From the time I was ten on, we would pack the Ford XL and head up to Yerba Buena Road in Malibu where my grandparents and my mom’s brother’s family lived. They all lived together in a 7000 square foot home on the side of a hill that had been poorly graded by the previous owner, a crook, according to my grandmother. The homemade grading resulted in a large 20 foot long crack that was two inches wide across the master bedroom floor. This was one reason the five acre property was such a steal when my constantly unemployed uncle convinced my grandparents to buy it.

The dream of a big family compound was always one that my uncle had promoted. I think he knew his ability to provide would be challenged. He and my aunt as well as their two children lived with my grandparents in this giant house in a harmony that not so quietly eroded along with the hillside.

Truly the house was in a beautiful spot. The full chain of the Channel Islands could be seen from the 1200 square foot living room on a clear day. This never impressed me as a child. The house was where my grandparents lived and we visited often, it was fairly boring there compared to the adobe house they had moved from in Tujunga with its terraced desert gardens. I was always a bit sad that they had made the move. I would ride by bike around the paths that circled the house over looking the Pacific Ocean avoiding the ones that were dropping off the hillside, never questioning what was eroding.

The house was “L” shaped. The long part of the “L” was a row of bedrooms and bathrooms connected by one long wide hallway, culminating at the master bedroom with the afore mentioned crack. The master bedroom had a bathtub the size of two hot tubs that could never be filled because of the water heater was incapable of producing that much hot water before the whole thing cooled down. At the bend of the “L” was a huge kitchen sporting an “island”. I think that this was the failed prototype for kitchen islands. It was so big that it was horribly difficult to cook anything in. The room was dark with one tiny window. My grandmother would have to sit in between tasks to save her legs from the miles she had to walk to cook a simple meal in that kitchen. Her legs were always hurting her. I cannot remember a time when they didn’t hurt her. I assumed it was the extra pounds that she carried on her small five foot one inch body, but maybe it a was the kitchen.

The enormous living room housed only two things, my grandmother’s piano organ and a orange brocade couch. Every visit we would be commanded to sit on the couch and listen to her play and sing along to a variety of show tunes. I rarely glanced out the three walls of windows, I was intrigued at the spectacle. Every note she held down, on the keys of the organ, were long and wobbly as she searched the music for her next note. She sat legs splayed in her homemade paisley muu-muu, reaching for the peddles of that organ, singing those songs, pressing the myriad buttons with names like “samba,calypso,ragtime,or minuette”. Her fine gray hair was always pulled up tight into a tiny bun on the top of her head. “Come over here and sing with me.” She would invite one lucky member of the audience to sit on the organ bench beside her. I never anticipated a day when this might embarrass me.

Certainly my grandparents were the two most “in-love” people I had ever witnessed. My grandfather was a Scotsman by decent. He was handsome, six foot four inches with a full head of white thick hair. A second marriage for both of them after both being widowed with young children, they had found the happiness they deserved. This sweet love affair was so intoxicating, I longed to be around it. I spent many weekends with them, driving out to the desert to pick pears, picnicking down at the beach under the sycamore trees, or driving out to El Rio near Oxnard for their favorite mexican food. We always had fun and we always ate well.

When I was younger and my grandparents were younger, although they still were old to me, they lived in Tujunga, near Pasadena. My sister and I spent every weekend with them in their adobe house on Glory Ave. The casement windows were painted turquoise. The yellow painted kitchen faced west and the afternoon sun lit up the room with the glory of the afternoon cooking. I knew that the street was named Glory for a reason. I was only happy there. The front of the house had a wide covered porch, perfect for playing dolls in the hot afternoons. There was an old goat pen, now covered over with trees and shrubs that my sister and I spent hours in. Best of all were the enormous granite rocks that lined the front of the property on the street, maybe there were ten. Those rocks became pirate ships, castles, orphanages, or houses, thousands of times. We had to work hard to jump from one to the next, they were so big. In the evenings we would watch television in my grandparents living room with the recessed lighting, hearing gently the hum and glow of the fish tank that separated the kitchen and the living room. We were safe there, away from the struggles of my parents marriage. In the mornings we would crawl in bed with my grandparents, my grandmother would snuggle us, keeping us safe.

In the afternoons we would always go on some excursion. The most exciting part of the excursion was the drive. My grandfather was a car nut. In 1965 he drove an orange convertible BMW and a Isetta. An Isetta was a 13 horse power, one cylinder, BMW that sported the front door as the entire front of the car. The door opened with the steering wheel attached. The car was not the most amazing part, it was that both my grandparents and my sister and I could fit into this thing with bags of groceries on the back shelf and drive back up the steep hills of San Gabriel Mountains. My father had one for a short time also, but he sold it one afternoon to the guy for $15.00 who towed us home off the Camarillo Grade. I wish I had that thing now, just to look at it and remember the laughing afternoons with my grandparents.

Years later after I was married, I visited the adobe on Glory Ave. The new owners had put a chain link fence around the whole property. I hope it was to keep something in. I got out of the car and stood next to those granite rocks that came hip high. I was sorry that my grandparents had moved, I loved this place, it had been my hideout.

They are both gone now. The house in Malibu was sold for a song due to the eroding hillside. The last I heard was that the house was used for making erotic films. My grandmother would have hated this, but the dead make few decisions.

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I am so ready for summer!

It is so foggy here in Santa Cruz right now. I know that we don’t need to worry about it yet. Memorial Day weekend it usually rains here. I know this because my neighbors spend the week prior to the three day weekend shining up their jet skis and stocking their motor home. The Friday afternoon before the long weekend, they pull out with their haul and head on down to Lake San Antonio, a lake I have never been to because I fear it is covered with jet skis. Anyway, every Saturday afternoon on the long Memorial Day weekend they return because it is raining. We watch them pull the load and the crew back into the driveway and unpack the fun. I am not gloating, it is merely an observation I have observed for the last twenty eight years that we have lived in our house. This year however they stayed down at the lake, maybe they got the sun that we all so desperately missed.

I am just praying for a repeat of last summer, soooo much sun and fun. It was great weather most of the summer. It is always foggy in the mornings and evenings here, but last summer we were almost able to forget that one drawback of coastal living.

I grew up in the San Fernando Valley in Southern California, specifically a suburb called Agoura. It wasn’t much of anything but rolling grassy hills and housing tracts. Summers were hot, extremely hot! My mom worked at a public swimming pool in the summers because my dad was a teacher and I guess someone needed to work during the summer. My sister and I thought we were the luckiest kids around. We got free admission to the public swimming pool everyday, all day. We each lived in our bathing suits, that quickly lost all their color and elasticity from the copious amounts of chlorine in the pool. We wore our hair long and green. We took every swimming lesson and water ballet class numerous times. We prided ourselves in knowing all the pool safety regulations and dispensed our knowledge with enthusiasm through the end of megaphones whenever we could get our hands on one. Whenever the lifeguards needed a victim to rescue for a drill, it was one of us. We were the envy of the public swimming pools kids, because when the pool closed from noon to 1:00 PM we got to swim with the lifegaurds while all the other overheated kids waited outside the chain-link fence watching us. It was a fine childhood.

It was during one of these summers that I took my first cake decorating class at Lanark Park Recreation Center. Little did I know that the complaining that I did over having to sift a one pound box of powdered sugar later in my life I would consider a tiny amount of powdered sugar to sift. I made a “Humptey Dumptey” cake that I was so proud of. I have never made one again, but I bet I could if I tried.

Of all the summer memories it was the warm summer evenings that I love and miss the most. The dinners outside in the cooling early evening. Our miniature poodle George lying with her belly on the shady evening grass. Playing guitar with my Dad out on the front porch, singing all those old Joan Baez and Pete Seeger ballads. Fresh corn on the cob that I had to cut off for five years because I wore braces. It is this experience that I cannot reproduce here on the foggy central coast. There are loads of other fabulous reasons that I love it here and I will never move. Ah, but those warm summer nights are a lovely lingering memory.

Fog in the morning is wonderful. It makes coffee taste very good. Coffee is already delicious, but that warm cup on a cool, foggy, summer morning has a quality unique to itself. There is a deliberate slowness to the morning. The blue ocean color breaking through the steely gray blanket of fog is magical. I love to walk along West Cliff in the early foggy mornings and watch this alchemy.

Where are those summer evenings? We have to travel to find them in the summer to warmer climes and turn the outdoor heaters on when we are here. We find them at Silver Lake in the Sierras every August and over at Mark’s sister’s house in Santa Clara. We have found them in Charlevoix Michigan at our friends “cottage” and in Portland Oregon at my mom’s in late June. We have purchased outdoor heaters and surrounded the patio couches with them. We blast the heat and watch movies outside on a big sheet hanging from the roof’s edge. We cannot rely on the nightly parade of summer evening warmth as I did in my youth.

Memorial Day weekend and it’s undependable weather is not an indicator of the summer ahead. It doesn’t mean we will have a month of fog in July, it is a weekend in May, not yet even summer officially. But, if we do have a month of fog in July we will enjoy our morning coffee in the fog,

walk West Cliff and then head somewhere to the sun, just over the hill or further, maybe we will check out Lake San Antonio.

Corn Salad

5 fresh ears of corn. Corn must be very fresh. Buy them at a farmer’s market when you know they have been recently picked. Corn begins to starch immediately and looses its sweetness.

• 1 basket of cherry tomatoes
• 1 red bell pepper chopped
• 1 yellow bell pepper chopped
• 1 serrano chile chopped (optional)
• 1 cup basil leaves
• 1/2 cup cilantro leaves
• 1 avocado cut into cubes
• 1/2 cup olive oil
• 1TB red wine vinegar
• 1 teas lemon juice
• Salt and pepper
• 1 shallot minced

Cut the corn off the husks into a bowl

Put the halved cherry tomatoes, and the chopped bell peppers in the bowl with the corn

Add the serrano at this time if you want a spicy salad

Add the avocado and the cilantro leaves. do not mix the salad at this point you son’t want to bruise the cilantro or the avocado

Make the vinaigrette

Put the olive oil, vinegar and lemon juice in a bowl , whisk with the salt and pepper. (Remember corn likes salt so taste to make sure you are adding enough)

Add the minced shallot

Cut the basil leaves into long chiffonade strips. Do not cut the basil until you are just ready to plate the salads,
basil tends to oxidize on the cut edges and look unsightly.

Toss the salad with the vinaigrette and put onto serving plates

Sprinkle the basil on top and finish with a few grindings of black pepper

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