Flights of Fancy

It’s the first week in October, 1969. On the third day the navy released me from my service contract, a Minority Enlistment, and on the seventh I turned 21. The navy had provided me with a wide range of skills and some grand adventures ~ that’s me in Hong Kong, standing in my boat as it’s being craned into the water ~ and some things less tangible. I had learned that I had value and that my contributions had value. I had learned what could be accomplished by a team working together, things I was never taught in childhood. So I saluted the quarterdeck watch on USS Tolovana for the last time, and headed home to take on the world.

Returning to my childhood home, I figured to be there a month or less until I found work and my own place, and you can’t imagine how I was looking forward to it. I think I mentioned earlier that my great-grandmother, a true Victorian lady with all the baggage that entails, was my primary caregiver. She turned sixty, two weeks after I was born, and having an infant dumped into her lap can’t have been easy. I’m giving her the benefit of every doubt here, as she spent my childhood never missing a chance to let me know how useless and unwanted I was.

Well, she would have turned 81 three weeks after I returned home. I didn’t plan to be there long, and paid for the use of my old room by taking care of some chores that were too difficult for her and her daughter, who would have been around sixty at the time and lived with her. As I say, I was catching a breather, helping around the house a bit, and studying the job market when great-grandma slipped rounding a corner into the hall, and broke her hip.

The surgery was mostly successful, but there was never any question of being able to afford the level of care she would have needed, no way grandma could do it all herself, and so my future was decided in the breadth of a heartbeat: I would live in my childhood home for room and board, and be an on-call nurse whenever grandma was at her job. Fortunately the house and car were paid for, and what she made supervising the maids at the 7-Seas Hyatt Lodge was just about enough for us to get by on.

But the period from 1970 through the spring of 1975, when the grand old lady finally passed, weren’t all drudgery. I enjoyed a surprising amount of free time, and being unfettered by a job, I spent much of it decompressing on the streets and in the dives of one of California’s most incredible little beach towns, Ocean Beach.

Look up the price of a shack on beachfront property in California. It will leave you gasping for breath. But OB in the 70s was San Diego’s center of the counterculture. The hippies, the poets, the free spirits, the surfers, the protesters, the dope-heads, all hung out together with amazingly little friction between the groups. It was like a big, extended family where all the siblings and cousins had differing interests, but loved each other nonetheless. I’ve never encountered another place like it.

I was writing during those days; stuck in the house when grandma was at work, why not, right? I still wasn’t creating anything profound, but I was learning lessons that would serve me well, and my God, the people and views I was exposed to during those five years and change have informed my writing ever since! We were all just one big happy band of carefree young adults, and we partied like it would never end… until it did.

Once great-grandma finally passed, it was time to get serious about adulting, and I’ll take that up in the next installment. But beach life, while happy and carefree on the surface, had some dark undertones running beneath it all, and next Sunday I plan to post a story set in the little beach town of my youth. The name of the town has been changed, the people are constructs, and the situation isn’t a precise biographical retelling of any individual’s life; it’s just a story to capture one aspect. My hope was always that there would be many more tales to tell, but it hasn’t happened yet. Wish me luck with that, and in the meanwhile, swing by next Sunday to enjoy Safe Haven. See you then!