I have had several wonderful days with my sister and lovely dinners out with my brothers and their wives, and then on Saturday my younger brother and his wife hosted an early birthday celebration for me…
And yes...
I will be 70 years old next week.
Then early Sunday morning, when there is almost no traffic at all on the Los Angeles freeways, my sister and I leave on an adventure, a short road trip.
It seems like leaving the city behind has lifted a burden on our spirits as well, and we are feeling euphoric as we travel north on the Coastal Highway a couple of hours out of Los Angeles.
I have forgotten how beautiful the central coast of California is.
My sweet sister glances over at me: “Ocean on our left.
Crosby, Stills & Nash on the speakers
(And we have been singing along with them “Do-do-do-do-do, do, do, do-do-do-do…) .
“Golden rolling hills on the right.
“Blue sky, 65 degrees. What more could you ask for?”
A restroom?
And yes, here comes a rest stop with its very own El Camino Real bell.
I counted 93 of these bells along the road on the way home.
We visited popular places along the coast. We saw sea otters bobbing in Morro Bay...
and elephant seals sprawled on the beach at San Simeon, near Hearst Castle.
And amazing scarecrows at Cambria.
We went camping near here when I was a kid...
and I remember catching a red snapper off the pier. And for the first time in many years I put my feet in the Pacific.
And then it was time to come home, back to the Ozarks and home.
And then my sister’s husband (who is Italian) leaves one last wonderful memory for us when we walk in the door.
“Music touches us emotionally, where words alone can’t.” ― Johnny Depp
Music can indeed have great power to trigger emotions.
In an hour so I will be leaving for the airport to fly away to Los Angeles to see my sister and brothers and their families. I did not see them last year because Richard and I were supposed to have a short vacation but that never happened. So I am overdue for some R&R.
I had no work to do yesterday, so I spent some time bouncing around on YouTube listening to all sorts of music that I enjoyed back in the day, among them this marvelous performance of the Blind Faith classic by Steve Winwood and Eric Clapton.
One line in the song is particularly poignant, “I’m wasted, and I can’t find my way back home…”
In 1969 when the song was released, I had experienced a couple of years of students at the college I attended falling into the black hole of drug use. Mostly they were just smoking too much marijuana but some were dabbling with LSD and “magic mushrooms” and the like. I watched a couple of very bright students turn their minds to mush and drop out.
But then there are some memories that are much closer to home. Sad memories of what happened to our only first cousin on my Mom’s branch of the tree. My mom had one brother, Ellis, who was quite a bit older then she was – between them were three other children born in the family that died in infancy. Ellis in turn had one son, Ralph. Ellis’ wife died when Ralph was very young, and I am fairly sure he and the boy moved back home for a while.
Ralph was 13 years older than I was, so he would have been 16 or 17 in this picture.
Later he had a good job at the Los Angeles County Parks and Recreation Department, a wife, and two children.
And then he started drinking and couldn’t stop. He lost everything: job, home, wife, kids.
By then Uncle Ellis had moved to a town in central California, and Ralph went to live with him. But he fell afoul of some men there who were threatening to kill him, so Uncle Ellis sent him to us.
He lived with us, briefly, in 1969. Mom and Dad tried to help him, but they did not understand alcoholism and did not have the resources or the knowledge of how to help him.
Ralph vanished out of our lives, and it was only later many years later that we learned he had died in 1971, at 34, homeless, on the streets of Los Angeles.
