Gardenias

I'm doing a story on the flora in my life and I searched the Internet high and low the other day trying to figure out what kind of flower my paternal grandmother had growing in her yard in East LA. I think they may have been exquisite gardenias, such as the one above. Also in her yard, I remember a tidy Missouri Synod Lutheran collection of roses, purple irises, and Bird of Paradise flowers.

I'm contrasting this with exploding cacophony of flora my maternal grandmother had in her quarter-acre suburban El Monte plot. She had mints and cati, poinsettias and poppies, along with a billion other exotic plants. But the most amazing thing about her garden were the fruit trees, from kumquats to apricots to oranges, limes, pomegranates, and walnuts. For a child, it was a wonderland, rivaling the mystical gardens of Babylon. But best of all, you could eat your way through it too.

In the Toronto winter, there is nothing I miss more.

Happy Birthday Aunt Beki

Today would have been my Aunt Beki's 60th birthday (see my Mom's post here.). I can't imagine her as a 60-year-old.

Most of my memories of her are from the summer(s) she babysat us on Dobson Street in El Monte. We watched Bewitched, Beverly Hillbillies, and Let's Make a Deal all day long, and my Aunt Beki would make us laugh and laugh with her running commentary on the shows.

My aunt had babies herself in those years and if I could tell her anything now, I would tell her how much I learned about raising kids from her.

Now that I'm a dad, my mind always rushes back to her caring for her own children -- these were really first babies I remember being around. To me she was the archetypal mom and I thought she was the greatest. She was the one, afterall, who introduced me to Cheese Wiz.

In later years, she ceaselessly talked about how my brother and I were the greatest kids in the desert and how all the girls were after us--and if they weren't, they should be. That's what aunts are for.

A couple of years ago, my Mom wrote a brilliant piece eulogizing her sister Beki and Johnny Cash. KUSP in Santa Cruz recorded her reading it for their "First Person Singular" piece.

Go here to listen to it on-line (click the "play" arrow). You can also download it, but you will have to register on the site to access the file.

El Monte 1962

My mom and I at my grandmother's in El Monte, California. My mom tells stories about El Monte being nothing but orange groves and dairies when my grandparents built their house there in the 1950s. You can still see some of that in this picture I think.

You can also see my mom wearing heels, which I don't think she has worn again since this picture was taken.

This is the glorious LA I like to remember, but I don't think it exists anymore. I can still smell the oranges in my dreams though.

Garvey Ave., South El Monte

My Mom grew up in South El Monte and I spent a good part of my childhood there as well.

You know, South El Monte has a certain something that many other towns don't. Not exactly sure what it is though.

Bobby

I had a very rare day off yesterday (thanks Wendy! your turn today!) and I went to see Bobby, the new movie about the assassination of Robert Kennedy. As far as movies go, it was really interesting---good I guess, but with a ton of characters connected only by the fact that they happened to be present at the shooting. Tons of stars, Harry Belefonte, Demi Moore, Sharon Stone, Heather Graeme, Martin Sheen, Helen Hunt, Lawrence Fishbourne, Elijah Wood, etc., etc. Lindsay Lohan caught my eye. I had never seen her in anything other than the tabloids so I didn't recognize her. I wasn't even sure she was an actor. I thought she was just another young drunk celebrity. She was sure sweet in the movie though.

I love anything about Los Angeles in the 1960s, so this movie was cool in that regard. It was also great to hear Bobby Kennedy's words. It's unbelievable to me that a politician in the States could have come so close to getting a presidential nomination by running on such a strong peace and justice platform. His speeches sounded like he picked them right up off the desk of Martin Luther King, Jr. Was this the real Kennedy? You have to wonder what would have happened if he had won the election in 1968.

I kind of wish director Emilio Estevez would have taken the Oliver Stone-slant and done something about the conspiracy theories on RFK's murder. I love conspiracy theories, even if I don't believe a lot of them. But I have serious doubts that Shirhan Shirhan was the only one who shot Bobby. Except for a couple of exceptions (Mark Chapman, John Hinkley, Jr., Squeaky Fromm) I don't believe in the "lone, crazed gunman" solutions. Lee Harvey Oswald, Shirhan Shirhan, Timothy McVeigh---no way any of these guys did what they did alone. You can find some of the doubts about RFK's place here and here and here.

I was seven, but I actually remember that election. A bunch of us kids from Nevada Ave. in East LA went down to hear Jose Feliciano ("Light my Fire" was big that year) open for Hubert Humphrey at an outdoor mall on Atlantic Ave. That was probably during the actual presidential campaign.

The night Bobby Kennedy was shot, my brother and I were living at my BamBea's house in El Monte. I don't remember my parents being around. I woke up early in the morning to Bambea sobbing, buried in a mountain of pillows and psychedelic colours of her bedroom with the TV blaring.

I asked her what was the matter and she said they shot Bobby Kennedy last night. She had been up all night.

Later that morning, I walked to the end of street to wait from my school bus and I saw a German Shepherd get hit and killed by a trash truck. I wondered if there might not be something seriously wrong with that day.


(The photo of RFK is from the very interesting website of Mike Strong)

East Dobson St., El Monte, Calif.

I lived here for most of the time I was in 4th grade. My Mom, brother, and I lived in the last house at the end of the long driveway. My Aunt Beki and Uncle Joe and their kids lived in the house next door. Sol and I and some neighbourhood kids made a baseball field in the empty dirt lot immediately to the left of our driveway, where there are three large buildings now. We lived here during the Sylmar Earthquake which shook LA on Feb. 9, 1971.

I am not sure why looking at this place still gives me the creeps.

Street Racer

That's me in June 1963, getting ready to take my uncle's MG for a spin around the neighbourhood, which I believe was El Monte. I must have been drooling over the opportunity, as you can see I was wearing not one, but two bibs for this big adventure.

Bambea

Yesterday my grandmother would have been 86, or perhaps 84, depending on what year she told you she was born. She also used several different spellings for her family name. To other adults she was probably mysterious in a lot of ways---I'm sure her neighbours in the bucolic L.A. suburbs of 1950s-1960s El Monte thought so. But from a kid's perspective (that's me and her above in the early 60s) she was the amazing, dramatic, and wildly spontaneous Bambea (from "Gram Bea" I guess).

Bambea was certainly unconventional. "Noisy, colorful and disorganized, but well meaning," my mom wrote when she sent me this picture. I have no end of crazy and beautiful stories about Bambea (...fire red hair and whip cream fights, artists' sketches all over the actual walls inside her house, her pool filled with poor kids from Watts every summer, a trip up the coast for the Summer of Love, fantastic food creations, a yard overflowing with poppies, poinsettias, and pomegranates....). Imagine Endora from Bewitched meets Phyllis Diller meets Eva Peron. That gets close to my memory of her. Though she died in 1977---way too young---Bambea had a very big impact in my life, mostly by nurturing my curiosity and giving me a sense of wonder about the world. What a wonderful gift for a grandmother to give.