Oh, my. Look at the time. Or at least today’s date. I have been so wrapped up in work that a few weeks snuck up me and pulled the wool over my eyes. That’s a feat, considering I’m allergic to wool. But I did notice my right eye was a little touchy and swollen yesterday.
I have another inspiration from work and interviews for articles. As the saying goes, what goes around will keep going around until something interesting comes around. And it did a few weeks ago. I was interviewing Janie Hibler, award-winning cookbook author, about “The Berry Bible.” The conversation was a nice and smooth one, and had a good personal feel to it.
Toward the end, we were set to wrap things up. And that’s when all karmic hell broke loose in a mad spin. When you write for a newspaper, you need to get all those essential nuts and bolts in place: who, what when, where, why…and sometimes why not. So, in keeping with time-honored journalistic tradition, I asked Janie if she was a native of Oregon. Several days before the interview, I took a quick gander at her website and had made a mental note – which I prompted unnoted – that she grew up in Arcata, CA. As soon as the word “Oregon” spilled out of my mouth, I prepared to insert my left foot and acknowledged that I recalled she was from Arcata.
Well, the floodgates opened. Turns out I spent several years in Arcata myself, and by our mutual recollections, she and I did time at that wonderful place together. My dad was a professor at Humboldt State College, today a university, and I mentioned that our family lived in Sunny Brae, still a subdivision even as we figuratively speak. I attended Sunny Brae Elementary, still an institution on the higher education food chain. Turns out her family lived in Jacoby Creek. That made me break out laughing as I recalled a little saying from my elementary school days: “Yay, yah Sunny Brae. Squeak, squeak Jacoby Creek.” Pretty silly sounding today to think that elementary schools already had rivalries set up.
I was always something of a rebel. When I was in the fourth grade, at my dad’s insistence, I turned our school band into an orchestra by playing a violin. That phase only lasted one year. I turned my attention to the piano.
If someone asked me where the happiest days of my childhood occurred, I wouldn’t even hesitate to answer: Arcata. We lived right across the street from a mighty redwood forest, and even as a kid I wandered off into the deep, dark woods to seek out some solitude. Back in my tree-climbing days, I just shimmied up the redwoods, sat on a branch and bounced. Pretty low-tech fun, to be sure.
The trees were ancient, the branches were – luckily -- sturdy, caring not a whit about the intruder who was raising such a ruckus. I recall one day going so deep into the woods that I lost track of time. This is a significant problem when one is surrounded by dark timber, and daylight is failing. I remember being scared to death I would never find my way out. Fortunately – and despite some pretty serious juvenile heart palpitations – I got out just as the proverbial night was falling.
I never told my parents about this. They would have killed me.
Our family also spent countless hours at Patrick’s Point, today a state park. It was a place to have some pretty unorganized, impromptu fun in those days, skittering down a path and finally arriving on the pebble laden beach. We collected driftwood and agates like they were going out of style. In fact, I actually am still in possession of some of that driftwood. It’s probably older than I am, although I continue to wear down and the wood is in a state of arrest. I’m just waiting for the right moment and project to let it float through my memory once again. There were also a multitude of Japanese fishing floats to be found, none of which followed me along to adulthood except in my mind.
It was a joyous and miraculous time to be a kid. It left a mark on me. To this day, I still have a necklace with an abalone shell pendant on it. That came to me in Arcata 53 years ago, and I still love it. The pendant is an elongated diamond shape, and interestingly I acquired a pair of abalone shell earrings here in the mountains of Colorado a number of years ago that have a cutout nearly the size of the pendant. Two things, in two spaces of time, joined at the hip.
As John Fogarty says, big wheel keeps on turnin…
So here I am, many years into the future, moving that karmic wheel back a few notches. As fate has it, there are a few Arcata ex-pats living in Portland, an area I visit regularly for business. We have talked about getting together, which is really going to be a riot when it actually happens.
I suspect it’s going to be a little scary, too, as we dredge up the memories of times in Humboldt Bay that would bring us together all these years later. But as I told Janie in an email, at least I know we didn’t date the same guys!
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