August 24th: Story #50

My story:

So, I tried writing this down formally and my friend Camille chided me, gently, suggesting quite strongly that I make it an oral story. Like so many of the others that have been given to me.

Where this story begins is in 11th grade. I read Joan Didion’s, “Notes from a Native Daughter,” as part of the approved curriculum for AP English. In that essay, she talks about the children of the aerospace engineers. And that phrase has haunted me ever since. It was kind of a curse, an imprecation, about who I was, and am, and what I stood for as a *type* of person living in California.

What I want this story to be about is how I finally reconciled myself to the fact that the charge of being a child of aerospace engineers, while not technically accurate, is also not unjust.

The next part of the story: I went off to college, and I spent my junior abroad, in Oxford. I missed California twice that year, and twice only: The first time occurred when a group of friends and I all went out dancing in London at a club called “Heaven”. And either on the way there or on the way back, we were walking along the street and ran into a group of Americans, among whom was a woman I recognized, named Oona, who had gone to a rival high school, but that I knew from drama competitions.

It was like a scene out of some 1950s movie—we recognized each other across the streetlamp-lit gray paving stones of Victorian London, ran to each other, and chatted to each other for a good 20 minutes about old friends, gossip (etc.). The truth of the matter is Oona and I didn’t actually know each other that well. And I haven’t seen or heard from her since. I hear that she got her Master’s from Northwestern and is now an art educator somewhere. But that night it was like we were long-lost cousins.

The second moment that year that I was homesick was also kind of quirky. Late in the spring semester I went to the movies and saw “Philadelphia” with Tom Hanks. And if you know the movie, there’s this wonderful scene in the beginning where the camera is panning over the city, girls are doing double-dutch on the sidewalk, and Bruce Springsteen is singing the theme song. I burst into tears; I was practically bawling. Now this was very confusing: at that time, I had never been to Philadelphia at all. Hell, I don't think I'd even been north of DC (wait, that's not right, I had been to New York, once). Whatever: there was absolutely no reason for that scene to make me homesick. But I it did, and I was.

You know, I still get a hitch in my throat when I think about that moment. It’s the weirdest thing.

I then went to graduate school. And in deciding where to go, I have to admit that California was not really part of the decision. Staying in the state was of secondary importance to getting into the best school. And so even though I got into UCLA, I was clearly going to go to Harvard or Chicago (which was my other choice). And I’ve never regretted that. But the fact that I didn’t think about CA with any kind of nostalgic attachment, didn’t even really look back when the plane lifted off for Logan, is part of what I’m trying to get across.

Once I got to Cambridge, there were two moments of homesickness. One was at a party I went to with my friends Janet and Camille. It was a horrible party. It involved a bunch of law students. It was in the third floor of a triple decker. It was hot. They had run out of beer. They had no ice. They were doing shots of *warm* vodka. The thing that saved the party: there was a bowl of homemade guacamole on the table that someone had brought and that no-one had touched. So Camille and Janet and I stood around the bowl of guac and INHALED it. We drew a little bit of attention to ourselves by our behavior, and when asked by other people what we were eating, we said, “you’d hate it—go away; this is nothing you’d understand.” Every party after that that we went to together we would take a bowl of guac with us and put it on the table, slyly, to see who would notice. And that is how we knew who was from California.

Usually we ended up just eating it ourselves. But anyway.

The last moment of homesickness occurred at Boston Pride. It was in a park on the Charles, close by the dam. And when we arrived at the festival, there was this disconcerting moment where the temperature dropped ten or fifteen degrees, the quality of light shifted, and the sky—which had been brilliantly summer blue—became a kind of opaque grey. I doubled over with cramps, I was crying. It confused the hell out of the people I was with. I had trouble explaining that what was happening was that this was fog, and fog wasn’t supposed to happen in the summertime. And if it happened in the summertime, it must be San Francisco, and so it should have been coming from the west —it couldn’t come from the east. The people I was with were all from places like DC and Rochester, and had no idea what I was talking about. I couldn’t explain it properly to them.

Around that time, I stopped being homesick. I wasn’t really a Californian anymore, if I had ever been. I had chosen to become an academic, and was becoming a member of the upper middle class. And academics in particular, but also other people like that, they don’t really live in one place. They go to fancy schools and have fancy jobs, and they circulate between NY and Boston, Chicago, and LA and San Francisco. And I chose that deliberately. And since then I have led my life in a way that is largely in a kind of non-space of conferences. My personal and professional network is in yearly meetings in places where I meet people who I’m connected to who live in Urbana-Champaign and Lehigh, PA, or Vancouver, BC.

Now, what I discovered about that life, that choice of becoming that kind of person is that it really only works if you actually live in a reasonable place. If where you put your head at night and where you wake up in the morning is a terrible place, the upper middle class life wears thin very quickly and starts to look hollow. I discovered this living in Texas, where six weeks wouldn’t go by what that I had to escape to another conference. It got to the point where I would go to the conferences just so that I could get decent coffee and bagels and a reasonable newspaper. And talk to people who I shared a basic worldview with. Texas took a horrible toll on me. Eventually we left TX, so we could stop paying that toll, in our weight, in our alcohol consumption, in our sanity. More so me than Drew; Texas wasn’t as poisonous for him as it was for me.

When we finally left Texas, it was for Drew’s job. Now I have to be honest here: we chose to move to California not because of some ancestral connection or some nostalgia for the golden dream. We chose it because we made a calculation that it would be easier for me to get a job—which was true. And now I do more interesting research at a better rate of pay than I ever would have in Texas. And it is true that I live in my hometown in the house that I grew up in. But it’s for career reasons, for job-related reasons.

That’s the children of the aerospace engineers piece; my presence in California is about being a part of a circulating orbit of professionals who live in California not because it is California but because it is part of the orbit of places that reasonable people live. And I’m okay with that, because it’s a wonderful place with good coffee and home delivery of the New York Times, and incredible hiking and basically functional politics and easy flights to places like Chicago and Boston and Philadelphia. It’s taken me a long time to reconcile myself to this, but there it is.

That’s my California story.

August 14: Story #49

Rob's story:

I've seen other stories that were like the one I'm going to tell you – it's multi-part, but they all tie together.

Really there are two California stories. I'll tell you them both. The first one is funny. It's about my California family; you may have already heard this one?

When I moved out here for college, I wanted to get far away from my family. My dad was already far away; he was in Hong Kong. My sister was off at college in Boston. The previous couple of years had been hard for my Mom, kind of a dark period. So getting away from New York, and going to Stanford, seemed like a good idea at the time. And so one thing that I got used to very quickly out here was not having any family. Which has its up sides and down sides, of course.

Family ended up emerging in the most random of places, at the farmers market. In the early days of At the Crossroads, I was working maybe 70 hrs a week? I was on outreach five nights a week. Getting home at midnight, 12-thirty. Work was very consuming for me; I would find it difficult to leave behind. I'd wake up on Saturday mornings and still have work on the brain. That was not a good thing.

Around then, I discovered the farmers market. At that time it was in a parking lot on Embarcadero and Green, about a fifteen minute walk from my apartment. It became my Xanadu, the place where I could detox from work. I was surrounded by shiny happy fruit, and shiny happy people. No one was telling me their problems, about how they had OD'd the previous night, or that they were suicidal. Also, keep in mind that at that time, the market wasn't nearly as touristy as it is now that it's in the Ferry Building. So if you were a regular, you could get to know the farmers and vendors really well.

Growing up in New York, fruits and veggies were simply something that you ate. They weren't something that you talked about, and thought about, and marked upon. They were just food on the table. In California, though, produce is a way of life. The Farmers Market was where I started to appreciate that.

Quickly, my favorite stand became K&J Orchards. For two reasons: the delicious Asian pears they sold, which I had never tasted before in my life. I remember the first time I had one of their Shinko pears, and thinking “what is this magnificent beast?” The other reason was because of Kalayada, this tiny little Thai lady, who could chat you up for days. Always said something that could make you laugh, and sometimes something that was mildly offensive. I genuinely looked forward to seeing her every weekend.

We got to know each other, and she asked me what I did. I told her, and she decided that I was a “good boy.” And that meant that I deserved to have free fruit. I think I assumed that it was common for her to do this? But I eventually discovered that it was, in fact, very uncommon for her to give away free fruit. So this was a high mark of her affection for me.

Eventually she started to talk about wanting to marry me off to her youngest daughter, Anna. And she would say this to me every week: “when are you going to marry my daughter?”

After some weeks of this, I asked her “what would the courtship have to consist of? What kind of effort do I need to put into this?”

Her answer? “Anna's a good girl. Two to three years of just holding hands, that's all.”

I think I said something like “you know, I don't know if I could be that patient.”

Her reply at that point was “oh, that's okay, because actually it would be kind of like incest.”

This surprised me, so I said “what do you mean?” “I have two daughters. I've always wanted a son. So, now you're my son.”

I kind of looked at her, somewhat bewildered, and just gaped at her, slightly shaking my head. Not denying her, but just puzzled.

She then said, “Son, you are now to call me Mom.”

What could I say but, “sure. Whatever.”

Within about 6 or 7 months I was calling her Mom.

So I got to know more about her. That she was the K of K&J. Soon what started to happen was that on days when she worked the stand alone, I would stand in for her sometimes while she took a bathroom break.

One time, I came up and she said “Son, son. I've been waiting for you. It's time for you to come work for the family.”

I said, “Sure. I'll watch the stand while you take a bathroom break.”

“No. That's not what I mean. It's time for you to really come work for the family.”

And I said, looking at her confusedly, “what are you talking about?”

“Don't worry, it's not big deal. I just need you here every Saturday morning from 7 a.m. To 3 p.m.”

I think said something mildly profane like “get the fuck out of here.” Not mean, just joking.

To which she said, pointing her finger at me, “Don't you EVER talk to your mother that way!”

I grabbed her by her shoulders and looked down at her (she's about five feet tall) and said, “listen you crazy woman, you are not my mother!”

And she looks at me and says, “Son, I'll ignore that comment. Back to your family responsibilities.”

And at this point I'm just a little bewildered by the whole conversation. And before I know it I'm negotiating for something I didn't want to get into in the first place, saying “Mom, you know I work until Midnight on Friday nights. I get home at 12:30. I'm not going to wake up five hours later to come to the market. It's just not going to happen. What if I came by about 10, until 1 p.m. Say, 2 out of every 3 weeks?”

Even as I said these words, I was thinking to myself, “stop talking! What are you doing?”

But Kalayada is an extraordinarily powerful person, and clearly inflicting her jedi mind tricks on me. So her response to my offer was, “Son. You are such a disappointment to your mother.”

I will never forget that. I said, “Mom, this isn't a negotiation. Take it or leave it.”

To which she said, “one thing that living with two difficult daughters has taught me is unconditional acceptance in the face of disappointment. So I will accept your terms.”

And that is the story of my California family.

The other story is shorter. It's just talking about the importance of the Marin Headlands. And loving the story of how they were created.

About 8 or 9 years ago, largely as an exercise strategy, I started hiking. I had grown up hating hiking, and had avoided it like the plague. I had tried it a handful of times in California, and had found it at least somewhat enjoyable. Around 2003, I realized that I really needed to get into shape, and I figured hiking would work if only because other forms of exercise are abhorrent to me.

I was pretty stunned to discover that 25 minutes away from my house was one of the most beautiful areas I've seen in my life: the Marin Headlands. I started going there maybe once a month. I was, and continue to be, amazed that so close to the second densest metropolis in this country is this area of incredible natural beauty, so peaceful and pristine.

I remember going to a friend's wedding. I was a groomsman, and talking to another groomsman, he started telling me about hiking Mt. Tam, and how long he'd been doing it. He said something to me, that when he said it was the hokiest shit I had ever heard. But now I fully understand and empathize with: “Mt Tam is like an old friend to me,” he said.

That is how I've come to feel about the Headlands.

I know my way around the Headlands better than I know my way around North Beach, where I've been living for 15 years. I know that if I go up the Fox Trail and overlook the ridge that leads to the Muir Beach area, and if I get there a couple of hours before sunset, that I will be covered in the most beautiful soft sunlight. I know that Muir Beach and Mt. Tam and Muir Woods in the setting sunlight look breathtakingly beautiful. And I know that if I am lucky I will get to see deer bounding up and down across the trail. I've probably been there 200 times in the last 8 years.

I didn't learn how close it came to all being developed until about 2 or 3 years ago. Where the Headlands used to be a military base. In the 50s, I think, it was decommissioned, and the government sold it to a developer from Pittsburgh. He wanted to build a town there called “Marincello” The county Board of Supervisors was in favor it, and the papers had come out in favor of it.

Now before he had bought it, there was a group of naturalists that had lobbied the government, saying that we needed to keep it a park. The government ignored them, but this group of environmentalists kept up their efforts, doing whatever they could to block the development. Basically trying to stave things off as long as possible while they built up their coalition. And initially they were unsuccessful. There was very little public sentiment backing them.

So Marincello started to get developed. Ironically, there is now a hiking trail – the Marincello trail – on the site of what should have been the main thoroughfare of the town. I gather also that there was a pair of large gates at the head of Tennessee Valley, that have since been taken down.

Anyway, I think what happened was that they brought up a couple of suits – pretty minor things, violations of arcane zoning codes, the typical things people do here in San Francisco to block development. As the suits continued, the coalition continued to bring up problems with this developer, and that slowly turned the tide. I guess part of his backing was Gulf Oil. And eventually, as public opinion started to shift, Gulf Oil backed out.

So the developer had to back out and sell the property. The people who had started the environmental group then put together an organization that purchased the whole place, for something like $6 million, and this became the basis for Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

By the way, the people who did that later went on to found the Trust for Public Land.

After I heard that story, I had an even deeper appreciation of what I was hiking through. It was supposed to have been a mix of apartment buildings, single-family homes, stores, all of that. Whereas now there are slugs, and quail, and deer, and bunny rabbits, and hawks. Basically there is this place that I can't imagine living without. Just like I can't imagine living without my family, or my closest friends, I can't imagine living without the Headlands – it brings me so much. I can go there again and again, and never get bored. Every time I'm just overwhelmed by how beautiful it is.

And I'm incredibly grateful to those people, who I've never met, and probably never will meet, for fighting their asses off to preserve an area that I truly believe to be God's country.

Story #47 (addendum)

This second picture does not count as a separate story, but merely as evidence that I did, in fact, make it down to Bloody Run Creek. It is, as you can see, a lovely spot.

It is not so lovely, however, that I was encouraged to proceed further. The road crosses the creek here. I did proceed a slight distance up the opposite grade, in pursuit of perhaps additional photos. However, I very quickly found myself passing a series of seemingly-abandoned house-trailers scattered amongst the trees. Three things occurred, more or less simultaneously: the satellite radio cut out (it was playing a remix of Coldplay's "Viva La Vida," so perhaps this was for the best); I had a weird sense of deja vu that I placed vaguely in the territory of an old MST3K episode ("Touch of Satan," though there was nary a walnut tree in sight); and thirdly, it struck me that I was almost certainly out of cell range.

I quickly pulled a 3-point turn and headed back to, ahem, civilization.

It was on the way out of the canyon that the questioning I had received at the North San Juan coffee shop came back to me.

August 7th: Story #47

Darlene’s story:

I’m from the story-telling capital of the world. Have you ever been? It’s in July, at the North Columbia Schoolhouse Cultural Center in Nevada City. Its’ really fun – you should go.

So the story I want to tell you today is primarily about a Chinese immigrant named Smiley, back in the heyday of our community. I live in a mining town, with lots of little towns all around: North San Juan, Malakoff Diggins, Columbia, Humbug, and Bloody Run. There’s a mural with Smiley in North San Juan – if you have time to see it, it’s really neat.

So: Bloody Run. Back in the day, Smiley and a lot of other Chinese immigrants came over to work in the gold mines. They also built a lot of the bridges and tunnels in California, along with mining gold. Many of them sent money back to their homeland. Some of them went back home after they had spent time in California, but others remained here, separated from their families.

Now Smiley was a very kind man, who liked to help others. He would do things for people, helping them build fences, or repair their homes. He was also very dutiful, sending back money to his mother for many, many years (even, apparently, after she had passed away). He was so helpful, and so respected that he was sought after by the mine owners as a leader in the community.

One time, Smiley and 80 other Chinese immigrant men were working on a road down to the Middle Fork of the Yuba River. They were working for a particular company that was trying to develop a rich placer deposit called the Delhi mine. While Smiley was down there working with this group of immigrants, he rose in the estimation of company bosses more and more. Delhi became very successful as a mine, by the way a – still working today. So the bosses sent Smiley and a group of other Chinese immigrants up to a place called Bear Trap Springs, setting them to building tunnels, chipping away until they found the gold deposits. After about a month, Smiley needed to go back home (to North San Juan) to check on his house, send his mom his money, tend to his fruit trees, that kind of thing. While he was gone, the other 80 immigrants were called together by their bosses to this wide beautiful flat spot next to the creek, to be paid for the month’s work that they had done.

But instead of paying them, the mining company bosses shot them all. Massacred all 80 of the immigrant men. And now that place on the creek, this beautiful beautiful place, is called Bloody Run.

The really sad part, if you think about it, is that mining bosses knew they were going to kill everybody, but they didn’t want to kill Smiley. So they waited until he was gone. It might have been coincidence, or it might have been planned – we don’t know. In any case, Smiley escaped the massacre. He died many years later, alone here in California far away from his family. He’s buried in the Protestant cemetery in North San Juan because they Catholics wouldn’t allow a Chinese person to be buried in their cemetery.

[The semi-scient narrator intrudes. The picture below is of the watershed of Bloody Run. There is no marker, so far as I know, of the actual site of the massacre.

Finding this location was an adventure unto itself. When I stopped at the coffee shop in North San Juan to ask for directions, I was asked – twice – why I was going to Bloody Run. It did not occur to me until later why this might be a matter which might bear questioning. The coffee-shop, by the by, is excellent, and has fantastic cookies. It is run by a well-muscled nut-brown lady slightly younger than myself, who was enjoying plaudits from all comers for having won the community mud-wrestling competition the previous evening (unfortunately, she also reported that she may have to go the local clinic to have her ears irrigated, to remove the congealed dirt). The shop also has a piano in the back room, on which on this particular afternoon a Buffalo Soldier biker was feasting the other patrons with a selection of jazz melodies.

From the coffee-shop, I took a series of roads which grew increasingly desolate, turning first to an oiled-down dirt track that had been run to washboard, and then down a path that was just plain gravel. I was sincerely glad to have asked directions, as at a critical juncture – where this picture was taken – the road sign had been ruint by some well-placed buckshot. From there it was a steep descent to the actual creek, more on which in the next post].

August 7th: Story #46

Catherine's story ("Sinkyone: A California Story"):

The Sinkyone is a part of the ‘Lost Coast’ in northwest California, an area of redwood-forested mountains cut by narrow canyons, so precipitous and unstable that Highway 1 skirts the area by going inland. On the east sides of the steep ridges, the forests change to include tan oak and madrone trees. The area drains the Eel River.

Native Americans have occupied this land at least since 6000 B.C. European culture arrived with the gold rush inland, bringing the usual misery of foreign diseases, warfare, displacement and slavery to the native population. From the 1850’s onward the area experienced boom and bust cycles: gold rush trading stations; redwood logging for shakes, fence posts, grape stakes and railroad ties; tan oak bark for processing leather. Logging in particular swung between boom years, bust years after the trees were felled, followed by another logging boom when machinery became available that allowed the logging in steeper, more inaccessible canyons. The latest boom in the area brought marijuana growers along with descendants of the earliest homesteaders and some Native Americans.

Archaeology in the region has been limited, but documents a transitional area with a complex history of resource use. The spear points of Paleoindians, hunter-gatherers who were among the earliest arrivals, are found nearby. This culture was replaced about 6000 B.C. by evidence of atlatl throwing darts and grinding stones (manos and metates), all of local materials. Around 500 B.C. the archaeological record adds bowl mortars and pestles, associated with acorn grinding, and fishing and sea mammal collecting material. This is evidence of trade exchange, and perhaps the moving in nearby of new groups of people. One thousand years later the bow and arrow were added.

Linguistic evidence also shows cycles of new arrivals. The Yuki, associated with the heart of the Sinkyone, have an isolated language not related to other North American groups. They are presumed to be the first inhabitants of the north coast, and may be linked to the Paleoindian hunter-gatherer artifacts. Pomo and Karok Indians, today living mostly south of the Sinkyone, arrived around 600 B.C., and over the years developed or borrowed acorn processing and bow and arrow technology. From 1 A.D. to 1200 A.D. came waves of Athabascans, with their fishing skills.

By the time of European contact, these various strands of culture met in the Sinkyone, with small tribal groups speaking different languages, and using a mix of economic and cultural practices from all of the various groups. The social units were small and family-based, using resources defined by seasonal movements along drainages in the landscape. Small tribelets gathered salt and clam disc beads, bows, redbood baskets, arrows and clothing. Tobacco, mussels, seaweed, fish, abalone, surf fish and chiton were all exchanged. Trade included simple exchanges of good, and exchanges using clam shell disc beads as a form of money. Groups also exchanged reciprocal use of resources (seaweed gathering for access to acorn harvesting). Sweat house ceremonies, gambling, and courtship occurred as a part of trade exchanges and fairs.

Tribal groups throughout the Sinkyone used fire to manage their resources. Some burned upland areas to encourage the grasses and ferns used in basketmaking. Some chaparral areas were burned to encourage seed-grass growth. Wild tobacco was planted in burned areas, and small prairie areas were burned in the redwood forests to provide open space for grass, ferns, seed plants and game. Acorn groves were burned with annual small fires that killed diseases and pests. Many of the tribes built fish weirs on streams to catch salmon.

By the 1970s, most of the Sinkyone had been logged over in all but the steepest and most rugged areas. The federal government owned the King Range Conservation Area at the north end of the Lost Coast. The State of California began to purchase portions of the Lost Coast for the state park system. But 7000 acres were owned by the Georgia Pacific Logging Company. The Coastal Commission required the logging company to protect a narrow coastal corridor, and the State, in 1977, designated 3500 acres as the Sinkyone Wilderness State Park. Georgia Pacific began to aggressively cut timber in its holdings.

By the early 1980’s, local environmentalists and Native Americans joined in lawsuits and civil disobedience actions to protest the aggressive timber-cutting. In 1985, the courts halted cutting at least temporarily and Georgia Pacific announced that its 7000 acres were for sale. 3300 acres were added to the State Park. The California Coastal Conservancy purchased the remaining 3800 acres and began a long-term planning process.

Native American groups formed an Intertribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council to unify Native American interests and to advocate for setting aside an area for traditional uses, cultural preservation and education. The initial Coastal Conservancy plan provided for the Sinkyone Wilderness State Park along the coast, and the eastern strip of 3800 acres to be ‘multiple use’, including logging and public access for hunting and fishing and recreation. The Intertribal Council resisted this multiple use, and discussions dragged on until 1997. At that time, the 3800 acres were turned over to the Intertribal Council to manage as the country’s first intertribal wilderness area. The Council is de-commissioning logging roads and restoring streams from years of degradation by logging. They do this work in collaboration with each other, strengthening thousands of years of relationships. And they do this in collaboration with the state park system, speaking for the loggers and homesteaders who have had their brief 150 years of relationship to this land. This Intertribal entity has reinvigorated a resource management role on this land that has existed for thousands of years.

I had a brief relationship with the Sinkyone country, beginning with site visits in connection with a small grant to the Intertribal Council from Hands Across America. Among other delights of this relationship was a first visit, guided by a Wailaki tribal elder, named Coyote. When we were lost, he demanded that our driver turn around: “Them Sinkyone people are all from the Eel River drainage, and we ain’t there any longer.” I wished then that I came from a culture that found it’s way around by understanding drainages and their cultural connections.

I went with my son Bayliss, then in his teens, to an Intertribal Council weekend at Usal, a coastal bay that is part of the Sinkyone wilderness area. At the end of a long afternoon of walking through shaded groves of redwood, one of the Native American leaders offered Bayliss a ride on his horse down to the ocean. Bayliss said he would remember forever the ride down the hill to the surf, into the setting sun, where a dozen young men were casting hand nets for the surf fish that would be our dinner.

July 10th: Story #36 [re-posted with correctly oriented picture]

Janet's story:

I used to have a recurring nightmare, when I was a kid. I didn't have very many, but I remember this one. It was in San Francisco. Now, I didn't have this nightmare until after we had moved away, and didn't live in San Francisco anymore. And the nightmare went like this: my mother was a waitress in a dim sum restaurant on a steep hill. And she was dressed up in a pink outfit like Flo from “Alice,” with one of those paper-hat thingies in her hair (what are they called?), and a white apron. Unlike anyone you've ever seen in a Chinese restaurant, ever. But there she was, in my nightmare. The restaurant was oriented with two rows of big round tables, with an aisle in between, the door on one end and the restaurant on the other. And she was taking orders – which again, doesn't make sense, because this was a dim sum restaurant – and my father appears in his bit part as a bus boy. Pushing a cart dramatically piled with dishes piled up over his head. So he's pushing his cart, to the next table to pick up dishes, and he can't see around: he hits my mother with the cart, pushes her out the front door, and she rolls down the steep hill.

And that's usually when I woke up screaming. That's it. My father kills my mother in a sitcom set-up on the streets of San Francisco.

[Note from the semi-scient narrator. This picture is of the only dim-sum restaurant in Sacramento that also sits upon a hill. You may not notice the slope, but nevertheless it is there. There are really only two hills in Sacramento; this is on the north slope of Poverty Ridge. When the DMV still required as part of its drive test that you demonstrate the ability to properly block your tires when parking on a hill, I had to do it on the south slope of this hill, about a half-mile to south of where this picture was taken].

July 29th: Story #45

Langley’s story:

I am 6th generation Californian. And my great-aunt Mary Caldera, who married this Portuguese guy for like two years, then divorced him, but kept his name for the rest of her life. Even though her maiden name was Foley.

Anyway. They lived in McCann Court, in Walnut Creek. Which used to be the McCann Orchards – but now it’s the court, you know how that happens. So my very Catholic great-aunt Mary told me about her first journey over the Four Horse Pass. Which is now the Altamont Pass, with the windmills, which everyone drives over. And she said it was harrowing. And they did have four horses on their carriages. She’s 94 years now.

And she tells this story that they did it to see her half-sister (my grandmother), Inez – so why was she named that? It’s because when her mother was in the hospital, the woman next to her talked her through the delivery, and then at the end, she said “I’ll name my child whatever you say,” at which point the woman said “Inez.” Wow. Because oh my gosh. Irish Catholic named Inez? Sure, okay. Whatever.

So. My great-aunt Mary was one of the first women to graduate from Berkeley. And she was very proud when I went there – unlike my brother and sister, whom my great-aunt was disappointed with, because there were big differences between her family (the Foleys/McCanns) and the Stanfords. The Torneys was the side of the family that had the surgeon -general (my great-great-grandfather) during the earthquake and the fire – big liberals. They were Catholics, you see. And of course that put them on the other side of a lot of questions form the conservative Stanfords.

Oh, I have a funny story about my great-grandfather, Edward Torney, known as Ned. During the Great Depression, [hand-slap] he needed his house painted. And he contracted with a couple of painters to paint his house. And it became a news story. Because someone was actually hiring someone to do some work. So they sent a reporter, to interview my great-grandfather, about his kindness to the common man. And he said, “My house just needed painting!” And then he slammed his door. He was a total asshole.

You know, Jeanette, Ann McCann says we should have/were supposed to cotillion in San Francisco. My generation didn’t. Oh well.

You know there are pictures, pictures of the fire and earthquake, that my great-grandfather took. They’re in the news now.

[The semi-scient narrator intrudes. I have been unable to confirm the location of 4 Horse Pass. Instead, I bring you a picture of a Concord Coach, about which Joseph Henry Jackson wrote, in "Anybody's Gold":

"It was the Concord that opened up the mines, that brought them into touch with the growing, thriving towns in the great Valley and with San Francisco down by the Bay. It was the stage-driver, more than anyone else, who enabled the miner in the hills to cease being a solitary creature, bewhiskered and lonesome, dependent upon bacon, beans, and homemade biscuit and perhaps a six-months-old newspaper for his moments of relaxation, and to become once more a citizen of the world. The stage brought him his luxuries, the fine wines and barreled oysters and Havana cigars that heleped make life worth living again, the mail and the news that linked him once more with home, the entertainment which did more than anything else to justify the long hours of digging, washing, and rocking that gold-mining meant..."]

July 29th: Story #44

Noelle's story:

I've been thinking and thinking. Should I tell you the one where I fell in the Yosemite River, or teaching my niece how to boogie-board?

My family, for years and years, has gone to Dillon Beach. And the thing about the Pacific is that you have to wear a wetsuit to go in the ocean, even in the summer, when it's achingly hot in Sacramento. If you're lucky, its 60 degrees at the ocean in Dillon Beach.

Last summer, my sister decided that it was time to let my niece to learn how to boogie board. Now she knows how to swim, of course – she's on the swim team. We'd been doing it for a number of years – my sister, me, my brother-in-law and my husband (who call themselves “the dominators” as in they “dominate the waves”). My niece didn't want to boogie board with her father, her uncle, or her mother, but with me. I'm her “auntie no-no” who always says “yes.” And this is a big responsibility, right? She's five years old, and this is the ocean. Bad things can happen. It's a whole nother ball game.

So I'm trying to teach her about keeping the board in front you – waiting for the wave to come to you, and then kind of falling forward with your board in front of you. Just getting used to the motion. We're in foam, just to start out. She looks out at where her father and uncle were – way out – and says “wait a minute. They're never going to catch any waves out there.” Which was totally correct. Even before actually doing it, she understood the concept. So she gets used to doing that. And she starts to back up a little further into the ocean, to where there are little baby waves. And I'm encouraging her to try one – “alright, let's go! Let's take this one!” And she screams. She's totally scared of the waves, even where they're at their smallest.

The waves are coming in, and I keep saying “let's try this one, let's try this one.” And she's going “aack! No!” screaming every time a wave came up. And I keep trying to encourage her, and she keeps screaming.

Finally, there's one that comes up, and it's clear that it's going to be a big one. Too big even for me or her parents, really. And she says to me, “This one, auntie! This one!”

Now, the other thing about this is that the current pulls you along every time, right? So we're kind of far along the beach, away from where her mother and dad are. So I'm like, “alright, Noelle! You really need to be on this!” So I'm standing there, ready, as close to her as I can be without knocking her down. And when the wave comes, she jumps out in front of it, just like she was supposed to: on her board, and she totally caught it! Totally caught the wave, the first time!

Her mom looks over, just as she's catching the wave, and she starts screaming “what are you doing!” And I'm like “it's okay, she's got it!” And there's a fantastic picture of her, riding this wave, with the biggest grin on her face.

She'll be the best little surfer girl yet.

[Absent a trip to the beach, this is the only outfit I know of in town to buy things like boogie-boards: Land Park Ski&Sport. Sadly, they are currently closed for the season. I like this place in part because of its gloriously ridonkulous 70's architecture].

July 29th: Story #43

Jade's story:

So I went to a private girls prep school in Los Angeles. It was the kind of place that people from the outside probably thought was a posh “tea and finishing” school where they taught you ladies' manners and that sort of thing. But it was really this proto-feminist sisterhood kind of place where nobody wore makeup and we all had boxers on underneath our uniform skirts.

We had a lot of school trips, which those kinds of schools are wont to have. Very memorable school trips. So, working backward: In the 12th grade we went camping at Joshua Tree and saw the spring bloom, and I was introduced to In-N-Out Burger for the first time. In the 10th grade we actually went camping in the snow and snowshoeing in Sequoia. Eating ramen and tunafish, which was really interesting.

By far the most – what's the word I'm looking for? – the most “unique” trip, I would say, or “retreat” as they would call it, was my freshman year in high school. We had a one-day trip which they called the “urban retreat.” It was 110 girls from this posh private school in Holmby Hills – you know, next to Aaron Spelling's house, where the star tours would stop every day. And they put us on a bus and drove us into downtown LA. Took us around for the day to historic LA spots. Like, for instance, this old Art Deco theatre, Olvera Street, that sort of thing. Trying to give us a little Los Angeles history. And of course, there was this absurdist moment where we drove by Skid Row, as if it were a tourist attraction. During which time, I would note, we were tailed by a couple of rent-a-cops. Because of course there were producers' daughters, and the daughters of very rich people in our class.

I found this profoundly absurdist for a couple of reasons: one, that you have to take a field trip to the other side of town. And it's not that we weren't aware that we were privileged – we were acutely aware of our privilege at this school. It was that we had to take a field trip to see how the other area code lives. Two, the idea of Los Angeles history. Which reminds me of that moment in “LA Story,” when Steve Martin is driving around that British woman and says “some of these houses are more than TWENTY years old!”

But I think the nice thing was that even as high school freshman is that we got the irony of it. None of us was so stuck up that we didn't see what they were trying to say, the point of what they were showing us: namely that we were very insular. That was there was more to LA than this Westside, Hollywood life that so many of our families were a part of.

But I still think that it's something that would only happen in LA. And that's why it's my California story.

[The semi-scient narrator intrudes. This is not, as you can probably guess, a picture of LA. It is, instead, a picture of the corner of 8th and L, in downtown Sacramento; roughly the epicenter of my hometown's historic skid row. In this picture is a defunct Western Union Office/payday loan shark outfit, an SRO called the "Bel-Vue apartments," the Little Dragon Chinese restaurant, and -- just at the top of the rise, where they raised the streets to escape the flooding -- a half-block of demolished emptiness, close to an clear and open acre that has been vacant for more than a decade, ever since a homeless person tore up the parquetry in an on old abandoned second-story ballroom and built himself a fire one cold winter's night. It was about this very stretch of town that Didion wrote the following, in "Notes From a Native Daughter":

"I want to tell you a Sacramento story. A few miles out of town is a place, six or seven thousand acres, which belonged in the beginning to a rancher with one daughter. That daughter went abroad and married a title, and when she brought the title home to live on the ranch, her father built them a vast house -- music rooms, conservatories, a ballroom. They needed a ballroom because they entertained: people from abroad, people from San Francisco, house parties that lasted weeks and involved special trains. They are long dead, of course, but their only son, aging and unmarried, still lives on the place. He does not live in the house, for the house is no longer there. Over the years it burned, room by room, wing by wing. Only the chimneys of the great house are still standing, and its heir lives in their shadow, lives by himself on the charred site, in a house trailer.

This is a story my generation knows; I doubt that the next will know it, the children of the aerospace engineers. Who would tell it to them? Their grandmothers lives in Scarsdale, and they have never met a great-aunt. "Old" Sacramento to them will be something colorful, something they read about in Sunset. They will probably think that the Redevelopment has always been there, that the Embarcadero, down along the river, with its amusing places to shop and its picturesque fire houses turned into bars, has about it the true flavor of the way it was. There will be no reason for them to know that in homelier days it was called Front Street (the town was not, after all, settled by the Spanish) and was a place of derelicts and missions and itinerant pickers in town for a Saturday-night drunk: Victorious Life Mission, Jesus Saves, Beds 25c a Night, Crop Information Here. They will have lost the real past and gained a manufactured one, and there will be no way for them to know, now ay at all, why a house trailer should stand alone on seven thousand acres outside of town."]

July 29th: Story #42

Andrew's story:

Can I tell you more than one story? I don't have a story, but a memory. Does it have to have a narrative line? Like man vs. man? Man vs. nature? Man vs. himself? I can give you all that in this story.

Okay, so the man vs. man aspect is parent vs. child. The man vs. nature is, clearly, VW microbus vs. Pismo Beach. The man vs. himself? Perhaps is “why did I have so have many of these children?”

So this is about my father. When I was a small child. A very, very small child. My father took the family to visit my uncle in Tracy. My uncle, a country doctor back when Tracy was the country, back in the 70s. Often paid in fruit. I'm not kidding, actually – you can ask his wife. Literally paid in apricots, which he would then dry on his roof, and give to us in big bags. Yeah, that's my enduring memory of old Uncle Harry.

So. Uncle Harry was, like my father, a Scottish cheapskate of the first order: if offering you a stick of gum, he would ask: “do you want half the whole? Or a whole half?” He and my father – and this is another story altogether – they grew up in British India, and Wrigley's gum was the coin of the realm. No joke: Wrigley's spearmint. Juicyfruit if you were really lucky. These are guys who like in their 70s were still playing tennis. A different era of people. Good Presbyterian stock. Anyway.

So there's no narrative quality yet, this is just character development. These were people who missed an arrow or something. They were too young for WWII and too old to be beatniks. Plus they were raised overseas, so they were weird.

All you need to know about my childhood memory is that my father packed seven children – all within ten years of each other, mind you – into a VW microbus and got them to the beach. That was an accomplishment.

This was the man vs. nature bit: man vs. waking up in the morning with your VW microbus halfway deep in the sand because you parked it too close to the beach.

Yeah. Digging that car out of the sand was a personal triumph. A triumph before one's family. A triumph before God. Because watching the water rise, gradually, onto where your car used to be, knowing you had to get everyone back to Tucson, that was a triumph.

This is not my best story, but it is my first memory of California. Digging trenches in the sand.

July 29th: Story #41

Deborah's story:

This is not that linear, so you can rearrange it if you think it would make more sense.

My brother Rob has lived in San Francisco for a long time. About 8 or 10 years ago we decided to go on a camping trip. There was only one CD we could agree on, which was The Jackson 5's Greatest Hits. It's on about 36 minutes long, so we listened to it a lot of times. Rob likes cheesy R&B ballads and hip hop, and I like Bob Dylan. But we both like the Jackson 5.

Rob had to drive the whole way, because he wouldn't let me drive. Because I don't drive fast enough. I did ask him to pull over once, because I thought I smelled burnt rubber. He accommodated me, but then later on, he kept doing things like after we stopped at a fruit stand and got back in the car, he said “maybe we should pull over? I think I smell something a little fruity!”

So Rob was a different camping companion than I was used to. The first time I should have known was when we started packing, we borrowed some gear from his co-worker Dan, who used to work at Yosemite. The bear cylinders were new to me. Because when I had been in bear country before, you were supposed to hang your food. But in Yosemite, apparently, you leave your food on the ground for the bears to play football with.

We were packing in Rob's apartment, and he was packing sweatpants. This was for a 4-day backcountry trip. I told him, “Rob, you can't pack sweatpants! This is for a backcountry trip.” And he said “why not?” I said, “cotton kills, man!” He said, “what are you talking about?” And I said, “if it rains, then sweatpants are worse than useless.” I'm his big sister. He said, “it's not going to rain.” I said, “how do you know” Because I was picturing all of these hiking trips I had taken places like Maine in August, when it would be 38 degrees and sleeting. And he said, “it doesn't rain in Yosemite in September.”

So I checked and sure enough, the average rainfall for Yosemite in September is 0.02 inches. So I guess he was right. But I still couldn't bring myself to pack sweatpants.

So we're hiking along. Rob in his sweatpants. And we'd had a pretty hard day. The elevation gets up to about 10,000 feet. We get to supper, and I cook about, I don't know, a pound or a pound and a quarter of pasta. Rob looks at me like I'm nuts. I said, “what? When you're hiking you get hungry!”

Turns out Rob doesn't really get hungry when he hikes.

So we had a lot of food left over.

I told him we had to eat it even if we didn't want to. He said he doesn't like to eat when he's not hungry. I said it was a backcountry trip, and we couldn't fit it in the bear canisters. And I kept on eating until I started to feel a little sick. But Rob wouldn't cooperate and he wouldn't eat anymore: he said we could bury it.

I said, “Rob, we can't bury it!”

He said, why not?

I said, “it's the backcountry. You can't contribute things to the ecosystem. And the whole point is not to habituate the bears to the presence of people.”

It was macaroni. Somehow we crammed it into the bear canisters. And I guess the bears played football with it.

I never could get him to listen to me.

I think we must have been hiking around with decomposing macaroni for 2 or 3 days.

There are three other things I remember about that trip. One: Rob's friend Dan, who lent him the gear, was his coworker at At the Crossroads, where they do street outreach for homeless kids. Most people think this is really noble. Dan told us when we got to Yosemite to look for his friend, who worked at the gate, his friend from when he used to work at Yosemite. We did find Dan's friend. And Rob told him that he was a friend of Dan's from work. Dan's friend said “Oh. You mean walking around at night?” That's the first thing.

The second thing I remember is that Rob tailgated everybody really viciously on that windy little road in Yosemite. He would get mad at them for driving so slow. But he would ride so far up their ass that they couldn't even take the turnouts. Because he would have rear-ended them if they had slowed down enough to take the turnouts. I couldn't get him to listen to me on that one either.

The third thing is that at one point my brother turned to me as said, “Deb, do you realize how many times you've started a sentence with 'If I ran Yosemite?'.”

It was a good trip. And a few years later I moved to California. And now I see my brother all the time.

That's my California story.

July 25th: Story #40

John's story:

In every collection of short stories, you need to have one with severed heads in the trunk of a car.

So. Many years ago, I worked for a medical device company. In the cosmetic surgery space. We designed and built little devices designed to hold facial structures in place in their new and improved locations. To test these devices, we needed to implant them in cadaver specimens; we had an arrangement with the UCSF willed body program. We would basically “borrow” the bodies for the day. Since I lived in San Francisco, I would drive down to the willed bodies program down in the Bayview-Hunter's Point area, pick up a cooler full of severed heads, then drive down to Palo Alto to our business office.

So we'd work on these heads all day. Then I would drive back up to San Francisco and return the heads to the willed body program. Of course, as these things happen, one day I got a late start getting out the office. There was bad traffic on 101. It was kind of a hot day. And I didn't return to the willed body program until 5:45.

The lights were out, the door was locked, and they were gone for the day.

So here I was: a cooler full of severed heads in the trunk of my car, going back home. I didn't feel particularly like bringing those heads up to my apartment. Or like putting them in my freezer. So I left them in the trunk of my car, where I thought they'd rest easy, as it were.

My girlfriend at the time was fascinated by these heads. She came down, opened up some of the freezer bags, and took a look. She was urging me to bring them up to the apartment.

At the time I was living real close to the Mission/Cesar Chavez intersection. My car had been broken into 5 times in the last 18 months. A Honda Accord, the easiest car in the world to break open. I was actually really hopeful that someone would break open my car that night. Maybe notice that the radio was gone, and so try to force the trunk. Where they would find a cooler full of severed heads. I even thought about leaving a note: “these are the LAST guys that broke into my car!”

So. Imagine my disappointment when I went out to my car the next morning, and no one had broken in.

July 24th: Story #39

Josh's story:

Alright. I came up with a clever name for this story in my head. It's the “Class 3 Trinity trio.” There's a lot of threes, I thought it was kind of clever.

Three years ago, a group of friends decided that we wanted to go rafting on the Trinity River. I've done rafting before – usually it's tubing on the Sacramento or the American rivers. Very mild, not much to it. The Trinity, though, it's a bit choppier than what we're used to. It has more Class 2 and 3 rapids. We'd made it down the river in our tubes, without much of an event. I'd fallen out on a class 2, but no big deal.

When we got near the Class 3, we knew we wanted to get out of the river and go around it, because it was too hairy. Most of us had made it out in time, except Eric. We walked around the rapid, and fortunately found him waiting for us, in one piece, at the end of it. We asked him how it was, and he said, “it was fine, as long as you stay to the right of the rock.”

The following year, we decided to make our second annual trip. With a bunch of new people. The tube I had that year was much too small for the river, and so I asked to be on one of the only rafts that we had. Joining me on the raft was Lauren, who has a fear of water, and did not want to be in a tube. And Anna, who was having a terrible weekend, whose car had broken down on the way up, who was having a migraine headache, and had gotten sick (thrown up). Needless to say, she didn't want the rockiness of a tube.

Lauren was in the front of the raft, Anna was in the middle, and I had taken the rear. We'd been given two paddles, both of which were low-quality plastic, and had a hinge in the middle that you screw in. About twenty strokes in, my paddle snapped in half. So for the remainder of the trip, I had to row with one paddle in the back.

We'd made it most of the way down without much incident. Anna had started to feel better, Lauren was gaining confidence in the water. We then reached the final rapid – the class 3. This time, we were a little more comfortable going on it, because (a) we had Eric's advice to stay on the right, and (b) we were in a raft, which is usually a bit more safe. We were the first ones there, and we started paddling right. The water started picking up. And as we got about 20 feet away, the other paddle snapped in half.

Swearing ensued.

We attempted to row to the right side of the river, but due to our new found lack of coordination, we instead pulled the back of the boat to the right. And veered toward the rock in the middle. The rock basically t-boned us. We hit it on the side, the raft flipped on its side right in front of the rapid, Lauren flew out. Anna flew out.

I stayed in.

More swearing ensued.

Anna was somehow pinned in between the raft and rock. Lauren had managed to stay on the upsteam end of the raft, and had managed to hang onto it, I'm not sure how. Anna, who was pinned between the raft and the rock, went under the raft, and flew down the rapid, on her back, on the left side – the treacherous side.

Lauren climbed back in. The only way to go down was on the left in, and we didn't have any paddles. So we just sort of gritted our teeth, closed our eyes, and shot down the rapids.

Honestly, I don't really remember much of what happened. I was more concerned about Anna, about whether she might have hit her head, or drowned, something like that.

When we reach the bottom of the rapid, we saw Anna floating on her back still. I yelled at her, I asked her if she was okay, and I saw a thumbs up. And I was extremely relieved, as it was probably the only time I've ever had to fear for the life of one of my friends.

We pulled up her. She got in the raft. She was okay. She had taken in some water, maybe gotten scraped up a little, but on the whole fine.

And by the way, no-one else had trouble on this rapid. Including our friends who had a dog in their raft.

The weekend, by the way, only got worse for Anna. She had to leave her car in Redding for repairs. And we narrowly missed driving a sedan, filled with six people, past the CHP regional headquarters. Lauren's fear of water was obviously exacerbated by this adventure.

No-one has mentioned going back this year. And I'm not sure if Anna or Lauren want to go. But I think I want to give it another try. The third time's the charm, right?

July 18th: Story #38

Amanda’s story:

The first thing that popped into my head when you asked for "California stories" was the moment I realized I was a Californian.

So here it is:

When I was 5, my family moved from the island of Kauai to Spokane, Washington. My mom wanted to be closer to her family, as it was difficult to see them at all regularly while living in the middle of the ocean. I went from being a kid who looked like everyone else on the block--with families of all different colors, shapes and sizes (but mostly tanned)--to being one of only 3 families of a different color in my church. My high school had .06% black kids. It was, and still is, a fairly monochromatic part of the country. (There was even a white-supremacist group called The Aryan Nations that had a compound in north Idaho. They had parades and everything. Oh my.....) What a change.

At places like the grocery store, we were often asked if we were adopted, my brother and I being very obviously Asian, olive-skinned with black hair and brown eyes, and my mom with a ghostly white complexion, blonde hair and blue eyes, and at a very intimidating 5' 11"; my white momma constantly being asked to re-spell her Japanese surname: Mom, "K-A-W-A-M-U-R-A"; clerk, "K what?" People at church would sometimes ask my mother how her boys were, not realizing that my brother's best friend at church, who was Korean, was not his brother. When I was 5 years old this was not so funny. Now it's hilarious, though you can see how it would skew a child's perspectives on how they define themselves and how they relate to those around them because of race. For me, ethnicity was a big deal, because it made me VERY different. Like, 98% different from the rest of the population.

So when I escaped to the Bay Area 7 years ago, it was, again, quite an adjustment. It took me about a year and a half just to figure out that the seasons didn't really change. How bizarre! It was also about that time, while sitting on the upper deck at Club Mallard in El Cerrito with a friend of a friend's adult, recreational softball team, that it hit me: California is REALLY diverse. I was at a table again, where 7 out of 10 people looked like me, their parents like my parents, their experiences possibly similar to my experiences of being asked, "Where are you from?", or "Are you Chinese or something?" I listened to one guy--possibly hitting on the girl next to him--explain that hapa babies with Asian or half-Asian daddies are always super cute. It was in that slow-motion moment, looking around the table, realizing the situation, soaking it all in, that I realized I wasn't a minority anymore! I was simply a Californian. I once again broke free from seeing color--from finding the differences in people instead of the similarities--and reverted back to my childhood view that everyone on my block kind of looks like me.....just some a little more tanned than others.

That's it. My whole story. It's a little strange, but it's always been a profound moment for me. It really did shift my way of thinking and helped me break some old prejudiced habits I had grown up with. I also started describing Californians as "us" instead of "them". :)

[Note from the semi-scient narrator: These are the census figures for San Francisco for 2010, to match the census returns we saw earlier with Helen's story. They don't release the enumerated individual returns for 80 years, so we have to make do with aggregated figures. As you can see, Amanda's perceptions are spot-on: San Francisco is fabulously diverse: 48.5% White, 6% Black, 33% Asian, and all sorts of categories betwixt and between (what the Census calls "in combination", including my personal favorite: "Some Other Race alone or in combination").

July 10th: Story #37

Winnie's story:

When I think of California stories, I think of my first trip out to California, when I was 15. Now, I had traveled before, of course – I'd been to Colorado – but this was my first real trip. My mother's sister Helen, and her husband Harry (Shey), lived in Brush, just north of Boulder.

I was out here to visit my Aunt Mabel. Now, I called her “Aunt” but really she was a cousin to me. Her father was my dad's youngest brother. Now there's a story there, too. See, he (her father, I mean, my uncle), left her and her mom at one point. And my parents took her in. And the story goes that he was later shot for Baby Face Nelson; it wasn't him, of course, but he looked like Nelson. I guess he must not have kept very good company.

You know, my mother never denied that story. And you know what she was like.

Well in any case, Aunt Mabel had married an oilman, Fred Collins, who worked for Phillips Petroleum in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. And they had three kids who'd all moved out to California: Martha Nan was a student at the Pasadena Playhouse actor's studio; Flossie was studying at Pasadena City College, and their brother Jacques (“Jack”) was at USC.

So I went out to visit with Aunt Mabel to Pasadena. She called my mother to say that she always wanted to do something for her, seeing as how my mother and dad took care of her. So she offered to have me come out to travel with her to visit her kids in California for the summer. Mom put me on a bus the last day off from school. And I rode to Oklahoma first. A young man tried to pick me up on that busride (and by “try,” I mean he did a pretty good job. He sat with me the entire time. And it was na overnight trip, too). Which was scary – the busride, I mean. Being picked up was exciting. When I got to Bartlesville, we got in my Aunt Mabel's Packard and we rode all the way to California on Route 66, past the hotels and the road-stands and all, until we got to Los Angeles.

Just to be clear: that boy on the bus didn't go with us.

Now, my Aunt Mabel had promised me mountains in Southern California. I had been to Colorado, you see. Well those mountains in Los Angeles just didn't compare. But anyway.

So we got to Pasadena, and they were living in an apartment, Jacques and Flossie and Martha Nan – and my cousin Flossie took me right away to a beach party. Well, I had never seen the ocean. And we met up with her friends from junior college, including a fellow by the name of Jim Cudlip. Who, the very first thing he did was throw me into the ocean. And we were bosom buddies from then on.

Hoo boy, the first time I met his mother! Now we had been going out for some months then. And he had a little car. His friends and he would keep a little jar of parts and such under the hood. And then they would drive into downtown Pasadena and pull into the middle of an intersection and make like the car was broken down. And then they would pull out that jar from under the hood and dump out the parts from the little jar onto the street. Run around the car and make like they were doing something to fix it. And when they got tired of folks honking at them, well then they'd get right back in the car and drive off.

This was before television, you see.

Well, Jim drove up with me to Mt. Wilson one night. And his car went kaput. [Sigh]

We had to hike to the ranger station and call his parents. And they came to pick us up in their little green Hudson. This was my first time meeting them. I hadn't known they were 110 or whatever. And mind you, I was the youngest in my family, so my parents were older then everybody else's parents. But his? They didn't adopt him until they were in their 50s. You know I always thought that was an inside deal. His mother never said anything about it, but Jim sure looked like a Cudlip, and I always thought that maybe it was his dad's younger sister who'd had some kind of indiscretion.

Well, when they picked us up that night on Mt. Wilson, it was all “How do you do young lady?” And “Who are you staying with?” And “Do they know you're out tonight?”

One time we went out to Avalon with Flossie and Martha Nan. Oh boy was that fun. We met up with some guys that she knew. They were from Stanford, and we went dancing at the Casino. Every night we were there we went dancing. Glen Gray was playing, with his band, the Champagne Boys. They wore white carnations in their lapels every night they played. Wow. Dancing on the beach, I couldn't wait to tell all of my friends about all the fun we'd had.

Now Martha Nan was the right age for those fellows, and she got hot and heavy with one of them. We had to leave the island before they did, but she made an appointment to meet her beau a couple of days later at the Cocoanut Grove in Hollywood – the one in the Ambassador hotel they've just renovated.

You know, I think they're going to make a college out of that place. It's on a real big piece of property.

In any case. This other time, My Aunt Mabel took all of us to Hollywood Park, because she loved the horse-races. Now my mother was convinced that I was going to burn to a crisp in California, so she had bought me a straw hat – a “picture hat,” the kind that sort of bends in the front? – to keep my face from the sun. And when we got ready to go to the park, Aunt Mabel told me to get my hat. Well when we pulled up and walked to the entrance, can you imagine? All these people ran up to me, saying “can we please have your autograph? Please can we have your autograph?” I couldn't figure out why they were talking to me until they started saying, “Judy! Judy! Judy!”

They thought I was Judy Garland...

[Note from the semi-scient narrator. This is the best I could do. I'll see if I can find a picture of my grandmother when she was 18, but I make no guarantees. You'll have to trust me that the fans at the Santa Anita track on that summer day in 1940 were not actually making all that major a mistake; my grandmother at that time really did bear a striking resemblance to Judy Garland.]

July 5th: Tale #35

Bill’s story:

So, I first came to California in 1962. I had just graduated from high school. I and a buddy of mine had come out to Washington state to work in the pea canneries. We were paid the princely sum of $2.10 an hour, under a union contract with time and ½ for overtime after 8 hours of work. After a month we decided that we were rich, and went to Seattle to the World’s Fair.

From there we headed down the California coast on Highway 1, and 101. I was completely enraptured with the North Coast of California and its Redwoods.

We heard that you could get jobs working in Salinas “in the lettuce”. So, we headed to Salinas, and stopped at a country gas station outside of town. We asked where we could get a job working in the lettuce fields. They informed us, sadly, that all the jobs for the White people had been taken. The only jobs left were for Mexicans.

We asked how much they were paying for the Mexican work, and they said $1.25 an hour. This was 66% more than we had ever made in South Carolina.

We headed for the state agricultural employment office. This was the last year of the “Bracero” program. The workers from Mexico were paid $1.10 an hour. Anyone who could prove they were US citizens or here on a “green” card got the first crack at any available job and was paid $.125/hour. That was premium pay in South Carolina. We were delighted to get the jobs. We went to work for the Bruce Church Lettuce company the next morning.

I soon graduated to the position of lettuce loader. My job was to pick up 20 tons of lettuce a day, in one 40-pound box at a time and throw it up on a truck 15 feet off the ground. Having grown up on a farm, this was a lucky break. Whenever there was no truck waiting, we could lay down in between the lettuce rows, and hide from the bosses. This was the best job in the lettuce fields.

We actually got the weekends off. We soon found our way to Monterey, and the California coast. Here we fell in love with John Steinbeck. Of course, we read Sweet Thursday and Tortilla Flat, then graduated to Grapes of Wrath and finally immersed ourselves in In Dubious Battle. We truly thought we had died and gone to heaven.

But as the summer wore on, we got homesick. So we got in the car, and headed for South Carolina.

Now the last thing I’d been told upon leaving my hometown in South Carolina at the beginning of that summer, by one of those distant cousins that everyone in South Carolina has, but doesn’t know, was that I had a rich cousin in California, named Bill Camp. I should call on him for a free meal, if I was ever driving through Bakersfield. His fourth grand-father, and my fifth grandfather, were brothers. Mine fought in the Revolutionary War, and his held the horses for his brothers, at the glorious defeat of the British at the Battle of King’s Mountain.

I mentioned this to my friends, as we were driving through Bakersfield. We stopped at a payphone. Sure enough, Bill Camp was listed in the phone book. I called him on the phone, mentioned our close family relationship, and he suggested that I should come over and have lunch.

Of course, I lied and said we had just gotten up from the table. Even though we hadn’t eaten in a day and a half. And of course he knew I was lying. So he said why not come over anyway, and perhaps we could have just a taste of fruit salad.

I complimented him on his gracious hospitality, and mentioned that it would be shameful to go home to South Carolina and admit that I hadn’t stopped by to say hello when I was driving through Bakersfield.

Of course, it turns out that cousin Bill had done quite well in Bakersfield, and had an enormous, gracefully colonnaded mansion, befitting a Southern San Joaquin Valley land baron.

We were very courteous and on our best “Southern“ manners expressing our delight at the delicious iced tea. We carefully began to tell him a little of our adventures. He asked if we had ever heard of a man named John Steinbeck. We unanimously stated that it sounded like a weird name to us, and not someone that a well raised Southerner like us should ever read.

He explained that he had burned every book that Steinbeck had ever written, that existed in Kern County. He even got his hands on every copy in every public library and every bookstore in Kern County. In fact, he had pictures of himself burning this huge pile of books from the “Bakersfield Californian”, the local daily paper.

He was quite proud of having run that scoundrel out of town, or at least his books.

We were, you can imagine, completely ignorant of who John Steinbeck was, and duly congratulated him on his defense of American freedom and liberty. After all, in his words, “burning books was absolutely necessary to preserve the values of the Republic from time to time.”

He soon suggested that we have just a bite of fruit to eat. He opened up the door to the dining room and there was a round table, 8 feet in diameter. Every square inch of was covered in every kind of fruit you can imagine. Many of which I had never seen nor tasted.

We ate every single bite. In fact, we never ate again until we’d crossed the rest of California, the entire state of Arizona, and 80% of the state of New Mexico.

What an adventure. That was my first of many California adventures.

July 5th: Tale #34

Fanny's story:

So my story is about my very favorite band in the whole wide world. Have you heard of the bluegrass festival? Hardly Strictly Bluegrass? It's a festival in San Francisco. It's free, put on by this really rich guy, Warren Hellman.

When I first moved out here, about seven years ago, it was awesome, but it was also pretty small. The clincher is that Emmylou Harris closes the festival each year. Every year that I've been going, it's been getting bigger and bigger, more and more people, to the point that some locals don't even want to go anymore. However, I really still like it.

Last year, 2010, I heard that my very favorite band – the Avett Brothers – were playing. They are like punk bluegrass meets pop. And really cute. And so incredible live. They completely jam out, with so much passion. They are all in.

So I heard they were playing. I immediately told everyone that I knew to save the date, because the Avetts were playing. My friend Meredith said, “oh! I'll have to talk to Joe Kelley because his company helps put on the festival, and he always gets back stage passes.”

Dunh-dunh-dunh!

So I called Joe Kelley. This was like in June, and I said, “Joe. You have got to hook me up with backstage passes.” And Joe said, “oh my god, of course!. I'll totally hook you up. Just call me the week of the show.”

Then October rolls around, and Joe Kelley won't return my calls.

No bueno.

I called my friend Meredith, and said, “Mer. Joe Kelley won't return my calls. WTF? I have got to get backstage passes to this show.” She calls Joe Kelley, because he returns her calls. And he said, “don't worry, just call me the day of the show, and I'll hook her up.”

So I do. Sunday I get there, and I'd brought my friend Alicia with me. Who is also a fan of the band. But tends to display a little bit less enthusiasm than I do? So I figure she would keep me level. And the Avetts were on toward the end of the day – I think they were the last band of the day. So we got to hang out backstage the entire day, and get free beer. Which was awesome.

So we saw the Indigo Girls backstage, talked to them, drank free beer. Saw Elvis Costello, backstage, drank more free beer. Because these were sort of general access passes. I also kept putting snacks in my pocket, because I'd become this snack hoarder.

And I kept thinking, “What will I say to these boys when I meet them?”

About an hour before their set, Alicia says,” alright. We've got to do this thing.”

So we go over toward their stage. It was gated off, and there was a guard. I kept waiting for the guard to take away my badge, because I felt like a fraud. But he didn't.

We're walking up to the gated area, and I see one of the brothers – his name is Seth – talking on his cell phone.

And I almost peed my pants. And I said, “oh. my. God. Alicia: That's Seth Avett. I'm so excited. Ohmigod ohmigod, ohmigod! Ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod!” Alicia says to me, “do you want to go talk to him?” And I said, “no...let me go to the bathroom, and I'll gather my thoughts.”

The backstage had really, really good bathrooms, actually. That totally made the passes worth it right there. So we're waiting for the bathroom, and out comes Scott Avett.

Oh. My. God.

So Scott Avett walked out of the bathroom, and I said, “you're Scott Avett!” And he smiled at me, with his adorable smile, and said with his sweet southern charm, “Why, yes I am.”

Oh. My. God.

So I talked to him. He was soooo super-cool. I let him know that I was not bathroom-stalking him. And that I absolutely loved his music. And that it meant so much to me – that their music changed my life. When I told him that, he said “you know, that's really good to hear. Because sometimes I wonder why we do this. And hearing that makes it all worth it.”

Oh. My. God.

Then I asked if I could give him a hug. And he said yes. So I hugged him. And then he signed my bandana.

Then I told him that my dog's middle name is Avett, and asked him if he thought I was crazy.

He said, “no.”

Oh. My. God.

Then I told him that I was going to introduce myself to the rest of the band, and ask them to sign my bandana too. Because they were just hanging out, right? And he thought that was a great idea. He said they were very nice. So I did. And they were very nice. They all signed my bandana, and gave me hugs.

Then Alicia and I went to watch their set. From the front of the stage. And after they played, we were heading out, but we decided to take advantage of the backstage passes to use the bathrooms. All the free beer, you know?

And there was Scott Avett. So I said to him, “do you remember me?” He said, “I do.” And I said, “Ohmygod, you guys were so good! So awesome! Ohmygod!” Then I asked him to sign my arm. And jokingly said to Alicia afterwards, “I'm going to get a tattoo.” To which Scott said, “Um, yeah. You shouldn't do that.”

'Cause he's awesome. And really smart.

Yeah. That pretty much is my story.

My new Avett goal is to have them over to dinner at my home. I'll tell you that story, too, when it happens.

June 10th: Tale #33

Carol’s story:

How many trips did we make down to Mexico? I don’t know which trip my daughter was referring to when she talked with you. But one thing I remember is a trip with one other woman, a girl really. We’d been in San Diego, and spent the weekend. We used to do that so often. We went over the border, and I think she was driving an old Lincoln. It was a pretty big, black, good-looking automobile. Now I didn’t smoke, but most of the people we knew did. And so when we went over the border, we would always buy a bunch of cigarettes on the cheap so that we could give them to friends and family.

Now this one time, we got pulled over. And in desperation, I took as many of the packs of cigarettes as I could – I imagine they were Chesterfields – and shoved them down my blouse. But as it turned out, that didn’t do me much good. Because when they pulled us over, they made us get out of the car, and go into a little shed, where they were taking pictures. I guess because they were worried about people carrying other things besides cigarettes. Or maybe they just wanted to pull over two pretty girls driving a smart-looking car.

Well, when we went into the shed, the officer – and by the way, there were no lady officers, it was all guys – told me to “drop it.” To which my reaction was, “buddy, if you touch me you’re dead.” But I pulled out the hem of my blouse and of course all those cigarettes fell out.

I suppose dumb old me I should have realized I was being propositioned. But regardless everything turned out okay. Just no cigarettes for our friends back home.

[Note from ye olde semi-scient narrator: despite what I thought I knew, Wikipedia assures me that Chesterfields are still made, and sold, in America. However, they are hard to find. Therefore, I chose to feature another Altria/Philip Morris brand in this photo. Rest assured though, I did not actually purchase any cigarettes; I found this empty pack at a bus-stop in Graz, Austria. And in case you didn't already know, "Smoke can be deadly."]

June 10th: Tale #32

Jeannette's story:

The reason why Modesto is called that, or at least this the story I’ve heard, is that there was this guy – a philanthropist, who gave money for everything in town, all of the public buildings, and the townspeople wanted to name the town after him. But he refused. And so they named the town after him anyway, but they called it “Modesto.” And yeah, we don’t know his name to this day.

[The semi-scient narrator intrudes: It's true, or true enough anyway. The modest fellow who declined to have a town named for him was, in fact, Bill Ralston, reaper of the riches of Virginia City and founder of the Bank of California. Modesto is also known as George Lucas's hometown, and the headquarters of the Gallo Wines empire. It was also the inspiration for the following lines: "I once met a woman in Dallas, a most charming and attractive woman accustomed to the hospitality and social hypersensitivity of Texas, who told me that during the four war years her husband had been stationed in Modesto, she had never once been invited inside anyone's house. No one in Sacramento would find this story remarkable ("She probably had no relatives there," said someone to whom I told it), for the Valley towns understand one another, share a peculiar spirit. They think alike and they look alike. I can tell Modesto from Merced, but I have visited there, gone to dances there; besides, there is over the main street of Modesto an arched sign which reads: WATER - WEALTH - CONTENTMENT - HEALTH. There is no such sign in Merced." (J. Didion, "Notes From a Native Daughter")

June 10th: Tale #31:

Warren’s story:

I was thinking, actually, about vignettes, rather than a story.

One thing that’s very California, that I don’t do now, is the whole lawn care thing. When I was growing up, I mowed the neighbors’ lawns. That’s how I made money to buy stuff. You have to trim the edges, cut back the bushes, mow the lawn. It’s a very hot and dusty job. I became very familiar with all our neighbors’ yards – and even today when I go back home we hop over the fence and take an orange because we know everyone’s backyard.

One of our favorite movies is “The Holiday” – I don’t know if you know it, it’s about two women who have relationship problems, so they swap homes. And there’s this Englishwoman, played by Kate Winslet. The first day she wakes up in her new home, in LA, what she hears is a leafblower. That’s the sound of California. You don’t get that that much around here [in Cambridge].

[Note from the semi-scient narrator: I live in a area of town that is less lawn-proud than Warren's old neighborhood, and more tree-proud. Thus, it was relatively easy to take a picture while a leaf-blower was being used in the background, to demonstrate the truth of knowing everyone's backyard, and the ease with which one might appropriate a neighbor's produce. See if you can identify the five (5) fruit-bearing plants in this photo; extra-credit will be awarded if you choose to include as a 6th the plant used by the local Native Americans for food. Hint: none of them are pears. Though I know a guy, if that's what you're lookin' for.]

June 10th: Tale #30

Greg’s story:

Okay. So where do I begin?

I got a car from a friend. Actually, we traded. My car was an old wagon, and I traded him for a super-fast sports car. It was my first week of owning the car. Late one night driving down Highway 80, I realized that I was low on fuel. So I went to the closest exit. Which was Auburn Boulevard.

After getting off at the exit, I found a gas station. Realizing that I was very, very low on fuel, I pulled right in. When I got inside the station – to the pump, I mean, as I didn’t actually go inside the store – I looked in my rearview mirror and saw a lovely, large lady approaching me.

Now on this car, when I take the keys out of the ignition, the locks on the doors unlock. And so imagine my surprise when this lovely, largely, lady entered my vehicle and asks me – what did she say? – “What are you about?”

I said, “I’m about to ask you to leave, and get out of my car!”

So then she said, “Now honey. We’re going to be hanging out here at the EcoLodge, if you want to have a good time!”

I guess the EcoLodge used to be an Econolodge, you see. But the sign fell down. In any case…

At that point she got out of the car, and joined the rest of her gaggle.

I decided that I would not purchase gas there. This meant hoping that I would actually make it home. Which I did.

You should probably add the bit where I called my mom and told her the story. To which her response was “did she know she didn’t have the right equipment?”

[Note from the semi-scient narrator: it took some doing to find this location. Among other reasons, it lies in a part of town that has "run to seed and small business, the kind of place where both Squeaky Fromme and Patricia Hearst could and probably did go about their business unnoticed" (to quote J. Didion, "Many Mansions"). More specifically, it is on what was once old US 40 -- now a frontage road for the interstate -- and surrounded by strip malls containing such must-see shopping destinations as "Baker Ben's Donuts," "The All Guns Shop" and "Discount Gold+Silver." It is also, for those of you who may have followed last-year's campaign, less than a mile from where Teddy Judah adjudged the Sierras to have started.]

May 8th: Tale #29

Margaret's story:

So here's the story. I first came to California to interview for grad school. At that time I was coming from St. Louis, but really I'm from all over the Northeast and the northern Midwest. So I came here to do the interview, and then afterwards we went to dinner at this house in the Berkeley Hills.

And I remember: first we drove up this crazy, windy road all the way to the top of the hills. We walked into the house, and it was just one room: floor to ceiling with books. It was beautiful. After dinner we walked out on to the porch, and of course we'd had a little bit of wine. But looking out, the fog had started to settle in. I could see these lights appear out of the fog, lights from all over the place, all around us. And I remember thinking, “Wow. Why don't I live here? Why don't I live in this wonderful, magical place that is right here, right here on earth? Why?”

And so I did everything I could to move here. Of course, now I live someplace else and have been trying to get back, but that's a different story.

May 8th: Tale #28

Nina's story:

I know San Francisco has ants in it.

San Francisco has a job to do about “fiddly-I-o” and that's my favorite song.

I like the Golden Gate Bridge.

And you can go straight to another line, to the Bay Bridge.

And you can go faster. If you make it longer, you might go faster.

I like to go where Nonnie lives, in Marin County. You have to cross a bridge to get there, the Golden Gate Bridge.

We take the 36 bus. We get off at Glen Park. We have a bus driver. His real name is Elmo. But he told me his name was “Bus Driver.” One day we brought an Elmo balloon, and he was real excited. He didn't know we had an Elmo, too. We have a lot of Elmos.

We need Elmo boxes. For presents.

When I was a tiny baby I was drinking in Mommy, just like she did with that little glass.

May 8th: Tale #27

Micah's story:

Are you Bayliss? So I was practicing dribbling basketballs. I'm not very good at shooting, and when I kept trying to shoot I never succeeded. Then somebody named Zachary came over. He wasn't necessarily the kind of kid that always did good actions. But he taught me how to shoot a basketball. And then I started to beat him – in basketball.

He now tells this story to other people.

He wasn't necessarily a better teacher than any other kid teacher – but he was a better teacher for me.

May 8th: Tale #26

Susan’s story:

In 1974, I was working in Seattle. I had been to grad school, and was working at the university. That year I went to visit a friend of mine in Riverside, who’d gotten a job teaching there. We went to do all of the tourist things, which I was very happy to see – being a movie buff. The stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame there in front of the Chinese Theatre, the Brown Derby, Forest Lawn (where I could see what was left of all of my favorite stars). We went to Hearst Castle, Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm (which was a total disappointment after Disneyland, one should really go there first before the other).

There seemed to be models everywhere. At Knott’s Berry Farm, for instance, there was a monument of the Paul Revere Statue from the North End of Boston. Which was odd – why did they have models of statues from other places?

And my basic impression of Hollywood, honestly, was that it was kind of tacky. Probably colored by the venue that made the most impression on me, called the “Palace of Living Art.” It was a wax museum next to the Hollywood Wax Museum, where I went to see the wax remains of my favorite stars. In any case, at the Palace of Living Art, they had wax models of famous paintings. Very strange. Things like the Van Gogh self-portrait with green streaks running down his cheeks. Or a wax version of the Mona Lisa. The Three Graces or Titian or Veronese or somebody. And as I was wandering in amazement through these rooms, I heard this thunderous sound coming from somewhere around the corner. So I went to check it out.

There I found this huge room, with a giant wax replica of the crucifixion. Complete with sound effects – thunder and lightening – and I was transfixed. I had never seen anything like it. And then out of the void, I heard this deep, thunderous voice, saying “Father, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

That was my trip to Los Angeles in 1974.

[Note from the semi-scient narrator: this is a picture of the wax museum in Fisherman’s Wharf. It too contains “living art,” including such classics as Ingres’s “Grand Odalisque” (oh my!), as well as dioramas of the Last Supper and the Sermon on the Mount. I did not go in, so I cannot tell you if the latter scenes include sound effects].

May 8th: Tale #25

Becky’s story:

Growing up on the East Coast, I didn’t hear many “California stories.” And so the only story I feel like I have would be an experience I had in California; and I wonder whether or not that would be sufficient?

Every other summer, my family and I would visit my grandparents, who lived in Las Vegas. And once there, we would strike out – usually to a national park. But one year we went up to San Francisco. And I remember my mom asking my grandmother whether or not to pack sweaters and jackets. And my grandmother said “Honey – it’s California, in August. It’ll be fine. Don’t worry about it.”

Well, of course, once we got there we realized that August in San Francisco can mean 50 degrees during the day. So my father offered my grandfather his lightweight jacket – like a windbreaker – which he happily took. And the first thing we did, the first place we went, was the Macy’s in Union Square. And the first thing we did there was all purchase sweaters and coats. My father, however, being a miserly sort, said that he didn’t need to purchase one because he was going to get his back. My grandfather, of course, didn’t purchase one because he was already wearing one. Hence, their plans didn’t exactly mesh well.

That evening we went to Chinatown. My grandparents had their hearts set on visiting a restaurant that they had been to 20 or 30 years before. We must have seen the entire length and breadth of Chinatown two or three times – in barely 50-degree weather – before my grandfather finally admitted that the restaurant must have closed long before. So we stumbled into a restaurant; my father stumbled in a few steps behind us, shivering and with bluer lips than the rest of us.

In the 20 years that have passed since then, my mother always admonishes us to bring a sweater when we travel to San Francisco. My father, of course, raises the question as to whether the problem was the weather, or the fact that his parents-in-law made us wander around Chinatown multiple times looking for a restaurant that had long since closed.

May 1st: Tale #24

Alice's story:

Well I'll tell you this story and you can tell me if it qualifies.

I was born in San Jose. When I was about 1 or 2, we moved to Michigan, to Troy. It snows a lot there, of course. And I must have been about three, and I looked out the window and someone had made a snowman. So I asked my parents: “What is that? Who made that?”

And my dad told me, “oh, it just snowed that way.”

So about two years later we moved back to California, to the Bay Area. And I started kindergarten in, it must have been 1976, because that was the last time it snowed here.

So we were living in San Jose again. At school they were letting the kids out in small groups of 5-10. And when my turn came, I ran out into the schoolyard looking around for the snowmen.

Well the kids just laughed and laughed at me. That was my (re)introduction to California.

April 23rd: Tale #23

K.'s story:

I can think of my husband's stories – he's got plenty of them: the dog story, the backpacking story. You should get him to talk; he really appreciates the art of storytelling, perfecting them until they're really, really good. The structure, the cadence, all of it. And that's why I'm oversensitive about this; it's kind of intimidating.

Alright, fine. So, one spring day in Visalia, California. On my way to high school, I realized it was too beautiful a day to be stuck in the classroom. I convince my sister – she's two years younger than me – that we should ditch, and not go to school like we were supposed to. We take a detour.

Being that we're only marginally bad kids, we decide that instead of getting into real trouble, we'd go to Jamba Juice, get some smoothies, rent a movie, and go back to our parents' house. Smoothies and movie in hand we pull up to the driveway and park. We're laughing, having a great time, because we're not in school, right?

And we walk in the door, and who's there to greet us, but my mom Who's as surprised to see us as we are to see her.

When she finishes reprimanding us, she goes out the front door, to find out that the car is on fire.

She starts yelling.

So she's screaming, sprinting back and forth between the car, and the hose, and the house, and the phone, yelling “call your dad!” And we're still laughing about the fact that we were totally busted. Of course we're also concerned to make sure that the smoothies don't melt. So the first thing we do is stash them safely in the freezer.

My mom is freaking out, so I comply with her demand and call my dad. He didn't answer. We still thought it was kind of amusing at that point, so we were leaving messages like “Hey dad. The house is on fire. Give us a call when you get the chance.”

We go outside. The car is smoking, and by this time it has gone up so high that all of the neighbors have come out to watch. My mom had called the fire department, and a truck came. At this point – and mind you we lived in a development where there was only one entrance – everybody in the neighborhood had come out to watch.

The cat, meanwhile, was totally laid out on the driveway all relaxing. Which totally freaked out my mom; she had to rush in with the hose in one hand to rescue the cat.

Then the fire captain starts asking questions. Because I had been driving, he directs them to me. I'm getting interviewed by this big official – and because I'm in high school I'm really embarrassed, especially to be surrounded by all these firemen, in uniform. When the chief asks to see my ID, I completely forget that I'd put this Hello Kitty sticker on it. I'm totally mortified, and say something like “oh, don't mind that!”, pulling it off so that he can actually see my picture. They finally manage to get the fire under control.

When my dad came home from work, he found his daughters grounded, the car totaled, and a really pissed off frantic wife.

April 23rd: Tale #22

Jessica's story:

So. I was driving from Humboldt State University, where I went to school, to home. It was on 299, and it was Halloween night. I noticed that there were Halloween celebrations going on, kids going out with their costumes. And as I was driving down Main Street, through the middle of Weaverville, this adult man, dressed in a pink Easter Bunny outfit, jumped out in front of my car. I was able to screech to a halt. The Easter Bunny went on to the other side of the road. I drove on. I thought to myself, “Hmm. I almost hit the Easter Bunny. On Halloween. In Weaverville.” That's my story. It really happened.

April 23rd: Tale #21

Austin's story:

Any story? Are you actually transcribing this?

Well, I lived in San Francisco for about 9 years in total. For some of those years I owned a car, and shared it with a friend. For some of those years, I mainly got around by bicycle. And at other times I got around by public transit. So I got to know the city pretty well; probably as well as any cab driver. For instance, all the alleys you could use to avoid points of congestion, or which streets and intersections to avoid at what times of day, that kind of thing. My point is that I got to know the city on three different levels of intimacy: as a cyclist, as a driver, and as a public transit rider. And, for that matter, as a walker – I'm pretty impatient on the bus, and depending on the frequency of stops it's often faster just to get out and walk.

So, as a driver, I knew that Fell and Oak streets have timed lights. I don't know if you're familiar with those streets – they're parallel one-ways that run in opposite directions on either side of the panhandle of Golden Gate Park. And as a car driver, I would get so annoyed with how other drivers apparently didn't know that there was absolutely no point in going faster than 25 miles an hour – you were just going to have to slow down anyway at the next light, before it turned green. My other aversion was to young people who owned nice sports cars, suped-up sports cars, and would drive unsafely.

One weekend day I was driving my Subaru down Fell street, and I came to a light. When it turned green, I took my speed up to 25 (or it might have been 30, whatever), and maintained it so that I would catch the sequence of lights. I noticed a sports car in the rear-view mirror behind me. And they were weaving thru traffic, going quite fast, until they passed me, pulled in front and cut me off. And of course, because they cut me off, they caused me to slow down at the next light.

Now, my natural reaction as a 26 year old male was, of course, to speed up, pass him and make him slow down at the next light. And then I swiftly and very cleverly boxed him in, such that he was behind one of those slow-moving buses (the kind that carries old people, maybe some kind of paratransit vehicle; in any case it took up the whole lane and then some). I made sure to slow down just enough so that I could enjoy watching him have to consider whether it was even possible to try and pass me without causing some kind of wreck. He was stuck.

While we were driving side by side he rolled down his window, flips me off, and begins yelling. I imagine that the real source of his frustration was that he had a faster, zippier car than me, and so obviously that meant that he should be able to go faster. Now, instead of describing the driver, I'll describe the car: it was a Honda Civic, with all the extra racing stuff added: a large muffler, a big tailpipe, low to the ground. It was also really loud. Noise pollution and air pollution all in one package.

Now I had just been to a Chinese produce store, and I had the bags of groceries in the seat next to me. Including a tub of cookies. English tea-type biscuits – very crumbly. So while his window was down and my window was down, and we were next to each other, as swifltly as a Cornhusker quarterback running the Triple Option, I pitched a cookie through my car winde, through his car window – all while moving at the speed of traffic - and hit him right in the face. I made three separate tosses, and hit him right in the face every time. Three for three.

This then produced a separate problem, namely a car chase around the City, where he followed me for approximately 40 minutes. Or at least it felt like that long, because I was scared. My goal was to lose him. Which I had to do not with speed, but with some kind of maneuver.

I led the chase over to the Western Addition and Lower Haight neighborhoods, which I am very familiar with. What I didn't want to have him follow me home, and have him know where I lived. So my strategy was to go to the kind of neighborhood that had lots of four-way stops, with enough traffic so that he would have to wait to go through the intersection after I had gone through, but not so long that he would have time to get out of the car and start kicking my door in (which has happened to me in the past, by the way). I succeeded in in losing him this way.

I started to go home via Golden Gate Avenue. Three minutes later I found that he was behind me again. I eventually lost him a second time at the intersection of Laguna and Market. And then I went home. Which was actually just a couple of blocks from there. And even though there were plenty of spots in front of my house that particular afternoon, I made sure to park at least four blocks away. I also took the roof rack off, and packed it away in storage for a while.

And that's the end of the story.

[Note from the semi-scient narrator. I apologize for the lack of verisimilitude in the make/model of the car. Though Revell does, in fact, have a '95 Honda Civic in its product line, they were out of them when I went to the hobby story.]

April 21st: Tale #20

Eric's story:

So this is when I was six years old, I think? That's basically when I came to this country – I was born here, of course, but then we lived in Taiwan for awhile before we moved back here.

My parents, one of their employees was this guy named Andy. And “uncle” Andy would tell me fishing stories. My parents never took me fishing when I was a kid, but I always had these grandiose ideas about what would happen when I did, how I would catch the biggest fish imaginable.

So they planned this trip among all their employees to Catalina. Part of the trip was to go fishing off the docks in Avalon. And I was this dorky kid, butI was really really excited about this. I would read the encyclopedia and these nature guidebooks about wildlife. So we went over on the Catalina Express and had our day, and I was so, so excited about how I was going to get to go fishing.

We went to the dock at night, because that's when the fish were supposed to be biting, I guess. And it was my dad, myself, and a bunch of the other Asian immigrant employees. And they cast a rod, and then gave it to me, because I was too small to cast my own. And it caught – it tugged real hard. And I couldn't reel it in because I was a six year old, right? So someone comes over to pull the line in for me. And he commented about how it was pulling hard. So he pulls it up, onto the dock. And you know what it was?

A leopard shark.

So it was like flopping around on the dock, this big shark. And I was freaking out, and it was flopping. So they all start hitting it, with their nets, maybe? Something ineffectual, anyway. But it was still flipping and flopping around, and they couldn't figure out what to do.

So they kicked it off the pier back into the water.

And I didn't go fishing again for like ten years after that.

April 13th: Tale #19

Anonymous's story:

it was horrible. the drunk tank has nothing on actual jail time....

so i checked in at 7pm on Friday and luckily there were 4 other girls also checking in for a dui stay. two of them were 48 hours like me and the other two were like 15 days minimum! so we check in...they take all our stuff and throw us into the drunk tank cell again. then after like 3-4 hours they have us get fingerprinted/mug shots and then we have to change into our outfit ;( We had to strip in front of the guard and then turn around, bend over, spread cheeks and cough three times! then we put our outfits one....big brown panties, blue pants, orange t-shirt, blue like dickies shirt over top, horrible orange socks and like old chinese man sandals. they gave us each a box to carry upstairs...with a towel, sweatshirt, bar of soap, packet of shampoo, a comb, a tiny toothbrush and packet of gel toothpaste. then we get upstairs and we had to grab our mattress, with two ill-fitting top sheets, and wool blanket. then we got assigned our cells/bunks. the room is huge, two stories...with like 8 bunks in the common area and then 12 cells each with two people. i got assigned to cell 10...then open the door and i have to get into the top bunk...my bunkie was a homeless woman named Sara with mental issues. the cell is tiny, with two bunks, and a silver toilet, sink..like the drunk tank but no walls. top bunk has the light RIGHT in your eyes and they never turn it off...they dimmed it the first night at least. no pillow so you have to use your extra clothes. the deputies are always watching and they use the intercom to scream at everyone. 6am..'line up for chow' so you have to be fully dressed and in line even if you dont want to eat. get your two trays of gros food, sit in the common ara and eat...you only have 15 mins. then we have to organize all the trays and get them out teh door otherwise we get in trouble. we had to clean then too since that was the only time they gave us the cleaning supplies. then you have open time for like an hour, then lockdown for an hour. chow again at 11....lockdown from 12-3...out again...chow at 5...lock down until 7:30...out again...lockdown for the night at 9. the second night, they didnt dim the lights at all...so i had a full 150 watts beaming into my eyes....i got desperate and created an eye mask....out of maxi pads! two pads on my eyes and my pants were tied around my head to make them stay!!! i got a total of maybe 3 hours of sleep total. luckily my homeless bunkie had books so i got to read to kill some lockdown time. anytime the cells were open i was out in the common area with my dui group of friends. they were all normal and we were all miserable together! one other girl got there on thursday and was doing 96 hours....it was horrible. TV was on but all the lesbians wanted to watch sports. everyone just talked about getting out; doing drugs and how badass they were. us dui girls just talked about how we're NEVER coming back. one time i stretched and the deputy yelled at me to either sit on a stool or on my bunk :( the food is the best part of the day which is so sad because its disgusting...like horrid but most of the homeless ladies will ask to eat yours. everyone was super nice and i never felt threatened....but its horrible to be around people like that for that long. nothing in common and no respect for them whatsoever. they would talk about doing drugs when they got out...and i was like, i just want a clean glass of water, chapstick and some fresh vegetables! its filthy and you dont want to touch anything....we all took showers just to kill some time. the showers were public...but they had curtains so they were pretty private. you have no rights, no say and are terrified of getting in trouble. the second night i wanted to ask them to dim the lights so bad but you're just so afraid of getting in trouble or written up that you just keep your mouth shut :( i just got really lucky to have a group of girls going through the same thing that i could talk to and hang out with. we went in together and left together so that made it way better. the two chicks in for 15 days....i dont even think i wouldve made it. you literally start to go crazy...no outside, no windows, constantly being watched, constantly grossed out. most of the people in there are for drugs so they woudl come in and literally just sleep for 3 days...get up to line up for chow but then give away their food and go back to sleep. we tried to not eat at first but then youre STARVING and will eat anything. its absolute hell and seriously is NOT worth drinking at all. a lot of people were in for probation violations too....10 days +....F that! it just seems like one you're done something bad...you're on the naughty list forever and if you get caught again....you're just doomed....so i'm scared shitless and wil do anythig to not go back....normal people do NOT belong there!

sooooo glad to be done with it...and it really makes me understand that whole thing more....its the WORST you could imagine. i think too that was in 'receiving' which is mellow. but if you're there for longer you get moved to a place with MORE lockdown and less contact with people :( so this was best case scenario! NEVER EVER GO!!!

[This story was submitted via e-mail. The author, for obvious reasons, wishes to remain unnamed.]

April 8th: Tale #18

Leslie's story:

I moved to California when I was 10 years old. And except for a few jaunts outside of the state, I've lived here for ever since, for the next 25 years. I guess the thing for me is how much it's changed.

So when I was 10 there weren't, relatively speaking, that many Asian people here. If we wanted any Asian food, or to go out to a restaurant, because we lived in the South Bay our best bet was Mountain View. One day I remember my parents took us to this one tiny Chinese restaurant on Castro St. And we had hand-pulled noodles. I was so amazed by them, I thought they tasted so good, that the owner came out. And he was so excited – there weren't that many Asian people, not that many customers, and especially to have this little Asian kid – that he ended up giving me a demonstration of how he made the noodles.

And then funnily enough, he started to put me to work. Like having me set some tables. But at the end it was cool because I got a couple pairs of chopsticks. Which for a ten-year old kid is pretty neat.

And it's so crazy now, because that restaurant is gone, but there are so many more that have taken its place. There are chinese grocery stores everywhere. It's strange to think, as people do, “oh, it's so Asian now, look at all the Chinese people.” Because it's always been diverse, of course – just more so now.

April 5th: Tale #17

Rebecca's story:

Rebecca’s story:

I find California surreal. My first visit to Sacramento, I went jogging. And there were two things: first, that it was 40 degrees in December. It should not be 40 degrees in December. Second, I was amazed, astonished, at the number of oranges. Rotting oranges on the sidewalk, piled up in the gutter. I seriously thought that people must have gone to the grocery store, bought supplies, and then simply thrown them away, tossed them into the street to rot.

(Note from the collator: in case you ever wanted to know what an artichoke looks like in its, erm, "natural" state, it's the spiky thing planted in the parkway, to the left of the flowers.)

April 5th: Tale #16

Megan's story:

So. Well the very latest story would be ____ and _____'s wedding, of course. But if we wait to tell that one we could be here five years.

Well I will tell you a very brief story. I don't know if it's a good story at all, but it's the one I can think of at the moment. What is the quintessential California-ness of this story? I'm not sure: maybe you can figure that out.

Every summer I visit Sequoia National Park with a couple who are my parents' age – they're like surrogate parents to me, I guess.

We stay in a cabin there. I don't know if you know the park, but it's Ieautiful: rugged, lots of snow in the winter. It smells wonderful. That year it was early in the season: June. And the trailhead I chose is like at 6700 feet, and there was still some snow. It was early in the morning, and I was alone. And I was la-la-laing alone along the trail.

I crossed this bridge. I know this trail because I've walked it for years and years. As I rounded a corner, there, I'm guessing it was about half the distance of a football field in front of me, was a giant male mountain lion, in the middle of the trail.

Of course I stop. I'm frozen in the middle of the trail. But he doesn't see me for a little while. It's a little hard to describe the feeling of this encounter. The first thing I was struck by was that all of the species you see in the wild are prey: they're vulnerable, they are eaten. And what I felt there – besides this incredible feeling of awe that I'm looking at a mountain lion – was “this animal owns the woods. This animal is not afraid. He owns the trail. ” He was chilling. He was not afraid of anything.

So I watched him for awhile. And after what seemed like an eternity, he sees me.

And basically we have a little bit of staring contest. And that's the other thing – he didn't look away. He didn't appear skittish, he just looked at me.

And then I was like, “Oh, shit.”

And most of this I've reconstructed – I don't actually remember that much. But I did have my running watch. And I know that one of the things I did was that I calculated: I'm about 2/3 of a mile from the trailhead. And I should start my clock now so that when I get to the trailhead I can tell them how long I've been bleeding out if he attacks me.

And then I was like, “Wait, you're supposed to throw rocks at mountain lions.” So I looked around and picked up some rocks.

When I got back to the cabin and looked in my hand I realized that what I had picked up was a handful of pebbles.

So we kept staring at each other. And eventually he turned around and walked away. And I was like “well, shit. I wanted to walk on that trail!” So I started following the mountain lion. And I was even running a little bit, trying to keep up with him, because I was like “well, when I'm going to see a mountain lion again?”

And then basically what happened is that we came to this stream crossing. The mountain lion got on this big boulder next to the stream. So I stopped. Because now he's perched high up, and I was maybe a hundred feet down the trail. And I just waited and waited and waited and waited and waited.

I think I was also too scared to turn around and turn my back to the mountain lion. It seemed like a bad idea.

So then the mountain lion jumped down from the rock and hid in the bushes. And I thought, “well, what do I do now?”

So eventually I walked past the bushes where he had been. And as I walked by I could still see him, sort of, in the bushes. And I walked by, and the lion left me alone.

But I have to tell you, for the rest of the day every time I heard a noise I the forest I jumped like a mile in the air.

So that's my California story. It was really magnificent. This is why we go to national parks, this is why we live in California.

March 31st: the semi-scient narrator intrudes.

If you ever happen to find yourself on the 210 near the 118, and you find yourself exiting onto Foothill Boulevard, you may note that it is near a large dry wash, with nicely appointed picnic tables and such. It is, in fact, Hansen Dam Recreation Area, maintained by the Los Angeles Department of Parks and Recreation.

This photo was taken almost literally by turning around from where the picture of the offramp (below) was taken. You can see the dam in the distant background.

The vantage may not be immediately familiar to most readers, but if you have ever seen the movie "Chinatown" you may remember one scene in particular. A scene involving Roman Polanski, Jack Nicholson, and a switchblade.

That scene took place on Hansen Dam.

There are times when California, despite the vastness of the available real estate, can feel very, very small.

This does not count toward the total.

March 31st: Tale #16

Steve's story:

I’m actually not really sure. I guess, what? Just anything? I don’t know what to pick at. I’ve been in the state, obviously, all of my life. Or, I should say, most of my life up until college.

I guess one of the things that struck me the most at the time, and that has really stuck with me was the ’92 riots. Were they ’92? The Rodney King riots, I mean. And the sense that the entire city was paralyzed by them.

The riots took place down in South Central. Which was really 10-15 miles from East L.A. But there’s really not a lot of obstruction between the two neighborhoods. So you could see smoke rising up from there. And we watched it on the news, even though we weren’t in the epicenter. We were, however, upstream from the smoke. And it looked like it was wildfire season; there was this really gross orangey haze. And it didn’t smell like wood. It smelled like all these other substances: plastic, metal. School was cancelled for a couple days because of things. Not for the health hazard, but more because the city didn’t really know what to do.

I remember watching the news, and how while it was concentrated in South Central, it spread out. To Koreatown even – which was closer to where we were. Nothing happened in East LA, really. There was apprehension, and I do think there were elements of the neighborhood girding itself for some possible overflow from the areas that were affected. But nothing really came about.

When we finally returned to school, there wasn’t really much discussion in the classroom. The kids talked about it of course, but the teachers just tried to carry on like nothing had happened.

I think I did end up going downtown once with my stepfather and mother once, and the route took us right through the areas that had been affected. It was amazing; it looked like a warzone. It was all the places that had been shown on television.

I don’t really recall what happened afterwards. It was “shock and awe,” and while there were efforts to do some “healing,” I don’t really know what happened afterwards.

Yeah, pretty much what I remember is that gross orange haze, over the city. It was surreal.

[Sidenote by the collator: This is a photograph of the offramp at which Mr. King was beaten by LA's finest. It is the Foothill Blvd exit off the 210, near the 118, way to the north of where the subsequent riots occured.]

March 23rd: Tale #15

Scott’s story:

Hold on: I need to find a history fact. So this is the one that I usually share. I have a lot of stories, actually. But the living near Disneyland one is a good one, I think.

So I spent the first years of my childhood in Anaheim. We lived like 3 blocks from Disneyland, and Disneyland Hotel. And I had my two brothers and my older sister and this was the mid- to late- ‘70s. When video games first got popular, like “Asteroids” and “Space Invaders” and we would ride our bikes. Remember banana seats? We had those. Or more specifically my brothers would ride me on their handlebars over to the Disneyland hotel. And we would run around. Play video games. Look at shops. It was like having Disneyland lite.

And so it was a different time. We didn’t have to lock our bikes up. Our parents didn’t really care where we were as long as we showed up for meals, right? And there used to be this tram that would go from the hotel, through the Disneyland parking lot, and drop you off right in front of Disneyland. And the first few times we went there, we would ride the trolley endlessly. And it was paradise just beyond our reach, right? We would stare through the fence and say “ahhhhh!” I mean we were literally, I was like 5, and my brothers were 9 and 11.

So, one day we realized that the only thing that kept us from Disneyland were the turnstiles in the front. They were turquoise, and bright yellow, and they would bonk you on the head if you didn’t move fast enough. But the rest of the park was just chain link fence, right?

And we decided to run for it.

And under the turnstile we went, and we were in paradise. It was like getting in the elevator right before the door closes. And we played there all day.

So if you can imagine the three of us, not needing to be home to eat baloney sandwiches for three hours, and having Disneyland completely open to us. Having like 75 cents and some lint in our pockets. And we explored – we actually did this an entire summer, once we realized that we could sneak in. And our favorite thing was to play “ditch ‘em” – which is like hide and seek, right? – on Tom Sawyer’s Island. And we would literally not see each other for hours. Because of course we would be sneaking on to rides. Pilfering candy, I will admit. I’ll own up to it. They had these sour…I don’t want to diverge too much into the candy thing, but they had these candy sticks, each in these individual jars, all different colors and flavors, it was like what your grandfather would it. It was dirt cheap, and the only thing we could afford. And they make these awesome multicolored spit balls – what do they call them? Loogies? Is that how you spell it?

And what we would do is get on a now defunct ride, called I think the alpine chairlift (maybe the skilift?). It was a gondola ride that went from tomorrow land to alpine village of fantasy land, through the Matterhorn. It was awesome. And of course we would loogie out of it, and it would fall like 100 feet to the ground, and you could hide, of course. Because there were walls that the gondola would go through where they couldn’t see you.

And we got caught, of course. And were kicked out of Disneyland more than once. How many people can say that?

And we would just sneak right back in, of course. Didn’t everyone run around Disneyland as their own personal playground? My kids think I’m magic now because I know all the shortcuts and back ways into Sleeping Beauty’s castle.

[picture: Disneyland?]

[Sidenote by the collator of stories: I have to apologize for the quality of this picture. The last time I was at Disneyland was over 20 years ago -- yes, back in c.e. 1990, when Madonna hit #13 on the charts with "Vogue" -- and it was indeed, to quote Scott, a different era. Among other things, one could actually drive to Disneyland without entering a labyrinth of perfectly groomed, scrupulously securitized, chimerically "public" access roads. Silly me for thinking that it would be even remotely possible to (a) stop the car, (b) without paying for parking, in order to (c) walk around and (d) take a picture. None of these are, in fact, allowed. This picture was therefore taken out the window of the car while we were stopped at a light (and, I note in passing, under the glare of two rent-a-cops in a golf cart). If you look closely, you may discern a "no pedestrians" sign, in the foreground of the white "chester-the-molestor"-type panel truck. Ah, Orange County. Bless its heart.]

March 13th: Tale #14

Danny's story:

Should age be a factor? I was 17 when all this happened. It was one of my first festivals, a multi-cultural music festival, my senior year in high school.

We decided to go this festival, and it was a four-day event. It was the American Cancer Society raising awareness, so it was a combination fundraiser/food drive. So we packed up our car and went to Chico. Which was like a four-hour drive from Visalia, give or take.

Mind you: I was very experimental at that age, as far as drugs go. I had taken about an 8th of shrooms, just for the drive up, plus some opium. We get there, checked into our campsite. It was four of us: Carlos, Crutches (his brother, so called because he was always along even though we didn't really want him), Miguel, and myself. We set up camp: a six-man tent, with awesome view. It was Angels Camp – a really great place, in a valley. There were an estimated 28,000 people that showed up for this four-day event. Tent city, but in the center was a stage for the Djs, and then surrounding everything were a bunch of shops, where you could buy anything: batteries, water, hay-bells (hay-bells! of all things), food, trinkets. And the show memorabilia, of course.

So next door to our campsite was another campsite, that had parked in front of it a full-on bin of oranges. We looked inside the tent and there was this old man and this old lady – maybe 60 years old – cutting oranges in half and making orange juice. We didn't think anything of it. So we walked away. Then Crutches said, “dude, we're going to be here for four days; we should start srhooming.” So we took the shrooms.

We start walking around, and some random person says “so and so's looking for you.” And we asked them “who?” (it someone we had never heard of), and they pointed out some guy with dreadlocks. So we walk up to the dreadlock dude, and asked him “are you looking for us?” And he turned around, with the biggest grin on his face – which was awkward, because I've never seen someone so happy to see a stranger -- and he says “pull out your hand.”

So we pulled our our hands. And he did this [making a gesture], placing something in each of our hands. Which we didn't know what it was. We looked down, and it was a little pill.

And this thing I do remember, just because of the way the guy said it: “Sally's gonna make you feel great!” And he pointed, I guess to Sally, to another tent. At this point we're like “okay, whatever.” We took the pills, and started walking over to Sally's tent, because we wanted to feel great.

It had been about twenty minutes, by the way, so the mushrooms were staring to kick in. Carlos and I went over to Sally's tent first, and we come across this guy with hair down to the middle of his arms, and rubber gloves, making something in a bucket in front of his tent. And we're like “what the fuck?”

Carlos being the way he is, said, “Are you Sally?” and starting cracking up laughing. I of course was like “dude, it's a dude. It's not Sally.”

The guy looks up at Carlos and he looks at me, and he says “are you looking for a good time?”

I wasn't sure what I felt about that, but I answered “Sure... yeah.”

He takes off one glove, reaches behind him, and grabs one of those old bingo cards, the cardboard ones with all the numbers on them. And he gets his other hand free of his glove, gets a pair of scissors and cuts the bingo card into five long strips. He puts one strip back, then distributes the rest to us evenly, one each. I kinda got weirded out, because when I touched it, it tingled. Which meant I dropped it in the bucket. So I reached in, and immediately the tingling started going up my arm. Then Sally (I guess that's what we're going to call him, 'cause we never figured out his real name) freaks out, reaches back behind him again, and gets some paper towels and starts dabbing my arms. And I'm freaking out, of course. He says to me, “you just dipped your arm into pure acid.” Which freaked me out even more because I was thinking acid acid, not LSD.

After hearing Sally say that, Carlos, Crutches and Miguel instantly pop their strips. Sally tells me “you'll be fine as long you take care of yourself.” And I have no idea what to do at this point, because I am sure I'm going to overdose on something, between the 8th of shrooms, the acid, and some ecstasy.

The music gets louder, and it's nighttime, but everything starts to get brighter. Its getting amazing: I could taste the sound, I could hear it, I could even smell the sound. It was absolutely delightful, very much so.

Then, out of nowhere, I felt awkward: everywhere I went I felt like I was going uphill. Like I had a weight on my back, when all I had was my backpack, with some water bottles in it. So I'm looking down, trying to make sure that I'm not going to trip over anything. Then I think I've got it figured out, so I look up. Everyone there, except for the guys that I had come with, was Spy vs. Spy, like the Mad comics book? The white guys and the black guys. Which is really scary, when you see that in real life. Everyone had these beaks and these hats, and their eyes were way back in their heads. So I approached one and said “hi. I'm Danny,” and put out my hand. The first person was real hesitant before putting out his hand, but he did, and said “I'm Sam.” As soon as he said that, he was no longer Spy vs. Spy, he was Sam, the person he said he was. Wow. So I started going around introducing myself to everyone, and the minute I did so, they converted from being a Spy to being a person. So for the rest of the festival, three out of the four days that we were there, it was my mission to introduce myself to as many people as I could and turn them into real people.

Now, mind you, there were 28,000 people at this festival. With this new discovery of making people into people, I started going around looking for the guys that I came with. Introducing myself to as many people as I could, saying “Hi, I'm Danny,” and shaking their hands, converting them back into people.

So then I get to this dance area, which was covered in dust from all the people kicking up the soil. I look around and it looked like a chocolate band, dancing like they were shuffling, or shadow-boxing. I look closer, and it wasn't a chocolate band, it was Carlos. He had become covered in dirt and sweat from all the dancing. So I told him my mission. He nods in approval, and continues to dance.

I venture back to the tent. At this point I'm fully in tripping-out-on-drugs mode. Some random person walks into the tent, holding an inflated balloon in one hand, and a non-inflated ballon in another hand. She smiles, and says “pick one.” So I do: I pick the inflated one. I pointed at it, she drops the non-inflated one, cups the inflated one in her hand, puts it in my mouth and squeezes it. To which my response was to fall back and black out. For about ten seconds. When I awoke everything was twice as everything: twice as bright, twice as loud, twice as good. But I could concentrate, right? Which made it awesome. Because I was still in control, so to speak. So she asks me: “did you like the nitrous?”

I had forgotten why I had come back to the tent, but I was hungry. So I started eating our snacks. Which was probably not the smartest idea. We had brownies, special ones. Cookies, special ones. Gummy worms – not special, but all melted together from where we had left them on the dashboard on the way up. And I was thinking “I'm feeling pretty special now, so let's go for the gummy worms.” I go to open them, and their all melted together: you could imagine it, right? They were just goo, sticking to my hand, and stretching up from the bag. And that was a light show itself: with the lights outside and the lights inside, I became a puppet master with a marionette of a melted gummy worms. This girl just stood their while I played with the gummy worms.

We were there for must have been five hours. Because the next thing I knew, the door of the tent zips up and the old people from next door pop their heads in with a pitcher of fresh squeezed orange juice and say “Do you want some morning sunshine?”

I tried dropping the bag of worms, but it was stuck to my hands. So I started laughing because I must have looked like an idiot with these gummy worms stuck to my hand. But she just smiled and took a glass of the orange juice and had me drink from it, like a mother would.

And that made me realize what an amazing world this is, but especially California. Because yeah there are a lot of awful things, you hear about these all these terrible events, but there are wonderful, wonderful people as well. Like these mom-and-pops looking out for people, making sure they're okay. And the fact that basically everything we did there was free. Honestly, it gives me hope for future generations, that they set the example of how to treat people.

March 13th: Tale #13

Heather's story:

All of my stories usually involve alcohol, and so they're a little bit gray.

Are you already typing?

I'll just tell something off the top of my head. This was my favorite re-encounter, with a friend of mine from high school. Who was like a bff, right? Yeah. So, once upon a time, I had a regret from high school. About a relationship that had vanished. But through Facebook, as kitschy as it sounds, we found each other after many many years. We had lost touch, but prior to which she had been a best friend – a kind of big sister, and the only person my father trusted to take me out. Which was great because she wasn't as perfect as he thought. And because she was a little bit older, that meant we had a steady supply of alcohol and I had a ride. She had taken this insecure little freshman, whom she'd totally crushed in 1V1 (basketball), under her wing to kind of mentor. So yeah, we drank some, but she was a role model, and got me into just enough trouble that she could look after me, and threaten some of the boys that I was interested in to behave themselves.

My junior year, she called me – freaking out, the most stable person that I knew – and I suspected the worst. So I drove immediately to her house. But the drama was nowhere near life-threatening; it was that her best friend had made a pass at her. And she wasn't sure how to react, because she had only been with guys to that point. And I assumed that she was freaking out because she wasn't interested, but...um, yeah. I didn't really stop to listen.

Anyway, slowly they began a relationship. But silent from the rest of us? We started to drift apart, and I always assumed that it was because she was afraid that I wouldn't accept her. Which made me sad, because I was really the only accepting, non-superchristian person that we hung out with.

How long ago was this? I graduated in '98 and this was last year, so it would have been over 10 years. When she contacted me, it turned out that she was studying to be an OB/GYn in Colorado, and had a 10-day break in her studies. So I invited her out to Sacramento, to visit and go wine-tasting.

It was the best trip to Napa, ever. Mostly because it was so random. She tends to be the kind of person who is very intelligent, but a little bit bitter? And we were rolling through Napa, looking for a biking jersey for her girlfriend. Spending way too much money, buying more expensive bottles than I would ever buy, and asking every stranger that we came across where we could buy a bike jersey.

As the day progressed, we were getting pretty drunk; things started getting a little grayer. Eating fantastic sushi, and catching up after all these years. Proceeding northwards in the valley, towards Calistoga. I don't even know how we were able to drive. We pulled up to this winery – Ballantine maybe? And we ran into a couple of guys, not our generation, but a little older, the next generation up. One was this quick-talking New Zealander, who claimed to own a winery down there. Plus a German who was his business partner (maybe?, it wasn't clear: this beer-bellied Bernie lived n a trailer in Yosemite). And this was their annual “joie de vivre” trip together: the time when they went off together to travel the world and rediscover their joy. So without giving a thought to seeing them again, we were all kicked out of the winery at last call. And when we got out to the parking lot, we discovered that we were the only two cars in the lot – except ours was a car, and theirs was a Dutchman trailer. So we decided to finish up with beers in Calistoga, following the Dutchman and trying to take a picture of it, in case something terrible happened.

We get to this brewery; and now mind you, we've been drinking all day. And the first thing they do is order a tasting round. We are like shitcanned by this time. Which should have told us that there would be a cost, right? And once we figured out that German Bernie was familiar with the great works of Arnold Schwartzeneger, we made him do lines from Kindergarten Cop, like “Who is your daddy, and what does he do?” over and over...

We also find out that Bernie is allegedly an incredible chef, and they've bought us drinks, right? So rather than walk out without any trouble, it turns into this scene where Bernie offers to make us dinner with things he has in the Dutchman. And they recommend we join them on into the forest. But we're like “um, no? We're not going to go into the fucking forest with you to have dinner!”

Bernie at this point is touching my leg, and New Zealander-man – totally not getting it – is hitting all over my friend. So she and I hold a little mini-conference in the women's room of this brewery. At which we decide that (a) we totally can't go into the forest with these two guys, but (b) we also can't turn down an offer for a home-cooked meal by a German chef. Also (c) I'm still wondering at this time whether or not she had excommunicated me 10 years ago because she thought that I wasn't accepting her of being gay.

So we decide that the best thing to do is to park the Dutchman in someplace public, so that if we're raped and killed, then at least the pictures we took on our phone we could send to someone so that they could find our bodies.

The Dutchman pilots agree, and we go a couple blocks down the street. And park in front of our hotel, revealing where we live. But also having rising expectations of the culinary arts that we are in store for. So we're still drinking beer, and it had a label that we didn't understand. But it had the last name of my friend. And it was hilarious – she was like a kid about it. She's this slightly shelled intelligent, perhaps a bitter woman and she was giggling about the bottle, which she asked me to keep track of so that she could keep it.

Then the food arrives. Which was TOTALLY disappointing, by the way. A step down from home-cooked with the family, but not at all what we had been led to expect. And about the time that things started to get really inappropriate, especially with New Zealand man, we decided to make a sensible exit right before it become a shitshow. It was perhaps a little tarty, but we got out of there, and got out of there safely.

She and I get back to our hotel room, and have a heart-to-heart about what an absolutely perfect day it had been. And that was where I finally got to ask her whether the reason why things had separated between us was because she was worried that I wouldn't have accepted her. And she told me that that wasn't the case at all; it was just that it had been easier. Her girlfriend attended a different high school, and although she was really brilliant she was also a little controlling as well, and she just didn't really want to deal with it. It was partly that the suburban high school we had been at was so full of Christians that even the gay men who went there wore flannel.

So I wanted to say two more things: when we got back to the hotel room, we realized that I had forgotten the bottle. So I have to promise to buy her one at BevMo, this amazing store that they don't have in Colorado. Now mind you, we still don't have a bike jersey for her girlfriend either. Also, I was totally freaked about whether or not we were going to run into them in the parking lot. She, being much braver than I, peeked out first, and gave the all-clear. So we grab our shit, and run to the car. And what do we find?

Bernie and the New Zealand man had left the bottle set neatly down outside my car door My friend was so excited, she was jumping up and down.

It's really fun to see totally cool, hard-edged people just freak the fuck out about stupid shit.

The p.s. to this story is that we still hadn't found the bike jersey. Despite following up every suggestion made to us but one – and that was to go to Cuvaison, this really good winery. And at Cuvaison, I found out that I like really, really expensive chardonnay. But there was nothing even approaching a bike jersey.

So we head out of town, stopping in St. Helena for a bite to eat. And there just happens to be a ton of people there on a Sunday. And we're about to drive right through, when someone pulls out and we dive right in to grab their spot. And it turns out that we are parked right in front of a bike shop. So we found the absolutely fucking perfect jersey – with a map of Napa, and all the right embellishments.

And that made the weekend a perfect 10.

Feb. 28th: Tale #12

Kevin's story:

So I have one, but it's not really related to California. It takes place in a regional park – does that count?

I wasn't around for this story. I was born of course, but I wasn't there for what happened. So anyways, we used to, at night, go to this one park nearby our house. And there were these lakes: we would hunt crawdads and stuff. Oh, oh, for instance there was this other time once, where we were out as a family and we spotted this toad. A bullfrog. And it was huge. Like enormous. Which was odd, right? Nothing wild is huge in California.

So my dad captured this frog. And we named it. But then we took it home and cooked it. Made a meal of that crazy big bullfrog.

So then, another time – this was during the day – my dad and his brother, my uncle, were out fishing. And they cast out the line they always do. But as it was floating down in the dark water, a duck that was swimming took a bite of the line. So there was this duck flapping its wings hooked on the line, and my dad and my uncle just pulled it on in. And they smushed it into the cooler, feathers and all. And you can imagine what happened to that duck.

So, yeah. Pretty much anything that came our way – well, except for dogs, we kept our dogs safe – we made a meal out of.

A couple years later, my dad goes to my sister. And he's kind of panicked. And he says to her, “You know that time I caught that duck? It was totally illegal. So whatever you do, don't tell anyone I did that!”

So now of course we tell everyone we can because it's such a great story. Plus I'm sure the statute of limitations has expired.

[Artist's credit: Pencil sketch of a mallard courtesy of Catherine Camp]

Feb. 26th: Tale #11

Heather's story:

I can’t decide between Los Gatos and Sutro Baths.

There’s…I guess I’ll talk about Hwy 1. It’s the road that runs along the California Coast. And it’s was my dad’s favorite drive to take. He used to drive it with my mom when they were newly wed, and even before when they were dating. Later they would take my brother and my sister, and drive along the coast.

I still remember the first time that my dad took me. It was the first time I had seen a coastline that was so beautiful, so jagged, so unforgiving, and so breathtaking. So beautiful. And we drove from, I guess it was…I can’t remember where we started – maybe it was the Bay Area. And we drove all the way up to Portland, to meet family. But I remember parts of it: where if you veered just a little bit, the car would go over the side, into the ocean.

And then we – my dad and I – took that drive several times. And then Scott and I took it. Not up all the way to Portland, but up to the redwoods. And then we took our daughters, and I hope they always remember it the same way I do. Yeah. The landscape is just beautiful.

You know what’s amazing? With Hwy 1 there’s the mountains and the oceans, and you get this dynamic landscape where they come together – that’s what’s so beautiful.

I really hope my daughters take their kids up Hwy 1.

Feb. 17th: Tale #10

Steve B.'s story ("Betty Never Traveled Much")

Betty never traveled much. But now that she had retired from he maid job at the Raddison, she traveled from St. Paul to Kansas City to spend some time with her younger sister.

They had a wonderful day together making pies. Cherry pies. Rhubarb pies. Springtime pies. Betty was tired. She laid down for a late afternoon nap. She didn’t wake up.

Tim and I went to the wake. Pam and Vi were there. Judy and Gary were there. Liz was there. Betty wasn’t.

There had been a mix-up.

The story was that the Kansas City undertaker had shipped what remained of Betty from KC to the Cities. Evidently the Saint Paul undertaker missed his time-line to pick her up at the airport. The airline shipped Betty back to KC.

It was a standoff.

Betty had already missed the wake. None of us wanted to miss the funeral. Morbid curiosity.

The undertaker in Kansas City evidently backed down. He cremated Betty and shipped her back to the Cities in a little box. The funeral was disappointing. An understatement of what it had promised to be.

Betty just sat there in her boring little box on a boring little table.

Afterwards we celebrated Betty. Her understated life and her greater than life personality. We laughed. She is the only person any of us ever knew that made more air mileage points dead than alive.

Betty never traveled much.

Feb. 16th: Tale #9.

E.'s story:

Have you heard “The Moth?” It’s people telling stories, without notes, without prompts or whatever – just talking. This is like that.

Well, the story I’d want to tell is about this guy I went skiing with. I had a crush on him, but I wasn’t sure about it – I wasn’t quite sure how things stood. But I decided to go for it. And the skiing trip was planned by this guy, who was totally into it – he had it all planned out. Now, Drew was also supposed to go skiing with us, but had to cancel for whatever reason. Which, in my nefarious plans, was actually fine.

So we went skiing for the entire day. And because I had this interest in him, I paid attention to what we talked about. One of the things that he kept talking about was, “Well, when you meet Mr. Right,” or, “When I meet Ms. Right,” or “When you have your four kids.” Basically setting up this situation where he was always rhetorically placing us in two different stories. But maybe I was being too cautious, right? Who knows.

At the end of the day, we were driving home, and I decided to bring up this topic – which he had been bringing up all day – of marriage, kids, etc. So I said “you’ve been talking all day about “my kids.” Do you think that you’d want to have children someday?”

And his response was “I’m not biologically able to have children. I wasn’t born with the right parts.”

In my mind, immediately I assumed that meant he’d been born a woman.

And I thought “Okay. I’m being challenged in what I think about relationships. Do I think I’d be interested in dating a woman? What do I say to this person who used to be a woman and is now a man? How do I talk to him? All day he’d been putting up a wall between “us,” and now he was letting down these walls, and maybe now he’s letting me in to something that clearly was a major event in his life.”

So while I was thinking about what I was going to say, or not say, he had mentioned that maybe he’d be willing to do adoption – if his wife was willing. Which was consistent with my idea that maybe he’d been born a woman, right? And then he asked me, “So. What about you? Do you think you’d want to have kids some day?”

So I predicated? Equivocated, maybe, just a little bit, and decided to say that “sure, I was thinking about adoption and foster children,” thinking that if he really was a woman, and if I really was into this – which I really wasn’t at all sure about – then I wouldn’t totally be closing the door to any future.

So the next scene is that he drops me off at my house. I get home, and think about what just happened. And I start wondering if I need to be brave enough to ask the question outright. And what is the question, you ask?

Well, it can’t be “are you actually a woman?” Because that might be insulting.

So I began to look up what kind of things could happen to a guy to not have the right parts to have children. Including being a hermaphrodite. Or having undescended testicles. Or no testicles at all. So I decided to write him an e-mail, with the least objectionable of those choices.

So I wrote him an e-mail saying “I don’t know if a friend should ask this question, but since you put it out there, I thought I should ask: what do you mean you weren’t born with the right parts? Does that mean you were born without testicles? Your friend, etc.” And then, after I wrote the e-mail, I went to meet him and his friends for happy hour. Nothing happened. Went to bed, work up the next morning. And opened my e-mail.

His reply was: “By the way, it’s none of your business. I meant, I wasn’t born with a uterus, and hence I can’t have children.”

And although my first reaction was “Wow! He was born a woman without a uterus!” I quickly realized that what he meant is that he had been sarcastic, and that he really meant that he couldn’t “bear” children.

Sigh. Strangely, he never wanted to talk about it ever again.

Feb. 16th: Tale #8.

Ray’s story:

A California story. Other than something that is representative of the “land of flakes and nuts?” See, if this was Southern California, I'd say something about “the land of plastic people.”

How about the fact that my baby's first food was avocado? Oh wait, no: it was Asian pear from the Ferry Building in San Francisco. Which my pediatrician father-in-law pointed out was probably not the wisest thing, making her first food something sweet.

February 12th: Tale #7.

Helen’s story:

My husband Eugene’s father was named Hideo. And the reason why his last name is not Mitani is that in Japan, the youngest son (regardless of older sons) must take the last name of his mother. So that’s why his father’s name became Tashima.

So the grandfather came to San Francisco in 1886, when Japan finally allowed people to leave the country. The prior year – in 1885 – they had restricted, and would not let anyone leave Japan. But because conditions were poor – lack of food, money, and so forth – they were allowed to leave the country and migrate elsewhere.

When they came to San Francisco, they had to go to Angel Island first, to be inspected. If anyone was ill, they had to remain there until they got well, before they were allowed to leave and go wherever it was they wanted to go. In this case, they went to San Francisco, and that’s where his father was born, in 1899.

After the earthquake, the family moved to the Los Angeles. The 1910 census shows who was still in the family, and the fact that they now lived in LA. One of the older sisters had died by that time, so the census data shows that (who was still with the family).

I don’t know what else to say, except that they continued to live there and raise their family. Later they moved to Pasadena, when he was about 14 or so. So that’s mostly it. I found it very interesting that they came so early on, and that we were able to find this information, to establish that they really did come that early.

February 12: Tale #6.

Linda’s Story:

Your mom would have a better memory of this. But there’s a story of one of the most successful of the Pony Express Riders. And he plied his trade forever and ever. And when he died, they discovered that he was a woman.

Are you recording this? I’m rambling.

Well, one of the things that I find interesting, now that I don’t have much of a connection to California, is that now that I come back to my house on E. 22th street is that I hear a lot of Cambodian. And of course they’re surprised to hear me speak it: “why do speak Cambodian?”

The other thing that I think of with that house, is when I left working for the state, I had already become pretty engaged in the Cambodian community. And they would ask me to help them with problems. Because they often lack a cultural broker. And I took it as a point of honor that they seemed to trust me, so I tried to help them whenever I could.

So, for example, we worked on the problem of the chief monk of the temple, and a neighboring woman would bring him food every day. And the community was convinced that something else was going on. So trying to figure out how to work on this problem for the Cambodian community in Oakland was tough.

Or the problem of this rapidly aging group of men, who still thought of themselves as revolutionaries. And wanted to form an expeditionary force to take back Cambodia. And of course they had connections to the CIA (sometime in the past), and that freaked me out.

One of the things at that time was that the Cambodians had become very proficient in the donut business. And so sometimes I would be paid in donuts. I would come home from work, and my mailbox would be full of donuts. Way too many donuts for me to eat. So I would give them away to all of my neighbors. Donut shops are to the Cambodian community what neighborhood groceries are to the Korean community, or laundries to the Chinese community, or motels to the Indian community. It is how they have become successful. So basically all donut shops in California are now owned by Cambodians. Which is interesting, because there are no donuts in Cambodia.

One of the reasons why I have always appreciated working with immigrant communities is that the kind of questions and observations that you get are a way of reflecting on your own culture. I remember I met an elderly Cambodian woman, and the question (as always) was “are you married? Do you have children?” And I said, “No, I’m divorced.” And she said, “Really! I’ve always wanted one of those!” She had been forcibly married to man during Pol Pot time, during this time of industrialized* marriages, and for her it was less a sense of boredom then of a need to get on with her life.

*[follow-up] By “industrialized” I meant a kind of mass marriage, where you were paired off with a stranger who you hadn’t ever met until right at the moment where you were in this big group of people. And this was the person you were supposed to spend the rest of your life with. It was a kind of industrial process for making marriages happen on a mass scale. I always had this image of two assembly lines, for pairing people off, with no emotion involved at all – and not even any choice. It was a way of trying to raise the population, and they monitored you. To make sure you did your job!

February 12: Tale #5.

Sladjana’s story:

Okay. So my story is about the revelation of the fact that my great-grandfather once lived in Sacramento. I learned about that three years ago, when my father passed away, and I had gone to Croatia for his funeral. I lived in Croatia in a city close to Hungary called Osijek. My father moved there with my mom when they were both young. He was originally from the coast, from Dalmatia. All of his relatives stayed in Dalmatia, in a little village called Runovici. When my father died three years ago, naturally my uncles and relatives, cousins, all came for the funeral. The day before my father’s funeral, we were all in my mom’s house, and one of my cousins told me about the properties that my father owned in Dalmatia. And my cousin told me, “Do you know that most of the properties we own in Dalmatia were purchased with dollars from Sacramento?”

That was a surprise to me. He told me that our great-grandfather, or our grandmother’s father basically, went to America with three other young men from the same village to work, to make some money and then go back home. The typical situation at that time was to come here, stay for ten years, save money, and then go back to Croatia. So the four of them came here together, and here they died. There was a certain accident, and all of them died on the same day in 1925. That was all I knew about what had happened. So I decided that when I got back to Sacramento I would do some investigation to try and find a cemetery where they might have been buried.

When I came back, after my father’s funeral, I started asking around in the Croatian community if anybody had ever heard a story about that incident in the past. Assuming, of course, that it would be hard because it happened so long ago, and maybe all the people who might have known anything about it would have died. I also asked – because most Croatians are Catholics – what were the oldest Catholic cemeteries in Sacramento. I learned that actually I work next to one of the oldest cemeteries – St. Joseph’s, in downtown. Our office space, actually, has windows facing onto that cemetery. So many times I would go look through the window and wonder whether my great-grandfather was somewhere laying down in that cemetery.

I asked my colleagues and friends and work for some kinds of hints and help in doing my search. I knew that I might have to get old records, to reach some kind of archive to find out who was buried in that cemetery. I tried to contact the cemetery office, but I didn’t learn anything from them at that time.

So for a few months I just didn’t make any progress on this matter, and didn’t investigate it further. Then one day my friend Helen, she asked me to take a walk around our office building, during lunchtime. We decided to walk through the cemetery. While walking there, I chose a certain aisle to walk through that was safe because the sprinklers weren’t on there, and we wouldn’t get soaked in water. When we reached that aisle, I looked at the first gravesite and I recognized that the person who was buried there must be from Croatia, based on his last name. And I told Helen, “this guy was from Croatia, and it shows on his gravestone ‘native of Austria, island or Korcula’.” The very next gravesite to that one indicated a person who had the same last name as my great-grandfather: Sabich. And it showed that he died in 1925. Which corresponds to the year of the death of my great-grandfather. And then I realized that this gravestone was identical to the next three gravestones. Another person who was also buried there had the last name of my great-grandfather. The two other men were obviously from the same village, and I recognized that my great-grandfather must have been one of the two with the last name of Sabich. I was shocked to see that they have nice gravesites, with beautiful stones, that even show their photographs, from the early days. Each of them indicated the same day of death, which was Feb. 1st, 1925.

I called my relatives in Croatia, my uncles, and I tried to learn what was the first name of my great-grandfather, because I wanted to see which one among the two was my great-grandfather. And I was told that his first name was Marijan. But they were not sure what happened exactly to them.

I asked my friends – and you’re one of them – how can I figure out how they died, and what was the reason? And you told me to check the state library, specifically newspaper articles from that time. Which I did. I went to the state library, and I looked at the microfilms, trying to find articles dated immediately after February 1st, 1925. And I found several big articles from the two main newspapers – one of them was the Sacramento Bee, and one of them was a paper the name of which I’ve forgotten.

Both of them had a big story on a tragic accident involving a car and a train. Basically, what happened was my great-grandfather and three of his friends were in the car, driving on Sunday, February 1st, in the evening, around 5 p.m., going over a railroad crossing. Apparently, they were speeding at the time, and they didn’t pay attention to the signals indicating that the train was coming. And the train came, and basically collided with the car – I’m not sure how to say this – and killed them. According to the witnesses of the events, they were singing before the crash. Which could be indication that they had some alcohol, who knows? And the crash was horrific. The articles said that it took the police some time to take the bodies out from under the train. It was horrible.

The obituary section in the same newspaper (the Bee, I guess) provided information on the memorial services, along with family members that were left behind the people who had died. The obituary indicated that my great-grandfather had a cousin who lived in Sacramento at that time. His name was Marijan Babich. And also indicated that my great-grandfather was the only person who was married among the four of them; he had a wife left and two kids. And the names corresponded to the name of my grandmother and her brother. It also indicated that all of them were from Runivici, Dalmatia.

So when this thing happened, apparently my grandmother’s family was informed about the accident. My grandma was 12, 13 years old at the time. He left Dalmatia when she was about two years old. A few days before his son was born, in 1914. When he died, his wife was informed about the accident, and she was supposed to receive certain insurance money. My uncles don’t know who sent it, or how – they weren’t sure how that happened.

I also learned that all four of these men worked at the Southern Pacific shops. They lived on 4th Street, I think the number was 1620. That house doesn’t exist anymore; today that location is the CalPERS building, or something anyway.

I shared this story with some members of the Croatian-American community cultural center. I learned that certain memories of the incident were still passed around by word of mouth. And people said that there was this accident with four men who had come from a wedding party. I don’t know if this was correct. I also learned that my father’s cousin – Marijan Babich – had a daughter named Iva Ostojia. I think she must be close to 90 now. Apparently my great-grandfather was her god-father. And she remembered him, slightly. I called her one time, trying to she if she remembered something about my great-grandfather. Unfortunately, she didn’t remember much – she told me that all she knew was what I already knew.

I was also told that there are members of the Babich family, descendants of the cousin of my great-grandfather’s, who live in this region still. And one of them, he’s a lawyer here in Sacramento. He learned about my brother and me, and he has tried to set up a meeting with us to learn something about his family. He’s never been to Croatia, but he is headed there this summer, to Runivici. So I’m looking forward to that meeting.

I have only one other memory about my great-grandfather, a somewhat romantic story about how my grandfather fell in love with the widow of my great-grandfather. Apparently my grandfather was much older than my grandmother, and he was interested in the wife of my great-grandfather. However, she was already married (she was a widow), and she was not interested in marrying my grandfather. At the time, she offered him her daughter instead. Who was 16, 17, maybe? I don’t really know; in any case she was very young. So ultimately my grandfather married my grandmother.

When the insurance money was sent from Sacramento after the accident, the family didn’t get it right away because the brothers of my great-grandfather wanted to claim the rights to receive the money rather than the wife of my great-grandfather. So they tried to take advantage of the situation. And there was a court case to try and resolve it. Apparently my great-grandmother died young, before she received any money following her husband’s death. When my grandfather married my grandmother, he hired a lawyer and fought the court case against the brothers of my great-grandfather. And he won the case. And so my grandmother and her brother received the money.

At that time, men had the right to receive more funds than women. So I guess my grandmother got a smaller portion of money than her brother. Also, she didn’t have a right to make a decision about how this money was to be used. She tried to encourage my grandfather to invest the money in real estate. Which would have been an excellent move. But my grandfather instead purchased a few – how do you call it – a few pieces of land for vineyards and farming. And lent the biggest amount of money to his neighbor, a friend. Apparently his friend and neighbor didn’t return this borrowed amount of money for a long time. And there was a lot of inflation going on in the country at the time. So when my grandfather got the money many years later, it was so worthless that he set up a fire and just burned it all. I don’t know if that’s correct, but it’s what my uncles told me.

However, he and my grandmother apparently had a very happy marriage. In which they had eight children. And these properties were always called “Grandma’s properties.”

That’s it.

Actually, I wanted to say one more sentence. I am so happy after all these years to know that I have deeper connection to Sacramento than I ever imagined. Throughout my life, I have always lived in places that don’t have many of my relatives. And I never really had anyone to visit on November 1st, nobody’s burial site to visit on All Saint’s Day. In Croatia there is a tradition to take flowers to the graves of relatives on that day. I am glad that I finally have someone whose gravesite I can visit on that day, to show my respect.

Feb. 10th: Tale #4.

Josh's story ("Chico"):

The year 2005 began as most, pretty uneventful. I was in the midst of my junior year at CSU-Sacramento, studying history. A friend of mine--Craig--ended his long-term relationship with his girlfriend in late January and wanted some company (i.e., drinking buddy). I obliged his request and made the trek to Chico, California.

During my weekend visit, Craig introduced me to one of his neighbors, Ritsuko Genka. While the introduction was brief, her beauty resonated with me. Craig and I continued on with our weekend and I left that Sunday.

I must have left Craig with the impression that I was interested in pursuing a relationship with Ritsuko; I received a phone call from Craig instructing me to contact her. Anxiety and nervousness engulfed me as I dialed Ritsuko’s phone number; however, the sound of her voice relieved my anxiety and our first conversation lasted over two hours. I could not have been happier.

As the conversations continued, Ritsuko and I decided to start a dating relationship, which eventually turned exclusive. Needless to say, I was ecstatic; the intimate connection I felt with Ritsuko was completely new to me. Also, the distance between where I lived (Sacramento) and where she lived (Chico) did not inhibit our relationship, as I originally thought. I knew that I had found someone special.

The semester soon gave way to the summer of 2005. I will forever remember the summer of 2005 as the best summer of my life; Ritsuko and I laid the foundation of our relationship during this time.

I drove to Chico each Friday afternoon during the summer of 2005. Each trip consisted of the same route - westbound, Highway 50 to Interstate 5, north and eventually onto Highway 99, north. Ritsuko always greeted me with long hugs and warm meals upon my arrival.

Our weekends consisted of Jon and Bon’s ice cream, Broadway Heights restaurant, Chico Heat baseball games, star gazing along Highway 32, and long conversations into the night. Sunday departures consisted of tears and long good byes. As the summer progressed, I fell deeper and deeper in love with Ritsuko.

This May (2011) marks our six-year anniversary and I fully intend on marrying Ritsuko, which does not surprise me; I knew I found the love of my life during the summer of 2005 in Chico, California.

Feb. 8th: Tale #3.

Elaine's story:

My kids had only arrived two weeks earlier, and my son’s gritty

protectiveness of his toddler sister was already driving me out of my mind.

Not that I could blame him. He kept her alive her first year, then saw her

only once a month, when a social worker picked them up at their separate

foster homes and let them play together for a few hours.

He cringed whenever I touched her. He pushed his way between us on the couch

at story time. He beat me to everything as I reached for diaper, wipe,

lotion, trash lid, faucet. I knew his flashing eyes watched out for a

hundred ways I could harm her, and he set off twice that many crises to

deflect my attention.

The rainy cold held us captive. Muddy shoes and sticky hands reached

impossible places on every wall. The damp churn of laundry piles was as

constant as the rain.

On the first day of the third week, the rain gave way to a lighter gray sky.

“To the park,” I announced. My new son rushed up to grab the handles of the

stroller from me, only to find that the handles were small, and pink. It was

a doll stroller, outfitted with a Dressy Bessy doll with an expectant

expression. “Bessy needs to get out, don’t you think?” I said to him with a

conspiratorial smile. “Would you please strap her in and meet me on the

front sidewalk?”

With eyebrows arched, he complied. By the time I jacketed, buckled and

wheeled his sister to the curb, he had taken off with the doll baby as if

entranced by the lightness and speed of the toy stroller. Block after block,

the pink wheels careened from sidewalk to tree roots to stairs to railings.

Wet leaves clogged the wheels, which squeaked as they scraped and skidded.

Muddy waves splashed up from puddles onto Bessy’s tidy buttons and snaps.

“Good job waiting for the green light,” I said as I caught up to him,

thrilled we had made it this far. His hands remained tightly bound to the

pink handles, secure in their mission. We crossed 30th Street, then

Alhambra, and headed for the playground. I felt an excited bouncing in the

stroller below, no doubt brought on by the sight of the swings.

We each unharnessed our charges and lifted them up into the bucket swings.

“Want to trade?” I asked him, not sure how far to take the game. He nodded,

so I adjusted Bessy’s sun hat and gave her a gentle push. He grabbed hold of

the chains and pulled his sister as high as he was tall, then let her go in

a big swoosh. She gurgled and shrieked appreciatively. “You’re a great big

brother,” I said. He shifted his weight to the other foot, and said

“Thanks.”

February 4th: Tale #2.

Marge's story:

While Dad was at Cal, he was a civil engineering major. And as I understand it, part of the senior project for him and his classmates was to build the stress model of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay bridge. He stayed on one year after graduation ('31 to '32) as a teaching assistant and also ended up completing that stress model. At some point in 1932, there was a picture of my father and the stress model in the Oakland Tribune.

Side note: the reason why I have that sideboard open is that the picture used to be in that chest. But I haven't been able to find it. I hope that you might find it in the archives at the Trib. I'll show you a picture of him so that you can have an idea of what he looked like.

One of his friends was Philip N. Fletcher (he was also my godfather). And he (I don't know for what firm) actually worked on the construction of the bridge. Somewhere in the photos taken over the years, there's a picture of him on the bridge. But it was a family photo, so there isn't a public record of it.

For years, in the second right-hand drawer of Dad's desk, which was a beautiful old desk, there were photos of the stress model. With the test measurements on the back of each photo.

When I was a junior in high school, in Connecticut, I took those pictures (with his permission) for a physics project. On which I got an A, by the way. Nobody in Connecticut had anything like it. The pictures ended up in a folder, but never got returned to the desk. In the dispersal of the family goods, my sister ended up with the folder. But she ended up dumping the folder, along with some of my old papers from college. It was disposed of. So.

One thing I would say is that the notations were exceptionally clear. My father had a hand not to be believed, better than any other male I've ever met.

There were many conversations in the family about what it was like to work on a project that was that historic.

Now when they made the modifications of the bridge to take the bus, truck, and train traffic off the lower level, and convert it into auto traffic, there were adjustments made – particularly around the entrance to the Yerba Buena tunnel – and he had some grave concerns about the efficacy of that build.

Forward to 1989 when it collapsed. But we don't have to go into that. It is true, thought, that the very piece he was worried about was the piece that collapsed.

Anyway, that is my memory of the story. It would be wonderful to turn over the pictures of the stress model, but I don't have them anymore. Being a nosy kid you always know where adults keep their hidden things, right?

[Note: the signatories to Mr. Mitchell Roberts's diploma are, yes, Robert Sproul and James "Sunny Jim" Rolph).