travel

September 25, 1978

September 25, 1978_edited-1

This day magnified how much hinges on small things. If J and I had lived on the west side – closer to LAX than to Burbank – he would’ve been on the plane that went down. Since we lived in Glendale – primarily because we couldn’t afford to live on the west side – he flew out of Burbank instead. He was driving out of the San Diego airport – heading for his court appearance – when he saw the plane explode.

JOHN AND I WITH CHRIS IN 1978
JOHN AND I WITH CHRIS IN 1978

If I’d been widowed in such a shocking way in 1978, I can’t imagine what my life would’ve been like. I know it wouldn’t be anything like the lives J and I got to share for the next 38 years. (For one thing, two of our children don’t get born.)

FATE

If I stopped to consider how many near misses with death might occur in any given day, let alone month or year, I’d be too paralyzed with fear to leave the house (which, of course, is no guarantee the house won’t fall down on my head when the Big One hits California.) Every time I’m stuck in traffic for hours, I’m lucky not to be one of the fatalities that triggered the sig alert.  If the 9/11 terrorists targeted the Empire State Building instead of the Twin Towers, I would’ve been two blocks away instead of two miles. So far, I’ve stayed healthy while friends who took better care of themselves struggle with terminal illnesses.

Fooled By Randomness

In 2001, Nassim Taleb published Fooled by Randomness which argues that modern man overestimates casuality in an effort to believe that our world is more rational than it actually is.  If we can convince ourselves we’re alive due to luck or destiny, we don’t have to worry quite so much about getting hit by a bus.

I have no answers; only questions. A quote from Taleb’s book:

Welcome to reality

“Reality is far more vicious than Russian roulette. First, it delivers the fatal bullet rather infrequently, like a revolver that would have hundreds, even thousands of chambers instead of six. After a few dozen tries, one forgets about the existence of a bullet, under a numbing false sense of security. Second, unlike a well-defined precise game like Russian roulette, where the risks are visible to anyone capable of multiplying and dividing by six, one does not observe the barrel of reality. One is capable of unwittingly playing Russian roulette – and calling it by some alternative “low risk” game.”

 

September 18, 1971

 

September 18, 1971

 

The universe as charted in Lloyd's mind.
The universe as charted in Lloyd’s mind.

Ensenada 1

Lloyd (not his real name) told me he had psychiatric problems when we met. Because of this, he claimed he could never have a romantic or sexual relationship with any girl. I didn’t want one with him so that came as a relief. Even though we didn’t live far apart, we started our friendship as pen pals.


Montalvo_edited-1

His voluminous letters were the first warning sign. Ten hand-written pages a day were typical. A tiny warning light flicked on when he pointed out that the stamps on the envelopes his letters arrived in were never cancelled. In other words, he drove them to my mailbox himself late at night.

He loved photography and wanted me to model for him. He took the photos featured here on one of our two photo sessions.  As a vain, shallow adolescent, I lapped this up – but not for long. His criticisms of me were scathing and increasingly frequent. In retrospect, I think one of the reasons I hung around was to win his admiration back. The desire to recapture something I thought lost kept me in a lot of relationships in those days. For that matter, it’s one of the reasons I kept a diary.


Ensenada 3

That’s why I can’t deny I saw Lloyd’s red flags long before our trip to Ensenada; I just didn’t heed them. There was that trip to San Francisco, when he threatened to swerve into oncoming traffic and kill us both. The fact that he didn’t follow through on that threat doesn’t negate it as a red flag.

I’d be crazed with fear if my daughter was dating a guy who displayed Lloyd’s character traits but for some reason I failed to fear for myself.  Like other young, dumb adolescents, I believed I’d live forever. I didn’t end the relationship with Lloyd because I was afraid but because I was exasperated.

I didn't focus on fear for myself.
I didn’t focus on fear for myself.

 

 

August 26, 1969

8-26-1969

 

MY PARENTS CIRCA 1969
MY PARENTS CIRCA 1969

This entry is a perfect illustration of the tricks memory plays. I would have sworn that my father came to LA to inform me of the call to San Diego and that today was the first time I was aware of the possibility. I was even more certain that it was on this day, at LAX, that he dropped the bomb – it was a done deal, they were committed to moving and I had no say in it. This, too, is apparently false. Who am I kidding, apparently? If the battle for truth is between my diary and my memory, the diary scores a knock-out.

SNEAKY FAMILY PREPARES TO ABSCOND
SNEAKY FAMILY PREPARES TO ABSCOND

If I hadn’t written everything down in my diary, I’d buy my own fiction in which, not so coincidentally, I am cast as the hapless victim. Until I came across this particular entry, I believed my version was 100% accurate. It turns out none of it is factually true.

In my defense, my version was emotionally true  to my feelings about abandoning  Santa Clara for San Diego.  I felt blindsided and betrayed. When I left to attend UCLA, I expected to return to Santa Clara every Christmas and summer – where else would I ever want to go?  I didn’t remember any other home before Santa Clara.  The shocking realization that – aside from a quick dash to box my earthly possessions for a move to a city I’d never seen and where I knew no one – aside from that, I could never go home again. The house I grew up in would be occupied by strangers.

Inverted Hurt

 

Good-bye

If I ruled the world, my family would never leave Santa Clara (or age, for that matter). My parents would live in our old parsonage which would look exactly like it used to – but that hasn’t been true for 47 years now.

And I’m still not completely over it.

DEL MONTE THEN – We didn’t own our house; Hope Lutheran owned the parsonage, we just lived there. The new pastor thought it was too small (no duh) and the church sold it in October, 1970, for $27,700. It was your basic three bedroom two bath Lawrence Meadows tract house. My thanks to Lester Larson who posted this 1956 Lawrence Meadows brochure, below,  on Facebook. The floor plan depicted in the brochure was ours; I think that may even be our house in the picture.

Lawrence Meadows

 

OUR HOUSE IN LAWRENCE MEADOWS IN SANTA CLARA
OUR HOUSE IN LAWRENCE MEADOWS IN SANTA CLARA

DEL MONTE NOW – This is what our house looks like today.  Apparently it now has six bedrooms and three bathrooms and the estimated value is (gulp) $1, 308,597.

House Now

 

July 12, 1968


June 12. 1968 Revised

Milking the cow back in 1955

Judging by the October 1955 photo above, even at four I wasn’t a “thank god I’m a country girl” type.  Still, I couldn’t help wondering what my life would be like if I’d grown up in Missouri instead of Silicon Valley.

Fishing with some of our relatives in Iowa.
Fishing with some of our relatives in Iowa.

Most of my cousins – almost all of my extended family – lived in the Midwest in 1968. Every other year, our family loaded up the station wagon and drove to Estherville and Graettinger in the northeastern corner of Iowa.  There are aspects of Iowa that are buried deep in my subconscious, images that are inscribed on my brain – brick or white houses, humidity and mosquitoes, dinners with fresh buttered sweet corn and strange puffy homemade bread. The smell of coffee wafted through the day – coffee and musty old books. The basements, which all contained a washer, dryer and toilet were damp and a little bit scary even though that’s where we always played.  It was cooler down there even though sometimes it was still so hot all we could do was breathe and sweat. I hate to sweat.

With adult cousins on my father's side
With adult cousins on my father’s side

My grandfather, commonly referred to as R.S. by all grandchildren, was a real go-getter, a non-stop talker. Even after retirement, he didn’t quit; he took volunteer work in a funeral parlor, probably to remind himself on a daily basis of how much more vital he was than the average man. In a box in his basement, he stored the obituaries of all his friends. The basement also held a pool table and assorted recreation equipment but my cousins and I enjoyed the obits most. I suppose our fear of death – and its imminence for all the aged people of Estherville – made it an object of high hilarity.

With adult cousins on my mother's side - at the tiny (very tiny) Spencer airport
With adult cousins on my mother’s side – at the tiny (very tiny) Spencer airport

We had no idea how quickly time could pass.

 

 

 

Our New Tradition – Every 21 Years – Meet In Rome

21 years ago, over Thanksgiving, John and I took our children and met our friends, Bill and Bobbi Atherton, for a week in Rome.  The photo below shows me and the kids at the catacombs in 1994.  (Chris is almost 18, Sam is 11 and Alex is 10. You don’t need to know how old I am. )
kcat
Today John and I (sans children, who now have lives of their own) are flying to meet up with the Athertons in Rome again. (It’s our new tradition.  Travel to  Rome together every 21 years till we die.)  Even though the children are not accompanying us this time, I’m posting a picture of me with them as we all look today below.  What a difference 21 years makes, huh?
Happy Holidays!

About Scandinavians

In a few days, I’m leaving on a trip through Scandinavia. I’ve never been there, even though I’m half Danish and almost half Norwegian (there’s a smidge of Swedish on the Norwegian side).  I have my own stereotypes about Scandinavians based on my extended family but in the interests of objective research, I skimmed two recent books on the topic – The Almost Nearly Perfect People (Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia) by Michael Booth and How to be Danish (A Journey to the Cultural Heart of Denmark) by Patrick Kingsley. The following bullet points are culled from these books.

  • Danes are joiners; they belong to more clubs than most nationalities.
  • Clubs include choirs, in which the blending of all voices is more important than any one voice – a perfect illustration of the Dane’s flock instinct.
  • Danes have the highest level of trust (in other people) in the world.
  • In the 90s, someone did an experiment in which they left 40 wallets unattended in forty cities. All 40 wallets were returned in only two countries – Denmark and Norway. So apparently some of that trust is warranted.
  • All of the Scandinavian countries talk smack about their neighboring Scandinavian countries. Danes are knocked for deteriorating language skills. Norwegians, resented because of their oil wealth, are knocked for being stupid country bumpkins. However, Sweden is the most intensely despised by its neighbors.
  • Swedes have a heightened fear of appearing foolish “reflected by one of the key words by which the Swedes define themselves – duktig. It literally translates as clever, but this is a specific type of Swedish cleverness; a diligent, responsible kind of clever; punctual, law-abiding, industrious clever.” (Booth)
  • In Sweden, it’s a major faux pas to touch wine glasses after a toast.
  • Swedes don’t converse with each other on buses.
  • Swedes are considered shy and self-effacing.
  • Ake Daun, author of The Swedish Mentality, describes Swedes as “a race of wallflowers racked with insecurities; they would rather take the stairs than share a lift.”
  • Norwegians dress in extravagant national costumes on May 17 (Norwegian Constitution Day) – heavily embroidered dirndls, hobnail shoes, shawls, bright-buttoned breeches, etc.
  • Oslo residents are the second richest in the world, right behind Hartford, Connecticut citizens.
  • Oslo is extremely expensive! Taxi drivers apologize for the fares. “Sorry. It’s Norway.”

More to come in future posts!