365 Memories

Another experience to come out of my father's L.A. years with Playboy was involvement with a private, membership-based Beverly Hills supper club called Touch. The connections are fuzzy in my mind. I always want to say that the club was backed financially by Playboy Enterprises, but I'm not sure this is accurate. It may have just been that one of the club's owners belonged to Hefner's entourage—being one of the many who made it their business to stop by the Playboy mansion on a regular basis. Or perhaps he (I forget his name, despite having heard it regularly at one point in my life) was a salaried employee of the company, linked somehow to club/casino operations? However it came into being, the Touch Club opened in the early 1980s (perhaps it was the year 1980; it was eventually sold in 1986), and we dined there sometimes, my parents and I; this was always a special occasion I got to dress up for. I don't remember the menu, but based on the intended clientele, I...

Then there are the books that shock you. Really shock you. There's a book like this for me, a book by Shel Silverstein . It wouldn't shock me as an adult, and especially not now that I myself am a writer: I understand the desire to make sometimes drastic departures from your best-known material. (Plus, sometimes your best-known material doesn't even represent your best self, though I'm not saying one way or the other with respect to Silverstein .) We all have many facets to our personalities, many wells to draw from in our quest for creative expression. Today, I'm sure I'd love this large-format, coffee table book of drawings—or if not love it, then at least really appreciate it—and I hope my parents still have it in their personal library. I'm guessing that they do. But when I saw this book for the first time, I wasn't an adult. I was around ten or eleven years old, and the book in question, despite Silverstein's huge contributions to the world of...

Although I am an only child, I paraded through childhood with a group of kids who felt very much like family—they even lived in my house. They were fictional characters, but no less real to me. Actually, while I was growing up, they often seemed more real to me than real people did. That is, they were much more honest. They didn't try to stuff you with platitudes or false optimism when things weren't going well, but they gave it to you straight . . . including giving you the knowledge that you'd make it through whatever it was, intact. These characters most often were the brainchildren of one or the other of two classic children's book authors: Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume . (In fact, they're so classic that I almost worry it's cliché to remember them here.) While living in Chicago, I started out with Beverly Cleary and her neighborhood of kids on Klikitat Street. Ramona may have been a "pest" to her sister Beezus —and as a parent, I tend to agre...

In the summer of 1999, while I was still in grad school pursuing my MFA in Creative Writing, my father and I planned a brief getaway—a bit of time for the two of us to change the scenery, to reconnect, to share simple meals, and to write and read and talk together. My father selected the destination out of a guidebook to monastery guest houses: we were to stay at Mount Saint Mary's Abbey, a community of Trappestine nuns in Wrentham , Mass . Mount Saint Mary's, it turns out, was the first monastery of Cistercian nuns in the United States. The first sisters had arrived from St. Mary's Abbey in Glencairn , Ireland, back in 1949, so our stay coincided with the Golden Jubilee anniversary year of foundation. We arrived, checked in, and were then shown to our rooms in the retreat house by the "guest sister." I remember two interesting things about the guest sister, though I don't remember how I learned them. Did she just volunteer this information? It would be unli...

In my experience, it's generally true that people living in city apartment buildings don't really get to know their neighbors. Of course there are exceptions to this, but more often than not, the neighbors-turned-friends are people who, I think, must live in other areas. I think of small town blocks lined with shade trees and kids who run from house to house, "Our Gang" style. But sometimes it happens that a building's inhabitants are drawn together; they rely on each other for the occasional ingredient that's no longer in the kitchen or for childcare in a pinch or even for genuine friendship. Most places I've lived, I couldn't tell you the names of the neighbors—it's not that I don't remember them, rather that I never knew them in the first place—but in the last apartment we had as a family in Chicago, I remember there was the S. family across the hall. I remember the mother, Dolores, and the daughter, Jenny. I don't remember the father (w...

March 26 was Easter Sunday in 1978. I was nine years old. I have had many memorable Easter celebrations—among them, one in Ireland and one in Greece, both when I was an adult—and I'll certainly write about them in coming weeks, but the general spirit of a childhood Easter season will always belong to 1970s Chicago. Between the ages of five and ten, those years in which holidays are perhaps most magical, we lived in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago. It was here that I still believed in the Easter Bunny (a tradition that seems odd to my French in-laws, since for them it's the "bells of Rome" that fly overhead dropping eggs down to expectant children; really, I guess that's no stranger than the idea of a rabbit "laying" eggs—we also go round about whether the Easter Bunny is the reason why "Americans don't eat rabbit," which of course we do but not as much as in France and, it's true, often not in childhood). And it was in Chicago...

Sometimes a restaurant location is simply doomed. No matter the change in management or ownership, no matter the various menu concepts and decor overhauls, no matter how much promotion, nothing makes it in this spot. (There's also the converse: the gold-mine location that will make even the most unworthy kitchen profitable. I'm not sure which scenario is more pitiful.) There's a restaurant I remember from the early 1980s in Los Angeles, and since that time it seems to have disappeared leaving almost no trace, or anyway not in cyberland . Perhaps it was just one in a string of restaurants in just such a bad location. Wanting to verify the name, to see if I really could have remembered it correctly, I did a Google search, and I didn't come up with much: some steak houses around the country (not the right cuisine); a link that looked promising, but once clicked routed me to a very unexpected pornographic site that made me want to pour Purell over my keyboard; finally, one...

Besides singing or watching traffic on the 405—or the other auto entertainment in Los Angeles, spotting outrageous vanity plates (there were never so many in comparatively straitlaced Chicago)—when stuck in the car for long stretches of time, my mom and I also played something we called the Introduction Game. I'm not sure if we invented it ourselves. It was an alphabet-related memory game, a pretend scenario in which we took turns being the host of a party, responsible for introductions as each new guest arrived. I think I loved the game in part because as the fictional guests showed up, I actually imagined the party scene unfolding. I was at an age when I thought that the most grown-up thing I could do was host a dinner party, or a cocktail party (though I had much less idea what that was actually like). It seemed such a glamorous challenge, being responsible for everyone's comfort and good time. Sometimes I imagined a sophisticated gathering of interesting, witty people. Othe...

Until I began to approach the middle school years, I didn't really listen to the radio. I listened to albums (yes, vinyl), on a turntable that was very juvenile in style but got the job done. Mostly I listened to Rodgers and Hammerstein, and to this day I can sing almost all the songs, even the more obscure ones, from their classic Broadway musicals. The radio was on in the car sometimes, but one of my parents set the dial or else I spun aimlessly through the stations, scanning for anything that sounded good despite not really knowing the songs. But, even in the car, the radio took second place to conversation or our own singing. All this changed sometime when I was around eleven, definitely by the time I turned twelve. In fact, I think it might've been some girls at a week-long (two-week?) sleepover camp for the horsey set who turned me on to the "coolness" of radio, the necessity for knowing the most recent hits. They, plus friends at school, were my introduction t...

Somewhere in the later years of elementary school, say the fifth or sixth grade, divorce became an important topic of conversation on the playground during recess and lunch. I had at least one friend whose parents either were divorcing or had already completed the process. Prior to this time, I'm sure the word "divorce" had come up—I mean, I knew what the word meant and knew that some portion of my classmates' families were "broken" (which was often the word that accompanied divorce back in the 1970s and early 1980s, despite being linguistically judgmental and rather inconsiderate of the families in question)—but it had nothing whatsoever to do with my family. I remember sitting outside with my friend, in some more secluded spot on the school grounds, not far from the "bungalows" that served as our classrooms. We sat on a cement ledge, I think, facing a couple of trees, and this I remember, too: we'd eat pomegranates and sunchokes , foods that ...

OK, the zip code was different—90024—but it was as close to Beverly Hills as I'll ever live. I was in the eighth grade, and we were still in L.A., moving from a house in Brentwood to a condominium in Westwood , right near the Mormon Temple (on Eastborne Avenue, off Santa Monica Boulevard). But the condominium was being renovated, and as with just about any renovation, the job was behind schedule. The house closed, our things went into storage somewhere, and we shacked up at an all-suite hotel for what turned out to be some number of months. Of course this was not your average "shack." To me, at the time, it was just a transient hotel—nothing remarkable other than a heated pool and a friendly staff who let me have the run of the place. But in fact, it was the Beverly Comstock Hotel at 10300 Wilshire Boulevard at Comstock , situated between Westwood Village and Century City. (It is now under new ownership, has been made significantly more posh, and is called the Beverl...

"Mama's little baby loves shortnin ' shortnin ', mama's little baby loves shortnin ' bread." My father would slap his knee as he sang. If I ran into the kitchen to fetch a pair of soup spoons, he would put them back to back and clack them together, good as any member of a washboard band. He'd do "Swing Low," "Dry Bones," "Old Man River." George Jones, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Alan Jackson. When I talked to my grandparents on the phone, they called me "sugar"; they asked " when're  y'all fixin ' to come down and visit?" When we visited, there was always a trip to Morrison's Cafeteria. Southern vegetables are cooked within an inch of their lives. Collards and pot likker ; string beans, okra, and black-eyed peas. Butter your corncob using a slice of white bread. Cornbread dropped in a glass of buttermilk, dug out sopping with a spoon. For a while, our northern kitchen boasted a set of h...

Almost exactly seven years ago, early April 2002. It was three months after my small civil marriage ceremony, performed in Connecticut by a justice of the peace; it was three months before the church wedding and reception planned for family and friends in southwest France. Married, yet somehow not, in a state of transition, I embarked with my father on a "heritage trip" by car, driving down into the Deep South. Georgia, Alabama: the roots of my father's childhood, the seat of a civil rights revolution in its infancy. I had really never explored this part of the country, not in any important way, and in no way with a feeling of connection. My grandparents, Southern to the core, had moved to a Florida retirement town before I was born, and visiting them never really seemed "Dixie" to me. This was a bonding trip, a time to pause and honor ancestry before the life of the future (my separate, legal family life) came to assert itself, forcefully, everywhere. We had pl...

Whinnying, stomping, snorting, sweet-sweating horses. Horses short or many "hands" tall, sleek or barrel-bellied, good natured or mean tempered, nervous or lazy; horses that would jump or rear, balk or bolt. I loved them all. I first used to ride at Bailey's Stables in Chicago, when I was somewhere between the ages of five and nine. This was in the mid- to late 1970s—a time that may also bring to mind for native Chicagoans the highly publicized disappearance and (it was later ruled) murder of the candy heiress, Helen Brach ; Richard Bailey, stable owner and despicable con artist, was indicted in soliciting her murder and was ultimately sentenced in the mid-1990s to what amounted to a de facto life term in prison, given his age, for a complex scheme of fraud and a trail of sordid crimes that included murdering many horses as well. I shudder to think of what must have been going on behind the scenes of my weekly riding lessons. All I remember was the gentle giant of a hors...

It's Saint Patrick's Day, and if a country could talk, today America would say, "Pinch me, I'm Irish," just as many of its citizens do entreat, whether the claim is legitimate or not. (Here I confess, I never did understand the pinching bit.) On March 17, you may as well just stick an honorary O' in front of your name, call in Irish to work, and set up a pint or two at your local pub. Sláinte !  I am willing to bet that nowhere else in the world could you find a bigger deal made out of St. Paddy's Day, and I can tell you from firsthand experience (details to come) that it's a much greater event (by far) here in the States than it is in the "old country." I'm glad, actually, that this is so. It would seem a bit off-putting—not to mention totally out of an often self-deprecating character—for the Irish themselves, in Ireland, to parade so lavishly on their own behalf. Here, though, especially in my home cities of New York and Chicago (to sa...

My father is a seasoned, sophisticated traveler. This is true now, and has been for a while, although of course it could not always have been the case. There was a first trip, sometime (a boy from Alabama battling fear and loneliness on a Protestant mission trip to Mexico in the 1950s). As long as I've known him, though, he's been the consummate travel planner. After working out flight routes well in advance and anchoring any trip with carefully selected accommodations, my father would stop at his favorite bookstore for guidebooks and other titles of local interest (whether "local" meant one state away or across an ocean), then he'd hit any store or stores that sold convenient travel items, including but in no way limited to: passport holders and money belts (for the traveler's checks he'd get from AAA), power cord adapters, pocket rain ponchos, protective bags to shield film from airport X-ray machines, mini plastic bottles for shampoo or lotion, "W....