In 1992, my friend Nan Bader informed me that I was the only Lutheran working in marketing in Central New York, and thus the perfect choice to attend a Lutheran-sponsored conference on "Marketing Your Outdoor Ministry" to be held at Asilomar, a YWCA conference center on the Monterey Peninsula. I had not been back to Monterey since leaving language school in 1969, and I leapt at the opportunity. Together with the director of a nearby Lutheran/Presbyterian camp I ventured westward.

November 1992

The chuckles started when we flew to San Francisco with Tony Bennett. He breezed up to the gate at O'Hare just at boarding time. I informed my fellow traveler that we were flying to San Francisco with Tony Bennett. A woman to my left, an attorney, looked up from her work and said, "Tony Bennett?" And I said, "Yes, he's right over there." She looked, smiled and said very carefully, "Thank you." After I'd found my seat on the plane, I smiled for another five minutes. Then I noticed the woman in the next seat was reading Proust in Italian. She was a pharmacist from Milan, just wrapping up an exchange program with a hospital in Chicago, and flying to San Francisco for a few days before returning to Italy. She was almost aggressively plain, blunt cut dark hair, no makeup, but had fabulous clothes, a wafer-thin watch; I imagined her an heiress, and we had a nice chat.

From the San Francisco airport, we drove to politically correct Berkeley, which is so hip and advanced that even a liberal like myself feels like a barbarian from the frozen steppes of the east. It must be a total cipher to conservatives. We arrived at my friend Jessica's house in late afternoon. I had not seen Jess since 1978; this was only the second time we've met, but we've been writing and talking for 15 years. I got to know her as a rubber stamp person in the 1970s; now she has created a line of salsas, Salsa Sabrosa; buy a jar today; that's Jess on the label. Her house is 100 years old, but has earthquake bolts and a large Golden Retriever named Custer so I was very comfortable.

On the way to dinner, we drove around looking at great old houses in the University area. For dinner we ate Burmese, which was delicious. Garlic noodles and sweet & smoky Thai iced tea stand out in my memory.

We went to a liquor store where the Korean owner said, "I like-a you green cap!" I was flattered. He said it again. While he watched Korean TV on cable, I found four microbrewery stouts and porters, in quarts yet. Then we stopped at a pub for some local microbrewed beers; I had a stout and a raspberry wheat beer.

The next day, armed with Jessica's maps and directions, we took the rent-a-car into San Francisco and had a fabulous day. Walked up to Chinatown, where I bought silk robes for Laurie and Abbie, then to Japantown where I hit a huge Japanese bookstore (Kinokuniya) and got a new book on sumo and packs of Japanese baseball cards. Winded from the hills, we took the cable car back toward North Beach. At the intersections, high up on the spine of the city, you could look down the side streets to the bay on one side and the ocean on the other. It was magnificent, made more so by blue skies, sunshine and 75 degree breezes.

On then to the Federal Building, tenth floor, USDA Forestry Service, where I tracked down Dee Ann Zwight, a real piece of work who smokes unfiltered Camels and fears nothing or no one. She took us into North Beach, past all the strip joints to the world's best postcard store - a huge room, floor to ceiling vintage postcards - and then onto lunch at the San Francisco Brewing Company. I said, "Is that the right door?" but Dee Ann was already through it. I had the Gripman's Porter.

We bid Dee Ann adieu, then drove to Lisbon Street to pick up Candi Strecker, a good friend I had been writing to for 12 years but had never met. Candi self-publishes the legendary 'zine Sidney Suppey's Quarterly and Confused Pet Monthly. We then sped to the Anchor Steam Brewery for a 2 p.m. tour. At the bar, Candi told me she was pregnant, which is the best excuse I ever heard for shaking off a breakfast meeting.

She also told us about an older sister, 20 years older, going blind, who drove herself to the eye doctor's office, where he said, "How did you get here?" She said, "I used the braille dots." We don't have braille dots in the northeast, because the snowplows would tear them all up in one weekend, but to the seeing driver they appear as reflectors which make the tires hum when you begin to weave out of the lane.

The Anchor Steam tour was ecstasy; Laura the tour guide knew her stuff, and afterward we returned to the tasting room to drink everything they make. The Old Foghorn barleywine was extraordinary on tap, a snootful of hops. And then Mark Carpenter, the production manager, who I met at the '85 and '87 beer festivals in Denver, emerged from the jungle of fermenting tanks and hoses, and sat and talked with us for 45 minutes. We had a swell time, and he gave me a bottle of spruce beer, made in '91 and never to be made again, to bring home.

And I got to talk to Fritz Maytag (brewery owner and Maytag heir) as he snuck in and out of the room to get a cup of coffee. Charming fellow, diplomatic about the interruption, who parks his Porsche inside the brewery.

Then back to Berkeley and around the bay in the evening darkness to Tiburon and Sam's Anchor Cafe, where I saw my dear friend of long standing Mary Barlow for the first time in ten years. She's a manager there, and hostessed our dinner, but first she and I went out onto the dock and talked, and looked at the lights on the bay. We met in the back row of second-semester Freshman English in 1965 (she missed the first class and thus had to sit with the W's) and we have been friends ever since.

Other guests at dinner that evening included Scott Owen, who as John Marr publishes a 'zine called Murder Can Be Fun, plus Candi, Dee Ann and her husband Spoolie, a diehard Grateful Dead fan, plus Robert (Razor) Blades and Sandy Jones, gardener and proprietor of the Handzon Winery, who gave me a bottle of homemade wine, and Jessica and a friend of hers who could not believe we didn't all know each other until that (magical) evening. She wanted to hire us all to go to parties to liven things up, and as he works for George Lucas, I imagine I would go.

The next day we motored to Monterey, and spent the early afternoon haunting my old haunts. I saw the apartment I lived in, 2040 Prescott Street, in the summer of 1969. I went into the deli next door and there was my landlord, Buster Campagno. The years had been cruel. He was busy with customers, but I did get to say hello, and he said, "Where did you go?" I gave him the short answer, since he had people waiting, and I went again.

We drove into the Presidio, by my classroom, still there, as is the movie theater (ah, 25 cents per movie) and the NCO Club with its picture windows overlooking the bay; it's now called "The Faculty & Students Club." All the buildings are painted yellow now, instead of green. Our barracks however is now second base on the athletic field. I got out of the car and stood in the parking lot from which I first saw Monterey Bay, the Sunday morning after leaving Basic Training in 1968. The seals and otters still frolic in the harbor below.

After a slow drive on the coastal road past Victorian painted ladies converted into Bed & Breakfasts that overlook the ocean, we arrived at the Asilomar Conference Center and checked in for the serious portion of the trip.

The conference - "Marketing Your Outdoor Ministry" - wasn't the most extraordinary piece of learning I've ever done, but the setting was swell, the lodges tastefully rustic and a Lutheran life insurance company was paying the whole thing. Deer roamed the grounds. I called Laurie from outside the lodge, looking out to the ocean, and could barely speak through the emotion; it was still beautiful, it had not changed, I had not been dreaming.

I settled into a routine as quickly as possible. Arising at 5:30 a.m., I walked on the beach each morning, starting in the dark and enjoying the growing light as the sun rose in the east, walking an hour out and an hour back, down the Asilomar Beach to Spanish Bay Beach to the paths that run alongside 17 Mile Drive.

It was still very dark even at 6 a.m., and one morning I bumped into an eight-point buck standing in the path. I stopped and he stopped, and then he strolled away. Following the boardwalk, I threaded my way through the dark dunes to the beach, and the clouds threatened, and the waves pounded the beach. There was no horizon so I couldn't tell how high the next wave would be, and I was right on the edge of the continent, alone, and startled birds flew up out of the dead kelp strewn in long heaps across the sand.

But I found my way carefully until sunrise and by 6:30 it was glorious. Sun up, the surf hissing like club soda, sandpipers at the breakfast bar, millionaires playing golf, retirees walking dogs, and young women gliding by on roller blades up on the road while young men surfed out in the waves. I was in heaven every step of the way.

I strolled by one guy who looked like he was right out of The Great Gatsby. I said, "Good morning," and he said, "Good morning," in a voice that echoed through a vault that held banknotes for five generations.

Another morning, I was walking past a cottage when, just ahead of me, a huge black bird alighted on a fence post, looked me squarely in the eye and called out to me. I had no idea what to say in reply, so I just stopped and stared at him for a moment, and he called again, and then flew away. I had this feeling that somewhere, someone was either feeding or conversing with this bird, and I was a disappointment.

During the day, I dutifully took notes at every lecture, and waded in the surf after lunch each day, shoes in hand. The water was like cold crystal; the sun was warm. It was pretty magnificent. And two farm wives from Wisconsin (who went shopping in Carmel in anticipation of milk prices going up) took a liking to me, which kept me from being sulky at meal times, it being hard for me to find kindred spirits in a hall filled with Camp Directors.

I missed all the parties, because I fell asleep at 8:30 each night, which is just as well as my roommate arrived at the door at Midnight and fell into bed snoring, in all different pitches and rhythms, punctuated by sudden bursts of flatulence, some like automatic weapons fire, others like warbles or jungle calls. I felt like I was living in a bear's den, and was only too happy at 5:30 to spring into the new day and the great outdoors.

I had heard third-hand that Gary Archer, a classmate from Serbo-Croatian, was still in Monterey, and I found him in the phone book. I called, and he picked me up at the main gate at six the next night. I hopped into the car and extended my hand, and he wrapped me in a bear hug. We had a wonderful dinner in Pacific Grove, laughing for an hour and a half. He was unchanged, except he had lost 30 pounds, quit drinking, adopted a son and become a charismatic Catholic; it obviously agrees with him. He returned to Monterey four days after being discharged in Maryland, and has never regretted it. He works at the Presidio, and brought me our Serbo-Croatian textbook as a souvenir.

Friday, the conference attendees took a bus to Monterey, where we started at the Monterey Aquarium, which was spectacular. I touched a manta ray. Kudos to the kelp forest, the jelly fish exhibit and the gift shop, where I found a chickadee pin for Laurie and a purple t-shirt for myself.

After the aquarium, I found someone of similar propensities, one of the conference speakers, a very large Irish Mexican Missouri Synod Lutheran named Clint Dennis who had been lecturing on cultural diversity, and we went to the Monterey Brewing Company, a brewpub in an old gray cottage where I sampled all four current beers, bought yet another magnum of stout, and toured the brewing rooms in the basement where we saw old dairy equipment pressed into noble new uses. Upstairs, MTV was on all day and the decorations had a tattered beauty that was very comforting.

We also hit someplace called McFly's, where the bartendress, said to be nationally famous, wore a name tag that read YO MISS. She responded to that, and because I had been tipped off, I asked to see "the wedding pictures," a small album she kept behind the bar. The bride wore white: a garter belt and stockings, lace veil, bra, panties and high heels. The maids of honor wore diaphanous black teddies. It must have been a Unitarian ceremony. There were also nice shots of her on a blue Harley. She took no lip.

Saturday, we took the bus to Carmel. I looked at $35 bow ties but bought zip-loc bags to bring home the beer and the wine. The real estate offices were the height of amusing; houses smaller than mine in Syracuse were going for $795,000. The beach, reached via a long, steep hillside of deep white sand, was yet another stunning crescent of beauty. From there, they took us to the Mission, where we stumbled into a wedding procession with eight bridesmaids in emerald gowns and stunning, tanned California topography, a trend set by the bride in (and out of) white lace. I was reminded of beautiful, rolling hillsides.

Saturday night, I fell asleep before the concert given by the guy who wrote, "The Candyman," so I have nothing to report on that.

I hated to leave, and if it was only a job and a house waiting for me in Syracuse, I wouldn't have. But I did, at 5 a.m. so I could see nothing . It was still dark when we passed Gilroy, the garlic capital of the world, on Route 101, and you could smell it five miles away.

We got to the San Francisco airport on time. I was carrying the world's heaviest carry-on bag, with magnums of stout, porter and a bottle of red wine. On the flight, I watched Death Becomes Her, then finished a P.D. James mystery, turning the last page as the wheels touched down in Syracuse. I had missed Laurie and Abbie terribly (and talked to them every day but Saturday - I can wait to see the phone bill), but I have them back now. And it is quiet at night.

All the sand in my cuffs,

Kihm