My Stories

M y first car was a 1959 Chevy Bel Air, you know, the kind with the big fins in the back. My parents gave me the car when I first got a driver’s license, the day I turned sixteen. I do not remember if it was a hand-me-down or a used car, they specifically bought for me. Thinking back now, I’m pretty sure it was a used car they bought and not a car they drove prior to me getting it. They always drove Oldsmobile’s. The car had a couple of issues. The brakes were not all that good, but I knew how to handle the car so had no problem in stopping it. A couple extra pumps of the brakes did the trick. Plus anticipating when you needed to brake in advance of braking. I’m not sure why I did not tell my parents about the brakes, perhaps it was because I was responsible for the car’s maintenance and did not want to spend the money. Anyway, I was satisfied that I could handle it. The other flaw was being able start the car without a key. You could simply get in and with your hand move the part that...

  Mushrooms I love to look for mushrooms with their many magnificent colors and shapes. I enjoy taking pictures of them. Mushrooms look primeval and normally grow in lush green forests and seem to come out when it’s raining, fogging, and misty. When I see mushrooms, I think of dinosaurs roaming the forest floor. I love to eat mushrooms. They are delicious baked, grilled, and fried. I particularly love them in stroganoff sauce over brown rice or pasta noodles. I love portabella mushroom burgers. I love the Asian variety of mushrooms used in stir fry. And there’s nothing not a good mushroom pizza, particularly if the pizza crust is thin and crispy. One of my all-time favorites is the Candy cap mushroom ice cream at Cowlicks and Frankie’s. Just thinking about it makes me want to take a drive up the Coast. I’ve never tried mushrooms as a hallucinogen. Many have and love the experience. I think it can be good for many things, but I think I’m too old to try but we’ll see what life brings...

  My last Dance at Cafe Danssa   The music cuts off, leaving an echo in the air as the dancers slowly come to their senses. They’re scattered across the floor, some sprawled on their backs, others tangled up like a heap of overturned marionettes. Somewhere in the distance, a voice crackles over the mic, “Um… let’s take a quick pause, everyone.” Just moments earlier. As dancers start pushing themselves up, checking for bruises and laughing in disbelief, one person—possibly the woman in the red headscarf—asks, “Is everyone okay?” A guy with a flowered shirt bursts into laughter, shaking his head, while someone else groans, “What just happened?” The dance floor is a mix of giggles, bewilderment, and people dusting themselves off. The leader starts to cue up a slower line-dance song, maybe to calm the room. A split second before that. I’m staring up at the ceiling lights, dazed, not quite sure how I ended up flat on my back. Around me, everyone’s in various stages of recovery, exc...

 The Black Sheep  I   have been going through old slides and converting them to digital format. I recently sent some digitized ones out to one of my cousins. The picture was of my cousin Barbara Ann and her son Randy when they visited us in Sacramento many years ago. Randy looks to be around ten in the pictures. Looking at the pictures brought back memories of them and their family.  Barbara Ann was my favorite cousin growing up, she was a year older than me and we used to play together at all of the family gatherings. She lived relatively close, and we saw my uncle, aunt, and the family often. My dad’s brother, my Uncle Len, was in partners with my dad in the miniature golf business. At some point soon after I was born, they split the miniature golf business and my dad and my uncle Len each owned two. A third brother, Uncle Charles, wanted out of the business entirely. The idea of the partnership sprung up during World War II. Uncle Len and Uncle Charles both flew b...

  It was six years ago when I sat at Aviva’s and looked at her DNA results, seeing that she was not 75% Jewish as I would have suspected, but only 50% Jewish.    Okay, there is a couple explanation, I thought.    One, that my mother was not Jewish as I had thought.    But she spoke fluent Yiddish and had documents when she came to the USA that showed her Nationality as “Jewish”.    Secondly, Aviva’s grandparents on her mother’s side were not both Jewish.    That was most doubtful.    Her grandfather was a Rabbi after all, and her grandmother immigrated to Palestine before there was even the country of Israel.    The third and more likely conclusion I came to that day was that my mother was not my mother at all.     There was once a hint that my mother was not my mother.    I remember one of those arguments my parents would have in the front seat of the car while I sat in the back.  ...

  It’s the Summer of 1965, I’m fifteen, and we’re going on a summer vacation to the National Parks.  Our supercharged Oldsmobile Super 88, almost the size of a tank, is towing our Kenskill Travel Trailer.  With the size of that Oldsmobile Super 88 engine, there is no issue with this car's ability to pull the trailer.  As I recall it took Super Gasoline with an Octane of about 97.  They don’t make it that high anymore except for rocket fuel. Our first stop in Zion National Park, some eight hours drive through the Mojave Desert.  We leave early in the day to avoid the heat.  Sometime in the afternoon, we drive past Las Vegas.  At the time Interstate 15 was not completed through all of Las Vegas so you were directed onto the Las Vegas strip.  Perhaps that was intentional.  My mom had fallen asleep sometime before Las Vegas and my dad glided through town with making a peep.  You see, my mom loved to gamble and loved Las Vegas.  We ...

  The coin collection   I was introduced to coin collecting at a very early age.  The miniature golf courses, which my father owned, also had penny arcades.  By the time I was a kid, the name “Penny Arcade” was a misnomer.  Only the weightlifting machine and the scale were a penny, several of the games were a nickel, and the best of the arcade games, the riffles and skee ball, were a dime.    Starting at about age seven, almost every day, I would go thru the pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters with my dad looking for coins to put in those blue coin collector books.  If we did not already have the coin, then into the books they would go.  In fact, we had several of each book, at least of the penny books, so I would have to find even more of each year’s penny to make the books complete.    And of course, each year had coins with a letter under the dates, “S” for San Francisco, “D” for Denver, and no letter meant the coin w...

   Concert - 1976 It's Washington's Birthday weekend.   My friends Alan and Martha are up from Los Angeles. The plan is to go to Lake Tahoe and to see a concert at the Sahara Tahoe on Sunday night.  We leave on Sunday morning arriving at South Shore at around noon.  There are literally no rooms at any hotel on the South Shore near Stateline.  We retrace our drive back to “The Y”, where Highway 50 meets Highway 89.  We turn right on Highway 89 heading towards the North Shore.  Surely this isolated stretch away from Stateline will have a motel with a room.  No rooms to be had.  We’re now at Tahoe City and continue onto Highway 28 towards Kings Beach.  Still no rooms.  We cross into Nevada and the road now turns South along the east shore of the lake.  Still no rooms.  At nearly dark we have finished the loop and are now back at Stateline on the south shore, where we started some four hours before.  Alan is mor...

 It's the Summer of 1986 and the grand opening of Rick’s Dessert Diner in downtown Sacramento.  Rick and Steve, good friends, had a grand opening bash and we were invited.  We’re in a booth at the back of the diner, and Susan proposes marriage to me.  We get married the next June. Let me jump back a few years before I move forward.  Susan was a Vista volunteer in San Diego in the early 1980s and Steve was her Vista supervisor.  They worked on tenant organizing.   Steve moved to Sacramento and began a career in the California State Department of Housing and Community Development.  Susan moved to Sacramento about the same time.   Steve co-signed on Susan’s Toyota Corolla so she could buy the car and which we held onto for many, many years.  The car was named Stephanie.  At Christmas season 1985, Susan and my first year living together, we went to the first concert of the Sacramento Men’s Chorus (now the Sacramento Guy Men’s ...

 I do not know why, when, or how.  It is one of those things in my life that is pretty much a total blank.  Sometime in the early 1980’s I went to Good Chevrolet in downtown Sacramento and bought a car.  Not just any car, but a Chevrolet Chevette, with a diesel engine.  I have no recollection if another car had failed or why exactly I had to buy this car.  Perhaps the lease had run out on my 240Z, my little Fiat or some other car I owned in this period of my life.  Or perhaps it was because none of the other cars were designed with a back seat for a child.  Perhaps my ex-wife and I just needed a second car, I really do not remember if we had one or two cars at the time.  I also do not remember consulting my ex or even showing her the car.  It really is the strangest thing how this car suddenly came home.  There must have been some deal attached.  Perhaps there was a zero-interest no down payment offers or some remarkable discou...

  Not too long after I turned twenty-one, I went to Las Vegas with some friends.    As I recall we were on our way to Zion National Park and stopped there on the way.    I did not have much money, but I had this theory that playing just one Kino number was a sure winner.    There are eighty kino numbers and twenty are picked each game.    The casino should be paying you four times the bet but If your one number comes up you receive three times your bet. Still, the idea of tripling my money was so inviting and such a sure thing.    But sadly, something went array with my calculation of odds.    If you lose one time, you’re almost positive to have that one number come up the next game.    And if you lose again, it’s almost for sure that the number will come up the following time.      I doubled my bet and lost.    Next game, I doubled my best again and lost.    A third time, I los...

  All through junior high and high school, I spend my summers working at my parent’s miniature golf course.  For college, I went to the nearby Cal State Northridge so still lived at home with my parents.  But once I was off to college, I wanted a different summer job.  I no longer wanted to work for my parents at their miniature golf course.  So once school ended each year, I tried something a bit different.   In the summer of 1968, I worked as a parking lot attendant at Roxbury Parking in Beverly Hills.   In the Summer of 1969, I worked at a gas station on Olympic Blvd. in West Los Angeles; in the Summer of 1971, I worked at Magic Mountain, the summer the amusement park first opened.  The only Summer I did not work while an undergraduate, was the Summer of 1970 when I traveled to Europe for nearly four months with two friends I had known from high school.  Each of these four summers has a story, a memory, that I still recount today...

  My earliest recognition of being Jewish was going to my Aunt Rose and Uncle Beno's house each Saturday night when I was around five years old.   Aunt Rose was my mother's sister-in-law.   Uncle Beno was not my mom's brother but rather Aunt Rose's new husband. They had survived the war and the Nazis and made it to Los Angeles.  Everyone in the house spoke Yiddish and Romanian, and perhaps some French.   I wish now, I would have learned Yiddish, or at least remembered what was said, but I can only remember a few words.  I found this so interesting as my dad, not being Jewish and not knowing Yiddish, seemed to have fun though he could not communicate with anyone, other than my cousin Lica, who spoke some English.     We would have a large dinner and then everyone would play cards or other games.  Dinner was long as there was lots of talk at the table.  I found this very boring as I was the only young person in the hous...

   A fire is coming up the hill from the beach.    Someone must have had a fire below.    The wind is blowing.    I thought this could never happen to us. My first reaction is to start dosing the house with water, but I’ve read and personally seen how fast flames can travel.    It is so windy and dry and the entire hill below us seems to be aglow almost instantly.    It is hot and embers are flying.    Quick, Susan yells!    Let’s get out of here.   I run into my far-right closet in the bedroom, the one with shelves and no clothes, and start grabbing.  I find a large empty box in the garage and fantastically begin throwing everything from the shelves, starting with the top one, into the box.  I can get most of the first two shelves in the box.  I throw the box into the trunk.  I return and grab whatever I can from the third shelf.   There are lots of more bulky items l...

  First Memories I have lots of memories from old pictures.  Some of these pictures have stories I’ve been told, or at least I think I’ve been told.  Sometimes I see a picture and really have no memory of it.  There is a picture of my five-year-old birthday.  Several children surround a swingset in a backyard.  I have no real memory of any of the children, nor the swing set, nor the birthday.  My only memory is my parents telling me they invited kids from my old house, as we had just moved to a new house.  But really, I have no memory of that birthday at all.  There’s a much later birthday when I am around ten or eleven of three friends and myself at Dodger Stadium.  At this point, I can only recognize two of the three friends.  I have no idea who the third one is.  I remember sitting in the bleachers, turning around, and having a home run hit me in the arm. That's my total memory of the day. There are some situations I ha...

  Love of Food From the time we met, Susan and I always have dinner together at the dining room table.  When the kids were at home, we all had dinner together.  A few years after we met, we were staying with some friends, between houses.  We were in horror that no one in their family ever had dinner together.  That only strengthened our resolve to have a sit-down family dinner every night.  We never watch TV over dinner.  I am happy to report that both of our daughters have carried on that tradition with their families and with dinner.  Dinner is family time.   Breakfast is like dinner.  We sit at the table and eat.  Granted that breakfasts, when the kids were in school, were rushed, but we almost always had some sort of short sit-down meal.  Once the kids moved out to go to college and we retired, breakfast came to be much as dinner.  We always sit down together and eat our breakfast.  Every breakfast is done wh...

  The Surprise About five years ago now, I asked to look at our daughter Aviva’s “23 & Me” results.  Aviva and her husband Mathew had used 23 & Me for genetic flagging three years earlier when she was pregnant with our grandson Sol.  They were able to give the coding results of their DNA tests to their physician at UCSF to spot any potential genetic birth defects.  Aviva nor Mathew never really looked at the results for what many people go to 23& Me for, ancestry results.  As I recall, Sol was taking a nap and Aviva was going out to run an errand.  I’m not sure why I asked to see her DNA results, but I did.  Perhaps I had been hearing some news buzz about 23& Me or something.  The first thing I noticed in the overview was that Aviva was 50% Jewish.   If I were 50% Jewish (my mom was Jewish and my dad was not), and if Aviva’s mother Tamar was 100% Jewish (Tamar having been born in Israel), then Aviva should be 75% Jewish, ...