Hi, Friends – While I’ve been reworking my Paris story – working title: “City of Lights, City of Shadows – my mind keeps going back to my days in Malibu and the story I’m trying to form from that time.
I’ve been going through some old snapshots of those days, bringing back not only memories of what things looked like but a remembrance of the aromas of the ocean and eucalyptus and sage, and of long ago emotions and a sense of horizons opening.
I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I lived in a tent in Malibu. Here’s a photo of the tent with me and two of the kids I looked after through much of that summer, Jeff and Brent Forrester. Wonderfully bright and talented boys. Man, do I look like a dweeb.
In those days we entered the property through this archway of greenery, like entering a separate world. The photo isn’t great, but we could see the ocean through the entrance and could always hear the rhythm of the waves from the property.
A couple days after I was hired (a long story in itself), the doctors I worked for, John and Debbie, got their building permit. The house went up during that long, pleasant summer. Here’s the earliest work, torn up earth and the framing for the foundation.
The house turned out pretty well, I think. Yes, that’s a bridge over the pool in the foreground. They invited me to come back and spend a second summer with them the year the house was finished. I had the room at upper right. No curtains, so I always woke up early. John and Debbie became treasured friends and I visited them many times over the decades, eventually bringing my wife, Felicia, and our own children to visit. I was touched that for several years after that second summer the room was still referred to as Steve’s room.
Here’s an angle on part of the garden and grounds I took care of. This pic was taken years later. My tent had been about where that blue tarp is.
John Brown and his son, Andrew the Imp, off the coast of Baja in a rubber boat. Felicia and I named our oldest son after John.
This is Debbie, at the time one of the country’s leading radiologists. I took the photo when we spent an afternoon in San Francisco while John was in a rugby tournament there. What guy wouldn’t be a little in love with her?
It’s been said that all our stories end the same way. John and Debbie are both gone. Jeff was taken by cancer much too young. Andrew is a physician’s assistant in Reno. Two more of the children, Simon and little Katherine (not pictured), live in the UK and New York City, respectively. In my mind, though, everyone here is still young and vital, and I’m again in my early 20s, thinking what a lucky guy I am to live in this place with these wonderful people.