francisco Reservation Center and I took the cedar chest with me.  United allowed me 500 lbs. of personal possessions which they flew out for me for  free.  Rod and I were married June 24, 1995 in a ceremony at our home.

I just had Mom's cedar chest repaired and refinished this year.  It sits at the foot of the bed in my guest bedroom and holds linens.  I treasure it.  As for the bedroom set Mom bought at the same time as the cedar chest with the money she made from her first job my parents still owned it at the end of their lives.  Momma passed in 1998 and Daddy in 2009.        

      

   

ME, NOW

    When did I grow up?  When did I grow old?  I'm five years younger than Grandmother when Mom threw her a birthday party for her seventieth birthday and she passed at seventy-six.  I'm seven years younger than Mom when she passed at seventy-two.  She didn't even live as long as her mother and the last four years of her life she was incapacitated by a stroke.  I don't feel old and the person looking back in the mirror looks pretty good but I'm careful not to look too close.

     It seems all my life I was waiting for life to happen and guess what, it just did, whether I participated or not.  It's not the life I thought about when I was young.  I don't even remember now what I expected because I've been living a catch-up life since I was twenty.  I was raised by a family believing in all the things you were taught in church and by a great Mom and Dad and still being a human is a hard job.  I would tell any young person now if you get yourself in a situation where you're trying to make a misstep turn out right to just relax and don't push things past no looking back.  The consequences may not be as bad as you think and may even be an unseen blessing.  Strange how things can turn out that way