Adapted from the Introduction to The Wonder Years

America has always worshiped youth. This attitude permeates our films and sports and culture, as if our fondest wish is never to grow up—which is, of course, a futile desire, destined for disappointment. But as America grays, some men and women are discovering a better alternative: growing older, but continuing to grow. To live life to its fullest. To play.

They have discovered something better than a fountain of youth: they have made their later years their wonder years.

They may seem like ordinary people, with bills and mortgages and extended families spread across the map, but they also have nurtured within themselves a relentless determination to tackle new challenges every day. Some find their challenge in the gym or on the track. Others surf, swim, vault, or even rope cattle.

Raising the bar ever higher is what keeps them going and constantly growing, breaking barriers, setting records, exceeding expectations—and showing the rest of us the way.

They show us that aging isn’t something to fear—it’s a chance to reinvent yourself, as many times as you dare. These adventurers in their seventh, eighth, and ninth decades of life are stars in a growing senior underground that has flourished while hardly anyone paid attention. And once you meet these folks, once you take in their accomplishments, their grace, and their joy at striving for their best each day, you can’t help but be inspired to find your own wonder years.

For the past two decades Rick Rickman has traveled the country chronicling the lives of aging adventurers and amateur athletes who defy the conventional wisdom about what it means to grow old in our society. Their stories dramatically illustrate what medical studies and common sense tell us: that people who exercise regularly live longer, live better, and, more often than not, enjoy better relationships in their later years.

As the official photographer for the National Senior Games in recent years, Rick learned that vigorous seniors like his own grandfather, who lived until a healthy age of nine-four, actually aren’t that unusual. What is unusual is to read about them or see them featured in any meaningful way in our youth-obsessed media and culture. During the summer of 2008, network broadcasters kept marveling and shaking their heads in disbelief when a forty-one-year-old American woman female swimmer qualified for the U.S. Olympic Swim Team bound for Beijing. Since when did we collectively decide that our expectation for greatness fades by forty? Or fifty? Or even eighty? The reality is that our entire population—seniors included—now benefits from unprecedented advances in nutrition, health, and medical research, and endless opportunities for staying fit.

Slowing down simply isn’t an option for people like Sister Madonna Buder (above), a Catholic nun from Spokane, Washington who competes each year in Hawaii’s Ironman Triathlon and keeps blazing trails for women athletes over seventy. [See an HBO RealSports video of Sister Madonna in action here]

Or Granville Coggs (below), a practicing radiologist and Congressional Gold Medal winner who didn’t take up competitive running until his seventies. He’s a track star in his eighties.

Or Laguna Beach surfer Eve Fletcher (above), who is her eighties and still hanging ten at the same Southern California beach she has surfed for the past fifty years, breaking down barriers first as a young woman surfer and now as a senior citizen. [See a video of her on the waves here]

You’ll meet Sister Madonna, Granville Coggs, Eve Fletcher and dozens of other exceptional seniors on the pages of The Wonder Years, which is being published this August as the National Seniors Games arrive on the West Coast for the first time.

Popular culture sometimes suggests there is little to look forward to our later years, but popular culture is wrong. The men and women featured in this book have a different message, one of grace and style, a path to the wonder years.

Photos: Top, Eve Fletcher at San Onofre State Beach. Next: Sister Madonna’s triathlon medals.

Introduction

Wallace Stegner, the second of two sons born to George and Hilda Paulson Stegner, arrived in this world on February 18, 1909, on a farm owned by Hilda’s father, Chris Paulson, in Lake Mills, Iowa. Paulson, a widower when Hilda was only twelve, was of Norwegian immigrant stock, English-speaking only when absolutely necessary, staunchly principled, hardworking, taciturn, rigidly Lutheran, and utterly patriarchal—the moral opposite in virtually every way of George Stegner, whom his daughter married at an early age, in spite of her father’s vigorous protest.

George, whose origins and ancestry are obscure (beyond the fact that he grew up somewhere near Rock Island, Illinois, and fled from home at the age of fourteen never to look back), was, in the words of his son, “a husky, laughing, reckless, irreverent, storytelling charmer, a ballplayer, a fancy skater, a trapshooting champion, a pursuer of the main chance, a true believer in the American dream of something for nothing, a rolling stone who confidently expected to be eventually covered with moss.” In short, a man who offended every piety Chris Paulson stood for—which was perhaps his major attraction to Paulson’s “bond-servant,” motherless daughter, and which very likely put the starch in her decision to run off. If she ever regretted her choice—and many times she must have—she kept it to herself.
Chasing the dream of getting rich quick, of finding some big rock candy mountain just over the horizon, kept the Stegner family drifting from pillar to post for nearly twelve years—from Iowa to North Dakota to Washington, back to Iowa, and eventually to Eastend, a frontier hamlet in the Cypress Hills of Saskatchewan. There they homesteaded a farm on the Canadian side of the U.S./Canada border and set about trying to raise wheat.

More pie in the sky. Six years and five busted crops later, they were on the move again, this time to Great Falls, Montana, where George made a furtive living running bootleg whiskey across the Canadian line into Prohibition-plagued America. But a year later restlessness overcame him once more and he packed up his reluctant entourage and headed southwest to Salt Lake City.

Miraculously, in the land of Zion they finally stuck. Wallace would attend high school in Salt Lake City, graduating from East High at the age of sixteen and immediately enrolling in the University of Utah, where, working part-time in a linoleum store to help make ends meet, he would complete his degree in five years. Encouraged by his professors to go on to graduate school, he went east to the University of Iowa, completing his PhD in American Literature in 1935. After a brief teaching stint back at the University of Utah, he headed still further east to a position at the University of Wisconsin. A year later, and owing in part to a Little Brown Prize for his novelette Remembering Laughter, he was offered an appointment at Harvard.

So where does California fit into all this wandering? The California Legacy books a showcase for distinguished “California” authors, and by this point Wallace Stegner has almost reached his forties without setting foot in the Golden State, except for one academic year at UC Berkeley (1933)—an adventure terminated, says Jackson Benson, because the “stodgy graduate curriculum in English, with its emphasis on philology—on Latin, Old French, Anglo-Saxon, and Middle English—was not really his cup of tea.” As it would turn out for this deeply rooted Westerner, neither was teaching at Harvard, though Harvard would satisfy a provincial yearning for cultural respectability not intrinsic to the inter-mountain West, and would introduce him to at least two profoundly influential men with whom he would become lifelong friends, Robert Frost and Bernard DeVoto.

Nevertheless, “all my life I’ve been going away east and coming home west,” Stegner once wrote. So when Look magazine offered him a job writing a series of articles on prejudice and the treatment of minorities in America, he left Harvard and moved to Santa Barbara, California, to be closer to the predominant sources of his investigation (Filipinos, Japanese, Chinese, Mexicans, American Indians), overshooting the true West by a few hundred miles, to be sure, but definitely headed in the right direction. And when a year later Stanford University offered him a half-time teaching job at a full-time salary, it was more than this child of the Depression could resist.

The rest, as they say, is history—nearly fifty years of it spent in the Palo Alto foothills behind Stanford, and more than enough to qualify him as an immigrant Californian. California, with its complex, pluralistic society, cultural diversification, and sheer worldliness, was precisely the environment for a man fleeing the provincial backwaters from whence he came but unable to find consoling habitat in the hills and hummocks east of the Mississippi.

In July of 1945 Stegner wrote an enthusiastic letter to his old friend and one-time University of Wisconsin colleague, Philip Gray:

California, that is Palo Alto, is not wilderness, coming at three thousand an acre and selling altogether too fast at that price. It is very pleasant country, for all that: golden wild-oat hills dotted with marvelous old live oaks and bay trees, with a dark pine-covered ridge of the coast range behind, and in front the hills dropping down over orchards and town to the bay, and beyond the bay the barren gold ridge of the San Jose Mountains with Mount Diablo coming up in the midst of it.

It was the beginning of a long-term love/hate affair with a region he would describe in a Saturday Review essay (included in this volume, “The West Coast: Region with a View”) as “America only more so,” and it would remain his home for the rest of his life.

Perhaps love/hate is too strong. But Stegner’s initial enthusiasm for this “region with a view” certainly tempered over time as those hillsides and orchards were transformed by development into an endless suburb stretching from San Francisco to San Jose, and as the home he built in 1949 in the Los Altos Hills became inexorably surrounded by mini-mansions and starter castles. A good deal of his time over the ensuing years was spent fighting that development and arguing for the preservation of open spaces. Asked by Richard Etulain (in Conversations with Wallace Stegner on Western History and Literature, University of Utah Press, Salt Lake, 1983) if he was optimistic about the future of the West, Stegner offered a qualified “no.” The few things that had been done right in the West were belated, he said, inadequate, too little, too late, and while he was speaking specifically of the inter-mountain West, his opinion included California—only more so. Nevertheless, counting himself among its permanent inhabitants, he felt a moral responsibility to the place which he forevermore would call home, and while, as noted, he was no native son of the Golden West, over the years he did as much as any aboriginal toward the advancement of its cultural environment and the protection of its natural surroundings.
In must be said, however, that the “essential” Wallace Stegner was never so parochial or sub-regional in his literary output as to be categorized as a “California writer,” unless that term refers only to living space. Relatively few of his 35 published books, 57 short stories, 242 articles, 164 forewords, afterwords, introductions, essays, chapters, and critical prefaces to other people’s work are set in, or have anything to do with, that “terrestrial paradise” so named by our esteemed sixteenth-century composer of episodic novels, Garci Ordóñez Rodríguez de Montalvo. All the Little Live Things, A Shooting Star, two sections of Angle of Repose, and five short stories comprise the regional oeuvre—which seems remarkably little for so prolific a writer.

The New York Times, identifying him as “William” Stegner, went on to describe him as “the Dean of Western writers.” That is perhaps closer to the truth, as most of his work was concerned with that much broader region, and as various localities west of the hundredth meridian claim him as one of their very own. The State of Utah counts him a native son, though he wasn’t, quite, and the University of Utah’s S. J. Quinney College of Law has created the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources and the Environment in his honor. Montana, where he lived for one year when he was eleven, also argues for a piece of the action. Montana State University at Bozeman has created the Wallace Stegner Chair in Western Studies to commemorate his passing through. The Eastend Arts Council in Eastend, Saskatchewan, where he attended grammar school and learned those frontier attitudes and cowboy codes of conduct he said he’d spent much of his life trying to escape (not altogether successfully), has restored the house his father built in the town in 1915 (now called The Wallace Stegner House), transforming it into quarters for artists in residence. And then there’s the State of Vermont, the setting for two of his novels and five short stories, where he spent many summers of his life at his summer home on Baker Hill in the village of Greensboro, and where, in accordance with his written instructions, his ashes were scattered after his death.

But when the maples started to turn outside his “think house” on that hill and Vermonters started covering up their tomatoes in anticipation of an early frost, it was back to northern California, his home in Los Altos Hills, his duties as director of the Stanford Creative Writing Program. As much as anything it is that writing program that identifies him with the state and its contribution to literary culture. Founded by Stegner in 1946, it became, under the twenty-five years of his guidance, a virtual Who’s Who of contemporary American writers—writers like Eugene Burdick, Tillie Olsen, Max Apple, Evan Connell, Steve Dixon, Larry McMurtry, Robert Stone, Ken Kesey, Ed McClanahan, Nancy Packer, Ernest Gaines, Merrill Joan Gerber, Scott Turow, Wendell Berry, Kenneth Fields, Robert Pinsky, Robert Hass, Edward Abbey, Al Young, James D. Houston, John Daniel, N. Scott Momaday, Thomas McGuane, Tobias Wolff, Ron Hansen, Ray Carver, William Kittredge. “Stegner Fellows” they were called. “Stegner Fellows” they are still called, fifteen years after his death, and in spite of the fact that not long after his retirement, furious with the Stanford English department for hiring a postmodern, avant-garde, experimental writer whose work was an insult to everything Stegner stood for artistically, he tried to have his name deleted from the program. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed.

But he did retire early. As he explained to Richard Etulain:

I…was pretty fed up with the disruptions of the sixties. It was no fun teaching.…So I decided I had other things to do, and it was getting on toward the time when I had only a few years to do them in…and I’ve managed to get three or four books into the years since.

Those few years turned out to be, in fact, twenty-one years (Stegner died in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1993 from injuries sustained in a car accident), and the books he turned out over that period included four more novels, Angle of Repose (which received the Pulitzer Prize in 1972), The Spectator Bird (which received the National Book Award in 1977), Recapitulation, and Crossing to Safety; a biography of Bernard DeVoto, The Uneasy Chair (along with an edition of his letters); and four collections of essays, American Places (with Page Stegner and Eliot Porter), One Way to Spell Man (for which he received the prestigious John Muir Award from the Sierra Club), The American West as Living Space, and Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs. A fifth collection, Marking the Sparrow’s Fall, edited posthumously, was published five years after his death.

Betwixt and between this flurry of activity he wrote forewords and afterwords to a half-dozen books by other people, gave countless lectures and talks, traveled frequently to receive honorary doctorates from the University of Montana and Middlebury College, the first Robert Kirsh Award for Life Achievement from the Los Angeles Times, the John Muir Award for contributions to conservation from the Sierra Club, the Western History Association Prize, the Governor’s Award for the Arts from the California Arts Council, the PEN USA West Lifetime Achievement Award, The Cyril Magnin Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts. Only when he was to receive a National Medal for the Arts Award from President George H. W. Bush did he stay home, declining the honor in protest over political controls imposed by the administration on the National Endowment for the Arts:

I believe strongly in government support for the arts—believe, in fact, that a government that does not support the arts harms both itself and the nation. I also believe that support is meaningless, even harmful, if it restricts the imaginative freedom of those to whom it is given.

Asked why, in retirement, and fast approaching his seventy-fifth year, he continued taking on new projects, new assignments, new deadlines, he told Richard Etulain:

It’s like a beaver’s teeth—he has to chew or else his jaws lock shut…You keep doing it because that’s really what you’re made to do, that’s what you want to do, and everything that you do projects you one stone further…so you throw another rock, until you just wear out.

Chicano Lawyers Who Write

We in the legal profession have grown accustomed to the idea of lawyers who also write fiction or poetry. Poet-lawyers such as Wallace Stevens and Archibald MacLeish often come to mind. And there’s this fellow named John Grisham who seems to have caught on. Indeed, at least one law journal, Legal Studies Forum (edited by James R. Elkins, a professor at West Virginia University College of Law), is dedicated to publishing poems, short stories, and literary analysis by attorneys. So, when I started writing fiction and poetry ten years ago while working full time as a government attorney, I realized I was not alone.

But I am not just a lawyer who writes. I am a Chicano lawyer who writes. Though my activities in the legal profession sometimes make their way into my creative writing, my fiction and poetry are chiefly grounded in and informed by my experiences growing up in a predominantly Mexican American, working-class neighborhood near downtown Los Angeles. Over the years, I’ve had the pleasure of reading the work of others who share both my professional and cultural touchstones.

In 1998, when I started writing, I was deeply influenced by Yxta Maya Murray’s 1997 novel Locas (Grove/Atlantic Press), centered on two young Chicanas living in the gang-ravaged Los Angeles neighborhood of Echo Park. Murray, a 1993 graduate of Stanford Law School and a professor at Loyola Law School in L.A., began writing after her clerkship with U.S. District Court Judge Harry L. Hupp.

“I had always wanted to be a writer,” says Murray, “but it was only when I began working on drug, racketeering, and bank-robbery cases that I got the mojo for a novel. I was spurred into action by witnessing so many men of color get sentenced to jail.”

Murray, who considers herself a mixed-race Chicana (her mother is from Mexico and her father from Canada), has published four more novels since Locas, including The King’s Gold (HarperCollins, 2008). “In my first two novels, I deal with urban populations; in my last three, I’ve dealt with the question of colonialism, both historically and contemporarily,” observes Murray. “I’ve become fascinated with the collision of [indigenous] American and European cultures in the 16th century, and how the conquest can be felt by our community today.”

Similarly, novelist Michael Nava has explored this “collision” between cultures, but with the added dimension of being a gay man in modern America. Nava, whose ethnic heritage is Mexican, Yaqui, and Cajun, graduated from Stanford Law School in 1981 and now serves as a staff attorney for California Supreme Court Associate Justice Carlos R. Moreno. In 1986 Nava published the first of seven mystery novels, The Little Death (Alyson), in which he introduced readers to Henry Rios, a gay Chicano criminal-defense lawyer. Rios confronts contemporary issues of bigotry and the ravages of AIDS as he solves gruesome murders and other crimes. Widely recognized as a groundbreaking novelist, Nava’s writing was analyzed through an in-depth interview in Spilling the Beans in Chicanolandia: Conversations with Writers and Artists (University of Texas Press, 2006) by Frederick Luis Aldama, an English professor at Ohio State University.

“It never occurred to me that the character in my books, Henry Rios, would be other than Latino or gay,” asserts Nava. “In the beginning, I was more interested in his experience as a gay man, but in the later books I made a conscious effort to explore his relationship (complex and difficult though it is) to his ethnicity, primarily through his relationship to his family.” Nava adds: “As a lawyer, I am a gay Latino in an overwhelmingly white and straight profession.”

Interestingly, while Murray and Nava have explored ethnicity and culture through fiction, Nicolás C. Vaca has confronted such issues primarily in his well-regarded and controversial nonfiction book The Presumed Alliance: The Unspoken Conflict Between Latinos and Blacks and What It Means for America (HarperCollins, 2004). Vaca has also written in a fictional style about his former immigration law practice. Many lawyers know Vaca from his nonfiction short stories that have appeared in this magazine during the past decade, including “El Borrachito” (April 2007), and “Burnt Beans” (October 2005). Over the years, I’ve enjoyed Vaca’s short stories and appreciate his poignant writing about Chicano and Mexican lives.

A graduate of Harvard Law School and a partner in the San Jose office of Garcia, Calderón & Ruíz, Vaca became a lawyer “to have an impact on society.” But he started writing creatively as an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley, when he took a course on Russian literature and read Anton Chekhov, Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Oblomov, and others. Chekhov particularly impressed Vaca because of his “lack of idealization of the peasant class, in that he wrote about them with all their imperfections.”

“In one of my midterm examinations,” remembers Vaca, “I took liberty with one of the questions and answered it by trying to emulate Chekhov’s writing. The professor, a Russian émigré, wrote some very nice things about my answer, and that inspired me to try to actually write short stories.”

Murray, Nava, and Vaca have advice for lawyers who want to become writers: “A page a day,” counsels Murray. Nava advises, “Find a writing group to encourage you, and keep the creative side of your brain active.” And Vaca offers tough love: “Writers write. In other words, do not call yourself a writer if you do not write on a daily basis.”

Julia Sylva seems to have internalized these admonitions. A former partner at such law firms as Ochoa & Sillas and Frandzel & Share in Los Angeles, Sylva now runs her own practice in L.A. Though she has published many articles on such legal topics as the Brown Act, redevelopment law, and public finance, Sylva also “finds time to write creatively as an extracurricular activity — a challenging task for a working mom.”

“I am currently drafting my memoirs,” says Sylva, whose résumé includes a four-year term on the city council of Hawaiian Gardens (1976-80) in the southeast part of Los Angeles County. Through election by her colleagues, she simultaneously served two consecutive one-year terms as mayor of the town when she was in her early twenties. Then in 1979, at age 23, Sylva began attending Loyola Law School. She did not run for reelection to the city council because the dean gave her a choice: continue her legal studies on a scholarship, or seek a second term on the council. Sylva chose law over politics: “I believe I made the right choice,” she says.

Aside from writing her memoirs, Sylva also has aspirations of publishing a cookbook on Mexican and Jewish cuisine, to be entitled Kosher Tamales. “It will include my mother’s childhood recipes,” she says, “and recipes we have jointly created since I converted to Judaism.”

What kind of reaction should Sylva expect from her colleagues when she publishes her first book? If it’s anything similar to what Nava experienced, Sylva may be pleasantly surprised. “Many of my lawyer friends through the years have been frustrated writers themselves,” says Nava. “So they have been keenly interested in how I managed to do both.” Murray says Loyola Law School, where she has been teaching for 13 years, is “beyond supportive” of her writing. Conversely, Vaca wryly notes: “Most [lawyers] are only mildly impressed that I am a published writer.”

But I dare say these lawyers do not write to impress their fellow attorneys. Rather, each is driven to explore through prose the intricacies, conflicts, and richness of their cultural experiences. For that, we as readers can count ourselves lucky.

This article originally appeared in the June 2008 issue of California Lawyer magazine, which is published by the Daily Journal Corp..

The writer: Daniel A. Olivas is a deputy attorney general in Los Angeles. He is the author of four books and editor of Latinos in Lotusland: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature (Bilingual Press, 2008).

Wally

This is a story I cannot possibly imagine telling back when I was twenty or thirty, or maybe even forty years old. Nor is it a story, exactly, because it’s true. So perhaps instead I should say: This is a true story and its subject is time.

I only half-knew Wally back when we were in college together. We shared the back row of a couple classes, wore the same white surfer tee shirts, though I wasn’t a surfer, and we went to a few of the same parties. Wally was on the water polo team, the swim team, too, and his body was a smooth and tense as an otter’s. I liked to swim, so sometimes he and I would toss a water polo ball back and forth, shoot at the net, that kind of thing.

Once in a while we would see each other near the beer keg at some party. Wally was a member of a hard-living, slightly wild, and to my mind, glamorous club. I was in no group at all. The point, I guess, is that Wally was a person I felt flattered to be — not a friend of, exactly—but recognized by. We would pass in a hallway and he would nod and I’d nod back as if we had something in common. He was one of a group I suppose I’d now call the Jock-Nihilists, a larger group, I think, than many knew. This was in the sixties, an era where people were said to be RF’ed, which stood for Rat Fucked, and exactly how that worked visually, I can’t explain, but essentially to be RF’ed meant to be the victim of a low trick. The most memorable use of the phrase I can think of actually came from the mouth of one of most impressive of these Jock-Nihilists—a friend of Wally’s—on a day one November when I was sitting out in the college quad, working on my tan. “Hey, Jim,” he said, “Kennedy got RF’ed.” And that was how I heard what happened in Dallas.

I was a Nihilist myself, but a garden-variety, college student type, embracing that creed mostly to disguise the fact I didn’t possess anything of value to lose. The difference for the Jock-Nihilists, however, was that they did. They were the great ones, the good-looking and confident ones. They were the ones who could actually get a date just by asking. They were the ones who played sports with effortless grace, and yet, at the same time, in the middle of a game or a party or just talking, I might catch the eye of one of them across the room as he was talking to a pretty girl, and he would give me back a look that said, “Sure, I know you see me here, but of course you realize that none of this means shit.” It was the same look I imagined Yeats’ Irish Airman had when he foresaw his pointless death, something along the lines of, “The years to come seemed waste of breath, /A waste of breath the years behind/In balance with this life, this death.” Or something like that.

The last time I saw Wally was the summer after we had both graduated. I was unhappily waiting for the army to call me up to Vietnam, but they hadn’t yet, and, monstrously healthy, I spent much of my time on various schemes to become 4-F, including one from a friend who was already in the Medical Corps, where I was supposed to empty a vial of bacteria he sent me unnoticed into my urine when I took my physical. Not only could I not figure out how I was going to sneak a test tube into my shorts, but worse, while I was waiting to be told the actual date of my physical (it kept being postponed) some of the stuff, which I’d been storing in my refrigerator, apparently escaped and a weird mold began to cover all my food. My friend never told me what kind of bacteria it was. In any case, at one point or another I decided that if I owned a car, somehow it would be a kind of talisman to keep the draft away. I can’t explain now why this would be so, but it was all I had, and it wasn’t much. So when I saw an ad for a convertible posted on the college bulletin board I called the number. Wally answered.

I went to meet him to look at the car in question. It wasn’t cheap, but mostly I was disappointed to see it wasn’t a full-sized model, but a coral red Ford Falcon, a smaller—and to my mind sort of dopey—version of a Real Convertible. Wally was cool enough to drive a vehicle like that around all day, and obviously did, and nobody thought less of him, but as for me, I knew that the moment I got behind the wheel people would see me for what I was, a person who wasn’t good enough to own a full-sized convertible. I told Wally it wasn’t what I had in mind, and he was a gentleman about it. “Oh well,” he said. He was just going to have to sell it to someone else because he was going to join the Air Force, and wouldn’t have a chance to drive anything for a few years. A week later, on the same bulletin board, I found a full-sized Ford Galaxy 500 convertible that was being sold by one of my professors. It was a glamorous automobile, and pretty much a complete piece of junk so naturally I snapped it up. In the end I did get out of the Army — the hard way — by starving myself and generally being so hopeless they sent me home, happy to be rid of me, and time went by.

A lot of time went by. About forty years after college, to be more precise, with good choices, bad ones, marriages, divorces, jobs and no jobs. Over the years, when the alumni news caught up with me, I might think for a tenth of a second about Wally, though not even specifically about him, only “those days,” or “those guys” of which he was one, but the alumni news came only twice a year, so I didn’t spend a lot of time reliving my old college days. There were class reunions, of course, but I skipped them despite the fact that after living in a dozen cities over several years I found myself in a house within walking distance (well, a longish walk) of the campus.

And then there came a day last spring that was unseasonably, uncomfortably hot, and my stepdaughter and I were in the neighborhood of the college with a little time to kill before I was supposed to drop her off somewhere, at a hair appointment, I recall. We were about a half an hour early, so I asked her if she wanted to take a quick tour of the campus. She’d been to the college once before, when I took a nephew of mine around for a visit, but I figured another trip, now that she was nearing college age herself, couldn’t hurt.

“Umm,” she said, meaning it was hot and she didn’t much feel like it, but which I took to mean, “Well, if you insist.”

“Come on,” I said. “It will be quick.”

And actually it was. Classes weren’t in session, so there were no eager student faces, no intense discussions, or any of those things I didn’t exactly remember from my college days, but I was sure must have been there. The large auditorium was open, but except for three people who were measuring seats, it was empty. We stood outside the empty dining hall and watched through a window as two people with buckets cleaned a spot on the floor. We walked into the old part of the library, which had been completely emptied for a film shoot. “We’ll look at a dorm,” I said, “then leave.”

So we headed up the hill toward the girls’ dorms, and I steered her between two large buildings that were used, at least when I was there, as lecture halls. I was getting hot and tired myself, and was thinking that while this tour wasn’t an absolutely terrible idea, it certainly was not one of my best, when, for the first time that afternoon, I suddenly heard some excitement in her voice. “Look,” she said, ”here’s a memorial to every one who died in World War One!”

Well, I thought, she does like history, and though I couldn’t figure out why a memorial plaque would be all that interesting, I was glad to see something had caught her attention. Certainly I must have walked by the same plaque a hundred times while I had attended classes there, and couldn’t remember once having noticed it.

I moved toward the girls’ dorms, but she wasn’t finished. “And look,” she went on, “Here’s World War Two,” — a pause — “and Korea, and Vietnam.” Sure enough there they all were, all the wars in bronze, listing all the dead alums, set into a stucco wall painted the same beige as I used to spread around those summers I worked on the college painting crew. Then a name caught my eye: Wallace Wiggins, it said, and my first thought was that it must have been Wally’s father, so I looked above it to see if it was the Korean War, or even World War II. But it was Vietnam, and when I looked back at his name, it wasn’t even dead, but Missing In Action. Wallace Wiggins: not dead, but not alive either, more like caught somewhere between the two, more like the workings of my memory. Wally had been there and not there for forty years.

We walked back to the car.

She got her hair done.

But by then, as had happened once or twice before, my world changed. In some fundamental way everything I had believed: the idea that somewhere, Wally and the rest of those Jock-Nihilists were going about living their lives, having children, grandchildren, fulfilling the promise of the college to provide the world with humane executives, educators and middle-managers — all things expected of a certain class —this whole vision of normality had been based on a lie. One of us at least had not kept up. One of us had been left back at the starting line all those many years ago, while we others ran blindly on, and now here he was, like one of those Stone Age hunters who fell only to be found in the heart of a glacier, centuries later. And that person had been, of all people, Wally.

That evening, when my stepdaughter saw her mother she told her, “Oh, Jim’s sad because a guy he almost bought a car from died.”

And I suppose that’s right, because really, when I come to think about it, our connection was only as close as that. We weren’t friends, only acquaintances, and I never even bought that car. But had Wally known something when he would nod at me as if to say, “No matter what, it doesn’t mean shit”?

I think he couldn’t possibly have understood the truth then, but for me, now, a curtain has been lifted, and from where I am standing if I turn my head a little to one side I can see Wally, an absurdly tiny figure in the jungle of time — smiling, tanned, right back where I left him all those years ago —his plane down, his buddies gone, and still hacking away at those vines that want to swallow him, still trying to find his way out of there, but to where and to what?

I can’t imagine.

Wally, you old nihilist you — you tell me.

The essay: “Wally” appeared in the spring 2008 edition of the Santa Monica Review and Jim also shared his essay with us at CaliforniaAuthors.com.

Considering Joaquin Murrieta

California schoolchildren grow up with stories of Joaquin Murrieta — the famous bandit who terrorized the state until he was shot and beheaded in 1853.

There’s a famous drawing of Joaquin in which his eyes are big and his long black hair is writhing like a head full of snakes and the menace in him is palpable.

Having traveled up and down the state since my childhood, I’ve noted dozens of places claiming that “Joaquin Murrieta slept here,” or “Joaquin Murrieta robbed this establishment,” or “Joaquin Murrieta used this location as a secret hideaway,” and the like.

There’s a famous poster, which is still reproduced and often seen in California roadhouses and biker bars and museums, with the unforgettable headline at the top:

THE HEAD
of the renowned bandit
JOAQUIN!
To Be Exhibited at the Stockton House
August 19, 1853 — Admission $

And of course, below the headline there’s a crude illustration of a man’s head preserved in a jar of alcohol.

I can tell you, that as a schoolboy, this poster got my undivided attention. My schoolboy texts called Murrieta a murderer and a horse thief. They suggested that he was a charmer and seducer of women. They all implied — or stated — that Murrieta was a homicidal madman and deserved to have his severed head exhibited.

The trouble is, when you start looking for facts about this man’s life, they’re hard to come by. It’s like trying to catch smoke in your hand.

My impressive New Encyclopedia of the American West , published by Yale University, offers this opening line in its article on Joaquin: “The existence of Joaquin Murieta, at least as the person to whom many murders and thefts were attributed in Gold Rush California, remains questionable to many historians.”

Well, thanks. They don’t even spell his name right. This encyclopedia goes on to say that if the Joaquin Murrieta of folklore really did exist, he was born in either Mexico or Chile, died in either 1853 or 1878. They say he was probably one of FIVE Joaquins named by the California State Legislature to be hunted down by legendary Texas Ranger Harry Love for their alleged felonies against the people of California.

But author Walter Noble Burns wrote a biography about Joaquin, The Robin Hood of El Dorado, in which young Joaquin was portrayed as a much-maligned Mexican who bore the brunt of Anglo fear and racism.

Other writers posited that Joaquin was a good and honest man who was turned into an avenging devil after his beautiful young wife was raped as he watched, and his brother was hung for stealing a horse that he actually didn’t steal, and Joaquin himself was brutally horsewhipped.

Some claim he was never beheaded, and the head in the jar belonged to another Joaquin, or perhaps to a man not named Joaquin at all.

Some claim his head was taken by thieves, or lost in the San Francisco earthquake.

In short, the more you try to find out about Joaquin the less you know for sure.

Sad? Not really.

For thus is fired the imagination.

And I asked myself… what if Joaquin had a descendent who was alive today?

And what if Joaquin’s head was not lost in an earthquake but rather stolen by his grandchildren and smuggled down through generations of Murrietas, to end up in a barn belonging to this descendent?

What if his diary was in the barn, too?

And his guns?

And what if his outlaw spirit still burned in the heart of this modern-day descendent?

And what if this great-great-great-great-great-great grandchild decided to stoke the legend of Murrieta again, to continue where Joaquin had left off — to become an outlaw, just like him?

What if she were a beautiful young schoolteacher?

What if the opening words of L.A. Outlaws were:

“Here’s the deal. I’m a direct descendent of the outlaw Joaquin Murrieta.”

Would you believe her, or not?

Uncovering Lost Treasures of Movie and Marketing Art

Now Playing tells the story of the previously unexplored cottage industry of historic, one-of-a-kind movie posters that existed throughout the first half of the twentieth century. … Lavish artwork and detailed text tell the ground-breaking story of these hand-painted movie posters commissioned by the nation’s local theaters — not the film studios — and created by local artists who were free to play by their own rules, creating unique visual advertising.

Once thought of as disposable signs meant to be enjoyed briefly and discarded as quickly as the marquee was changed, these posters were often destroyed, painted over or adapted for a new film. And some preserved their favorites, unaware that in the twenty-first century they would be regarded as valuable works of film history.

These independent artists had the challenge of communicating their messages concisely in broad strokes with few words, “less is more” being their constant mantra. they didn’t have the luxury — or the encumbrance — of seeing the films beforehand, of complex review quotes, or long lists of cast and crew. Instead, they had one mission: sell the movie. With paintbrush or pen in hand, eachartist created his or her image for the film that would appeal not to all of America, but to their own hometown.

Impassioned as they began to investigate the history of these one-of-a-kind posters, researchers Jane Burman Powell and Lori Goldman Berthelsen discovered a treasure trove of artwork by numerous long forgotten artists. Hollywood historian and noted author Anthony Slide joined the team to write Now Playing, a story that had never been fully told, a study rich with posters in full color and black and white that have been lost to the public eye until now. Through the generosity of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, more than 150 of these beautiful posters have been gathered in Now Playing, many of which are the part of the permanent collection of the Margaret Harrick Library at the Fairbanks Center for Motion Picture Study.

All images: From the book Now Playing: Hand-Painted Poster Art from the 1910s through the 1950s, by Anthony Slide with Jane Burman Powell and Lori Goldman Berthelsen copyright (c) 2007 by Lori Goldman Berthelsen and Mel Powell.

The Posters for Son of the Sheik, Nobody Home, Devil’s Brother and The Mummy courtesy of the Margaret Herrick Library. The poster for Girl Shy courtesy of Dr. Phil Sansone.

A Q&A with the author of A Handbook to Luck

Q: A Handbook to Luck ranges more widely from Cuba than some of your previous books. Why did you choose to do this at this point in your writing career?

A: I spent a large part of the last fifteen years living in Los Angeles, which one writer intriguingly called ‘The Capital of the Third World.’ It’s a city of immigrants with literally millions of stories of dislocation and adaptation, tragedy and dramatic beatings of the odds. It’s an irresistible place for a writer. I’d dedicated myself in my first three novels to telling the story of Cuba and its various Cuban migrations from different viewpoints and time frames. But it was time for me to move on. I woke up one morning on the edge of the Pacific and suddenly discovered that there were stories all around me. It was a matter of choosing what I wanted to focus on, of finding just the right characters to speak to these preoccupations.

Q: Where did the idea for A Handbook to Luck come from?

A: When my daughter was little, I hired a babysitter to take care of her for a few hours a day. She was from El Salvador and every morning she came, it grew harder and harder for me to go to work. Her stories were that incredible. She could be watering the lawn or sweeping the kitchen and ask quietly: “Did I ever tell you the time I shot my first husband in the foot?” What!? My jaw would drop and I would stop whatever I was doing or intending to do and listen. Her storytelling went on for years! Well, this woman is the inspiration for my Marta character. She hasn’t worked for me for ten years but we remain close friends and I am the godmother to her daughter. And I still listen to her stories.

Q: The novel progresses from the year 1968 to 1987. Why did you choose this time period as your setting?

A: The time period roughly mirrors my own coming-of-age years and I felt confident describing a lot of what happened then. I have a political and cultural context for those years — a far cry from my last novel, Monkey Hunting, which was largely set in colonial Cuba.

Q: The main characters in A Handbook to Luck are an impoverished girl from San Salvador, a privileged girl from Tehran, and a boy originally from Cuba who lives in Southern California and Las Vegas as a child. You are from Cuba and live in California, but was it hard to imagine the landscapes of Tehran and San Salvador?

A: I felt that I needed to go to El Salvador and Iran to do this novel justice. I couldn’t get a visa to go to Iran (I tried three times), but I managed to spend a couple of weeks in El Salvador, mostly traveling around with my daughter on the back of a flatbed truck with my old babysitter and her daughter. We visited her family all over the country, and listened, listened, listened. Many people talked to me about the civil war, something which is not spoken of much there, at least not openly. It’s almost as if there’s been an unspoken collective amnesia to avoid discussing unpleasant memories. But the trauma of the war lives on in everyone. In the book, I give the act of witnessing the war’s atrocities to Evaristo, Marta’s brother, who spends most of his life living in trees.

Q: The three main characters live in California in some point in the novel. Did you choose California because you are familiar with it, or do you think it’s more of a melting pot than other states?

A: California is immigration central for the United States; Los Angeles, in particular. There are more Vietnamese living in L.A. than any other place in the world outside their home country. The same is true for Salvadorans and Koreans and Mexicans and Japanese — you name it. My daughter and I have done a lot of foreign travel, but we’ve crossed as many cultural boundaries living in Los Angeles as we have crossing international date lines. “What country do you want to visit today?” I might ask her on any given Saturday and we could very well find ourselves immersed for the afternoon in East L.A. or Koreatown. There are extraordinary cultural opportunities in L.A. that most people don’t appreciate or take advantage of, to their detriment.

Q: Your novel explores the notion of luck and circumstance. Why did you decide to focus on this?

A: Since I was a kid, I’ve been fascinated by notions of luck and fate, coincidence and destiny and chance. Was this meant to be? Do good things always emerge from bad, as my mother would tell me? How will my life be different if I turn left this minute instead of right? I was happily plagued by questions like this all the time, and they followed me into adulthood. To my mind, there is nothing more fraught with peril and luck (good and bad) than migration. In A Handbook to Luck, I tried to write a story that combined my interests and obsessions on these themes.

Q: All of the characters in A Handbook to Luck seem to outgrow their traditional family backgrounds and move on to a more modern, American life. How true do you think this is to the typical immigrant experience?

A: Yes, my characters do outgrow their traditions and try hard to adapt to life in the United States. I’ve certainly seen this in almost every immigrant community I’m familiar with. But the price is often high and immigrants may end up feeling like they don’t belong anywhere — not back home, not in their adopted country. Then memory goes to work on the past, as it always does, distorting it, selecting incidents, and revising history. That’s the basic recipe for nostalgia, isn’t it? Every immigrant I know struggles to find a balance between the present and the past, between the preservation of his or her traditions and language and becoming culturally fluent in their new surroundings.

Q: You were born in Havana and raised in the United States. How does your experience inform your characters?

A: As an immigrant myself, I can speak to the cultural duality that comes from “living on the hyphen,” as another Cuban writer put it. I know what it’s like to be both a participant and an observer in a new culture, to be an insider and an outsider at the same time. It made for many uncomfortable moments when I was growing up but now I see it as an incredibly privileged place from which to write.

Q: What’s next?

A: I’ve started a new novel tentatively titled The Lady Matador’s Hotel, which is set, for the most part, in a luxury hotel in Central America ten years after the end of its civil war (a thinly-disguised Guatemala). It features a widely divergent cast including my main character, Suki Palacios, a female matador of Mexican-Japanese descent who grew up in Los Angeles. She’s in town to participate in the first all-women bullfighting competition in the Americas.

The Darwin Dilemma

Most Americans could not say who Gordon Gould was, or John Logie Baird, or Nikola Tesla, or Edward Jenner, or Jack Kilby, although the work of these scientists is ever-present in our daily lives, part of our culture, our entertainment, our communications, our defense, our medical care — our entire modern technology. The world in general and America in particular would be unrecognizable without them, our lives immeasurably poorer and quite probably shorter. Yet most of us couldn’t pick them out of a line-up, much less an encyclopedia.

So who are they? Gould invented the first laser, the ubiquitous device that makes possible CD and DVD players, fiber optics, military targeting systems, and bladeless scalpels that perform lifesaving surgeries unimaginable a generation ago. Baird invented television and changed the world, while Tesla powered it, having invented a way to deliver alternating current to home users and our modern electrical infrastructure — the one in which, day after day, without consumers giving it a thought, the lights go on and the toasters toast and the garage doors open and the respirators pump air into the lungs of premature babies. Kilby invented the microchip, another omnipresent device, the silicon brain inside computers and cars and nuclear reactors and iPods and GameBoys ­ the transitional techno-fossil bridging the mechanical and digital ages. And the Englishman Jenner saved our lives and ended terrible scourges by inventing the first vaccination — defeating Small Pox and pointing the way for an army of other disease vanquishers.

These great men, these scientists for the ages, dominate our households, but they are not household names. America loves to consume the fruits of science, but we are mostly oblivious of how the stuff works, and of the men and women who discover it for us. Even the giants among them are surprisingly anonymous.

Only three scientists of significance have achieved lasting name recognition among Americans in the twenty-first century, and none of them are directly linked with any of the technological wonders the nation so prizes. There is Einstein, who became a true celebrity notwithstanding the fact that few Americans even remotely understand his science; his fame endures mostly because his name has become a noun, a synonym for “egghead,” the ultimate colloquial immortality, and because his crazy-haired photograph is a perennial poster favorite. There is Newton, remembered not so much for his invention of calculus and physics as for the apocryphal story of an apple falling on his head to inspire the theory of gravity. Or perhaps it is the venerable cookie that shares his name.

Finally, there is Darwin, the only scientist who has achieved both lasting fame and lasting infamy in America. He has inspired generations of scientists and evangelicals to do battle, and his thinking remains as relevant and provocative today as it was a century and a half ago. His writings, data, and reasoning are still plumbed and studied in the twenty-first century by biologists, paleontologists and botanists. One of the nation’s leading paleontologists and evolutionary biologists, Kevin Padian, a pioneer in studying the evolution of dinosaurs and birds, says he and his colleagues still find new ideas and insights in Darwin’s work. Padian teaches advanced graduate school seminars on Darwin at the University of California at Berkeley, and he finds even the top students in attendance, already well on their way to becoming accomplished biologists and paleontologists, are “blown away” by what Darwin achieved and how little they really understood of his life, his scientific accomplishments, and the obstacles he faced.

Darwin’s influence, of course, extends far beyond the world of science. Alone among scientists, Darwin has inspired continuing political and cultural movements in America ­ some in support of his views, but for the most part against him and against what he is thought to represent. Over time he has become an archetype, a mythic figure at once revered and demonized — routinely ranked by scientists as one of the three or four most important thinkers in history, and just as routinely ranked with Hitler and Marx in the religious right’s pantheon of evil.

As with most myths, the true Darwin and the nature of his research have become clouded in the popular imagination, his philosophy mischaracterized, his quotations misused, his shy and gentle personality vilified, and his science — the seemingly familiar theory of evolution — mangled beyond recognition. This, too, is part of the story of Dover.

The simple truth is, Charles Darwin did not “invent” evolution; he didn’t even initially use the term, preferring instead the phrase, “descent with modification” or the word “transmutation.” His seminal book, The Origin of Species, which laid out the basis of his life’s work and which he continued to build on for decades, uses the word “evolved” exactly once. It is the very last word in the book.

Nor did Darwin think up the notion that life progresses, develops or evolves over time. That idea had been around long before he was born and, in its most general sense of organisms adapting to survive and thrive, was never particularly controversial. It was the mechanism of evolution ­ the mysterious process causing it to occur — and the extent to which a species could or could not be transformed — that got people riled, challenged conventional wisdom and belief, and became the focus of Darwin’s research.

Darwin was content to let his writings speak for themselves, and to continue writing books that examined plant and human evolution, and then the evolution of emotions and human psychology, leaving his supporters in the scientific community to defend his theories. They did so, vociferously and, in the end, successfully. The Origin of Species was reprinted many times and was the last great work of science written both for a specialized readership of scientists and for a mass audience. It was widely read throughout the world, lauded, mocked, satirized and discussed, until it became entrenched in the popular imagination, a cultural touchstone of enlightenment or corrupt materialism, depending upon the point of view. The weight of the evidence as Darwin’s century drew to a close seemed to scientists to favor evolution and its power to explain so many diverse observations and natural processes. By the time Darwin died in 1882, his ideas were being taught in universities worldwide, replacing the works of William Paley and the advocates of intelligent design.

Darwin had won the first battle. But not the war.

Moving from Tight Little Machines to the Novel

I recently interviewed Salvador Plascencia on the occasion of the paperback release of his novel, The People of Paper. I asked if he was working on another novel or perhaps short stories.

He replied: “I think I’m stuck writing novels for better or worse. I’m too scattered to be able to make one of those tight little machines they call short stories.”

Tight little machines? Perfect.

But what struck me more than Plascencia’s eloquence was his unapologetic candor. At the time, I was in the midst of trying to make the leap from short story writer to novelist, and going crazy in the process. Plascencia got me wondering why I was putting myself through all that angst. I’d garnered nice reviews for my two collections, Assumption and Other Stories and Devil Talk, and my stories have been taught in high school and college. My novella and children’s picture book were also well received. I write because it gives me joy, not because it’ll put food on the table. I had no compelling reason to start writing a novel.

When I started writing, why did I gravitate to short stories rather than the novel? Part of the answer is the delight I derived when I was younger and falling in love with those tight little machines by such writers as Fitzgerald, Maugham and Hemingway. And then later, I discovered the likes of Boyle, Cisneros and Bender. I learned that a short story is like a poem: each word, every sentence, has to matter. Yet I could think of a few great 500-page novels that might be trimmed by a few thousand words without losing much strength.

Another reason why I gravitated to the short form was my busy schedule as a full-time litigator with the California Department of Justice. I’m also a husband and father. The spotty writing time that I can scrape together in the evenings or weekend mornings makes it difficult for me to maintain any sort of continuity for longer pieces. I know other writers can do it, but we all have different strengths, as my mother always reminded me when I was young. I figured that I could write short stories for the rest of my life and that would just fine, thank you very much. There was no disgrace in being a short story writer. I mean, Borges never wrote a novel, right?

I completed another short-story collection, which my agent and I sent out. But a couple of large publishing houses passed on it with basically the same sentiment: love your writing but short stories are a tough sell. Don’t you have a novel in you?

This was a bit maddening because, as all writers know, no one ever asks a novelist, “Don’t you have a short-story collection in you?” Never. Ever. But that’s fine. There are greater injustices in life.

In any event, since I like challenges, I tried to map out the kind of novel I would write. And this is when I started to go a bit crazy. Visions of writing the “Great American Novel” crept into my brain. Once that happened, the very idea of writing a novel seemed like an impossible—and not very fun—job. And then I conducted the Plascencia interview, which shook some sense into me. I suddenly realized that I would not write a novel unless it was fun. If I decided not to move to the longer form, that was fine. So I figured I’d take baby steps. If I were to write a novel, what would be about?

I’ve written about Chicanos of all ages and income levels who confront various challenges from unrequited love to battles with bigotry or economic hardship or you-name-it. I’ve also set stories in Mexico and I haven’t been afraid to dip heavily into magical realism especially in my collection, Devil Talk. And because I was raised as a Roman Catholic and converted to Judaism in adulthood, I’ve touched upon issues of intermarriage, religious tensions and even the Holocaust.

I saw no reason to stray from these themes. I kept reminding myself that this novel would have to be fun to write. Otherwise why do it? I didn’t want to get bored with the characters or plot, something that never happens when I write short stories. I mean, look, they’re short. You get in, you get out. It’s a little thrill ride with no time for things to get dull.

I eventually came upon the overarching inspiration and structure for my novel that would pull together all of these elements. Maybe it wouldn’t sell, but so what? (That noise you hear is my agent sighing—deeply, sadly.) But I knew that if I were to write a novel, this would be it.

I also knew that my novel would not have the panoramic, epic breadth of, say, Luis Alberto Urrea’s brilliant The Hummingbird’s Daughter. It would be closer to the novel-in-stories such as one of my favorite books, The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, or perhaps Laila Lalami’s exquisite Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits. While the chapters would connect, I wanted each to be able to stand alone as a short story, to be self-contained and a world unto itself. Not only did I want to touch on some of my favorite themes, I also hoped to address such timely topics as the quagmire in Iraq, Los Angeles politics (especially our Chicano mayor), immigration and assimilation.

Once I settled on the themes and structure, I approached each chapter with the joyful giddiness I get from starting a new short story.

I finally finished the novel and sent it to my agent and she, in turn, forwarded the manuscript to a couple of editors who wanted to see me make the leap to the long form. Now all we can do is wait. Will they like my novel? God only knows.

But I had a damn fun time writing it.

From the introduction

We had forests. As a child, I read of Sherwood Forest in England, where men could be lost to sight for years; of haunted woods in Europe, like those where my mother was born, where wolves and witches and darkness reigned amid the huge firs; of rain forests in South America where birds and monkeys screamed amid the dripping branches; of the chestnut and hickory and dogwood of Appalachia and the wilderness of trees in the great eastern forests of America.

And though no one knew it, in my part of Southern California, the inland reaches of terrain where most of us see only smog-shrouded hills and dried wild oats and mazes of freeway, we had magical, mythical woods as well—thousands and thousands of acres planted in orange and lemon and grapefruit trees that covered much of Riverside and San Bernardino and Redlands. Apricots and olive groves in Hemet, the date palm groves in Mecca and Indio, walnut trees in Elsinore, and cherries and apples in Cherry Valley and Oak Glen. Between them, in the wild San Gorgonio and San Jacinto Mountains, on the rolling hills of Temecula, we had pines and oaks that had lived for centuries. Along the riverbeds were cottonwoods and willows, and in the desert Joshua trees made their own eerie forests, and smoke trees rose from the sand. All my life, here in this place, we have had our own myths and legends and stories, but they were not heard very often outside in the world.

I live in a house three blocks from Riverside Community Hospital, where I was born, where my brothers, my ex-husband, and his siblings were born, and most of our friends and all of our children.

I have always lived here, except for my college years, and I have seen nearly every mile of land in the region which this new anthology calls “Inlandia.” When I was a child and people from elsewhere asked adults about where we lived, I remember hearing again and again that we were an hour from the mountains, an hour from the desert, an hour from the ocean, and an hour from Los Angeles. And I always thought, when I was a child, But why would we want to leave?

We had everything, in my eyes. The endless forests of cultivation, the lush wildowers of the desert in spring, the date groves and pine forests. Trout from mountain lakes, lemons and oranges and avocados all winter, and as children we didn’t care when smog veiled the hills in the summer. We mined the foothills near our house for fool’s gold and rose quartz, and then we lay panting in an orange grove, and swam in the swift waters of the canal, where grass waved on the bottom as though in a true stream.

In fact, I realized as I grew older, everyone wanted to come here, to the inland region. Everyone’s parents had come from somewhere else. My own mother was from Switzerland; her parents had moved from their small valley to seek their fortunes. They did not €nd them in Ontario, Canada, or northern Florida, but then they saw the ultimate pictures of prosperity and success, the land of milk and honey as represented in decades past: the postcards of purpled, snow-covered mountains in the distance, and orange trees in the foreground, all golden in the sun.

That is truly what we saw, growing up here, all winter. It was paradise, though I have since learned that the rest of the world might not recognize it.

In elementary school and junior high, I found that nearly everyone’s parents had immigrated here—from Louisiana and Oklahoma and Mississippi, from Michoacán and Zacatecas and Guanajuato, from the Philippines and Germany and Japan. I had friends whose fathers were military men and whose mothers were immigrant brides from those countries. I had other friends whose fathers were military men and who’d returned to the South and vowed never to live in poverty and segregation again. All settled in Riverside, in San Bernardino, in Victorville—wherever there were military bases. And their children grew up in the Inland Empire—a new people. They played with the children of the Okies who’d broken down here, with my mother-in-law’s people, who’d broken down in Calexico and whose sons became some of the €rst black Border Patrol agents.

I lived in a neighborhood called Okietown for the €rst three years of my life, and then my mother married my stepfather, who had also found his promised land here, having left New Brunswick, Canada. We moved to Riverside, and they have never left.

We ran freely as children, to the foothills and groves and river, and my parents, who loved this landscape with the passion of those raised in snow, took us camping everywhere. We knew every mile of Inlandia.

The dinosaurs of Cabazon, where people could eat hamburgers inside the head of a brontosaurus. The date palm groves in Mecca and Oasis and Indio, where even the names were exotic, and where I stood under the gray-green fronds arching above me, touching the etched trunks and the golden sprays of dates cascading overhead, and knew it was really a cathedral. The heat was so intense, and the cicadas’ song €lled my forehead, and the smell of water in the irrigation furrows was silver. On the way home, we got date shakes in Indio and watched the famous movie—The Sex Life of the Date.

I love every mile of my homeland. The fields of watermelon and cantaloupe in Blythe and Ripley, where my foster brothers and sisters came from. The savanna-like golden grasses in the Temecula Valley, with the oaks gathered like black clouds in the distance. The steep entrance of the Cajon Pass, where the mountains are purple in winter dusk and the wind is so €erce it will throw trucks like toys. The dunes outside Palm Springs and Whitewater, where the sand is white and soft as cake flour, and the smoke trees rise like ghosts in the distance. (My ex-husband once worked at a juvenile correction facility in Whitewater, and when Los Angeles boys tried to run away, he followed them in that desert, as they trudged with suitcases and radios through the creosote and rabbitbrush and hot sand, until they gave up in what they considered a particularly impersonal hell.)

I love the tiny communities that only we in this place know—Rubidoux, named for a pioneer of the area, and Belltown, where our cousins live near the Santa Ana River; Agua Mansa and La Placita, where New Mexicans came to grow grapes along that river and build adobe houses, marked now only by a cemetery and a few scattered homes; the old Cucamonga, where vineyards flourished and my parents bought wine; and Muscoy, on the outskirts of San Bernardino, where my brother liked to check out fighting roosters

For twenty-five years I have written about this region and tried to infuse my work with love and desire and the fierceness we retain in these small places where people loved their own with the vehemence, the stubborn and suspicious and inventive qualities required to survive in this part of Southern California. It was a place where the land and sun and smog and violence and people could be forbidding, but the same land and sun and people offered survival and love and tungsten-hard loyalty to each other.

And for all these years, I have wanted to see my place represented in literature, in a wide-ranging collection of all the communities and voices and landscapes I’ve known.

Here it is.

The oranges, the Washington navel and Valencias I’ve tasted all my life, the ones my brother grew for many years, descendants of the tree which I drive past often and always nod to in obeisance. They are here, in John Jakes’s excerpt and in the narratives by Harry Lawton and Mary Paik Lee of those Chinese and Korean men and women who harvested the fruit.

The legends of Tahquitz, the angry god whose stories I heard as a child when I was afraid to hike in his canyon above Palm Springs, and the stories of Mukat and his children, who lived in the desert. Malcolm Margolin’s account of the expulsion of the Cupa people from Warner Springs, less known than the famous tale of Ramona, but sadder to me because I knew Gordon Johnson, a descendant of one of the women wailing as she left her home. Johnson’s stories of humor and heartbreak on Pala, where his ancestors persevered, bring the story full circle.

The forbidding, alluring desert is here, in Erle Stanley Gardner’s excerpt: “I went to sleep with the sand making little whispering noises that sounded more and more like words.” I have heard so many times those whispers, in Cabazon and Palm Desert, and have been trapped in a truck while the raging winter sandstorms blasted the paint off the hood. Erle Stanley Gardner wrote in the inland area, sometimes at the Mission Inn, where Carrie Jacobs-Bond wrote her poem included here, and where I wrote parts of all my novels.

Sometimes I believe we have an advantage here in our land, because even the very words used to describe us are lovely: pomegranate and pyracantha, bougainvillea and jacaranda, granite and ghostly coyotes and eucalyptus. Even our smog makes the sunset vivid as dangerous passion.

The writers I read for inspiration as a young author are here. I always admired Laura Kalpakian’s fictional St. Elmo, her creation of a place much like San Bernardino, and how, as the excerpt in this anthology shows, she knew the people here so well. Route 66 was a mythical place in our history, and no one wrote about it like John Steinbeck; not until I read The Grapes of Wrath did I understand the refusal of many of my elderly neighbors to get rid of a carburetor or radiator or even an old tire.

Recent statistics reveal, several years in a row, that the many disparate communities of my city, my region, my landscape—once fairly small in population—have been transformed into the fastest-growing counties in America. Hundreds of thousands of people, drawn by affordable housing, have left Los Angeles and Orange and San Diego Counties to move to this area.

The new voices in Inlandia represent the best of my hopes and dreams and literary desires, the eloquent renderings of how the old worlds and new have collided and melded in this place like no other. Alex Espinoza has made his native Colton into Agua Mansa, a tender and heartbreaking and hopeful place. The Riverside landscape of Michael David Egelin, the Highland of Keenan Norris, the Blythe of E. J. Jones, and the Salton Sea of Gayle Brandeis are all places I have always wanted to see in print, the mirages and neighborhoods and voices I missed before.

When I left Riverside to attend university in Los Angeles, I was already fully formed, stubborn and fierce and suspicious as my inland compatriots. As I’d expected, my universe was ridiculed. “You’re from Riverside? The Inland Empire? What do you have out there? Cows? Oranges, right?”

To answer the people from Pasadena and Los Angeles and Orange County and San Francisco, I had many responses. My land has had the distinction of being the capital of many things in the past—arson, smog, urban sprawl, methamphetamine, biker gangs, and yes, citrus and dairy. We have always been a rural place where people grow things to make their fortunes, and sometimes they grew hamburgers and Hell’s Angels, as in Eric Schlosser’s examination of the MacDonald brothers and San Bernardino. M. F. K. Fisher gave up on growing anything but haunting memories. People grew desire for gold, they grew insane. I knew the Harada house, where a Japanese American woman grew courage.

Now many of the groves—walnuts and apricots and oranges—are gone. Now people in this region grow houses, and mortgages, and more and more children.

But in the past, sometimes people who came to inland Southern California grew nothing but false hope.

In college, as a seventeen-year-old freshman, I was assigned to read Joan Didion’s essay “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream.” Her depictions of inland life were stunning and at the same time painful to me. “This is a story about love and death in the golden land,” she begins, and describes what was to most people “an alien place…a harsher California…this ominous country.” I had never read a phrase like “talismanic fruit,” and I stayed up all night with my €ngers turning the pages, knowing she was exactly who I wanted to be, that I wanted to write like that. But I had never seen anyone examine my own world, the Santa Ana winds, the lemon groves bordered with river-rock walls, and it was through those words that I now learned how others saw us: “the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life’s promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and a return to hairdressers’ school … Here is where the hot wind blows and the old ways do not seem relevant, where the divorce rate is double the national average and where one person in every thirty-eight lives in a trailer. Here is the last stop for all those who come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways.”

I lay awake all night, thinking of my friends and their parents. My future husband’s parents, who fled Mississippi and Oklahoma but who’d brought their cooking and voices and ways with them. My neighbors, born in Japan and the Philippines and Germany, now married to white and black and Mexican American servicemen, whose children I had always known. My own mother, who had left the cold behind and whose husband left her amid a dust storm in Glen Avon with me at three and a new baby, when the dirt sifted under the windowsill and covered everything.

I went home the next day and tried to tell my mother about the piece, and about writing, and about how it made me feel. Didion had said, recalling one of our great scandals, “Here is where they are trying to €nd a new life style, trying to find it in the only places they know to look: the movies and the newspapers. The case of Lucille Marie Maxwell Miller is a tabloid monument to that new life style.” My mother frowned and said, “Lucille Miller? Oh, your Aunt Beverly lived on her street. The one who killed her husband. Beverly always said that woman was capable of murder.”

I didn’t know what to feel then. I was one of those people Joan Didion knew everything about. I drove to Ontario, the neighborhood in the essay, where my father and his siblings had struggled to survive when their parents, who’d immigrated from Colorado, left them. To Fontana, where my grandmother worked at Kaiser, the now-closed steel plant which was our lifeline. To San Bernardino, where my mother had her €rst job. To Muscoy, a tiny place of dirt roads and clapboard houses where my stepfather had bought a one-room shack with no bathroom. His €rst property. I drove home to my neighborhood in Riverside, which made the places in Didion’s piece look good by comparison.

I wanted to someday know the code of her elegance and precision and genius, the prose I admired so much, but I wanted to read about my dreamers in their smog-shrouded pale asphalt streets, in their orange groves where the white blossoms fell around us like stars when the sun was going down, in their canyons where the gods of the mountains, like Tahquitz, waited for revenge, in their silver-hot vineyards and the date groves of Mecca where dark men cut grapes and put paper bags around the date clusters.

And now it is here. Inlandia.

How a California justice shaped our nation’s story

The realm of judicial biography can be a difficult one. U.S. Supreme Court justices, many of them, live monkish lives on the edge of great events, exerting profound influence across many years and issues but often from the periphery, not the center.

To take just one example, the Court under the leadership of Roger Taney infamously attempted to patch together a national framework for the preservation of slavery in the years leading up to the Civil War. More than one hundred years later, Taney’s place in American history remains defined by Dred Scott v. Sandford, which overruled the Missouri Compromise and declared Scott a slave despite his residency in a free state. Taney’s contribution is rightly considered a blight to the Court and a propellant toward America’s most searing war.

But even there, the Court and its chief justice played their role on the outskirts of the great debates of that period, with Abraham Lincoln in the center chair and those immediately around him in the lead supporting roles, so indelibly captured in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals. That creates an awkward vantage point from the perspective of a storyteller, and it makes observation of the Court subtle. Honest, effective writing about justices requires recognition that while the Court makes grand policy, it does so in the course of deciding cases, not writing laws or ordering armies into the field.

Judicial biography is further complicated in some instances by the justices themselves. As lifetime appointees, they have a tendency to go to the Court and then largely disappear from public view. They are public officials, yes, but of the type that can steer a shopping cart through a Washington grocery store and barely attract a nod. Their deliberations are private and difficult to penetrate; they affect much but say little.

Some justices simply defy the proposition that understanding a life helps to illustrate a career. In modern times, William O. Douglas forms one such paradox. Douglas laid down some of the great markers of American civil liberties — his defenses of speech and protest are ringing rejoinders of a happily disputatious society; his examination of the right of privacy stands as a hallmark of libertarianism that now finds itself underpinning Constitutionally protected abortion. But Douglas himself was a cranky, unpleasant man, cycling through marriages, contemptuous of his clerks, neglectful of those around him. As a result, it can be jarring to attempt to reconcile his Constitutional genius with his personal ineptness, though a few brave biographers have attempted just that.

None of that inhibits understanding of one of the twentieth century’s most important justices, arguably its most significant chief ever — Earl Warren, the subject of my new biography, Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made. The book represents the culmination of nearly five years of research and writing — and an even longer rumination on Warren’s work. In a sense, I began my work on Warren as a reporter for the Atlanta Constitution in the late 1980s, when I covered Mayor Andrew Young and, by extension, the civil rights legacy that Warren helped create and that Young upheld. I did not contemplate a book in those days, however. I did not allow myself to consider that possibility until I became an editor for the Los Angeles Times in 2001 and discovered the richness of Warren’s pre-Court life, his rise to power and his governance of California. After some preliminary research revealed the scope of that story, I became convinced that a full biography, one that explained his growth from rather conventional prosecutor to extraordinary chief justice was a worthy, important undertaking — and a timely one, too, given the nation’s present preoccupation with civil liberties and their place in a nervous society.

I soon discovered what a large life I had elected to measure. Warren was 62-years-old when he arrived at the Court in 1953. Unlike the present inhabitants of the Court, Warren did not come to the office as a professional judge. Rather, he already had assembled a huge, public and important life — as a prosecutor, California attorney general and California governor. Few politicians had a record to compare. Elected governor in 1942 by offing an incumbent Democrat, Warren went on to be elected two more times to the governorship. In 1946, Warren had achieved what by today’s standards can only be considered a near-impossibility: A lifelong Republican, he won his party’s nomination for the governorship that year — no surprise — but he also won the nomination of California’s Democrats. No person has ever come close again. In 1950, he beat Jimmy Roosevelt, son of FDR, by more than a million votes.

In his years as governor, Warren presided over California’s extraordinary expansion. He used to reflect that it was his job to make room for 10,000 migrants arriving every Monday morning. It was hard, he conceded, “but it can be thrilling.” By the time he left office, Warren had absorbed millions of new residents with dazzling speed. A state that employed 24,000 people when he became governor had 56,545 when he left. Wages in many industries doubled and then doubled again. He inherited a deficit and left a balanced budget.

Nationally, Warren also was a known figure. He sought the Republican nomination for president in 1944, 1948 and 1952. In 1948, he was named to serve as Thomas Dewey’s vice presidential running mate on the ticket that lost to Harry S. Truman (The Chicago Tribune pronounced that “Dewey Defeats Truman,” but that was the only place where the ticket won). That defeat, however, did little to dim Warren’s luster, and it was natural that Warren would eventually find himself a place in Washington. President Eisenhower’s 1952 victory, which ended generations of Democratic rule, cleared the way.

With such a history of winning and wielding political power, Warren did not shrink from putting the Supreme Court at the center of national affairs. Most famously, he inherited a divided and conflicted Court in the matter of Brown v. Board of Education. Under his predecessor, the Court had held Brown over for a term, struggling to find a way to overrule segregation without damaging the Court’s reliance on precedent. Warren found such a way, and, with the skills of a seasoned politician, delivered a unanimous Court on behalf of striking segregation in public schools — and did so in his first term as Chief Justice. That ruling did not end segregation immediately, but it gave life to the civil rights movement and established legal and moral underpinnings for the long march against one of America’s most disreputable institutions.

That was just the beginning of Warren’s long and effective command of the Court, over which he presided until 1969. Not all of his decisions were popular — many were not — and “Impeach Earl Warren” became the buzz phrase of the John Birch Society in the 1960s.

But his decisions spoke to his personality and humanity, for better and for worse, and honest appraisal of Warren’s record on the bench reveals a far more moderate and complex man than his critics are inclined to admit. Warren had come to public life as a prosecutor working in a Progressive Republican tradition, and those early experiences shaped his jurisprudence. He was appalled by crime and vice — both robbed working people of their savings and dignity — and he’d seen too much unprofessional police and trial work not to be offended by it. After some initial hesitation, Warren took aim at shoddy police practices from the bench and exerted what power he had to check them, motivated not by a desire to cuff the police but by one to improve their professionalism. That campaign crested in one of his most famous contributions to American law and culture, the 1966 ruling in Miranda that gave suspects their now-universally known “right to remain silent.”

In the area of pornography, Warren, again mindful of his own experience, consistently resisted the idea that the First Amendment allowed pornographers to go about their business. He was disgusted by smut and furious at the idea that his daughters might be exposed to such filth. Similarly, Warren was a great believer in dissent and in the idea that the Constitution protected protest. But he also was a patriot, and when a young man named David Paul O’Brien burned his draft card in Boston to protest the Vietnam War, Warren voted to uphold O’Brien’s conviction.

O’Brien was not Warren’s finest moment, but it is of a piece with his long devotion to the idea that the Supreme Court exists to protect the basic principles of American society. In general, that devotion served Warren well. He understood well before much of the nation that racial segregation was fundamentally unfair for what it did to children. It troubled him to imagine boys and girls reciting government-written prayers in schools. He understood the burdens of the poor, and could not abide the idea that the rich would understand their rights and be represented by lawyers when the poor would not. And, as a man returned over and over to office through the ballot box, he had an abiding faith in free and fair elections, and thus did not hesitate to strike poll taxes, literacy tests and schemes designed to give some voters more weight than others.

Those cases and many others provide the capstone of a great career that began in the imagination of a Bakersfield boy in the waning years of the nineteenth century, that carried him through world wars and the Cold War, that placed him atop the commission that examined the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas, and that ended at a pinnacle of legal and political authority. All of that makes Warren’s story a judicial biography, yes, but also the story of a nation as it grew, a chronicle of American history and the passage of American society into its maturity, guided by Warren himself.

The size and scope of Earl Warren’s life makes for compelling biography — at least I think it does. The nature of his personality makes it even more so. Warren’s personal and public lives are integrated into a whole character, not a flawless one but a solid and coherent one where one experience illuminates another. And, in this case, what made for good character also made for a great man. Earl Warren lived a long and important life; he was an assertive maker of history, a man of principle, of the type for whom many have such longing and nostalgia today.

I am privileged to have made a study of his life, but America is the real beneficiary: The nation that Warren made, our nation, is better because of him.

Eighteen years ago, I set up camp in the golden West, joining the hundreds of migrant workers who made small fortunes by hauling what is now called content out of the television mines that, like Los Angeles itself, periodically cave in without warning. I was satisfied by neither work nor love, but the terrain began to comfort me in unexpected ways. In Ohio, where I grew up, I never felt at home; I realized at an early age that I did not belong on the shores of a lake that was frozen most of the time, or in a city that always seemed to whisper discouraging nothings in my ear. I guess that’s why I always preferred the New York Yankees to the Cleveland Indians (although felt like a traitor for rooting for them before I moved to New York, the anti-desert, land of nonstop reaction), and why I used to send away for cactuses (I know you’re supposed to say “cacti,” but I don’t like the sound of it) that I could get from places with named like Kaktus Jack’s and Desert Botanicals and keep them on a window ledge near my bed. I don’t know if my window ledge faced west or not (the gray skies often obscured the sun), but seeing the outlines of my little cactuses against the clouds fueled my fantasies of the never-neverland where the turnpike went, the land where the misunderstood found understanding, the land where Zorro and Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp wouldn’t let anyone hurt you, the land where a girl named Jane lives forever as a Calamity, the land where the only thing anyone or anything really wants is a drink of water.

Once in Los Angeles, I immediately had the sense that I had planted myself at the edge of a desert, and that I was indigenous and could flourish here. I liked the idea of sinking roots into this quicksilver garden, this false greenhouse watered by hijacked rivers and tended by gatekeepers anxious to keep the temple of fame from getting too crowded. Maybe it was the light; the light was different out here — things showed up better, looked more like themselves. Maybe it was the space. Maybe it was in the seamless stretch of sunny days; they were different too, a bright backdrop for a carnival of beautiful creatures who lived phototropic lives, predators who drifted in to drink at the oasis from regions where those who stay behind get old. Or maybe it was that song in the background, coming from what I soon learned was Joshua Tree National Park, fading in and out, connecting me to some other world, the enchanting tinkle of chimes, from hidden patios up there behind the bougainvillea, rearranged by the Santa Ana winds that swept across the endless waves of sand outside the city, carrying good news.

The song first came and got me when I was on assignment for a local alternative newspaper, attending a workshop facilitated by “the shaman of Beverly Hills,” a well-known woman who had written a series of books about women and inward spiritual journeys involving power animals and other primal symbols. The workshop was at a banquet room in the airport Hyatt, down the hall from a meeting of the International Chiefs of Police, who presumably were power animals. Several hundred women were in attendance. After various introductory remarks, the lights were dimmed, candles were lit, and Native American flute and drumming tapes began. We were told we were going on a shamanic journey. (As an anthro major whenever I had bothered to, one, declare a major and, two, appear in class, I was not alarmed by this statement and in fact took it with some excitement.) “Close your eyes, get quiet, and visualize yourself going down a hole into the earth,” the workshop leader said. “Along the way, take in whatever crosses your path. I want you to follow this path, however it looks to you, to an altar. At that altar, I want you to find something you need from someone you know.” I had not yet been to Joshua Tree National Park, but at the airport Hyatt with my eyes closed, I knew I was deep inside it, traveling down a path marked by ocotillo and sage, crossed by a desert tortoise. As my trance deepened, the path took me to a large sandstone altar that stood under the shade of an ancient and giant Joshua tree. Atop the altar was a small vial of what I took to be water. The sun glinted off the vial, and then from behind the tree my maternal grandmother appeared.

In my family history, she was a woman known for the wonderful and cryptic line, “Life is funny. Oh dear, oh dear.” She had died at least a decade before this shamanic encounter at the airport Hyatt, with a letter from me in her hands. It was while living in New Mexico — another desert — that I had found out about her passing. As she approached me in my trance, she handed me the vial from the altar. I took it and started to cry, knowing in my bones that what she had just given me was not a vial of water, but a vial of tears, my own tears, tears I had not shed since my parents’ divorce when I was in fourth grade, and from that point on, had pretended that everything was funny and fine when in fact it was rarely either. As I clutched the vial to my heart, my grandmother faded back behind the Joshua tree, reclaimed by the desert. A raven’s cry joined my own and then I followed the path back to the surface of the earth, exchanging a glance with the tortoise. Sometimes life is not funny. Oh dear, oh dear.

In an instant, everything had changed. Mary Austen’s land of little rain had yielded to me a personal monsoon. I started skipping dinner parties, openings, reordering my life. Joshua Tree National Park had become my church, my temple, my Stouffer’s frozen turkey tetrazzini. Week after week I would leave Los Angeles, the Xerox machine of America’s dreams, and head for the Mojave, where they all started. I felt at home in this vast space where, if you happened to be near the right dune at the right time, you might stumble across a cosmic joke in the form of a shamanic workshop at the corner of Highway 111 and Bob Hope Drive, a biker with a used bookstore and an espresso machine (more on this later), a cosmetic epiphany in the form of a shack that peddles thigh cream next to an earthquake sinkhole, or endless miracles of nature such as the reclusive desert frogs that leap out of the sands after a rainstorm. The more time I spent wandering the trails of Joshua Tree National Park, the clearer it became that the desert — not Long Island, Wall Street, the White House, Madison Avenue, the Home Shopping Channel, or other regions born of mirage — explains the national character: it is the wide-open space that rocket-fuels the American obsession with personal rights, an extreme terrain that both comforts and kills; an underrated scape that is always there but doesn’t particularly care if you are; an ever-changing blank slate that does its own kind of business, turning tricks if the tricks are there to be turned, but has no price or any other result in mind. And then, of course, there’s Indian bingo.

Soon I was spending so much time there that I found the very Joshua tree of my dreams — the one that looked just like the one under which my grandmother had appeared in my vision — and I visited it often. JTNP became my second home; my friends in LA started calling me Chuckwalla Deanne and the friends I made out there started calling me Deanne from LA. And that’s how I learned the cardinal rule of the desert: Don’t ask, don’t tell. The desert doesn’t care who you are, and neither does anyone or anything who lives in it. But more than that, it’s filled with freak show treats and wonders. Call me sun-baked, but every spring, I make a pilgrimage to the rocks in the shape of late New York Yankee manager Billy Martin (a couple of dunes over from Sandy Koufax Wash). And then there’s the Joshua tree that I mentioned. Did I tell you that it talks? Oh, it’s got a harangue, but who doesn’t? And this one is more interesting than most. “Calm down,” it always says. “Stop running. There is no one by the name of Karl Rove out here, we do not know from Beyonce or Britney Spears, we place no stock in polls, and by the way, whatever happened to ten-cent beer night? Bring me the arm of Fernando Valenzuela! Do you see how the gringos have stolen his stuff?” I do, I reply, and I toast my daggered friend with my canteen.

Mary’s Cake

I am elbow-deep in almond-scented batter trying to figure out what Mary Todd Lincoln was thinking when the spirit of her dead son, Willie, came to her during a séance. The batter is for a white cake, which — according to my cookbook, Lincoln’s Table by Donna D. McCreary, a volume that resides in what I have come to think of as my personal Lincoln Library — was invented by a Monsieur Giron of Lexington, Kentucky, Mary’s hometown. The cake was intended for the visit of the Marquis de Lafayette in 1825, and was such a triumph, the recipe was begged by the Todd ladies, who turned it into a family staple. Mary Todd made the vanilla/almond cake for Abraham Lincoln when they were courting. She continued to make it after she became a wife and a mother; and after she was a First Lady (although I suspect that by then, she had somebody else grate the almonds for her).

I know all this about Mary Todd Lincoln because I am also elbow-deep in a historical novel about the problematic wife of the sixteenth president. It’s a book I’m writing in first-person, in Mary’s voice, one that is nothing like my own. Mary Todd Lincoln was a well-educated woman from a Southern family. (I am from New Jersey.) She spoke French; and she possessed a wickedly sarcastic sense of humor. Each morning, before I begin writing, I open a book of her letters and read until I imagine I can sound like her.

Thinking like her is more challenging.

In most fiction, you create your characters, fill them with desires, and then send them off to do things. In historical fiction, your characters have already done everything, and it’s up to you to figure out why.

I’d spent the hour before tackling Monsieur Giron’s recipe staring at a blank computer screen trying to figure out why Mary Lincoln was so sure it was her son who came to her during séance. I’d gone through every book I had on Spiritualism, when I spotted, at the bottom of the pile, my copy of Lincoln’s Table. (I had been researching the ingredients in buttered crab, a dish that was frequently served at the Lincoln White House). Suddenly, whipping up the white cake seems a very good idea, a sort of literary method acting — and much easier than buttered crab.

Now, however, as I attempt to fold stiffened egg whites into thick batter, I am not so certain. And then it comes to me – almonds. Willie’s skin could smell like almonds. And that smell, the scent of her son’s skin, is what makes Mary know that the spirit is his.

It takes me two more years to write my novel. And many more white cakes. Mary’s cake becomes for me, a version of Proust’s madeleine, a way into her (fictional) memory. I bake it when I need to know how Mary felt when she watched her husband die, when she was called “the most hated woman in America,” when her eldest son committed her to the lunatic asylum. And in the process, I discover why baking can be so satisfying for a writer — because after two hours, you KNOW you’ll have a cake.

The morning before my book release party, I am once again elbow-deep in almond-scented batter. I am making Mary’s white cake for that night’s reading, using it to entice my friends to come; telling them it isn’t often you have an author bake for you. But that isn’t the real reason I am turning my (very small) kitchen into a bakery. Feeding them the white cake feels necessary, a way of reaching across history, as if it would be impossible to understand Mary’s story unless you had first filled your mouth with the vanilla/almond sweetness of her cake. And as I fold in the egg whites (at which experience has made me no better) I find myself wishing I could bring a slice of white cake to everyone who reads the book.

Especially if I can get somebody else to make it.

Mary Todd Lincoln’s White Cake
(Adapted from Lincoln’s Table by Donna D. McCreary)

1 cup blanched almonds, chopped in a food processor until they resemble coarse flour.
1 cup butter
2 cups sugar
3 cups flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
1 cup milk
6 egg whites
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
confectionary sugar

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease & flour a bundt cake pan. Cream butter and sugar. Sift flour and baking powder 3 times. Add to creamed butter and sugar, alternating with milk. Stir in almonds and beat well. Beat egg whites until stiff and fold into the batter. Stir in vanilla extract.

Pour into prepared pan and bake for 1 hour, or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean. Turn out on a wire rack and cool. When cool, sift confectionary sugar over top.

The Californian

I wander
among them
with dolphins on my shirt
a visitor from a dry land

I come as
an ambassador
from rattlesnake
country
smelling of
digger pines
and the salt
of the
Pacific

I am a describer
of seals and star
thistles
of earthquakes
the late night
jolt
the run for
the door

from March to November
I tell them
we have no rain
I try to conjure
the red
dust for them
but even the air they
breathe is
green

it all comes
tumbling
down
sooner or
later
I tell them
boulders
mud
freeways
the people you
love
they all crack or burn
nothing is permanent

they listen
politely
some even take
notes

I feel like
a small stone age tribe
recently
discovered by
eager
anthropologists

Nixon and Kennedy, Bonnie and Clyde: The G.I. Bill and the Arts

“Close-up,” Arthur Penn murmured into the control-room microphone. “Nice and tight.”

The junior senator’s chiseled features filled the screen in response to Penn’s command, a handsome face, eyes unwavering on the camera, the politician’s words simple and direct, just as he had been coached. The senator finished his thought, then the television picture shifted to the other candidate in the debate: the far more seasoned and experienced of the two, probably smarter as well, but also pale, shifty-eyed, his clothes a poor fit, his five o’clock shadow plainly visible. The contrast couldn’t be plainer; it almost didn’t matter what either man said, Penn knew.

Only one of them looked presidential.

Just as Penn had planned.

It was 1960, the Golden Era of live television, when giants of the stage, screen, and literature came together every night to invent and re-invent a new medium, never quite sure what would happen when they fired up those lumbering, balky video cameras, never quite sure what line would pop from an actor’s mouth, what glory or disaster would dance live across twenty-million black-and-white screens, then disappear into the ether. In those days, the men in the control room, the directors and producers, most of them World War II vets like Penn with a G.I. Bill degree behind them, had to have ice in their veins. There were no do-overs, no room for error, no filler material to populate the airwaves should disaster strike. The “On the Air” light came on and you were live, with the biggest audience in the world, in history, waiting to see what you were made of. Doing television in those days was exhilarating, adventurous, and merciless, and Penn was one of the pioneers and masters of that particular tightrope.

And now the men vying to be leader of the free world had arrived in his shop to stage the first-ever televised presidential debate. The advance man for the Democratic candidate had come to Penn and his producer, two rising stars in the business, and said, We’ve never done this. No one’s ever done this. We need you to tell us about television.

So Penn told them — and thereby helped launch a new age of American politics, the modern era of image and sound bites and form over substance, though it seemed like so much more at the time. For the first time, a director of teleplays and theater and Hollywood films was called upon to instruct a political candidate on the nature of television — how facial close-ups were critical and make-up a necessity, how short, punchy lines were far better than lengthy nuance, and how looking directly at the camera, rather than at the moderator or the panel of journalists who would be questioning the candidates, would create the illusion that you were staring every viewer in the eye and speaking directly to him or her. It was a trick, a bit of acting, this peering at the bulbous lens of a giant camera and pretending it was a person. But it was a great trick, Penn explained, not at all like mugging for the audience while onstage. It made you seem more real and less artificial, even as it went against a politician’s most basic instinct to always look the person addressing him in the eye.

This proved to be good advice, good enough to persuade seven out of ten viewers of the debate that a shifty-eyed man who had not been coached, who had no make-up, who rambled in his answers and who never seemed to look viewers in the eye ­ a fellow named Richard Nixon ­ had lost the debate by a wide margin (even as radio listeners, unaware of the carefully constructed imagery, decided he won). And it was good enough advice to give just a bit of extra momentum to the other candidate, John F. Kennedy, who won the White House in one of the closest elections in history.

“It was TV more than anything else that turned the tide,” Kennedy candidly admitted after the election. And if Kennedy was correct, if it was TV that did it, then much of the credit goes to director Arthur Penn, a television, stage and film pioneer who brought such diverse classics as The Miracle Worker and Bonnie and Clyde to life, one of the thousands of G.I. Bill veterans who flooded the postwar world of the arts in America and, along the way, changed most everything they touched.

• • •

The crop of artists, novelists, poets, actors, and other creative talents who returned from wartime service to be educated and trained through the G.I. Bill is so vast as to be impossible to catalogue beyond a simple highlight reel: Novelists and essayists Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, Frank McCourt, Art Buchwald, Pete Hamill, Edward Abbey, Elmore Leonard, Mario Puzo. Poets James Dickey, James Wright, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Randall Jarrell, Frank O’Hara, Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur, A.R. Ammons. Stage and screen writers Paddy Chayevsky, Rod Serling, Aaron Spelling, Terry Southern. Actors Walter Matthau, Robert Duvall, Tony Curtis, Harry Belafonte, Rod Steiger, Gene Hackman, Clint Eastwood, Paul Newman, Jason Robards, Charles Bronson, Ernest Borgnine. Artists Robert Rauschenberg, Leo Krikorian, Dan Spiegle, Robert Miles Runyan, Kenneth Noland, LeRoy Nieman, Richard Callner, Ed Rossbach, Robert Perine. Schools for art, acting, photography, dance and design from coast to coast were sustained by veterans returning from war, and by the G.I. Bill dollars they brought with them, in some cases rescued from imminent closure. The men and women who graduated from them after the war launched a twentieth century renaissance in the arts in America, from new ways of using color on canvas to the groundbreaking literary nonfiction of New Journalism to Beat Poetry to entirely new and even shocking ways of telling a story on screens large and small. The fifties are often remembered for their bland conformity, but the postwar period in the arts heralded a time of enormous experimentation, advance and daring.

Arthur Penn had not entered the war expecting to be part of any such moment or movement. His main hope at the outset had been typical and basic — to come home in one piece and not in a coffin ­ and, perhaps, to find something other than the family watch-making business to sustain him once the shooting stopped. That chance came in the form of the G.I. Bill, and a free ride to a the experimental Black Mountain College, a legendary hotspot for groundbreaking art and philosophy, where such luminaries as Albert Einstein, Aldous Huxley, Anais Nin, Henry Miller and William Carlos Williams could be found roaming the campus and staging spontaneous lectures and debates.

Although he had no idea at the time, Penn’s journey to the pinnacle of television and filmmaking began on January 11, 1944, when two very distinct roadmaps for rebuilding post-war America landed on Congress’s doorstep.

One vision for “winning the peace” came wrapped in the pomp and ritual of the president’s annual State of the Union address. The other was scrawled by lobbyists a mile from the Capitol on hotel stationary, then hastily typed up for public consumption.

One represented nothing less than President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s plan to expand the Founding Fathers’ original vision of a just America: giving every citizen the right to a rewarding job, a living wage, a decent home, health care, education, and a pension ­ not as opportunities, not as privileges, not as goods to which everyone (who could afford them) had access, but rights, guaranteed every American, cradle to grave. He called it a “Second Bill of Rights.”

The other plan, courtesy of the era’s most powerful veterans organization, the American Legion, advanced a more modest goal, or so it seemed: to compensate the servicemen of World War II for their lost time and opportunities, offering sixteen million veterans a small array of government-subsidized loans, unemployment benefits, and a year of school or technical training for those whose education had been interrupted by the draft or enlistment. The Legion called this a “Bill of Rights for G.I. Joe and Jane.”

The first plan promised to reinvent America after the war.

The second offered to put things back to where they were before the war.

As it turned out, neither plan’s promise would be kept. FDR never got the chance to remake America. Instead, the G.I. Bill did.

This was not by grand design, but quite by accident, as much a creation of petty partisans as of political visionaries. And yet the forces set in motion that day in January 1944 would power an unprecedented and far-reaching transformation of education, of cities and a new suburbia, of the social, cultural and physical geography of America, of science, medicine, and the arts ­ and, just as importantly, it would alter both the aspirations and the expectations of all Americans, veterans and non-veterans alike.

A nation of renters would become a nation of homeowners. College would be transformed from an elite bastion to a middle class entitlement. Suburbia would be born amid the clatter of bulldozers and the smell of new asphalt linking it all together. Inner cities would collapse. The Cold War would find its warriors ­ not in the trenches or the barracks, but at the laboratory and the wind tunnel and the drafting board. Educations would be made possible for fourteen future Nobel Prize winners, three Supreme Court justices, three presidents, a dozen senators, two dozen Pulitzer Prize winners, 238,000 teachers, 91,000 scientists, 67,000 doctors, 450,000 engineers, 240,000 accountants, 17,000 journalists, 22,000 dentists ­ along with a million lawyers, nurses, businessmen, artists, actors, writers, pilots and others. All would owe their careers not to FDR’s grand vision, but to that one modest proposal that was supposed to put the country back to where it was.

There was never anything like it before.

There is nothing like it on the horizon.

It began with a simple question: Now what?

The accidental author: Thomas Steinbeck tells the story behind Down to a Soundless Sea

It has been requested that I divulge the peculiar lineage of my modest volume of short stories, Down to a Soundless Sea. I can only assume that there is some hint of the mysterious expected. If that is the case, then I’m afraid there will be disillusionment to spare, and for that I apologize in advance. Down to a Soundless Sea can claim only the most unassuming nativity as a book, for in fact, it was never intended to be such. The truth, though mundane in the extreme, seems to possess some charm for people, so I will confess and throw myself upon the fickle mercy of my readers.

Some years ago, while working on a screenplay for Disney, I happened to make the acquaintance, through my friend and attorney, Phillip Rosen, of a gentleman named Michael Freed. Michael was, at that time, beginning work on a beautiful little resort project on the coast of the Big Sur in Monterey County, California. The location of his small hotel was centered about the homestead of the famous Post Ranch perched on the rugged coast overlooking the vast expanse of the Pacific from a remarkable altitude.

Michael Freed appeared to have expended great effort, energy and considerable funds into seeing that the new Post Ranch Inn fit artistically and environmentally into this ancient landscape. This meant a great deal to me because as I am an old denizen of the Big Sur, and have habitually taken a rigid stance on the encroaching tourist desecration of that magic stretch of mountainous coastline.

One evening, while enjoying the marvelous views from Michael’s home high in the Sur, Michael informed me that he had come across an old letter from my father, written as a young man and addressed to the Posts who owned the ranch. The letter concerned the reimbursement of funds advanced to my father for the stage journey to Monterey. Michael asked if I knew anything of my father’s history as it pertained to the Post Ranch, and I said that I did.

I informed Michael that my father, along with many other boys from Monterey and Salinas often came to work the ranches in the Big Sur during the summer hiatus from school. This was rough and very dangerous country for herding cattle and the additional help was eagerly appreciated. There had been a saying in circulation that indicated the value of these young cowhands to their employers. It was said that young cowboys bounced, but old skinners break. And it was pretty much the truth. I told Michael that my father knew the Post family well, and occasionally rode for them in that same capacity. I went on to tell him the story of my father and the Great Sur Bear, which took place while he was working for the Posts one summer.

Michael appeared amused. He refilled my glass with a dash of excellent and ancient tequila, and asked if I knew any other stories about the characters that once inhabited the Sur in the old days. I proceeded to spin out several yarns I had been told by my father or my aunts and their friends. As the evening closed, my host asked whether, for a small financial consideration, I might write down a few of the stories for the edification of his hotel guests. He thought it might be interesting to self-publish a few volumes for the hotel and allocate them to the various suites. I assumed they would eventually take their places next to Gideon’s ubiquitous Bibles.

I told Michael that if he would refrain from holding me to a tight deadline, I might eventually get around to the project when I could spare time from making a living as a Hollywood hack. And I did ultimately, after several years of starts and stops, come up with the requested material. Michael seemed pleased with my efforts, so my wife, Gail, a very handy person to have around on such occasions, began to prepare the work to be self-published with a small company out of New Mexico.

In spite of the friendly enthusiasm for the work, it remained my considered opinion that virtually nobody north of Santa Cruz or south of San Louis Obispo would be remotely interested in reading stories about the Big Sur, so I put no effort into finding an appropriate commercial publisher for the volume. Then one day, my New York literary agents at McIntosh & Otis asked if they might read the work solely out of curiosity. I had not requested their services professionally concerning the book, and saw no harm in letting them peruse the manuscript. I was stunned, therefore, when everyone at M&O professed to really enjoy the work. Elizabeth Winick even asked my permission to send it out to a few publishers. I acquiesced only with the friendly admonition that it appeared to me to be a total waste of her valuable time considering the market for regional short stories. Though it has always been my particular favorite literary format, I was well aware that my tastes represented a minority viewpoint when it came to publishing and marketing.

I thought nothing more about this exchange for several months, so it came as a total shock when one day my lady-wife came up to my studio to proudly inform me that Elizabeth Winick had garnered a very interesting offer from Dan Smetanka at Ballantine Books to publish my short stories. Since my lovely wife takes rare delight in sparking my fuse on occasion, I, of course, assumed I was being done over for some childish prank I had pulled earlier. It took a while for her to convince me that she was on the level, if only because the news was so handsomely timed and totally unexpected.

From the mists of regional obscurity Down to a Soundless Sea emerged standing on its own wobbly legs like a newborn colt. I was proud to speculate upon the possibility that perhaps this new creature would have a life of its own. Though I am still charmed by the image of my modest endeavors sharing the bedside drawer with Gideon’s Bible in a small coastal hotel in the Big Sur. In that regard I would have always thought myself in the very best of poetic company.

I have been additionally invited to compose a few passages about my volume of short stories, but the request came plumed with a caveat that indicated some reference to my father’s tacit literary influence would be appreciated. This is by no means the first time this subject has been broached, I assure you.

In fact, I have been plagued most of my adult life, like the myriad progeny of other famous parents, with the same question. And I have long since wearied of inventing amusing and cunningly misleading answers to satisfy the curious inquisitor. The “question” is inevitably sincere, but the falling axe still rings in my ears like a peal at an execution, “What was it like growing up in the shadow of a great American author like John Steinbeck?”

In response, I usually force my right eye to twitch rapidly, arch my left brow menacingly, hitch up my shoulder like Walter Brennan and politely ask the way to the lavatory. I rarely reappear.

To begin with, the whole concept of growing up in someone’s shadow implies something rather prodigious and plant-like in habit. We speak of elder generations as though they were light-hoarding redwoods instead of life affirming bastions of care and concern. So, I’m afraid what follows will have to pass for an answer to this perpetually posed “question”.

As I recall I was never really faced with the dilemma of growing up in my father’s shadow, in fact, the whole concept was foreign to me until strangers started asking the “question”. And though I know this must prove something of a journalistic disappointment, and contrary to everyone’s evident expectations, I was a relatively happy child by present standards. In fact, I grew to become emotionally robust, and survived and thrived on the sunlight and growing room my father created for me. I romped and was nurtured in the richest available pastures of literature, poetry, history, theater, humor, and thanks to my mother’s relentless contributions, was immersed in an exceptional library of music of all kinds. It was her extensive record collection that scored my childhood sorrows and daydreams of glory. To this day I can rarely read without hearing music behind the words, and vice versa.

At every opportunity that I can recall with certainty, my father, with great humor and generosity, endeavored to hone and encourage my youthful perception of apparent realities, broaden my spiritual and navigational horizon and always encouraged me to interpret what I witnessed through the eyes of common sense and rudimentary compassion. Though John Steinbeck believed that universal compassion was a painfully acquired skill, and as such, required a lifetime of practice to master. He didn’t advise it for novices.

The most remarkable aspect of my father’s skills as a parent can be illustrated by the most powerful of all my memories of him. In all the years of his concern, tutelage and care I cannot recall hearing one mean-spirited or soul-crushing criticism, and I never witnessed his hand raised in anger regardless of provocation. This by no means reflected the purity of my youthful character, but rather my father’s forbearance and patience with fools. He was a man of mature years who had not forgotten one detail of the confusing struggles of his own boyhood, and tailored his parenting skills accordingly. In short, I received from my father as much as any son has a right to expect, and much more by some standards. It would appear to me that only a deeply disturbed father would want to see his progeny fail at anything in life. It is in the nature of most fathers to fervently yearn for their children’s success in everything. It appears to represent one of the imperative bonding codes necessary between fathers and children, especially if an offspring shows a particular interest or inherent skill in his father’s trade or profession.

In a Newtonian sense, as my father was so fond of reminding me, all creative humans stand upon the shoulders of giants, and I assumed it was always his expectation that I would make resourceful use of the numerous artistic shoulders available to me, and in my turn lend a modest shoulder upon which others might stand if necessary.

These simple reflections bring me to at last “answer” the “question”. To table the phrase in the simplest terms, growing up with John Steinbeck was an absolute blast. And I will be forever grateful for every moment I had in his company. Aside from those traditional foxholes that fathers and sons are destined to occupy from time to time, John Steinbeck was the most entertaining and rewarding character I ever met. He was a man of infinite curiosity, borderless interests and a sense of humor that mimicked Mark Twain’s fascination with the absurdities of the human condition. I can’t remember one moment of boredom or disinterest. He made sure my world was constantly exposed to new and wonderful ideas, and saw to it that I kept myself occupied with rewarding projects. In short, my father gave me all he could, and more. If there is something more a father can do to earn a son’s love, loyalty and respect, I do not know of it.

The writer: Thomas Steinbeck began his career in the 1960s as a motion picture cinematographer and photojournalist in Vietnam. He also has taught college courses in American Literature, creative writing and communication arts. He serves on the board of the Stella Adler Theater in Los Angeles and the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas. He has written documentaries and numerous dramatic adaptations of his father’s work, mostly recently writing a screenplay for Travels with Charley. Thom Steinbeck published Down to a Soundless Sea (Ballantine), in October 2002 and lives on the Central coast of California with his wife, Gail. “I write because I enjoy writing,” he says. “I enjoy the storytelling.”

The stories: In the seven stories that make up Down to a Soundless Sea, Thom Steinbeck traces the fates and dreams of an eccentric cast of characters, from sailors and ranchers, to doctors and immigrants — as each struggles to carve out a living in the often inhospitable environment of rocky cliffs, crashing surf, and rough patches of land along the California coast and the Big Sur. In Blind Luck, a wayward orphan finds his calling at sea, only to learn that life must concede to the whims of authority and the ravages of nature. In Dark Watcher, with the country at the start of the Great Depression, a professor craves a plausible discovery to boost his academic standing — and encounters the Indian myth of a shadowed horsemen that may ruin his career. An Unbecoming Grace tracks the route of a country physician who cares for an ill-tempered cur ” but feels more concern for the well-being of the patient’s beleaguered young wife. The collection concludes with Sing Fat and the Imperial Duchess of Woo, a novella that follows the tragic love story between a young apothecary and the woman he hopes to marry. Read an excerpt.

Buy the book.

The Real Gidget

This is Giget

The Taco Bell Chihuahua is named Gidget. So is the ladies’ room at the Tres Hombres Restaurant in Hawaii. A cook on the Internet calls herself Gidget. Malibu Chicken features a sandwich called Gidget, and Barney’s sells a line of Gidget lipstick. A stripper on cable television goes by the name of Gidget, and a Southern California band called The Suburban Lawns invoked Gidget in its song, “Gidget Goes to Hell.”

There is a person who has a certain visceral reaction whenever she comes across another person or product carrying this name, whenever she hears or reads about its use. Sometimes she finds it funny and laughs out loud. Sometimes it breaks her heart but she doesn’t show it. Sometimes she’d like to file a lawsuit, but decides not to, because who wants to deal with lawyers? And sometimes she just gets tired, and doesn’t talk to anyone for a while. This person is Gidget — not any of the seven actresses who have played the perky beach bunny who occasionally surfed but more often ran after boys, but the real Gidget, from whose life all things Gidget have sprung.

I met Gidget in 1986 when I was writing for a television series, The New Gidget, joining the legions who had warmed themselves at the Gidget fire through four Presidential administrations. Although taking this job was a violation of my lifelong rule never to buy or associate with anything that has the phrase, “the new,” in its title, I found myself with little choice. I was broke, jilted, and living on macaroni and cheese.

As I soon found out, writing for this television series came with a full set of luggage and even a storage locker or two. The New Gidget was the product of a lineage with more “begats” than the Old Testament. It was a sequel to a TV series (Gidget) that was a sequel to a movie (Gidget Goes to Rome) that was a sequel to two or three other movies, all the way back to the first Gidget, a wacky movie starring Sandra Dee and her Cadillac-fin bazooms. This was itself an adaptation of the novel, Gidget, The Little Girl With the Big Ideas. Written by Gidget’s father, it was based on the real Gidget’s contemporaneous accounts of adventures on the beach in Malibu during the 1950s.

One day, one of the show’s producers entered the writers’ office, followed by a diminutive and stunning brunette in her mid-forties, wearing clam-diggers and what women everywhere would refer to as a cute top. “This is Gidget,” he said. “She really surfed.” I forced a little wave. As a member of the machinery that churned beach life into an endless round of Frankie-Annette-cowabunga-hey-dude bad surf jokes, I was already mortified. Now came the news that I would be repackaging a real person’s life, a life that already had been re-packaged countless times. I was not looking forward to meeting the subject of what surf writer Craig Stecyk calls, “the most successful and longest-running episode of teenage exploitation since Joan of Arc.”

Gidget seemed uncomfortable, too. I wondered how she had felt about this entire goofy enterprise. What could it have possibly been like to meet the people who made a living by spinning stories for a Hollywood character to whom she had permanently lent her name? She mustered a clipped greeting.

“Off the beach she’s known as Kathy Kohner Zuckerman,” the producer continued. “No, call me Gidget,” she said quickly, emphasizing the name, and promptly left the room. Someone attempted small talk. The producer apologized and backed out the door. “Maybe some other time,” he said. Suddenly my job had taken on new dimensions, had even become interesting. Was Gidget of the Hebraic persuasion? I wondered, pondering the nature of both her maiden and married names. I soon learned that America’s most famous surfer girl was indeed Jewish. Not only that, but the queen of the California beach — long regarded by outsiders as the domain of beautiful blond boys and girls — had a family history that was shaped by a lunatic’s dream of Aryan perfection and then nurtured by the hallowed American right to pursue happiness.

A firm believer in going to the source, I decided it was time to read the obscure novel written by Gidget’s father, Frederick Kohner. Strangely, there was not a single copy of it on the Columbia lot, the very studio that was in the never-ending process of building the Gidget pyramid. I spent weeks searching for the book. It seemed that the little-known surf saga was long out of print, a gold mine that had been stripped and boarded up a million years ago. The Los Angeles County Public Library did not have it. The Beverly Hills Public Library did not have it. Used bookstores in town did not have it, although they did stock other, lesser-known works by Kohner, such as Kiki of Montparnasse and Cher Papa (both, tales of precocious teenage girls). As the search became more arduous, my anticipation increased. Finally, I uncovered the long-lost message in a bottle — a tiny novel with yellowing pages that hadn’t been checked out in six years. It was hidden behind some other books by authors whose last names begin with “K” on the shelves of the Santa Monica Library, just five blocks from the beach. I grabbed it from the receding surf of time. On its cover, a sea waif caught my gaze, inviting me to join her and two lanky surfers under the palm trees in the background.

“I’m writing it down,” the book began, “because I once heard that when you’re getting older you’re liable to forget things and I’d sure be the most miserable woman in this world if I ever forgot what happened this summer.”

In the impassioned voice of a young girl falling in love with life, invoking a surf lexicon still used on the beach today, Kohner wrote of the summer that Gidget turned sixteen and learned to surf. This often-told event has lured countless wanderers to the shores of Southern California, even as it continues to anger surfers who blame Gidget for telling the world about what they once regarded as a private wave.

I waited until The New Gidget was cancelled a few months later to make contact with its progenitor. During the course of conversations over several years, Gidget revealed bits and pieces of her surfer past. Yes, she was Jewish, but so what? No, she didn’t surf any more; why would she want to? Yes, she was married and had two sons. They surfed, but not very often. She said she liked the Gidget movies. She thought the television series-all three of them-were fine. She was proud of the success that her father had had with the novel based on her life. And then she interviewed me. “Why are you asking all these questions? What does everybody want from me? I don’t understand this Gidget thing, do you? I’m just a girl who went surfing.” And there the conversation always stopped.

Then one day she called me at home. “Can you come over right now?” she asked, sounding girlish and impatient. “I’m turning sixty soon. I’m ready to talk about Malibu.”

“Malibu” was shorthand for life at Malibu Point from 1956 to 1959. In this hallowed surf warp, legendary figures such as Mickey “Da Cat” Dora danced on the waves and into the mists. Mysto George, The Fencer, Moondoggie, Golden Boy, Scooter, and what could now be called the Beef Council (Meatball, Meat Loaf, and Tubesteak) adopted a precocious teenager and named her, as they did the others, for her most notable characteristics. Because she was a girl — one of the few who surfed at the time — and, at five feet and ninety-five pounds, a midget; unto us, the sea nymph, Gidget, was born.

This is Me

I visited Gidget in her modest ranch home in a quiet Pacific Palisades glen minutes from the beach. She and her husband, Marvin Zuckerman, a scholar of Yiddish and dean of a local college who is ten years her senior, have lived in the house since they were married in 1964. When they met, Zuckerman had not heard of Gidget, the movie, and knew nothing of beach life. “I grew up in New York,” he said. “I’m an academic. I only went to foreign films.” To this day, he has not surfed, but Gidget taught him to ski, and they often visit Sun Valley, Idaho on family ski vacations. Their two sons are now grown, although Gidget still refers to their bedrooms as “Phil’s” and “David’s” (and Phil jokingly refers to himself as “ben-Gidget,” invoking the Hebrew prefix meaning “son of”).

Still slender and curvy in her jumper and T-shirt, Gidget guided me through her house. The interior at first suggested Old World pursuits — there were lots of books and a piano (childhood piano lessons had led to a lifelong hobby). But in the hallway, I saw a large black-and-white photo of a striking teenage girl on the beach with her surfboard, wearing the innocent smile and modest swimsuit of the 1950s. “This is me,” Gidget said proudly. She looked as happy as she did that day on the beach, a far different Gidget than the woman to whom I had been introduced on the Columbia lot. “That’s the picture Life magazine used.”

I recognized the photo, although I could not remember exactly where and when I had seen it before. It was one of those images that summed up a world so perfectly, there was nothing left to say. The Gidget in the photo is the Gidget that launched a thousand boards, and the one who now guided me into her once-and-future past. We headed out to the patio, and Gidget talked about how it all started.

“We were living in Brentwood,” she said. “My mother used to drive some of the neighborhood guys down to the beach. They would put their boards in her Model-T. I tagged along. I wanted to surf — it looked like so much fun. I pestered everybody for lessons. I remember asking a surfer named Scooter if I was bothering him. He said, ‘You’re breathing, aren’t you?’ There was this guy named Tubesteak living in a shack. A few other surfers were always hanging around. They were always hungry. I think some of them lived there, too.”

Just as the Stations of the Cross are key points along the way to a defining religious moment, the shack Gidget referred to — although long gone — is a sacred site, along with its revered twin, The Pit. Its very mention among surfers, especially those who surfed Malibu in the ’50s, conjures a mythology that forever binds the wave-riding tribe. On her pilgrimages to the beach, Gidget would bring a picnic basket filled with homemade sandwiches and trade them for use of Tubesteak’s surfboard. Soon, she bought her own board for thirty-five dollars from a well-known shaper named Mike Doyle. “I wish I still had it,” she said. “It was blue and had a totem pole on it. Today it would be worth a small fortune.” (According to Stecyk, Gidget is underestimating her worth. “If you add up the raw commerce, based on the Gidget movies and television shows alone,” he said, “not to mention the rest of the surf industry, which, for the most part, erupted in the 1960s, you’ve got a multi-billion-dollar empire built almost entirely on Gidget’s back.”)

Yet, apart from Gidget-related revenues (which are not particularly vast, since deals made in the 1950s are minuscule in today’s terms), it is not an empire in which Gidget or her family have a financial stake. Over the decades, it has floated hundreds of boats, boards, and kayaks, providing robust incomes for an axis of surfers based primarily in Southern California. Some of them scoff at the Gidget phenomenon even as they ride its endless wave; others have no knowledge of the role Gidget and her father played in bringing surf culture to landlubbers.

It is easy to see how Frederick Kohner became fascinated with the stories his daughter told him about the beach. He and his two brothers grew up in the Czechoslovakian spa town of Teplitz-Schorau (whose tainted waters Ibsen wrote about in his famous play, Enemy of the People.). Their father Julius was the proprietor of the local movie house. In 1921, Paul, the eldest son, joined the early wave of Jewish émigrés and left for Hollywood. Within a few years, he was a powerful agent with a list of clients that included Ernest Hemingway, Ingmar Bergman, Walter Huston, and the reclusive writer, B. Traven. Walter, the youngest, left for Vienna to study acting.

Frederick, the middle son, embarked on a career as a screenwriter in Germany. He left in 1933, after attending the Berlin opening of one of his movies only to discover that Goebbels had ordered all Jewish credits removed from the film. Arriving in Los Angeles with a writing deal at Columbia Pictures, he settled at the beach with his wife Franzie and raised two daughters. A prolific screenwriter, he racked up credits that include Never Wave at a WAC with Rosalind Russell and Mad About Music, which received an Academy Award nomination for best screenplay in 1938.

The sun cast its spell on the children of the Eastern European émigrés in Hollywood, many of whom came of age during the Fabulous Fifties. In 1956 Gidget began spending all of her free time at the beach — after school, after work, on weekends, or when her family was visiting friends in the Malibu Colony. “My father and I would walk down [to the beach],” she said. “I would tell him about all of the surfers. I told him I wanted to write a book. He said, ‘Why don’t you tell me your stories and I’ll write it?’ I said, ‘OK.’”

Gidget became her father’s muse, recounting tales of “bitchin’ surf,” giant “combers” that rolled in from Japan, and escapes from a “boneyard” when caught between breaking waves. Frederic, fascinated, paid careful attention to his daughter’s language. (English was her first language; his was German.) With her permission, he even listened in on her telephone conversations. A man possessed, he wrote the novel in six weeks, weaving Gidget’s accounts and conversation into a charming novel, published in 1957. It reflected the preoccupations of the era, from the bomb to Fats Domino. Yet one theme resounds above all others — Gidget’s passion for wave-riding.

“The great Kahoona,” the Gidget character says in the novel, “showed me the first time how to get on my knees, to push the shoulders up and slide the body back-to spring to your feet quickly, putting them a foot apart and under you in one motion. That’s quite tricky. But then, surf-riding is not playing Monopoly, and the more I got the knack of it, the more I was crazy about it and the more I was crazy about it, the harder I worked at it.” This is one of the best descriptions of surfing I have come across and I only wish I had read it as a kid when I was riding collapsed cartons of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer on the filthy waves of Lake Erie.

At the end of this sweet summer’s tale, as Moondoggie confronts the Kahoona over what appears to be a scene of consummated passion, Gidget takes off on her board. It’s a classic day with bitchin’ surf; in fact, some big waves are rolling in. In an epic moment that has been lost in the countless Gidget remakes and retellings, in a moment that makes this a long lost Catcher in the Rye for girls, Gidget ignores the warnings of her men and continues paddling out to sea. Defying social convention by not heading back to the sanctuary of land and middle-class life, uninterested in whether she can hook up with a beach bum or a fraternity boy, she just wants to surf, confident that she can ride with the best of ’em. “Shoot the curl,” the boys call, once she’s up and cruising. “Shoot it, Gidget.” And shoot it she does.

Then, long before the feminist wave of the following decades, comes the radical conclusion, one not conveyed in any of the ensuing GIdget manifestations. Gidget concludes that she was never in love with the Kahoona or Moondoggie — so much for boys and their predictable offerings. The objects of her affection all along were her surfboard and the sea.

His little surf saga completed, Frederick showed it to Paul, who hated it and told him to find a new agent. Frederick went to William Morris, a publishing deal was instantly hatched, and the movie rights went to Columbia for $50,000. Frederick gave Gidget five percent (an act that would be described nowadays as “buying the rights” to a subject’s story).

The book hit the racks a few months before Vladimir Nabokov’s notorious novel, Lolita — another tale of a teenage nymph written by a European émigré — and favorable comparisons were made. Critics hailed Kohner’s work for its authentic evocation of a curious subculture, and some marveled at how a foreign writer became so fluent in American slang. Surfing exploded several years later; who better to spread the word than the father of the water sprite, Gidget, a man fleeing the poisoned springs of central Europe, charmed by waves and those who found freedom by riding them?

Dear Diary

Now, as Gidget beckoned me into her kitchen, she had a secret to reveal. Her scrapbooks and diaries — the holy grail of contemporary surf culture — were arranged on the breakfast table. She had retrieved them from a secret hiding place before my arrival. I was surprised and a little nervous: what genie would leap out once the seal was broken?

Each of the five pastel leather covers was embossed with the image of a girl in a ponytail, pencil in hand, beneath the title, “Dear Diary.” For the first time in forty years, Gidget opened the tiny gold locks. She put on her glasses and poured over a few pages in silence, then smiled and started to read aloud. Out tumbled news of a sweeter time, the goofy, gee-whiz voice that had memorialized Malibu forever and propelled the culture on a never-ending ride.

“ ‘July 22, 1956,’ ” Gidget read, “ ‘I went to the beach again today. . . . I just love it down there. . . . I went out surfing about three times but only caught one wave. We were all sitting in the dump, smoking and drinking. God forbid my parents could have seen me.’ ” (“The dump” was a synonym for The Pit, and Gidget remarked that although she didn’t remember doing any drinking, she had lots of photographs of this site.)

She opened a scrapbook and thumbed through pages of black-and-white snapshots until something caught her eye. “Oh, my God,” she said, “look at this.”

Sure enough, there was The Pit, a not-particularly-sunken area of the beach where she used to sit and smoke with Mickey Dora, Tubesteak, and another legendary surfer named Johnny Fain. This was a picture the collectors would never get to bid on, a permanent relic in Gidget’s secret cache. “Listen to this,” she said, becoming more breathless as she reconnected with the memories conjured by her diary pages. “ ‘June 16, 1957. Boy was it a fabulous day today. Everyone was at the beach. I rode a wave today and everybody saw me.’ ” She smiled and thumbed through another volume. “ ‘August 3, 1957. Boy the surf was so bitchin’ today I couldn’t believe it. . . . I got some real good rides from inside.’ ”

A calling card fell from the pages.

The Glen.
Call or Drop by any time
Blackout  Harry the Horse  The Sloth
937 No. Beverly Glen
GR 9-6945

“Oh, my God,” Gidget said, studying the card as it transported her back to the scene. “I went to a party at The Glen — it was this famous party where they all dropped their pants. But don’t tell anybody. Bill was there — Bill Jensen. Moondoggie.” A few undated entries from that year told of similar pranks: “Golden Boy buried my surfboard and disconnected the distributor of the car. I threw my pineapple into his face.”

And then a note of menace: “Someone painted a swastika in our driveway.” Asked about her family’s reaction, Gidget indicated that this painful subject was off limits. But the sad fact is that the swastika-surfer connection dates back to the 1930s, when a line of surfboards featured the motif, and controversy still exists over whether the symbol was appropriated from Native American or Nazi symbolism. At one time, even the famous Malibu shack displayed a swastika; to this day no one can or will say who painted it, or why.

By 1958, Malibu had changed. In her entry of June 30, l958, Gidget wrote that she “went and saw them film my movie. . . . God was it ever stupid to see Sandra Dee play my role. . . . All the actors looked like complete fagits [sic] it’s really funny. I don’t believe that they are actually filming a movie [about me].”

Suddenly weary, Gidget closed the diary and said, “Gee, that’s not very nice. I guess I’d forgotten what I thought about the whole thing.”

We called it a night, and as I drove home, I thought about the marvels that had been laid before me, the raw stuff of the narrative of our collective history. This particular journey was now complete, I realized. I had come to write for the odd little television show, The New Gidget, and as I did, I learned of an important cultural secret and came to know the person and the story behind one of the most misunderstood American pyramids — the truth behind a name that was once emblazoned on the cover of a movie magazine next to those of John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe.

Some time later, I accompanied Gidget on a return to Malibu. It was a perfect day, not too crowded. “Good waves,” Gidget said. Then, as we walked past The Pit and toward the now-vacant site of the shack, she said, “Jeez, did you see that?” She took off her sandals. The site obviously emanated powerful tribal crosscurrents not detectable by outsiders. “Oh, my God,” Gidget shrieked. “There’s Mysto.” Mysto George had been surfing Malibu since 1954, never missing a good day, long after many of Gidget’s contemporaries had drifted away, long after younger surfers had quit the scene, because the waters now carry raw sewage. In full wetsuit and neoprene cap, with the blazing, sea-blue eyes certain surfers have, George was carrying his dinged-up long board, ready to paddle back out. “Looks bitchin’,” Gidget said. “Yeah,” he said. “You wanna surf?” Gidget said she had been thinking about getting back to it. Later that day, she took her board to the shop for repairs.

A few days after that, a special commemorative issue of Surfer magazine hit the stands. Gidget was number seven in a list of the twenty-five most important surfers of the century, a bold move on the part of the premier journal of surf culture, which generally retains a seafaring, “ye har mateys” cosmology that ranks women with the weather-strange forces to be reckoned with, but not so primary as to be included on the important census lists that are surfing’s equivalent of who gets tapped for the Rapture. Gidget was one of only two women in the list, ranking not far below Duke Kahanamoku, the universally adored Hawaiian father of modern surfing, and higher than Mickey Dora, revered king of surf style. Gidget’s placement near these gods stunned some members of the surf establishment, but the deed had been done: The unassuming surfer girl was finally getting her due from those whose livelihoods she had fueled. As the century turned, and major figures and groups began apologizing to each other for decades of mistreatment and abuse, maybe in preparation for an apocalypse or maybe just because it was time, it was nice to know that Gidget had finally made the cut.

Not That Nice

I’m still driving around L.A. thinking: Oh, I wish I could put that in my book. Or: Why didn’t I put that in my book? One of the problems with writing a memoir while you’re living inside your material is the constant feeling that everything is your work: a pothole, a missed garbage pick-up, a carpool lane, a Sigalert, the mayor’s bottom teeth, a dinner party where the hostess takes you on a piece-by-piece, swatch-by-swatch tour of her fabulous renovation, the inane blather of a yoga “professional.” My book took me all over the place, and into all sorts of off-limits bastions: Hollywood soirees with comedians and movie stars, fundraisers during the Schwarzenegger campaign for governor, dinners with nattering producers, the secretive headquarters of the State Water Project. In the course of writing it I entered into contracts with film location scouts, I did discovery in a hit-and-run accident in the Hollywood hills, I entered into some tacit negotiations with a stray pit bull puppy who decided to call my house home, I got naked in the sulfuric pools at Esalen up on the Big Sur coast, and I twisted myself into the fish position next to Nicole Kidman. Of course like everyone else, I had to deal at the same time with the daily grind of family and scheduling: the grocery store, the bills, dinner, the pediatrician.

So I had to weed out a lot of that normal stuff: stuff that is just the day-to-day repetitive material of living, although I also trimmed a section on my first visit to a psychic: She just didn’t have that much to say (maybe I am psychically inscrutable). And I cut a section on movie-star knitting and celebrity hobbies — how it’s fun and rewarding for a movie star or it-girl to work away herself on a hobby, but to pick up the kid from school or go to the DMV or call the dry cleaner, she needs a personal assistant. Also I trimmed a bit about my visit to a restaurant where you eat in the dark — the utter dark (the waiters were blind; I am not kidding). I went to eat in the dark with a friend, and all we could talk about — as we knocked over our glasses and scattered our fusilli and frisee — was what if there’s an earthquake? But still, I felt that these little sections, although amusing, were just not to the point.

And the point was that, incredibly, after all these years and all the visuals coming at the rest of the world on TV and in the movies, California is still exotic territory to those of us who live here but are not from here. Now, I’m used to exotic because the two places I wrote about before I came to California were Haiti and Jerusalem. So I can handle — in L.A. — the plants that look like giant genitalia and those city blocks where world architecture of three centuries is represented in a series of single-family homes on small lots.

For me, a more exotic attribute of California than the architecture or the flora, or even than coyotes and mountain lions in the hills, is the state’s insistence on niceness — a cliché, but true. A defining characteristic of Haiti and Jerusalem is certainly not courtesy. Though Jerusalemites are sometimes hospitable and Haitians are usually well brought up, random acts of kindness are not what those two nations are known for. Whereas, every day in Los Angeles, I still reel from positive and encouraging responses, from earnest rejoinders.

Of course, L.A. is also a city where cops shoot 18-month-old babies, where celebrities occasionally knock off their spouses, where whole neighborhoods downtown are filled with homeless men, women and children, and where teenaged girls walking home from school are killed by drive-by gangs — amazing that a place like this is so determined to retain its veneer of friendly kindliness. Maybe the violence is just a backdrop that helps highlight the niceness. Or vice versa … Yesterday evening, I was astonished to watch a group of people being nice to each other — even apologizing preemptively for their opinions — while discussing the latest crisis in the Middle East: You would not find such a conversation in Jerusalem or in Gaza City, or even in New York.

All this niceness has been good for me. I’m learning to say “Wow,” or “absolutely” or “you got it” instead of “yes.” And I find that doing so lowers my stress slightly. My normal stress level is known to be high because not only am I from New York, but I’m really originally from New Jersey, highest-stress state in the union. I still can’t believe it when I signal on the Hollywood freeway and the person whose lane I’m coming into slows down to let me in. The first time that happened, I said to my son, “What does that idiot think he’s doing?” And then I realized the nice fellow was just being polite. You got it.

In New Jersey, he’d try to run you off the road.

But of course niceness isn’t the be all and end all in California. California includes not only the aging hippies at Esalen (nice), and the barista-obsessed yuppies of Marin County (also pretty nice), and serious off-the-gridders in every corner of the state (more often than not, reasonably nice too) — but also Hollywood. Oh, David Geffen: he’s so nice. Hmmmm … That doesn’t spill too trippingly off the tongue. Even the ones who are known to be nice, like Ron Howard or Steven Spielberg, are maybe not quite so nice. Spielberg, for example, employs a crisis management firm, which is not something nice people generally need. But then again, Hollywood, like the Vatican, is its own country.

I’m feeling a little depressed now that I’ve finished my book — elated too (it’s over!), but sad. One problem for every writer is that a book is never, ever finished, yet there the book goes, out into the world, openly declaring itself to be done. I can look at almost any page of any book by me (or by anyone else, for that matter) and see a possible improvement. A book is like a painting in that way: In your imagination, it dazzles with its perfection. Before you write a book, it is a clear, brilliant, faceted gem, a whole elaborated, organized, and beautifully structured unique entity. Then you put it down in ink and the wretchedness sets in.

And then, after you’ve finished being wretched for a few years in front of your computer, publication begins to happen and you realize, My God! People are going to read this. (Anyway, a couple of people…) Along with the publication of any book comes an unpleasant feeling of exposure, especially with a first-person non-fiction book, and especially a book about a nice place by a person who’s not always that nice. I mean, I’m pretty friendly and bien-elevee, as the Haitians would say. But I’m just not always that nice, especially in writing.

So I try to console myself with this truth: writing is not about being polite. A writer of any value cannot afford to be too nice. (Just as any writer who says “I love to write” is not too good a writer.) You can’t, on paper, hold on to your good-girl persona, your Mr. Nice Guy, and expect to produce anything worthwhile. A writer may be a good person or a bad one, a righteously indignant person, or a true believer, or a cynic, or a baseball fan, or your best friend, but the one thing you can be sure of is that he or she will not in the end be terribly, awfully “nice.” A writer has an obligation to write as honestly as possible about the world as it is experienced. To tell the truth. Absolutely.

As a friend of mine who works in Hollywood said after reading my book: “Oh, now I know what she was thinking all that time.”

Listening to Lilac

There is a swale on my place where cold air collects, and where lilac bushes grow happily. In April I take cut flowering branches of lilac to the farmers’ market.

I unload my van at the market, setting out on the ground my buckets of lilac, buckets of irises, buckets of ranunculus, some late tulips, a few late anemones yet. By sunrise the early customers are striding through the market. Here comes one now, fiftyish, gray pixie haircut, glasses, basket under the arm, purposeful stride. As she passes my stand, she looks over, then stops. "Lilacs!" It is at once a question, an answer, an exclamation. She approaches my stand, picks up a bunch of lilac, holds it to her face, closes her eyes, inhales deeply, holds her breath for a count of three, exhales, and then begins to talk.

"The spring I was seven years old, my mother was in the hospital. I went to live with my grandmother on her farm in Illinois. Outside the back door of the house was an enormous lilac bush, with a hollow space under it like a cave. My cousin and I spent hours sitting under that bush, talking and catching bees."

“Were you ever stung?”

“No.”

“Those must have been gentle bees, or maybe you were gentle children. Would you like a bunch of lilac? They’re four dollars.”

“Do they last?”

“Not too well. They’re undependable. Maybe three days. Cut the stems into hot water when you get them home.”

“Yes, I’ll take a bunch.”

The reaction to lilacs is so stereotypical that a sociologist looking over my shoulder would have it fully described in less than an hour. The glance; the recognition; eyebrows raised, posture frozen; the exclamation; the approach; the scooping up of a bunch and holding it to the face; the deep inhale, eyes closed; the holding of breath for the count of three; the exhale; and then the monologue. Memories, of decades past and places far off, spoken in a tone almost confessional, the bustle of the marketplace overpowered by the recollection of some other lilac-laden time.

Rumpled academic type, tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, long curls of gray hair stylishly hanging over his collar. “Lilacs!” Eyebrows raised dramatically. Picks up a bunch. Deep inhale, eyes closed, count of three. Drops them back into the bucket. “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d…” he begins, and makes an expansive gesture to encompass the row of etceteras needed to finish the quote. I help him out. “And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night, I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.” This is the main variant of the monologues of reminiscence — the first line of Whitman’s poem. I hear it a dozen times in the course of the morning. It is a rare bird who gets past the first line, however. The memorizing and reciting of poetry is not what it was a hundred years ago.

Chinese lady, about seventy, wheeling a bicycle through the market. “Lilacs!” She parks her bike awkwardly in the middle of the crowd, walks to my stand, picks up a bunch of lilac, inhales, eyes closed, count of three, exhales. “During the war it was not safe to be in Shanghai. My parents sent me to boarding school in England. We wore uniforms — a blazer and necktie. I had such a hard time with the necktie, it would make me cry; sometimes the front part was too long, sometimes it was too short. Life was not easy.” As an afterthought she adds, “During the war.”

Paunchy businessman, gray hair, bald spot, reading glasses in his shirt pocket attached to a cord around his neck. “Are these lilacs?!” The deep inhale, the eyes closed, count of three, exhale, eyes still closed. “Wellesley, Massachusetts, May of Ô57, Theresa. Sweet Theresa of the short, short skirts.” He inhales greedily.

“She sounds delightful. Would you like to buy a bunch? They’re four bucks.”

“Yes, yes, good idea.” He hums happily while I wrap his flowers in newspaper.

An old lady, eighty-five at least, stepping carefully through the market, hair white, dark green beret askew, transfixed by a silver pin, green overcoat, eyes of Ming dynasty blue-and-white porcelain. “Lilacs!” She picks up a bunch of lilac, holds it to her face, inhales, eyes closed. Molecules of lilac scent tumble upward in the air stream, alight in her nasal passages, find the chemoreceptors on nerve endings into which they fit like a key into a lock. Antique neural circuits hum to life. I wait expectantly.

“When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d, and the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night, I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring. Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring, Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west, and thought of him I love…” By the time she begins the third stanza in her quavering voice, eyes closed, clutching her stem of lilac like a martyr her crucifix, I realize that she knows it all, the whole poem, and will recite it all. The clatter and swirl of the market-place fall away. We are enclosed in an intimate bubble, transcending the petty linearity of time, together, just the four of us: the dusty farmer with his buckets of flowers; the porcelain-eyed narrator with her stem of lilac; the mournful, whiskery Whitman; and the assassinated Lincoln, supine in his coffin.

I still have my first copy of The Grapes of Wrath, a cracked, taped–together thing I stole from Mrs. Jouthas’s American Lit class because I couldn’t bear to part with it, and because of my crush on Mrs. Jouthas. I did, however, out of guilt and a sense of the book’s value, pay for a replacement copy.

Today, one sniff of that book’s cheap pulpy paper takes me back to that class: an entire year of wishing that Cheri Miller would finally see how cool I was, a year of trading snide remarks with Diana Tucker, who would work with me at Upstart Crow some years later and is someone I still trade snide remarks with today. I can see the posters above Mrs. Jouthas’s blackboard —Onomatopoeia, “the bells, bells, bells”; and Metonymy, “football is king” — and see her immaculate handwriting in blue, green, and yellow chalks. That was more than thirty years ago.

My most powerful reading memory is the opening chapter of The Grapes of Wrath. Night again, a different bedspread, olive green with traffic signs, Beatles posters on the wall, Cream on the record player. I had come to the book in a roundabout way, through my cousin Chuck, fourteen years older, who was living with us while attending graduate school in business. He’d suggested The Grapes of Wrath, saying I must read it or forever be doomed to a life of long hair and Dr Pepper, and because he seemed so wise, I took it up, though with some pain. It seemed very long. But it was time to get started on the book report, and lying on my bed in the privacy of that teenage night, I cracked open the first pages, completely unprepared: "To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth."

When I typed these lines from memory, I was surprised at how well I did; I spelled "gray" with an "e," and omitted "part of" and one comma.

By the time I finished the first chapter, I was determined that I, too, would be a writer someday, and that I would read everything else by Mr. Steinbeck, who I discovered, to my chagrin, had died six years earlier. I interrupted my reading long enough to write the first pages of my first short story, then went back to Steinbeck, and read until dawn.

I believe every compulsive reader has an ideal reading spot; mine is the orange Naugahyde recliner in my childhood living room. My latchkey afternoons became devoted to hours of reading in that chair, the close autumn sun pouring richly over the white paperback, its black spine, and dyed yellow edges. When I finished with The Grapes of Wrath, I stayed in that chair, and started in on Cannery Row, and every two or three days, I’d bicycle across the flat suburbia of the Santa Clara Valley to a tiny B. Dalton store to purchase another Steinbeck with the money I made washing dishes at a card club. Then it was back to the big chair.

As a typically lonely American teenager, who preferred my noises and company on the loud side, these afternoons were a revelation to me: the joy of solitude, the pleasure of it. I remember these newly consuming afternoons and the books I held there as much as what I read, but I remember the afternoons because of what I read. Steinbeck’s words, and those of the writers who followed, took me out of my San Jose self and transported me to new worlds. In the course of one week, ensconced in the big chair, I might travel to Kenya or Peru, enjoy the decadence of an English manor, or get shipped to the Gulag; I could be man or woman, child or ghost.

•••

It isn’t only the surprise of the exotic that first draws us into books, it’s also the recognition we feel. My friend Liz Szabla was fourteen when she discovered Ernest Hemingway and cut school one day to stay home and finish A Farewell to Arms, which she’d started the night before, another fortuitous book report. There’s a lot of vermouth in A Farewell to Arms, and Liz was so captured by the book that she raided her mother’s liquor cabinet: lo and behold, vermouth. She poured herself a milk tumbler’s worth, settled into the big chair in her family room, and spent the day sipping and reading, slightly tipsy, and occasionally pounding the arm of the chair, yelling to the empty house, "Yes, yes, that’s the way it is, yes, yes, yes, he knows everything, exactly, I love this book." Liz lost track of the time and did not hear her mother’s key in the door. Her mother wasn’t so much angry with Liz as surprised that anyone had the perseverance to drink that much "dry" vermouth. Hemingway’s characters, of course, were drinking "sweet" vermouth, slightly more palatable.

Reading alone in her chair, Liz felt the first great stir of connecting with a world beyond her own: she drank vermouth and felt deeply in tune with Lieutenant Henry and Miss Barkley in the streets of Milan, the war booming in the nearby mountains. Not only was there a big world out there, Liz knew she belonged in it and knew in her bones that there were others like her.

The strangeness and the recognition of reading are almost always mingled, and I first encountered their confluence in a visceral way. While much of the setting for The Grapes of Wrath, California’s central valley, was only a few hours from San Jose, it might as well have been the moon to me; I had come from Okie stock on my father’s side, but the plight of the Joads was yet science fiction. After The Grapes of Wrath, I read Steinbeck’s other California fiction — East of Eden, Cannery Row, Tortilla Flat, The Long Valley and others — all set in the Salinas Valley and on the Monterey coast an hour’s drive from San Jose. The landscape that Steinbeck described with loving power, the soft steep coastal hills, "shaded and dusky," and the live oak and manzanita forests, was a landscape I knew, but through his prose, I came to see this world, my only world then, as if for the first time, and I would ride my bike into the hills to see them for myself but with Steinbeck’s words still tumbling in me. Finally, it seemed to me, I knew the names of the world, names that had always been just out of reach like late–summer apricots on the highest branches.

When I turned sixteen, and finally got my driver’s license, I would get in the car, cutting school, and drive down to Steinbeck country to roam and wonder. My favorite spot on these trips was Cannery Row, at that time a tacky strip of art galleries and abandoned sardine canneries that still spoke of Steinbeck’s world: rotted–out boilers, run–down "paisano" shacks, vacant lots carpeted with lime green sweetgrass. I’d nose around the salt-worn laboratory of Doc Ricketts, Steinbeck’s closest friend, through whose cracked windows I spied specimen jars of squid, anemone, and frogs, which perhaps Steinbeck himself had helped catch and prepare. Across the street was Wing Fat’s, the Chinese grocer where the locals once bought pints of "old Tennis Shoes," and just up the hill, Flora’s, the local brothel, now, to my disappointment, a cheap spaghetti restaurant. I’d perch on a piling above the tide pools and stare at the ocean for hours, here in a very real place where vivid, yet imaginary characters wandered.

I’d been to Cannery Row before I discovered Steinbeck, but had only seen it as a place with a nice view of the ocean. Now, through Steinbeck’s musings on Robert Louis Stevenson, one of his favorite boyhood writers, I knew that I was standing at the edge of the Western world, at the end of history, looking west into the east, toward the future. The world was bigger because of Steinbeck, but also within my grasp.