June 5, 2005
Laurie began the month of April with one of those spa viruses that just melt away the pounds while you recline and feebly acknowledge the comings and goings of your uniformed attendants. The chauffeured limo with swirling red lights had swept her off to Community General hospital at 4 a.m., and I brought her home five days later. She was 10 pounds lighter and as weak as a kitten, and we weren't sure if our trip to California, to celebrate our 25th anniversary, would happen after all. But I read aloud to her from Anne Lamott's Traveling Mercies, our friend Melissa sent a box of See's candy from California, the St. James prayer chain worked overtime, and by April 20th, Laurie was ready to go, and certainly in need of a walk on the beach.
We flew to San Francisco on a Wednesday, after putting Gus in dog-jail the day before. His whimpers had torn my heart out, but I reminded myself that he is a dog and we are people, and sometimes, in extreme situations, you have to put people first. A woman I saw in the Philly airport must have been similarly traumatized because at 7:24 a.m. she was drinking a martini.
The flight from Philadelphia to San Francisco was more than five hours long; I had just settled into my middle seat and congratulated myself on not sitting next to the very, very large woman across the aisle when a very, very large man came down the center aisle, working his way toward us hand over hand on the seat backs. A small woman was seated next to me, on the aisle; she looked up at the large man and said, "Which seat would you like?" He looked at the vacant seat next to the very, very large woman and then at the seat next to me and said loudly, "That one! There'll be more room." So up she got and as he settled in next to me he lifted the seat arm and said, "Do you mind if I lift the seat arm?"
I was trying to be a good person, so I said, "Go right ahead." He said, "There are advantages to being big, and disadvantages." He called for a seat belt extension, took a hit off an asthma puffer, and Laurie wondered quietly what the advantages were. I spent the next five hours leaning to the left. At the end of the ride as people rose to get their carry-on bags, the man's wife started to stand and he said, "Sit down, we're waiting." Waiting for the plane to empty. Completely. After five hours of leaning to the left, I was not such a good person any more. I must have groaned because he turned and said, "Do you want to get up??" And I said, "I would love to get up." And he replied, "Well, okay, if you want to stand there with all the other jerks." Yes, we certainly did, and a minute later we filed off the plane with all the other jerks, thrilled to be free.
Our rental car, provided for us by a young Chinese-American trainee who danced through the process like Fred Astaire, was a Hyundai Sonata, "a free upgrade," and a darn nice car it was. Laurie drove into San Francisco because she's a better driver and I'm a better navigator. The Hotel Cornell de France on Bush Street is next door to a theater which hosts the World Famous Nude Review, so it is easy to find. We checked in, patted Noel the Golden Retriever on the head, and settled into a familiar room, happy to be back in San Francisco. I was being a good person again, so I offered to take care of the rental car, which needed to go to the garage across the street.
At the curb, I unlocked the car door with the key, hopped in and started the car. Almost. When I turned the key in the ignition, the engine did not start. Instead, the horn began honking and the lights flashing. I did not panic. Surely there was a simple explanation, a button somewhere marked "Stop the Car Alarm." I hit a lot of buttons, flailed around at levers and dials, but none of my actions yielded the desired result. The wipers, however, started wiping at a leisurely interval. And after a minute or so, the horn stopped. I had not been arrested for grand theft auto; I assumed the crisis had passed, and the car would now accept me as its rightful occupant. I turned the key in the ignition and the horn burst into song again. I did not welcome the encore, and I was sure that there were many people within a block or so who felt the same way. Perhaps it was disbelief or denial that prompted me to try the key a third time, and I did, but the car responded as it had twice before. Now I was certain that arrest was imminent, with a news photo to be wired back to the Skaneateles Press showing me in handcuffs under the sign for the World Famous Nude Review.
With the horn blaring its third chorus, I decided to brush up on the operations of the Hyundai Sonata. I found the owner's manual in the glove compartment and flipped through the pages to the soft beat of the windshield wipers. There was an index, but it had been created by someone who had chosen unusual names for everything in the car. Terms like "car alarm" or "alarm" were too intuitive and thus absent. But eventually I found my way to the desired paragraph that told me how to turn off the alarm: I had to depress and hold down a button on the little black battery-powered thingee attached to the key ring. I did this, and there was a short beep to signal my success. I returned the key to the ignition, and was rewarded with the gentle rumble of the engine.
Because the garage is diagonally across the street from the hotel, and the street is one-way running away from the garage, I had to drive around the block, or a few blocks actually, since intervening streets are also one-way. I set out on my journey, the wipers periodically sweeping across my field of view. Of course it was a sunny day, so everyone knew I was an idiot. But San Francisco is a big city, and no one seemed to care if one more idiot was loose on the streets. By accident, I turned the wipers off as I was turning into the garage. I suppose I could have read about the wipers in the owner's manual, but they were probably indexed under "precipitation response" and things were falling into place on their own. I returned to the hotel on foot, whistling a happy tune.
A Laurie must-visit is Chinatown, so we went to Grant Street and settled in at the Cathy House, for a mid-afternoon snack of pot stickers and egg rolls with a pot of restorative tea. I would like to tell you that the Cathy House was recommended to us by our good friends Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, who dined there in early 1941 when Diego was in town to see his Pan American Unity murals at the Golden Gate International Exposition, but I cannot. My fortune cookie informed me, "You are loyal and honest with a deep sense of duty and justice. Can always be trusted to guard the secrets of others." The placemat reminded me that I had been born in the Year of the Dog, which could explain my empathy with those of the pooch persuasion. Rested and refreshed, we strolled up Grant and shopped for the mandatory Chinese items: a cloisonne egg, green silk slippers, and a bag of almond cookies from the Eastern Bakery, the oldest Chinese bakery in the United States. I'd like to tell you it was recommended to us by our good friend Bill Clinton, who stopped there for a moon cake in July of 1996, but I cannot.
I can tell you that our good friend Candi picked us up at the hotel that evening. Standing one door down from the World Famous Nude Review, we were easy to find. I've known Candi since my rubber stamp days; she is a fabulous source on information on postcards, thrift shops, books, and all things Ohio. Her husband, Matt, who we picked up at his workplace near the new ballpark, can tell you all you'd ever need to know about vintage radios and televisions, the creation of computer games, and the life of Nikola Tesla. We told Candi that we had prepared for our trip to San Francisco by watching Bullitt the night before, and she said that she used to drive to work along part of the chase scene's route. ( I am sure she never violated any traffic laws and was rarely, if ever, airborne.) We had a delicious dinner at Little Nepal, and saw parts of San Francisco the cable cars do not reach, including a breath-taking view of Daly City, which still looks like a stalled train on a hillside.
Thursday morning, we headed south, taking the quicker route, 101 down to 156, and over to Route One. On the way, we drove through a eucalyptus grove, something you don't see all that much of in upstate New York. As hard as it was, we passed by Monterey and continued on to the Carmel Mission, a.k.a. The Basilica of Mission San Carlos Borromeo del Rio Carmelo, founded June 3, 1770. It was something we'd missed in 2001, and something Laurie wanted to see. I had been there in 1992, but couldn't enter the sanctuary because a wedding was in progress. (The bridesmaids wore green.) This time we saw it all. The sanctuary was beautiful, the grounds lovely and peaceful. We agreed that the quarters of Padre Junipero Serra were a tad too Spartan, or at least too Franciscan, for our tastes. We exited via the official gift shop, the first such emporium we were to enrich during our travels.
And then it was down Route One to Big Sur. One of the first things we noticed this trip were all the blues of the ocean, not just one shade of blue, but three or four or five, changing in depths and shallows, over sand, over kelp, over rock. Add the mountains, the valleys, the coves, the surf, the rocks, the seals and birds, the ocean horizon, brilliant sun or dense fog, or both together, and you have a landscape that you will never forget.
"The wild road winds round ledges manufactured from the mountains and cliffs. The Pacific in blue spasms reaches all its superlatives." -- Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, 1945
Perched eight hundred feet up a mountainside, where the Santa Lucia Mountains meet the Pacific Ocean, Nepenthe is one of our favorite places on earth. Built on land bought by Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles for a getaway they never got away to, the restaurant has been run by the Fassett family since its opening on April 24, 1949. The food is excellent and the view is one of the best on God's green earth. Laurie would eat there twice a day for eternity.
I wish I could tell you that we heard about Nepenthe from our good friends Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, who visited while filming The Sandpiper in 1963, but I cannot. Neither can I tell you that former patrons Man Ray or Steve McQueen told us. Alas, it was a sailor named Jim Hartman who first brought me to Nepenthe, in 1969. In spite of being an enlisted man from El Paso, Jim had a taste for the good life and an idea of how to live it.
Waiting for the hostess, we heard someone answer the phone and thus got an official pronounciation of "Nepenthe." It is neither "Nepenth" nor "Nepenthee," but rather "Nepenthay." Another mystery solved. Moments later we were whisked to seats overlooking the ocean, and looked over the menus with brimming eyes. I started with the herb-cured salmon with basil aioli, crumbled goat cheese, slivered red onions, capers and buttery toasted baguette slices. Then on to the grilled marinated chicken breast on a French roll, topped with maple-smoked cheddar, lettuce, tomato and chipotle mayo. Laurie went for the broiled swordfish with melted cheese, lettuce and tomato on a toasted French roll, a sandwich she has craved since her first one in October of 2001. She also ordered french fries to be shared with a western blue jay who took his first fry straight from the basket in a blur of blue. After that, we lined up sacrificial fries on the edge of the long table to protect our own investment. The waitress told us the jays have been known to take fries directly from patrons' mouths.These are really good fries.
In addition to the convivial jays, the skies and mountainside were also populated by crows, turkey vultures, hawks and a very large woodpecker in a nearby tree (which Laurie identified as a Downy Woodpecker, but it may have been a Hairy Woodpecker, given its size -- clearly we need to check again). We capped our lunch with slices of cheesecake and three-berry pie, and then forced ourselves to go down to the Phoenix gift shop, an Aladdin's cave, where I found my first commemorative hat, a bar of eucalyptus soap to remind me of the eucalyptus grove every morning, and a postcard with teapots to send to Melissa, who is an authority on all things tea and Dante. There were no Dante postcards. I'd like to tell you that the writer of "The Divine Comedy" drank at the Nepenthe bar with Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller and Anais Nin, but I cannot. You would see right through that one.
Lolly Fassett added the Phoenix Shop to Nepenthe in 1964, and some of the first items for sale came from her collection of Native American jewelry, pieces she chose because they were "either incredibly beautiful or incredibly interesting." Not surprisingly, everything in the shop is beautiful, interesting or both. Laurie fell in love with a silver bracelet set with small colored stones but couldn't justify the purchase. This is a woman who once called me at work to ask if I thought it was okay to buy shelf paper for the kitchen cabinets. It pained us both to see the bracelet return to the case, but I knew we'd be back the next day.
A few minutes and a few miles later we found ourselves at the Big Sur Lodge at Pfeiffer State Park, in a cabin with two bedrooms and a fireplace. In need of a walk after our epic lunch, we headed into a redwood grove and up to Pfeiffer Falls. I had never been this close to redwoods, and they were magnificent. I hugged a tree, and felt better for it. At the beginning of the trail, a cross-section of a redwood logged many years ago was set up, with arrows pointing to the tree's rings, showing the time of various historic events. When the Magna Carta was signed in 1215, the tree was already a giant.
Mankind will never again allow trees like these to grow unmolested for hundreds of years, and I felt privileged to see nature's handiwork while it stood, before some "Defense of Our Nation's Forests Act" is passed to authorize clear-cutting and black-top paving to end forever the threat of forest fires, the destruction of luxury weekend getaways, and attacks by mountain lions upon innocent Christian children. What thoughful, courageous Congressman is going to vote against that one? The trees, for the moment however, were untouched and holy, and the waterfall was beautiful, about 80 feet high and just as scenic as all get-out.
"This is the California that men dreamed of years ago, this is the Pacific that Balboa looked out on from the Peak of Darien, this is the face of the earth as the Creator intended it to look." -- Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, 1957
At the Big Sur Lodge general store, we made one of our most important travel purchases, a deck of Bicycle playing cards. It was going to be a week of rooms with no TV and no phone, and neither one of us had brought a guitar. The only game we could remember was Gin Rummy. Still waddling from lunch, I bought a small cup of fruit and a bag of Mint Milanos for a light dinner. Laurie purchased similar provisions and we returned to our cabin and settled in for an indoor picnic as it began to rain. It was wonderfully cozy, and we felt a million miles away from our daily concerns.
In the morning, we went to the mysterious Pfeiffer Beach. It's less than a mile from the State Park and the Lodge, but there is no sign for Pfeiffer Beach. There is a sign that says, "Trailers not recommended," which serves as a wink and a nudge to the wise. Once you've made the turn, and wound your way down through the first couple of curves, suddenly there's a very nice official sign for Pfeiffer Beach. But nobody is advertising for traffic. The single-lane road continues past the sign, down and down and down, past homes, cabins, across a stream, finally to a toll-booth (unattended but with clear instructions for payment) and into an official looking parking lot. From the lot, it's a short walk to the beach. And what a beach. Here the mountains meet the sea, and the sea pounds the rock. We were awed, delighted, and after about 15 minutes we were almost blown off the beach by a sudden change in the weather. It was time to go indoors.
"...the granite sea-boulders are prey to no hawk's wing, they have taken a worse pounding,/Like me they remember/Old wars and quiet; for we think that the future is one piece with the past, we wonder why tree-tops/And people are so shaken." -- Robinson Jeffers, "Granite and Cypress," 1925
Our next stop was the Big Sur Post Office, which, given my love for all things postal, was as much a pilgrimage as it was a chance to mail Melissa's postcard. The postal person was a natural beauty, as befits Big Sur.
And then on to the Henry Miller Library. This combination shrine, museum, performance center, sculpture garden, book store and hangout was recommended to us by Dan Donehey, a former Monterey classmate. The description on the Web notes "an eclectic selection" of books; I was perilously close to finishing Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, and needed something new to read. Fortunately, in the midst of the Miller-era literature was H. Rider Haggard's She, an adventure tale in print continuously since its publication in 1887. I had read Haggard's King Solomon's Mines many years ago, but She had escaped me until now. What a book. For all its faults, and they are legion, this is a ripping yarn, with a shipwreck, cannibals, swamps, caverns and chasms, a lost civilization, flaming mummies, life and death in the balance, and, of course, Ayesha, a 2000-year-old but eternally youthful vixen with flowing hair, filmy garments and a silvery, come-hither tone that fogs men's minds. The cover was illustrated with Franz von Stuck's painting, Die Sünde (The Sin), which created a sensation when first shown in 1893 in Munich. A naked Eve, already in league with the serpent who is draped over her bare shoulders, joins the snake in looking at the viewer while Marvin Gaye sings, "Let's Get It On." The works of Haggard and von Stuck both inspired Freudian references in their day, so there was a real logic to this pairing, and lurid adventure was just the ticket for this bad boy.
Speaking of bad boys, one of the recurring motifs on the walls of the Henry Miller Library is a photo of a man's face in close proximity to a shapely female derriere. Seeing this pose with a number of smiling men, I wondered if it was a standard format, like the backgrounds you chose for a yearbook or church directory photo. "I'd like the Henry Miller background, please." Next time, I'm going to ask.
We returned to Nepenthe for an encore lunch and shelter from the weather. We warmed ourselves with soup and pots of tea. I had the salmon appetizer again just to be sure I remembered it correctly from the day before. After lunch, we returned to the Phoenix and the bracelet was still in the case. I took it as a sign. Laurie was still reluctant, but clearly in love, and with two salespeople and myself working as a team, we finally succeeded in persuading her to accept the bracelet as a 25th anniversary present. In celebration, I bought a Flyer Gold Plane 5 milk chocolate bar imported from Switzerland and flavored with the highest quality vanilla beans, said to be "The Best Candy Bar in the World" and adorned with an airplane on the wrapper.
After we returned to the Big Sur Lodge, the skies cleared and we decided to try the Valley View trail. It was listed as "easy to moderate" and tempted us with a view of the ocean and mountains, and perhaps a glimpse of a California Condor. But as its name hinted, we were going to have to climb. The hills of San Francisco had left me winded, but climbing a mountain in Big Sur I felt like a Boy Scout again. It was glorious. However, I was conscious of every step Laurie would have to take, going up and down. Laurie had been in the hospital three weeks earlier, unable to stand, but she was willing to try. And she was a veritable Sherpa. Forty minutes later, at the top of the trail, she was my hero.
We paused at the "scenic overlook," watching birds and soaking up the glory of Big Sur. And then back down we went, taking an easier return trail that hooked up with the Falls trail we'd been on the day before, getting another redwood grove fix before returning to our room, and a quiet dinner in the Lodge restaurant.
"And that is why I choose to remain here, on the slopes of the Santa Lucia, where to give thanks to the Creator comes natural and easy. Out yonder they may curse, revile and torture one another, defile all human instincts, make a shambles of creation (as if it were in there power), but here, no, here it is unthinkable, here there is abiding peace, the peace of God, and the serene security created by a handful of good neighbors living at one with the creature world, with noble, ancient trees, scrub and sagebrush, wild lilac and lovely lupin, with poppies and buzzards, eagles and humming birds, gophers and rattlesnakes, and sea and sky unending." -- Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (1956)
Breakfast on Saturday morning was not so quiet but much more interesting. Three runners at a nearby table were in Big Sur for the marathon to be run on Sunday. A young man was calm, relaxed, a mellow Buddha, ready to take the day and the run as it came. In contrast, two women were tightly wrapped studies whose pre-run rituals, dietary patterns and race tactics were complex and inflexible. The women talked about water bottles and cups and at what precise mile points they would accept water and what supplements they took with their water while they were running and what they did when the water was not at the precise mile points, and about power drinks, power bars and the merits of walking-running. One of the women was a classic runner, a bird-like creature wearing her running cap throughout the meal, and a sparse meal it must have been because she was carrying no extra weight over the miles to come. The other women looked like she had just checked herself out of a clinic -- pale complexion, red-rimmed eyes, more of a marathon crier. Neither woman talked about the joy of running or the scenery. Nor did they discuss some of the Big Sur Marathon's special features -- Taiko drummers at the base of Hurricane Point, a tuxedo-clad piano player at Bixby Bridge, the whales spouting, the seals barking, the belly dancers. I hope they survived.
"In the beautiful woods of Carmel an iris bends to the wind" -- George Sterling, "Spring in Carmel," Selected Poems, 1923
After breakfast, we packed and drove up to Carmel for a little light shopping and strolling. It was raining again, but it did not dampen our enthusiasm. First stop was the Cottage of Sweets, where Laurie had scored creamy Australian licorice in 2001. The licorice was still there, as were her favorite lemon Napoleon hard candies. Up the street, the rain urged us into an arcade where we found a shop (Kris Kringle of Carmel) with Patience Brewster's Christmas figures, and had a nice chat about Skaneateles with Carol, the shop's owner. One of our favorite stores was a studio devoted to the work of Stephen Huneck, artist and author of My Dog's Brain. In a shoe store window, Laurie saw a pair of Rockport shoes she wanted, so we popped in, and, since we were there, Laurie persuaded me to give up my lawn-mowing/porch-painting sneakers in favor of a new pair of walking shoes. Hey, we were on vacation.
As noon approached, we headed for Monterey. At the wharf, we rendezvoused with Laurie's brother Jeff, his wife Millie and their son Erik, who had come up from Long Beach to vacation with us. With the advent of the cell phone, the thrill has gone out of making connections; you can talk to each other until you're too close to hold the phone. We had lunch at a Japanese restaurant by the public pier, and then Laurie and I checked into the Grand View Inn in Pacific Grove, looked at the ocean from our bed, and spoke with Abbie who was lost in a snowstorm in Indiana with a disabled car. It took about 30 minutes of calming tones, advice and prayer to sort that one out, with an Indiana State Trooper acting as God's emissary on earth, fixing Abbie's car and sending her safely on her way.
And then off to dinner with Gary and Susan. Gary, who you may recall from my epic missive on the Defense Language Institute, is a friend and fellow language student who had the good sense to return to Monterey, rather than take up life elsewhere. I had not spoken to his wife Susan, face to face, since 1972, and it was wonderful to see them both. We met at The Sardine Factory, compared notes on child-rearing, talked about Susan's recent trip to Israel, cutting hair, selling shoes, writing and music, and dined lavishly on abalone bisque, sanddab fillets, and all kinds of good stuff.
The next morning, Laurie and I went for an early walk in Pacific Grove and communed with seals before checking out of the Grand View and reuniting with Jeff, Millie and Erik at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The most profound difference for us, since our last visit, was the Aquarium's embracing of Spanish. And not just subtitles. Every English sign was mirrored with a sign of equal size in Spanish. Every greeting was in both languages. Every presentation was given in both languages; everyone was bilingual, right down to the diver at the bottom of the kelp forest. As she fed the fish, she chatted with the crowd in Spanish and English, alternating which she spoke first. And, not surprisingly, the place was packed with Hispanics, who, from all appearances, felt comfortable and welcomed.
My favorite at the Aquarium is the kelp forest. I could watch it for days. And the otters. I could be an otter. But the deep sea dome with the giant tuna, that was way cool, too. We lunched at the Aquarium's cafeteria (clam chowder in a bread bowl). And of course, we visited the gift shop, where I scored another hat and two t-shirts. I only packed four t-shirts for the week, which put some pressure on me to find three more clean ones, but I was equal to the task.
Our next stop was Asilomar. We love the Asilomar Conference Center. Established in 1913 by the YWCA, with its early buildings designed by Julia Morgan, the same architect who worked on San Simeon for William Randolph Hearst, it is now a part of the California State Park system. The grounds are lovely; small deer roam freely; the rooms are comfortable and inexpensive; and a boardwalk takes you through the fragile dunes to the beach, a glorious beach.
I actually found my way from the Aquarium to Asilomar without a map, showing that although I am a slow learner, there is hope. We checked in and this time I did use a map to find our way to our building: Windward in the Sea Galaxy cluster. Our room was huge, as befits a conference center, with two sinks so Laurie and I could make ourselves beautiful simultaneously. Asilomar allows strays like us to stay as "leisure guests," provided they have a spare room to offer. We stayed in ours about 60 seconds before heading to the boardwalk, through the dunes, across the road and down to the beach. Taking off our shoes, feeling the warm sand on our bare feet, walking to the edge of the ocean, we felt like we had crossed some invisible finish line. We weren't touring any more; we were where we wanted and needed to be. We were back. We were home. We were on the beach at Asilomar, and we had won.
We lingered at the water's edge as long as we could, leaving ourselves just enough time to return to our room and change for dinner. Jeff, Millie and Erik appeared and whisked us off to Roy's at Spanish Bay, a Euro-Hawaiian fusion restaurant that Millie had researched on the Web. An important side-benefit was the necessity to travel on 17 Mile Drive, one of the most beautiful stretches of road in the world. Sadly, a number of McMansions are being built, dwarfing the older homes built when people who possessed wealth also had some taste and restraint to go along with it.
Spanish Bay was fun. Nice architecture, nice interior design, lovely bathroom, lots of people looking well-to-do, and one young boy, sent by his father to fetch a menu, already showing a polished arrogance and disdain for the working stiffs. Our wait-persons were wonderful. The hostess noted that she had a son who looked just like Erik; her husband was Irish/Japanese and she was Portugese/Latina, if I remember the combinations correctly.
We enjoyed the view and the sunset. I had Roy's famous blackened ahi, and it was pretty darn good. Midway through the meal, Erik began to tire and Millie produced a DVD player. When I was a child, I was always quiet and well-mannered in restaurants because I was paralyzed with fear. This was true for any meal my father attended, at home or away. At picnics, I was tied to a tree, so my options for misbehavior were severely curtailed, an arrangement that probably worked to my benefit. But this is 2005, and Erik put on headphones and settled in with SpongeBob SquarePants. Jeff said, "I know, it's weird. People say we're spoiling him, but it's worth it for the peace and quiet." The boy was mesmerized, and perfectly quiet, until SpongeBob did something so hilarious that Erik had to laugh out loud, a great explosion with the unfettered gusto of a whoop, a bray, a war cry. He was quickly notified that silence was golden, and after a moment of fear that his video fix might be taken away, he returned to silent viewing, sitting very still. Until he fell off his chair. Just vanished from view, with only a headphone cord to indicate which direction he'd gone. But he reappeared, hopped back into place and resumed viewing. It reminded me of the time Erik's grandfather fell off his chair at Gruen's, a little German restaurant in Syracuse. You could see the family resemblance. What a magical thing is DNA.
And then we were back at Asilomar, sitting on the bed, playing cards, eating chocolate. The good life.
Breakfast is free, and because we had been eating high on the hog, its simplicity was welcome. And again I was reminded of how handy language skills are. Laurie asked for a yogurt, and the woman behind the counter furrowed her brow and said, "Yogur?" and waited for Laurie to nod. I said, "Uno mas," and the woman's frown turned to a smile. "Gracias," I said as she handed me one more yogurt, and she smiled again. My Spanish is limited, but it was nice to have the right words at hand.
One of the things I love about Asilomar is trying to figure out who belongs to what conference, and what they are conferring about. Late in the day we came up with the idea of joining every association that holds a conference at Asilomar so we could be in constant attendance. There was a Montessori group this time, but they were colorless compared to the quilters, who had sewing machines set up in their meeting rooms and brought samples of batting and backing to breakfast. One older woman was wearing a quilted vest, and Laurie asked her if she had made it herself. She confessed that she had and Laurie said, "It's beautiful," and the woman smiled.
And of course, Asilomar has a gift shop, where I found my third hat, another chocolate bar, more good things to drink.
For those of you who have not been listening to my stories for 30 or more years, I will recap. In 1968, after Basic Training, the United States Air Force sent me to Monterey, California. The Defense Language Institute at the Presidio of Monterey was an astounding contrast to Basic Training at Lackland AFB, Texas. A good contrast, if there's any question. From a flat, barren land where we wore flat, barren expressions, to a green hillside overlooking a blue bay where seals and otters frolicked, and the light returned to our eyes. My assigned language was Serbo-Croatian. I had studied Spanish and French, but never anything like this. Our instructors were civilians and native speakers, all from Yugoslavia. We gradually, sometimes painfully, learned to speak and understand Serbo-Croatian, but we were also invited into another world, another culture, into Mr. Jeffrey's boyhood during World War II where he survived by eating garlic, into Mr. Dimitrievic's time in a prison camp in Italy, into Dr. Stude's interrogation by the Gestapo where they pulled all his teeth, and, most amazingly, into Dr. Wessel's Sarajevo boyhood, where he, at 14, witnessed the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the start of World War I.
In 1992, I was sent to Asilomar for a conference, and returned to the Presidio, walking around the grounds with no questions asked. But when I first brought Laurie to Monterey, a few weeks after September 11, 2001, the base was barricaded, and we were not welcomed. And as we turned the car around, an army lad with an M-16 stepped out from behind a tree, giving Laurie an unexpected first-time view of the business end of an automatic weapon. It was quite a thrill for her, and I wondered if she would ever get to see the site of so many of my stories, or if I would ever set foot there again. But then Dan Donehey, a fellow student in 1969, found me via my Web page about DLI, and told me that there was an alumni coordinator now, and we would be welcomed. Dan gave me her name and e-mail address, and before long I was in touch with Natela Cutter, who said that indeed we were welcome and she would be happy to show us around.
We drove over from Asilomar on Monday morning, and after 20 minutes at the gate with a beleagured security person who was processing a long list of workers from a moving company, Natela was called, appeared and wisked us on-base. "I'm the Alumni Queen," she told the security guard, who had suspected we weren't with the moving company, and who now had us figured out to his satisfaction.
We parked our car and Natela drove, taking Avril Lavinge out of the CD player and putting in folk music from Yugoslavia. "If this starts to make you crazy, just let me know," she said. In addition to being the Alumni coordinator, she was also a former Serbo-Croatian instructor and the wife of the currrent department head. This was a match made in heaven.
And I was in heaven, seeing my classroom again, and the chapel where Jim Starr got married and I took all his wedding pictures out of focus because I was drugged to the gills for pain after a wisdom tooth extraction, and the movie theater which had five movies a week for 25 cents each and we saw every one of them. And the gate with Dee's just outside, except it's not Dee's anymore. And the NCO Club, where workmen had just gutted the interior to make room for classrooms, and the Officers' housing where an officer's wife had once waved to me while gardening.And the Tin Barn, the name of which I had completely forgotten, the ark where we occasionally assembled, a long walk uphill in low quarter shoes. It's still there. But our barracks, B-13, is gone; if you stand on third base of the baseball diamond, you're about there.
Gary is still there, too, having returned to Monterey in 1972, landing a job in the library/warehouse, distributing language texts and tapes to students. We visited his domain, just across the street from the gas station where I bought my first set of tires and gassed up my 1966 Volkswagon. Gary and Natela presented me with a "Survival Guide in Serbo-Croatian" and flash cards which will help me with phrases like "Lie on your stomach" and "Don't be afraid." I can't wait to try them at the next cocktail party I attend.
And then Natela took Laurie and I up to the current Serbo-Croatian department, where I sang a few bars of "Tamo Daleko" for the department head, who wasn't expecting it at all, at least not before noon, and we met many of the teachers. Only one of my instructors is still alive, living nearby, now in his nineties. So it was all new faces, and it dawned on me that the pupils today were not born yet when I was a student. But I did not feel old. I felt terrific.
Natela said we could sit in with a class, and because Laurie is a good sport and I could not get enough of this experience, we were happy to take a seat. The instructor was a striking blonde woman with a lot of attitude and great shoes. I adored her immediately. The students were Army, Navy, Air Force, young men and women.
In 1968, we learned with an easel holding line drawings from our text book, pointing at the relevant frame of the dialogue with a wooden pointer. "Dali ste vi unchenik?" "Da, ja sam uchenik." Today, they have "smart boards" running off lap-top computers. And when the smart board went dark, the instructor reached around and slapped it, shocking it back to life.
"Chutite" the instructor said to an airman who was momentarily off-task. "Be quiet." I hadn't heard that since 1969, but I knew what it meant. You don't forget something you've heard a hundred times. And the airman, wounded, said, "Zhao me je." I hadn't heard "I'm sorry" in Serbo-Croatian since 1969 either. I was as happy as a hog in a wallow.
A sign on the wall read, "Imate slobodu izbora, mozete razgovarati ili na srpskom ili na hrvatskom." -- "You have the freedom of choice, you can speak either in Serbian or in Croatian." It was such a contrast to the nationalism of my era, the Serb vs. Croat tensions that were apparent among the faculty, a microcosm of Yugoslavia in 1968.
"Ko zna? Ko zna?" the instructor snapped, after asking a question. Who knows? Who knows? I wanted to shout, "Ja znam!" But I didn't know, because I was only getting about one word every twenty. "Ja ne znam" was more appropriate. Then the class did an exercise where a pizza delivery person destined for Carmel was lost in Seaside, and they had to role-play the delivery person and the would-be pizza consumer, giving and taking directions. After about five minutes, one student said, "Pizza je hladna" and my brain ground out "hlado = cold" and suddenly I got a joke in Serbo-Croatian. It was so funny I am still smiling.
After class, we met Ben Da Silva, the head of the alumni association and former dean of DLIWC. He had been a student at DLI in the 1960's, like me, but his life had taken a different path, one that went through Vietnam and back to Monterey, where he learned more languages, taught and eventually led the school. We had lunch together, in a chow hall that belonged on a campus rather than an Army base. We had a great talk. I would have stayed all day, had not the beach at Asilomar been calling me. But I hated to leave. I hated to leave in 1969, and I hated to leave now.
Seeing people in the classroom who weren't even alive when I studied Serbo-Croatian at DLI, I felt, for the first time, a part of something much larger than one language class, a member of a family of people who have shared the experience, who recall the beauty of Monterey and the wonder of another culture opened up to us, by native speakers, one verb and one memory at a time.
When it was time to go, I still remembered how to say thank you for everything, "Hvala vam na svemu," but I couldn't say it enough. I did understand the "Nema na chemu" that followed. "Don't mention it."
We drove out the upper gate so I could see my apartment at 2040 Prescott, next door to Campagno's Market. Took a leisurely drive back through Monterey and Pacific Grove to Asilomar, deciding which houses we could live in (most all of them) and then meeting Jeff and Millie and Erik on the beach for kite flying, stone stacking and long walks.
I think I reached peak happiness at Asilomar, walking barefoot on the beach, watching the surf, watching the shore birds scurry along, letting the spent waves wash over my feet, letting the sun and sand warm my feet, and the sea breeze blow through my very soul, cleaning out all the junk. I recalled how my mother loved to watch the water, and wondered if it was part of her legacy to me, or something that everyone gets.
The dogs on the beach at Asilomar are the happiest dogs I have ever seen. Dashing into the surf, running back onto the beach, diving into the sand, digging holes, chasing sticks, balls, frisbees, barking at each other, wagging and panting, almost grinning with the joy of it all, they are in doggie heaven. And what a crew. Big dogs, little dogs, purebreds, mutts, Labs and Goldens, water dogs and lap dogs, and they know one another, racing to greet new arrivals, beagles giving cry, everyone sniffing.
Many of the dogs' people had a long plastic device with a curved cup for a tennis ball at one end, enabling you to pick up the ball without bending over and then throw it really far with no strain on your shoulder. Dogs and masters alike seemed to think it was the greatest invention since the food dish. A greyhound chased a soft frisbee. One Golden ran over as I walked along the edge of the surf and rolled his ball to my feet; we played throw and fetch for a minute, and I felt honored.
We were beachcombing when the tide was out, and found, in a tide pool, a shiny, perfect golf ball. Not being versed in the currents, I wasn't sure which course it had come from. Might it have made its way to the sea via the stream that flows through the Spanish Bay course? Or was this an errant shot at Pebble Beach that had been swept away by the ocean and washed up here? Could it have come off the club of Bob Hope or Bill Murray? One is not allowed to collect shells on the beach at Asilomar, but the sign said nothing about golf balls, and we quickly claimed it as a souvenir.
That evening we had dinner at the Fishwife, a nearby restaurant with excellent seafood, and took another walk on the beach, before playing cards. In the morning we took our last beach walk, and reluctantly got into the car to drive back to San Francisco. I hate leaving Monterey. I always have. And I always have to tell myself why I'm leaving. It's a real argument.
As we pulled up to the curb at the Hotel Cornell, we saw there was a new line on the sign for the World Famous Nude Review. "Look, Laurie," I said, "It's Rookie Night." "Go for it," she replied, and I thought aloud, "This could pay for the whole vacation!" My head filled with visions of a generous cash prize, waves of applause, bouquets flying over the footlights, me standing there as the Good Lord made me, my arms spread wide, "I love you, San Francisco!" But reality set in, and I realized the prize might not be cash but a trophy, too big to pack, too cumbersome to carry, and we had an early flight the next morning. Although confident of victory, and fascinated at the thought of a new career path in adult entertainment, I decided, wistfully, to pass on Rookie Night.
Our last day in California, however, was not to be without other joys. In 1979, my friend Mary took me to the Hoffman Grill on Market Street for lunch; I was hoping it was still there, but alas it passed into history at the hands of a developer in 1983. Mary didn't recall Hoffman's, but thought I might have been talking about the Tadich Grill, and given the state of my memory, and the word "Grill," I said, "Yes, that's it!" (A check of a 1978 notebook has revealed that I was in both Hoffman's and Tadich's on that trip; now I just have to figure out who took me to Tadich's.)
The Tadich Grill has been in continuous operation since 1849, when it was opened as a coffee stand on a wharf by three Croats. A gentleman named John Tadich immigrated to San Francisco in 1872, and began working for his fellow Croats soon after, and became sole owner of the restaurant in 1887. He sold in 1928 to the Buich family, which carries on the Tadich tradition. Today, the Tadich Grill is San Francisco's (and California's) oldest restaurant. Mary assured me that if Herb Caen was still alive, he would have been at the bar. I loved Herb Caen, having read his column in the San Francisco Chronicle when I was stationed in Monterey. Settled in a booth at the Tadich Grill, I felt right at home.
Given its Croatian origins and Croatian-American ownership, the restaurant's seafood recipes have as much to do with the Adriatic as with the nearby Pacific; I had the Seafood Cioppino with garlic bread, a fabulous stew with clams, prawns, scallops, bay shrimp, crabmeat and white fish in some kind of heavenly broth.
Over our bowls of seafood, Mary's boyfriend, Brian, mentioned a friend who was on Prozac and stopped having sexual fantasies, and asked me if Zoloft was affecting me in that way. And Mary, who has known me for 40 years, who knows me as well as anyone on earth, who knows that I have no secrets and probably would launch into a discussion of my sexual fantasies even though my wife was sitting immediately to my left, began signaling even before the question was finished, miming a zipped lip, her eyes wide, shaking her head and then, not sure I'd gotten the message, said out loud, "Don't go there." And because I always do what Mary asks me to do, I did not go there, but instead took another mouthful of Seafood Cioppino.
After lunch and a few digital photo moments with Mary and Brian, we made our way back to the Hotel Cornell, stopping first at a small convenience store where I found a cold bottle of Squirt, a grapefruit soda from my youth that I had not seen in 30 years. It tastes the same, delicious.
Our last dinner in San Francisco was at the Jeanne d'Arc, a wonderful French restaurant in our French hotel. After our last trip, I had written about a young Chinese woman who came in and chatted with the head waiter in Chinese, then sat down with friends, the conversation in French at first and then in English. This time, a young Chinese couple was dining nearby, and in the middle of the meal, the woman took a call on her cell phone, the conversation entirely in Spanish. If you want to eavesdrop in San Francisco, you really need to pay attention in language class.
Sitting there, I recalled a line in Marie Vassiltchikov's Berlin Diaries where she is describing a hopelessly uncultured couple. "They barely speak two languages," she wrote. The lady of the Jeanne d'Arc came over, looked at our salad plates and said, "C'est fini?" Fresh from the visit to DLI, with Serbo-Croatian words fluttering through my head like startled sparrows and my high school Spanish and French bumping into one another in the crowded halls of memory, I finally managed, "Oui," after ruling out "Da," "Si" and "Yes."
I don't remember much about the flight home, reading She in the airplane, playing cards with Laurie. On the flight out, we had met our friend Susie in the airport, headed for Florida; on the return leg, we saw no one as delightful or interesting.
The morning after we returned to Skaneateles, we went to the kennel to get Gus, and boy was he happy to see us, and we him. That night, all of us were home in our own beds, but I found I could not remember the Serbo-Croatian word for "Why." I wasn't going to rest until it came to me, so I turned on the light, got back up, and opened the dictionary. "Zashto." Of course. "Zashto da ne?" And so to sleep.
Links:
Asilomar Conference Grounds... www.visitasilomar.com
Big Sur Lodge... www.bigsurlodge.com
Carmel Mission... www.carmelmission.org
Cornell Hotel de France... www.cornellhotel.com
Cottage of Sweets (Carmel)... www.cottageofsweets.com
DLI Alumni Association... www.dli-alumni.org
The Fishwife... fishwife.com
Grand View Inn... www.pginns.com
Henry Miller Library... www.henrymiller.org
Kris Kringle of Carmel... www.kriskringleofcarmel.com
Monterey Bay Aquarium... www.mbayaq.org
Nepenthe... www.nepenthebigsur.com
Roy's Restaurant... www.roysrestaurant.com
The Sardine Factory... www.sardinefactory.com