I did not read the whole story that comes next in the book of short stories tonight. It was too long for a relaxing read for me. It is called Doctor Marigold. It has been fun so far as it has the voice of a market seller talking about deals to be had and I get to read it out loud to myself in my best English accent. I don’t have a good English accent, but it is one with eight years’ experience in the country, made as a mask to hide myself among them to prevent having to ask the endless barrage of questions; “Are you American?” Easier to just hide under soft vowels and dropped consonants than to have to explain to everyone where I am from and what brings me there. It was also nice to hear the unbiased opinions they have on Americans.
So, I read the huckster’s voice softy aloud and tried to bring back that voice I earned in what seems a bit like another life. This gets mixed up with the Norwegian that Garrison Keillor goes into while telling stories of Lake Woebegone, which I usually play all night long so when I wake up in the middle, I have something to focus on and try to get back to sleep. It’s either listen to that and fall back asleep or spend too much time in front of the fireplace while downstairs putting a log on to heat the house and need a little extra to focus on, so write a blog post that comes out of nowhere and onto the keyboard. Not an interesting blog post, mind you. What could be interesting that someone writes in the middle of the night? That’s probably the worst thing to do. The only thing actually worse is reading such post. But I need not worry, because I never do. I only feel pity on those who do.
It is a good time to think of things that once were and are no more. I remember when I was around five, my mom rented an apartment for a short time that was up a flight of stairs on the second floor of a small white house. There was not much to it. The front door opened to a living room and kitchen combo. There was a door to the bedroom. Honestly, I do not even remember how to put the bathroom into this memory. What I do remember is that when coming down the stairs, one had only to walk through a single row of houses and there was the very beach of the Pacific Ocean. Mom said in years after that the rent price was not bad there, but the liberties the landlord expected to take were. So, she moved out. The memory of the place is very brief. Amazing it is though, to visualize coming down the stairs and into sand right there at the bottom.
My great grandparents liked to travel. They had a Layton trailer, and they took it to places with exotic names like The Fountain of Youth at The Salton Sea, and Flaming Gorge, and Green River. They took me along with when I was quite young to the Rincon Beach north of Ventura, or Wheeler Gorge Campground, truer to north from there, where they lived behind a white picket fence in their E. P. Foster home, built in 1925. It was a white house with dark green trim. There were two large windows on the front of the house, either side of the fireplace. Two windows flanked the same living room on the west wall, catching evening sun through the panes of glass, shaded by the large fuchsia bushes between their house and Dixie’s house next door. One of the things that most fascinated me about this wonderful, airy house was the closets in the bedrooms. They both had windows in them that could open, and air the clothes inside. Great grandma kept the door to that closet open, and the sash’s up in the two windows in the bedroom, delivering a heavy dose of that foggy morning air that is such a grand element of those early childhood memories I have contained deep in my head. How I’d love to throw up the sash and open that air into the lives of my own children, to share it with them. How I miss always that California air.
I drove there when I was 23. I was on my own in a car, heading away from Colorado and memories I did not want to live with my face exposed right to them. The power of first love could only be soaked away in the soft, wet, foggy, eucalyptus and salty scented morning air that one cannot experience anywhere else that I know of. It was foggy along the coast when I drove there. Compared to the dry desert, and the thin air of Colorado, it almost seemed like I would have to swim through the thick of the morning. Nothing washes away the past like the new air that has just blown in off the Pacific, unspoiled by all the pollution and combustion of humanity. Great-grandma’s house had gone to my grandmother when she died. It was only a mile from the beach in Ventura. It always seemed kind of empty without my great-grandparents’ voices filling the breakfast nook and the kitchen while eggs and bacon and two ‘flapjacks’ or hotcakes cooked on the old gas stove. On a clear morning the sunlight spilled over the mountain to the west, and into the windows of the nook. I always sat facing the windows, where my great-grandparents always sat at either end of the table, the light raking across them, never blinding them as they talked about life and everything in it. They were always an interesting couple, conversation dominating their every morning, be it just them, or with the company of their family and friends visiting early. Afternoons were TV soaps, gameshows, and for him, a baseball game on the TV while another played on a radio he put between him and the arm of his easy chair. Every room, voices and light. That is what I remember most about it. The cool evenings were when they would come out and work the rose bushes along that white picket fence.
I love that old home, and those two old people. We were worlds away in how we grew up. He was parentless buy the time he was six and ran away and started working as a roughneck at the age of 13. She was born in Eden, Utah, and lived in Lyman, Wyoming when she left school. He was her third husband, and even though she was a faithful Mormon, and he was most definitely not, they got along well together. They were very tidy, neat people. I do not remember a mess anywhere in the place. Ever. All of these memories are so long ago, some fifty years almost, and the voices speak out to me from the hollow spaces in my mind where everything echoes, and the images are greyed out by the wash of time. How I wish I could open these images up and walk into them, and bring my family to them, to show them these wonderful spaces that cannot be found anywhere in this world anymore.