Half a lifetime ago

From January, 2005


I don't know what it is about the dead of winter. It makes me contemplative, wistful and reflective. It may be the move to a new state, a new environment. There's a strangeness to it all and I realize that my roots are more east coast but I have to remember that I've spent 35 years of my life in California and change doesn't come as easy as it used to.

I remember my first few months in the small northern California town where I was to live for the next 28 years. I found the main street quaint, a throwback to the 1950s where you felt that innocence was still possible. It was late 1974 and we had just emerged from the rancor of Vietnam, Nixon and Watergate. Innocence was in short supply as we as a nation had been yanked out of the fantasy of the Eisenhower/Kennedy years into the real world where we weren't always the good guys and morals and values were relative. All this had passed in one short decade and we didn't seem to be able to catch our breath. Exploring this Central Coast town was like going back in time 15 years or so. Perhaps that's why people love small towns, they can rediscover a place they knew in their youth. A place where you could drive on the roads without encountering a traffic light for quite some distance. Where the hills and valleys of the countryside were within a stone's throw and the downtown drug store still had a soda fountain just like it did back in 1955. I remember one such visit to the soda fountain with a new friend. We were both 19 years old and it goes without saying, young and foolish. We would go in just to have a coke and gawk at the waitress who worked behind the counter. A large breasted wench who constantly talked about and pined for her boyfriend, Dwayne. Now and then Dwayne would come in while we were there. Usually he was wearing a plain white undershirt and blue jeans. It was a scene right out of a James Dean movie and it fit right in with the scenery. Me and my friend would roll our eyes and smirk at each other as we watched their nose rubbing and cuddling. Eventually those two got married but I have no idea what became of them after 1980. Who knows? Maybe their innocence and optimism conquered all and they may well have lived happily ever after.

In early 1975 my old friend Brian and I would cruise the main street in his blue Datsun pickup. We would stop at Nino's Pizza on Main Street, right across from the drug store soda fountain and order a pizza, one of the best I'd ever had. He made his pizza the old fashioned way, he threw the dough and slapped it on the tray and used a unique blend of cheeses that I've never seen duplicated to this day. Once again, this place was a throwback to the 1950s, with booths lining one wall and a jukebox playing all the current hits from 1975. Funny, I'm refering to a scene from the 1970s that recalled the 1950s. Strange. Nino's Pizza isn't there any more. He moved the place in the mid 1980's to a newer venue in another part of town. I never warmed up to that place like I did the old one. At least he brought the poster sized pictures of his then toddler son in white shirt and chef's hat that had adorned the walls of the old place. Somebody came in and turned the place into a video store. After many years Bob's Video has now left as well. I have no idea who now occupies what I will always refer to as "Nino's Place".

It's funny. I've been asking people lately an interesting question...when were you the happiest? What time of life are you nostalgic for? Now, the people I've been talking to are more my age so all of you under 30 years of age have to wait awhile before you start asking yourself that question. But by and large most people I've quizzed about this unanimously say it was that time in their 20s when they were going to school, still under the wing of their parents, studying at college, traveling, exploring. It was between the ages of 20 and 30. It was before they were responsible for a mortgage, before they had kids, before life had a chance to grind them down, a time when they still had their parents, a time when they could explore the world without worrying about consequences. Maybe the lesson here is to stay in school.

I lived in an old house on Chappel Road that was surrounded by lettuce fields. A local farmer was our neighbor and landlord and we couldn't have asked for better. It was located at the edge of town so that it was easy to jump on the two lane highway which led to my community college in the next town. Just living this close to the highway cut nearly ten minutes off the trip and I was grateful for that as I spent all my time there in those days. Living out there gave our St. Bernard, Heidi, plenty of room to wander as well. I remember her dying day when she tried to venture into the fields across the road to lay down amid the walnut trees. Just a peaceful place to go where she could die among the trees and grass. That field is now a housing development, completely at odds with the cozy farm house across the street where I had spent the best several years of my life.

I have been gone from that town now for just over two years. I miss it. But I wonder sometimes if it's the town I miss or my youth. Maybe both. What is missed is the moment in time that is unrecoverable, out of reach and beyond one's grasp. I have a picture I took of my Alfa Romeo which I took in 1979. It shows the Alfa in the local college parking lot, just over the bank by the tennis courts. One can see the fields in the background beyond the parking lot. The frontage road that would take you to Castro Valley Road then a quick left to Highway 101 and home. Sometimes I feel like I can jump right into that picture and be that 24 year old once again. I don't miss California that much. But I miss that town. More than that, I think I miss a life that used to be, a life that will always be out of reach and unattainable. But it exists. Somewhere in an alternate universe an alternate me is still there. Still in that town, still driving the old Alfa, still going to school, still cruising Main. It's a place where Heidi still greets me when I come home from school, where a tennis match could be had at the drop of a hat and where my father's rose bushes are always in bloom. Somewhere in the interstellar mists that town is there just like I remember it. Just like in the picture.