Charlie in front of our garage in August 2000. Renovations were in progress, and the planks were from a Douglas Fir which we had chopped down and had milled.
Look at the expression on Charlie’s face! Pure, unadulterated glee!
Here’s Albion in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris in the fall of 1994. He was a few months older than Charlie in the above picture, but the same sort of glee is written all over his face.
That’s what soccer did for all our boys, more or less. Albion, our first soccer fanatic and star, started it all off in his first term at Happy Valley School, the fall of 1997. He couldn’t speak English, but he could speak soccer, and that’s how he communicated. Some of his classmates became his first team. They couldn’t talk to each other – Albion was just beginning to learn English – but they spoke the same language on the field of play.
We lucked into an elementary school which actually had a soccer pitch for the boys and girls to play on during breaks on most schooldays. And that was it. We were off and running! Well, okay, the boys were off and running: the parents didn’t quite achieve that sort of pace, but we did love to watch!
Look at that style! My favorite is the pointed fingers: it’s all in the balance!
The photo of Charlie at the top of the page was taken when he was then our latest recruit to the sport, before he actually played for an organized team. He turned five at the end of that month, and had yet to start at Happy Valley School. So soccer was limited to those few occasions when Albion or someone else would play with him, and they were precious moments. He had just kicked the ball in the picture, and the look on his face tells you all you need to know about he felt about that.
Paul on the sidelines during the fall 2005 Breakers’ season watching over his young charges. Way to go!
The second photo of him comes from the fall of 2005. But look at his style there, and look again at the back yard photo over five years before! It’s the same! At least twelve seasons of youth soccer separate the two pictures (we have a hard time keeping track), but the same style and enjoyment characterize both. He loved taking corners, and did it and does it very well.
By 2005, he was playing for the local Under 10 Select boys team, the Breakers, and this was serious stuff. You can tell how serious it was then from his intense concentration, so well caught on film by Tony Pagliaro, a local professional photographer (http://www.santacruzphotography.com) who we were lucky enough to have as one of the other team dads.
What do these two pictures have in common, apart from Charlie? Or should I say who do they have in common? Paul Gooch is who. He was kicking the ball to Charlie just outside the top photo in front of our garage, and he later became his coach, first in the fall 2003Santa Cruz Under 9s developmental league, and then in the Santa Cruz County Breakers Under 10s.
Albion is red-faced after sixty minutes of hard running during his second US season in May 1998. He always kept running and running.
In fact, all of us in the family would like to thank all of those who put so much effort into organizing and managing recreational and competitive soccer in Santa Cruz County, and especially Woody, Tricia, Rich, Marilyn, Nanette, Tom & Mary, Bob, Bryan, Hal, Drew, Nigel, Vicky & Nate, Frank, Melissa, Tony, Paul, Chuck and Boo, Sunil! That list covers the boys’ coaches over the years until about 2005. The list goes on.
One of the guys on that list is Santa Cruz Woody. That’s his stage name: he’s a musician, whose songs of peace are sung at concerts all over Northern California, and a vintner, whose Branciforte Vineyards Pinot Noir is an excellent wine, as well as a recreational youth soccer coach whose skills are second to none. In short, Woody is one of those ecelctic and involved people who make Santa Cruz County such an interesting place to live.
Woody coaching Alex eight years later in the spring of 2006. He’s the big guy in the hat.
He was Albion’s coach during his first seasons at Happy Valley School, and his first season with Albion is a great illustration of how much more youth soccer is than a game, and of how much more a youth soccer coach can do apart from coach.
Woody was fascinated by how he would coach a boy who barely understood a word he said. He put a lot of effort into non-verbal communication, featuring a lot of smiles. Albion really wanted to understand how to play better soccer. He always features a lot of smiles. The upshot was that Woody had a lot to do with Albion integrating so well and readily into the elementary school community here. Here is another picture of Woody.
Alex in his fourth or fifth season. Katie Freeman, another professional photographer, was there to record the team. We’ve been lucky with team photos (http://www.katiefreemanphotography.com/). Thanks Katie!!
Woody jumps us forward to the spring of 2006, when he coached one of our children again, this time Alex, in the Excel spring co-ed league. The Lightning went unbeaten that season, and all the players were suitably thrilled.
Alex had picked up soccer too, as soon as he could, which was the fall of 2003. He loves the game just like his older brothers. He too is a star.
Alex on the Breakers in 2007, at the NorCal tournament held in Turlock. He can always cut and weave, almost at will, and his bigger opponent here is aiming for the ball where it was a moment ago!
Alex’s games during those early seasons often took place on the fields at Good Shepherd, a local Catholic school. During his first year, I saw Paul Ohrlocher, then UCSC’s men’s soccer coach and a pillar in the local youth soccer community, on the Good Shepherd fields at the same time as Alex was playing. Paul already knew Charlie, and I dragged him across to Alex’s field. In two minutes he had seen what I wanted to show him: “you can see right away when a boy’s got what it takes,” he said.
Sure enough, like Charlie, Alex too played under 9 developmental soccer, playing for the White Sharks, and he too graduated at ten to playing for the Breakers, the select club in the County.
Tom didn’t arrive in Santa Cruz until the summer of 1999 (see this part of the family history). By the time he got here, he had spent two years playing rugby in France. He had loved it! I can relate, having played rugby from age 11 until 13. I also really enjoyed it.
Tom with his French rugby team. He’s the third from left in the back row. I don’t know the details.
Unlike American football, in which few players on the team get to run with the ball, in rugby everybody does so regularly. In fact, you can’t throw the ball forward at all, as you can in American football, which means that there is a lot more running with it. There is also no protective armor of the kind used in American football, but there is still a lot of full body tackling, often at speed. Tom recounted to us much later the one occasion when he had been knocked out when his head hit the ground. I’m glad that we didn’t hear about that at the time!
Tom’s picture when he played on the Harbor Junior Varsity team.. What you can’t see from the photo is how much he had grown up and out by this time in High School.
When he first arrived in Santa Cruz, he concentrated on finding a rugby team to play on here. Unfortunately, there just wasn’t one: the sport is viewed as too dangerous for children. There is American Football for children, called Pop Warner, and that he tried out for a season. But it is a less skilled game than rugby (how’s that for a controversial opinion!), and he did not really take to it.
He finally started out with soccer much later than those who had arrived here to live in 1997. But he applied himself, and found sympathetic coaches who believed in him: thank you Sunil Bhojwani and Ian Adamson! I have a particular fondness for Ian, who has always remained loyal to West Ham United in the Premier League! In the winter 2005-6 season, Tom made the Harbor High School Junior Varsity team and Ian’s Under 19 competitive team, the Meteors, won the local District Cup.
The Excel team Nick co-coached in spring 2003, with him in the middle behind the players.
As time goes on, we move into different roles as well as different teams. I already mentioned that Albion took a referee training course, and refereed the younger children’s teams for a while. Unfortunately, he found it hard to make the more difficult calls, principally I think because those on the wrong side of such calls can be very upset by them. Albion really does not like to upset anyone, which is a very endearing trait, if you think about it.
Nick also tried a different role, coaching. He too had arrived in 1999, two years after Albion and Charlie, and he had the additional disadvantage in soccer terms of not attending Happy Valley School. Going directly into seventh grade at Branciforte Middle School, he missed soccer being the usual game at breaks, as it was at Happy Valley. He too got into soccer, without Tom’s detours through other sports. He too played competitively, coached by Nigel Sanders-Self one year, and I haven’t been able to figure out why I don’t have any photos of Nick playing during those years.
I too tried my hand at soccer from time to time, typically in parents – boys games during the teams’ end-of-season parties. It’s always been my favorite sport. But I am not physically what I used to be, a point proved during such a game at the end of one of Charlie’s seasons, I think maybe with under-10s. The boys are quicker than their size suggests, and I was going for a ball which I though I had easily. But one of the boys got there first, and my foot rolled off his and twisted my ankle. That didn’t used to be such a big deal. This time, it was black and blue for about ten weeks, and I’ve been much more careful ever since, to the point of barely playing at all. Which gives me more time to watch the boys!
Alex is taking a shot on the hard indoor field in Scotts Valley, since converted into a library, with his dad playing the role of goalie, with mixed results!
This family has spent more time on soccer than on any other of its leisure activities. I never tire of it. And Marie-Hélène was always a trooper, and became quite expert in the game over time. With all the games that we watched, she had plenty of time to learn!
As we spent so much time on soccer, it deserves a few extra pages on this site! The fall 2003 soccer season, featuring what were then new levels of both child involvement and parental commitment, appears on this page. The Santa Cruz County Breakers Under 10s Fall 2005 Season, photographed by a professional, appears on this page. And an intense and a little troubled season in 2008 appears here. Had enough yet?!
Taken on our property after a storm that lasted a few days in October 2004. The sun came up in the morning, and the mist poured out of the trees: stunning. Not a lot of rain here, but when it comes it makes for some beauatiful scenery.
I rather like that one. But the humorous side of it really does not apply to Santa Cruz. Not that we don’t have our fair share of New Age and other bizarre creeds and practices: we definitely do, in spades!
But there’s a pretty high level of something here too: maybe intelligence, maybe empathy, maybe spirituality, maybe freedom (there’s town just down the coast called Freedom, California: an inspiring post office to mail letters from!), some valuable human quality, I don’t know exactly which, but I know it’s high.
Ha ha ha ha ha!
A whole clump of Bay on our neighbors’ land that was eroded by the creek and fell in a storm in early 2008. The seasonal creek is in full flow on the left. (Click to expand!)
Of the 16 years that our family spent all together, 13 were spent in Santa Cruz, 1997 to 2010. Our children came of age here: they don’t know it yet, and maybe one or two of them never will, but we gave them a childhood in a little piece of paradise.
We were extraordinarily lucky to be able to live here all that time. This is the future, “Small is Beautiful,” and it is bright. We surmounted hurdle after hurdle here, until we came to one too high even for us. But if you have to come a cropper somewhere, let it be in a place like this!
Santa Cruz sits in California where the redwoods meet the wine country meets the mountains meet the coast.
Paula’s surf cafe, where we love the $1.99 “Basic Breakfast”, where surfboards, surfing magazines and surfing posters serves as decoration, and where even the hard-working manager is a surfer!
Roll the combination around your mind for a moment. The redwoods: the giant Sequoias have gone from the local countryside, easy logging in the second half of the last century to build San Francisco and other nearby cities, but they live on not so far away, the oldest living things on the planet, an awesome natural world to explore and feel close.
We have 40 normal-sized redwoods on our property, dating from the logging, and they’re like oaks in England, solid, dependable, a reassuring part of the California landscape. Their roots mesh with each other, supporting each other in a storm. Many trees have fallen over the years on our property: quite a few Bay, the odd Douglas fir, that’s the natural order of things in a forest. Never a redwood. It is impossible to tire of walking around our almost three acres and feeling their canopy overhead: the adjective used to describe a canopy of redwoods is normally “majestic;” even our modest copses give you a piece of that.
You need to keep your wits about you in Santa Cruz: Fergus, who regales in solving crossword puzzles, caught this one on Walnut Street. Think about it: is the law a moral profession?
The wine country, vineyard after vineyard right next door, is dotted across the Santa Cruz Mountains: several local friends each own their little vineyard, and proudly share one of their own bottles with us every once in a while. The whole town, even its back country hamlets, is fascinated by wine. I’m no oenolog, but enjoy spending time with those who are. There’s money in wine, of course, but hearing complaints from a local vintner about treading grapes all weekend demonstrates that, at least on a small scale, this is a business where profits are inextricably linked to a very real kind of hard work.
Santa Cruz is here because the San Lorenzo River flows into the ocean here, giving the early missionaries and other white settlers a few miles of relatively flat land between the ocean and the mountains. But it’s the mountains, the Santa Cruz Mountains, that have shaped this little town.
Many roads in the county are as bad as highway 17. This is Granite Creek Road. Check out the sign (click!), the assorted skidmarks and the bark worn off the base of the trunk. By what, you may well ask! The cars lose.
To this day, there is no easy road here from San Francisco Bay, the local urban conurbation. We have highway 17, a four-lane highway running from Santa Cruz to San Jose, “over the hill,” as the locals say. Patchen Pass caps the 13-mile stretch of 17 through the mountains. It’s only 1,800 foot high, but that’s not what defines this highway:
“SR 17’s combination of narrow shoulders, dense traffic, sharp turns, blind curves, wandering fauna such as deer and mountain lions, and sudden changes in traffic speeds have led to driving conditions that result in a number of accidents and fatalities, leading to the reputation of SR 17 as one of the most dangerous highways in the state.” That’s Wikipedia, and they omitted the reverse camber on some of those curves.
All those hazards lumped together on the main road to Santa Cruz is what keeps our town small and quaint. The urban conurbation visits us on summer weekends, but has never managed to engulf us, even though we are very close to each other.
Taken on a bike ride during a winter swell off Lighthouse Field. The lighthouse is out of the frame to the left. The solitary surfer is waiting for a break in the waves that will give him time to paddle out. Just look at that breaker!
The urban conurbation visits the ocean and the beach. Ever since I was a small boy in England, the seashore has fascinated me. The shore here is as interesting as it can get. We’re at the very top of Monterey Bay, and the sandstone shoreline crumbles and changes under the weight of those Pacific Ocean breakers. Main beach is surrounded by long cliffs west and east (yep, at the top of the Bay, the shoreline runs West to East), which hide their own discrete coves between headlands and promenades.
Mavericks in February 2010, taken and copyrighted by Brocken Inaglory, found on Wikipedia under “Maverick’s – Location.” Click to see the surfer!
It is these headlands that create the surfing breaks which raised Santa Cruz’s profile in the 1950s and ’60s. Maverick’s, California’s big wave surf spot, first braved by Jeff Clark, then 17, surfing alone or in front of his high school buddies in 1975, is an hour up the coast. Perhaps because Maverick’s is close enough for Santa Cruz surfers to reach whenever the swell is good, Santa Cruz big wave surfers are among the best in the world. Think Peter Mel and Darryl (“Flea”) Virostko.
I don’t need the big waves, although the occasional swell is just fine. I just like to bike along West Cliff Drive, next to the breakers and the spray on the rocks, watch the colors of the sky and sea change every day, I mean it, every day, and see the surfers up close off Lighthouse Field, where there are waves breaking almost whenever you pass by, not all big waves, but most of the time surfable waves.
A worthy cause, on the front page of our worthy local paper, the Santa Cruz Sentinel.
I like to see the women sunbathing and watch the young families with their children splashing happily in the waves, eagerly running toward one, more eagerly running away from it, excited cries and squeals, on Natural Bridges State Beach, where the natural bridges are now down to one but the Monarch butterflies still arrive every year, a featherweight throng settling a couple of hundred yards inland.
I like to gaze south across the Bay past the sailboats and the fishing boats to Moss Landing and Pacific Grove, or out west across the ocean to where the whales migrate every year, and to feel the fog coming and going, and the tide rising and falling, and the waves breaking and retreating, day after day after day, as I ride by. That’s enough for me.
These signs are collectors items! The signs disappear almost as soon as they are put up, with the regrettable result that none currently survive. The City of Santa Cruz remains a nuclear-free zone, by municipal ordinance.
Around 60,000 lucky souls share this natural wonder. Few of them spent formative years in Birmingham. Few of them know how lucky they are. I never forget how lucky we are.
We are 15 minutes from the ocean, and an hour away from Monterey and Carmel. Pacific Grove too is about an hour around the Bay, and Big Sur an hour and a half. On the urban level, San Jose and Cupertino are 45 minutes away, Palo Alto an hour, San Francisco an hour and a quarter, and Berkeley an hour and a half.
If you haven’t guessed already, we love it here!
An art car, splendidly decorated just to be interesting and evocative, on Cooper Street just off Pacific Avenue in downtown Santa Cruz.
Santa Cruz has what each of us in the family needs. Here’s a partial list of the highlights:
The beaches are everybody’s highlight. Here’s Alex in May 2004. We were eating a Mother’s Day brunch with the Hanlons, at Zelda’s on Capitola Beach: literally, the restaurant’s deck is on the beach.
1. We have to start with beaches. This is a holiday town, a tourist destination, and holidays and tourists are all about beaches. Over time, I’ve noticed that we residents begin to take them for granted. One of us will go to a party on the beach or a barbecue at one of the fire pits on a beach, one of us will play a game of beach soccer or volleyball on Main Beach, or a group of us will share a meal for a special occasion at one of the cafes with a terrace on the beach. Because that’s where you go, that’s what you do. We’re all here because it’s all here. We don’t even think about it.
Charlie on the same day. The parents conversed while the children played on the beach.
2. Surf shops, surf culture, surfboards, and the Silicon Valley business people who get up early to surf for an hour before their morning commute (there are more of them here than you’d think), and who talk about the expected swell and the day’s surfing and how it compared to other days and other waves. They’re like fishermen, comparing catches and the one who got away! Then there’s skate shops like Bill’s Wheels, not particularly fancy places, but with a good stock of the bits and pieces that skateboarders all need, because skateboards impact after impact and break pretty often. Bill’s Wheels is where first Alban and then Alex equipped himself to enjoy the assortment of well-designed skate parks and other skating opportunities in the local towns.
Alban and Tom on the same day in Capitola Beach. This was a game which everyone got into.
3. Pacific Garden Mall downtown. Actually, it’s no longer called that: it’s simply Pacific Avenue now. The Mall was all but flattened by the Loma Prieta earthquake in October 1989, and they rebuilt it in a more open and conventional plan. But it’s still a great place for strolling on a summer evening, window-shopping and listening to the always evolving local buskers (Tom was one for a while, with his guitar and a couple of friends playing behind an open guitar case facing passers-by, a gentle invitation to make a donation). There’s coffee to be had at places like Lulu’s and Verve, as well as the national brand coffee shops, where Marie-Hélène can watch the world go by from her table on the sidewalk and feel like she’s back on a boulevard in Paris, without the cold and rain that she found there most of the year.
Our second last happy Happy Valley School graduate, Charlie, with Mrs. Coonerty on graduation day in 2007.
3. Bookshop Santa Cruz, one of the stores on Pacific Avenue and one of the last survivors (they operated out of a tent during the aftermath of the earthquake) of the eclectic and earnest bookstores that thrived with the hippies, founded in the late 60s and bought by the parents of the current owner in 1973. It is feeling the digitalization of content, and the threat it poses to more traditional media, but maintains a loyal customer base, a fascinating collection of books and an eclectic assortment of readings. The current owner is the granddaughter of the woman who looked after our children during their breaks at Happy Valley School, there known as Mrs. C., until her retirement in 2007 at age 93 or 94. We didn’t ask which! She watched over her charges in the playground every day until she retired.
One more beach photo, this one from nine years earlier, Daphné and Tom had the same idea in St Malo. Here they are with Roxanne, who later became Charlie and Alex’s Godmother. Tom has always been a good sport.
4. The remaining hippies. I must confess that, as a former hippy, I have a fair bit of sympathy for those who remain. As long as there have been hippies, Santa Cruz has always been a base of hippiedom. When I first used to drive here with friends in 1976 or 77, for a weekend away from studying at Berkeley, we would sleep on Main Beach, literally, without anyone caring. It was the sun that woke us up the next morning. Not sure that things still work that way. Clint Eastwood made a Dirty Harry movie a few years later with a nasty rape scene set under the wharf on Main Beach: that was just a morbid fantasy. His perpetrators were a Republican stereotype of bad people, and thus did look like hippies. No way, Clint; love your films, but no way! Hippies were a force for good: “damn hippies,” snarls Alex!
Law enforcement can be a challenge in a liberal community. Bet the County Sheriff lived to regret this ad.!
5. The LGBT contingent is very welcome here. Adrienne Rich, the feminist poet and one of the old guard of US lesbians, makes her home near the town, but she was far from the first. There was Charley Parkhurst, the cross-dressing stagecoach driver who was one of the first women registered to vote in the US, because she pretended to be a man. This was in 1867. Here is Adrienne, in the classic “From an Old House in America:”
“But can’t you see me as a human being
he said
What is a human being
she said
I try to understand
he said
what will you undertake
she said
will you punish me for history
he said
what will you undertake
she said
do you believe in collective guilt
he said
let me look in your eyes
she said . . .”.
Wow! She probably wrote that before moving here, but it still echoes all around our little town.
Here’s the man himself! Having made surfing possible in the cold water of the Pacific Ocean, Jack O’Neill now spends most of his time doing charitable work.
6. Jack O’Neill, inventor of the wetsuit for surfing, originator of the O’Neill mark that you now see throughout the world, and a true individual, US style, still makes his home here. Not surprisingly, Santa Cruz Skateboards is also based here, with its clothing line popular all over the world and ugly blue hand logo. There are other surf and skate related industries, and then there are the techie entrepreneurs, more or less famous, in the area. We’re just over the hill from Silicon Valley. Philippe Khan moved here from Paris and founded four companies over time, beginning with Borland and continuing with Starfish (anyone remember Sidekick, Outlook before email?) and LightSurf. He invented the camera phone here when his daughter was born in 1997, the year we arrived, by jury-rigging a camera with a cell phone.
Love this sign! Somehow, the Coastal Commission permitted it to be placed on the clifftop, perhaps to enable Santa Cruz to earn a little money from surfing! The municipal wharf is in the background.
7. The Pacific Ocean is the star of our show, with its cooling breezes almost every evening, giving us a climate to envy, even if Marie-Hélène does think that she was sold a bill of goods on the temperature here, because of that natural air conditioning. It also gives us the surprisingly uncluttered promenade of West Cliff Drive, where there is only one house between the the sidewalk on the cliff and the ocean in the two or three miles of strolling between the Dream Inn (next to the Wharf) and Natural Bridges. There are no businesses on the same stretch of scenic byway, and only a couple of two-story apartment blocks: all within the city limits. Santa Cruz can’t claim all the credit for this rural landscape right on the ocean: the California Coastal Commission protects it so insistently that the city can’t even install more “No parking” signs without their consent!
Here’s one of those beaches nestled among the headlands. Steamer Lane is the other side of the headland where the lighthouse stands: it’s a surfing museum.
8. The most beautiful University campus that you have ever seen. I know, I know, there are too many superlatives on this page, but there are so many superlatives in our town that to portray it accurately we have no choice but to use them. UCSC, the University of California at Santa Cruz, or Uncle Charlie’s Summer Camp, depending on your viewpoint, was voted in 2002 or 3 one of the best party schools in the entire US! The campus is an old ranch, the Cowell Ranch, that looks out over Monterey Bay from above the west side of town. The Colleges are built nestled among the redwoods high on a plateau, and when the trees thin out the view from the meadows spreads out forever, encompassing the town in the foreground and then the mountains and the ocean as far as the eye can see. One of those meadows hosts an annual pot-appreciation event every April 20: fortunately, none of our children has any interest in such things!
The Santa Cruz and Big Trees Railroad’s Christmas Special at the Boardwalk. Courtesy of Roaring Camp Railroad.
9. This one is mine: I’m a train freak, which is quite a difficult obsession to satisfy in the US. Roaring Camp Railroads is kind enough to run a tourist train from the Boardwalk on Main Beach through the redwoods up the San Lorenzo Valley to Roaring Camp in Felton. The locomotive is a diesel, because the city won’t allow a steam engine to pollute our air. The company’s steam engines run on the lines that climb up into the mountains from Roaring Camp. The track used is part of the railroad which originally delivered the logged redwoods from the mountains to the docks or mills in Santa Cruz at the end of the nineteenth century.
10 percent of the votes cast in Santa Cruz County in the 2002 presidential election went with no apologies to Ralph Nader. The bumper sticker that most attracted our attention, until Marie-Hélène realized the “jeu de mots,” or play on words, and banned it: Gotta Lick Bush and Dick! You’re right: not funny at all! Especially not at Alex‘s Catholic pre-school!
The populist at work. Howard Jarvis’s initiative gave major corporations and landowners a windfall, but of course allowed property taxes to be higher for new property owners in the future, because the cap was a percentage of the real property’s current value when acquired.
Is there a downside to our little piece of paradise? Yes, and of course it is man-made. In 1978, while I was a junior at Cal, voters passed the Jarvis-Gann initiative, an easy initiative for voters to pass because it was designed to stop property taxes increasing. Nothing like a simple argument to motivate voters! Especially when their property taxes had been going up too fast in the preceding years.
Hidden in this initiative was a provision which made it impossible for the legislature to increase property taxes in the future without a majority of 66%. Guess how many times taxes have been increased since 1975? None, or close to it. But every populist fool who comes along attracts those same shareholder votes with promises to reduce a tax or fee.
In short, the State is now in the absurd situation (considering the wealth of its natural resources and the success of its industry and entrepreneurs) of having no money, and I mean no money. Higher education has been suffering from this for years: now secondary and even elementary education is suffering. What kind of populous is not prepared to finance adequately the education of its own children? It’s an embarrassment. It’s a disgrace.
Slides happen too. This one on Vine Hill Road in early 2006 closed the road for over a year.
Then, less consistently, but occasionally it’s a real worry, the same nature which enriches our daily lives messes with them too. Our storms, hard-driving and powerful, give us power cuts with monotonous regularity, as the trees fall on the wires. Why can’t PG&E create a power transmission grid with a little redundancy? Every so often, a storm will wash out a major piece of road, and it will slide down the hillside in a river of mud. Trees fall regularly on our and our neighbors’ property. Here is a photo of one that landed on Edgar, our first luckless motorhome.
October 1989, Pacific Avenue right after the Loma Prieta earthquake.
The whole world knows of the most significant of our real problems, , the San Andreas fault. 1989’s Loma Prieta earthquake on that fault devastated our downtown, killing several. Every time we fell the earth move, even a little jolt, and we feel them more often than I’d like, we fight the panic: is this the big one?
It’s due, it’s overdue, and it’s inevitable. I don’t even like to write that down, because avoiding this particular inevitability has a particular appeal. We’re not going to slide into the ocean, as those jealous people back East wish periodically, but something enormous will indeed happen, sooner or later.
The San Andreas fault hovers over each of us, and over all of the wonders of our little town, like a constant well-hidden premonition.
The year began with the bang of Nick having a bad car accident. He was 17 when it happened. Early on a weekday afternoon in January, he was driving alone on Granite Creek Road, one of the worst winding, hilly, narrow, poorly maintained roads in the area, heading home from High School. The yellow lines in the middle of the road were almost invisible. It had rained a couple of days before, and although it was dry almost everywhere else, it was still damp on the shaded portions of Granite Creek.
Nick at his High School graduation with his Yaya Chrystie (Sunshine’s mother) and his uncle Gary (her brother).
A car coming the other way came over the double yellow lines and pushed a panicking Nick over the edge of the tarmac. The edge had about a three-inch high lip. He over corrected in bringing himself back on to the road over that high lip, and consequently crossed over the double yellow lines himself, straight into a minivan. Its driver was 75 years old, and not strapped in. . . . The authorities (in the person of the District Attorney’s Office) determined that there were no indices of misbehavior on his part, no drugs, no alcohol, no friends in the car, no speeding, and thus let him off without being prosecuted by the State.
We enrolled Nick in a Skip Barber driving course at Laguna Seca Raceway, near Monterey. He spent a day confronting every hazard the road can throw at you.
So he’s prosecuting himself.
We essentially obliged him to graduate High School, which he did not want to do after the accident. His grades dropped precipitately, and he was just about the last person in the line to be awarded his diploma. He refused to drive at all for several months. We then sent him to Europe for a six-month stay based with his mom in Paris. He worked here and there (at a youth hostel, in a grape harvest), and tried to decompress. That was going to take a while. It was going to take character.
Alex took this interesting shot of his maman, by l’Etang du Beauché near La Grée during our summer vacation. He was six at the time.
Marie-Hélène took the initial weight of the accident entirely on her shoulders. She took the call from the neighbor where it occurred, and talked it through with the conscientious and thorough California Highway Patrol officer who investigated. She held Nick as he cried and cried at the scene, and then watched the other driver and his wife, who unlike her husband had been strapped in but was still gravely injured, driven away with Nick to be flown by helicopter to the trauma center in San Jose. . . . Not an auspicious beginning to the year. She spent the rest of the year picking up the pieces, for herself and for the family. It was a real human drama, both the accident and its aftermath, and working through it took qualities that she may not have known that she had.
The happy couple on vacation in La Gacilly, near La Grée, in July 2004. It became a year of vacations of one kind or another.
It may also have taken more out of her than she had to give by that point, after ten years of four or more children to look after, more in most of those years. She has so many strengths, but the worst part when one of your children has a real problem is how responsible you feel as a parent. It eats away at you. The logistics were a nightmare for her during that period, which didn’t help. I was working down in Newport Beach, only home on weekends, and Marie-Hélène was obliged to drive six children to and from three different schools scattered around the area, not to speak of handle the various soccer practices several times a week and their other activities.
Then came one of those events which looked and felt bad at first, but turned into a real blessing in disguise. In April, I was laid off by my employer in Newport Beach, after only ten months on the job, and of course moved back home on a full-time basis. The ensuing free time was a godsend. By the end of the year I was 50,000 words into a memoir of my first 18 years. It took another three or four years to finish, because work normally has to come first, but for the rest of 2004 work played second fiddle to the family, and to me. The company had been generous in their lay-off terms. There was no rush to find the next job.
How can you tell when there’s a Rail Faire in your playground? When rails appear there! Alex will excuse us for noting how adorable he looks in a cowboy hat!
I joined in what was going on in the family in ways that were rarely possible during the seven years we’d been living here in Santa Cruz. Happy Valley School had an annual Rail Faire, inspired by Mr. Mac, a train buff who had taught almost all our children at one time or another, and was much appreciated by each. He had a G scale model train circling the ceiling of his classroom.
Charlie learning the backstroke.
The only year that I was able to attend the Rail Faire was 2004. I even donned period costume (well, sort of!) and participated by helping run the model railroad set up in the playground.
A real sight for sore eyes was my joining in the swimming! For many years , Marie-Hélène arranged for some swimming activity during the summer for the younger children, and any of the older who wanted to join in. As this activity happened during the week, I inevitably missed it. Not in 2004! I was careful not to impose myself too frequently, but did spend a few hours alongside the pools of that summer, and even an hour or two in them! There’s a shot of the great white English whale on his flopping way into the pool on the Pools II page.
Daphné and Alban during an afternoon at l’Etang du Beauché in Carentoir.
Daphné and Alban joined Marie-Hélène, Charlie, Alex and I in France for a portion of our summer holiday. Tom was with his mom, I think, and Nick gallivanting around Europe. The vibe was not good at La Grée, at least not from Daphné, who was sliding into the habit of being pretty rude, at least to me. Although this made sense in terms of her age, turning 17 at La Grée, she had been given a car in the spring, and I didn’t understand why that wouldn’t have improved her attitude toward me. I had paid for the damned thing!
The Focus may have improved other aspects of her life: she regularly did her homework without being harassed to do so, which made her unique among the four adolescents. Plus she held two jobs the fall semester to keep herself in funds, working 30 hours a week during the Xmas rush. We bought the car, but theoretically she was to share in the running costs. We were happy to see her adapt so easily to work in the real world.
Charles and Alex with guns in the metro, same vacation. Alex says that we were on our way to see Oncle Denis when this was taken.
Her first boyfriend appeared to be serving some time at the pleasure of the State (we can’t be sure of this: like her mother, she is very discrete), but she remained loyal to him in the fashion of the times. She has friendships with other guys, “with benefits,” as they say in the younger set. Oh boy! We do not want to know what that means. Her grades are good, and she has a natural writing talent, but her aspirations were diverted by attending the local Teen Court. It’s a model of a real criminal court, where juvenile petty criminals are prosecuted, defended and judged by a jury of their peers, with the only adults the judge (a real one, at that) and bailiff. As a result, she now wants to work in the criminal justice system, perhaps not the ideal outcome of this well-meaning exposure. In light of her boyfriend, we call that “looking for love in all the wrong places!”
Alban, after doing a little mountain biking up at UCSC with his friend Justin, who took the photo. They had been doing jumps, with the bike leaping through the air: always the athlete.
Two years younger, Alban deliberately got as close to failing in school as he could, all to be cool. We engaged Fergus to tutor for him and Tom; he’s a friend from my undergraduate years at UC Berkeley, and was very pleased with Alban’s progress. He turned white when we told him Alban‘s most recent grades: “but how did he do so badly? It’s just not possible!” As I said, it was quite deliberate.
In the living room at home. This was the third photo that Marie-Hélène took using the new Nikon D70 which she received for her birthday. I admit to using that camera a lot!
Nor would he do any of the activities that we would like, for instance continue his soccer, at which he excelled, or start high-board diving, at which he showed great promise. Rather, he applied his natural athleticism to skimboards, which involved racing along the water’s edge after a wave breaks and then jumping on a board which skims on the shallow water. So he’d gone from skateboard to surfboard to skimboard. We gave up on moving him on to blackboards, but made headway in helping him discover that not all reading will make him bored!
The Costco guitar which Tom received for his birthday. It came with all the doo-dahs that he needed to learn how to play it without much additional expense. Of course, we moved shortly into pressing needs for other doo-dahs! That’s Alex in the background.
Tom was another beneficiary of Fergus’s tutoring skills, which I can personally vouch for having known him for so many years. He was another who did not benefit from this particular assistance anything like as much as he could have. I do hate it when the teenagers seem to be conspiring together to thwart the parents’ obviously good intentions! In this case, there may not even have been a conspiracy: both Alban and Tom are very close in age and I think simply reacted the same way. If we suggested something or, worse, required it, it was to be resisted with all possible force! Not a unique parental experience.
Tom did better at what he elected to do himself. He recently took up wrestling at Harbor High School, and has taken on with fervor learning the guitar that he received for his birthday this year, both of which are encouraging. He has even started taking an interest in cooking. All very nice.
A regular port of call on the way home from school was this Donut Shop. Maybe this was not a day when Alban wanted to be photographed!
Unfortunately, his most inflexible habit remains saying no, which he regretfully does a great deal at school as well as with his tutor. His reaction to the uncertainty of new knowledge seems to me to be to rise up against it, which does not bode well. Since I started explaining this to him a couple of months ago, he has promised to turn over a new leaf . . . next year! At least he’s thinking over the principle.
Tom and I took a wonderful road trip to western Colorado during the summer, as I exploited my new-found freedom, at least for a few months, from professional duties. From Tom’s point of view, the trip was notable for his abandoning the ever-present videos and video games in favor of the extraordinary scenery and his dad’s company. We drove hundreds of miles across back-road Nevada without seeing a motel, and explored the great American West for six wonderful days behind the wheel of a fast car. Of such irresponsible interludes is bonding made!
Few things make a teenager smile as much as a bottle of beer that he can pretend is his own! You know what the others are, and we’re not going to go there. Taken during our mother’s day brunch.
Charles and Alex are still at an age, 9 and 6 respectively, where it is easier to get along with them and feel at ease with them. We’re not defending ourselves constantly against this or that accusation or confronting time after time this or that refusal.
Death Valley had something for everybody. These dunes were a blast for the boys to roll around on, and a pleasure for us to look at: there’s unique scenery whichever way you look.
The four of us, Marie-Hélène and I and Charlie and Alex, spent Thanksgiving in Death Valley. This was another escape attributable to my temporary escape from paying work. We stayed with the Hanlons at a hotel located about 200 feet below sea level. Amidst this glorious scenery, Charlie‘s high spot was a tarantula he saw on the rocks in a dry canyon. He took four photographs of that handsome furry spider.
He is a bit influenced already by the pervasive negativity emanating from his older siblings, but remains at heart a sweet boy. You can almost see him self-consciously learning how to become a less sweet older boy, but without yet taking it to heart. On his own, maybe a little tired or worried, he likes nothing more than a long hug with a parent, and he is careful to allocate the hugs democratically between us. He remains a star of his soccer team, and is currently watching Manchester United on TV as I write this (switching back and forth between the soccer and Sponge Bob Square Pants), but supports Real Madrid, where his current soccer hero Zinedine Zidane plays.
Charlie’s birthday party was held at Indoor Soccer Central in Watsonville. It looks as if he had just blown out the candles on his cake here. His shirt is a Real Madrid shirt.
In his Christmas wish list, mixed in with the soccer garb and video games, he wrote “Nick to come back.” Needless to say, Nick, who was taking an extended post-graduation vacation in Europe, was thrilled to hear that!
Alex plays the violin well, soccer well, and does very well at his schoolwork. He is, in short, a very well-rounded little chap, if a little fragile to look at. He has a very discerning palate, and can distinguish tiny differences in foods. The result of this ability is unfortunately that he won’t eat a lot apart from French fries, grilled cheese sandwiches from Chili’s and Mexican rice, preferably from Taqueria Vallarta.
Alex experiencing a pleasure known to all small boys, the haircut! That’s Tom in the background. Click to see the wince!
It is always a surprise for the other team’s parents watching his soccer games when he goes at it, wins the ball and runs around the bigger and stronger looking players on the other team. Which he does with a frequency that rivals Charlie’s. At the age of six, he has taken the first step in that inexorable progression toward leaving home by starting to do the occasional sleepover at a friend’s house, and to have friends to sleep over. He is thriving and blossoming and very cute, as only a six-year old can be.
“Charles de Gaulle was a President?” he asked his mother one day recently, as she noted in the family diary. “I thought he was a goalkeeper!” Alex has the last word.
Charles and Alexander were baptized this summer in the church of Saint Anne de Tréal in Brittany by l’Abbé Texier, a friend of their grandfather’s. Aren’t they little angels?
Merry Christmas to you and yours!! Or Happy Holidays, as you wish!!
Russ and Annie celebrate his birthday in August 1997 in their home a couple of blocks from the ocean in Santa Cruz.
Russ and I met at law school on the East Coast in the fall of 1979, introduced by my Guinness sweatshirt. He walked right up to me and asked if I’d like to share a Guinness with him. Why certainly, mate, and welcome to New Haven! And that’s how we first made the acquaintance of Toad’s Place. I think! Russ?
Russ getting his just desserts! That looks like Marie-Hélène holding the bottle of wine. Wait a minute: shouldn’t Annie be the woman giving her better half what for!
I was very flattered to be Russ’s best man when he and Annie married on the first day of spring in March 1982 in Washington DC. They all shared a house on the beach the second year of law school with me and a few other people, and Russ christened it “Hotel California.”
Here’s why. Both Russ and I had lived in Northern California before law school, Russ working as a paralegal in San Francisco and me as a student at UC Berkeley. In the cold and damp of Connecticut, we both missed California lots. One day, we would say to each other, we were each going to live there again.
Brendan, a year old in late 1998, enjoying his food! A comparable shot of Alex is on the “About” page.
Russ went back there right after graduation, and has stayed ever since. I spent a year there after graduation, during which he and I took and passed the bar together, but it took me a while longer than planned to move there. About ten years longer!
Russ’s and my relationship remained very stable during that ten years. He knew how much I felt trapped in Paris during the later years there, and always encouraged me to come to Santa Cruz, he meant to live. I listened, but circumstances were such that I had to bide my time.
Here are Annie and Brendan, during a joint trip over to Pleasanton in April 1999, with Charles (“if I open it any wider, maybe I’ll be able to shovel more in!”), Daphné and Alban.
That didn’t stop me coming to visit the Hanlons. I remember driving myself crazy on their living room floor trying to learn how to use my first little Compaq PC, bought over the hill in August 1992. I remember eating my heart out at their place during the summer of 1994 when Marie-Hélène was in Six-Fours with Daphné, Alban and their father.
In short, we remained friends, even though we were no longer single. That’s a worthwhile achievement. So many friendships between guys grind to a halt when they marry. Annie had her reserves, of course – for one thing, she’s Australian and I’m English, which can create its own reserve! – but she always welcomed me and my family into her home.
Brendan dozing in his dad’s arms during our camping trip to Big Sur, May 2001.
Now we both live in Santa Cruz. Of all the people that the Stock Berhaut Browns received help and support from on arriving in California, none offered as much as the Hanlons.
Born only five months apart, Brendan and Alex have spent a lot of time together as they grow older. Here they are in June 2001, looking oddly similar!.
They hosted Marie-Hélène, Charlie and me on our first collective exploration of California in early 1997, when we visitors were checking out whether Marie-Hélène could learn to like it here. I’m sure that one of the reasons that she decided that she could was their warm hospitality.
Once our decision was made, they helped us out constantly during our first crazy months in Santa Cruz.
We were missing Nick and Tom as well as all our furniture, and I was trying to develop a business as a corporate lawyer while simultaneously locating and buying a house. Russ’s office became mine for a few months, especially later in the evening when the children were asleep in our hotel room. I used his fax number and modem for dial-up internet access. Remember that? I’d need to log on almost every day, to keep on top of the work and the disputes.
Never a word of complaint from my gracious late evening hosts.
Here they are in May 2004, I think at Zelda’s in Capitola.
Brendan was born at the end of that crazy summer of 1997, just after we moved into our new home. Alex was born about five months later. Not surprisingly, over the years Brendan and Alex became pretty good friends.
One of the things that Brendan and Alex had in common for many years is that they liked to play soccer, especially together. Here they are in Manteca in early 2007 during State Cup. Brendan is wearing their team shirt, and Alex the tournament T-shirt.
For one thing, they both developed a strong interest in soccer, and for different periods played on the same teams. That was very convenient, for the parents as well as the boys. We could, and did, check in and chit-chat on a regular basis on the sidelines at the games.
We both cared deeply about our boys’ sports. That’s no surprise! Youth sports can be a surprising hot bed of peculiar conspiracies and well-meaning but unqualified coaches, and it was a real pleasure to share an oasis of sanity with Russ.
In short, we often agreed, on the topic of youth soccer as on many others!
I mentioned that Annie and I always got along pretty well. So did Marie-Hélène and Russ, This was taken at Alban’s birthday dinner in 2007.
Russ and I continued to have a lot in common. Neither of us particularly appreciated the corporate law firms that have turned our profession into a mere business obsessing on profit, profit and more profit. We each followed a different path, which ended by 2005 in each of us working independently under our own shingles.
We practice different types of law: he’s an appellate litigator, and I do mostly commercial deals, but we practice in a similar way. Even though each of us always needs to worry about covering the bills, we don’t have to turn every conversation into billable time. Many of our law school classmates earn more, but we like what we have doing it our way.
We accompanied the Hanlons to Death Valley for Thanksgiving 2004, staying at the Furnace Creek Ranch and exploring the local splendors.
Our joint Death Valley visit in 2004 was a great success: as ever with the Hanlons, we had a great time. I did the math that year. It had been 25 years since Russ and I shared that first Guinness before the start of our first year of law school.
So, Russ, let’s hear it for the next twenty-five years!!
Here are most of us, at about 200 foot below sea level at the edge of an enormous mosaic of salt called Badwater. Brendan is next to Alex. Marie-Hélène took the picture. Russ is holding up a lump of salt: I’m sure that he had a good reason!
For Thanksgiving in 2004, the Hanlons invited us, or at least those of us old enough to be interested and young enough to be interested in spending a long weekend with the parents, to accompany them to Furnace Creek Ranch in Death Valley, California.
Click to see the sign, proof that we were at a couple of hundred feet below sea level. It was an odd sensation looking up at that sign from the valley floor.
We were not surprised that none of our adolescents in the US (Nick was in France) elected in their turn to accompany us. A little hurt, maybe, even perhaps discretely relieved (they were all hard at work at the time), but not surprised. Everyone says that it is perfectly normal that they begin to make their own ways, and it is obvious that as a family we cannot remain all together indefinitely, but . . . why not?!
The odd volcanic crater that we visited on another afternoon. The boys climbed down (all the way) and back up (all the way, but a little slower!).
This trip was another of the perks of my period of temporary relief from professional duties: there were a lot of silver linings in that particular cloud!
We had never managed to reach Death Valley before, because it was such a long road trip for the family. On this occasion, the Hanlons’ invitation gave us that extra incentive, and the example of friends with children taking the same long road trip.
In the photo at the top of the page, we were exploring Badwater, finding our way across the ground peeking through this slowly disappearing lake by treading on the salt crusts which separated the pools of shallow water. As you can imagine, this was fun for both parents and children! Here is another photo from the same portion of the trip, this time including Marie-Hélène.
The moonrise caught by Marie-Hélène out of the car window on the way back to Furnace Creek Ranch from the dunes where we had spent the afternoon.
Russ was very surprised to see the water there at all. Notwithstanding its name, he had never seen water in Badwater during any of his earlier visits to Death Valley. Apparently it had rained hard in August, the first storm in 20-odd years, and all the water that had drained into Badwater, forming an impromptu lake, had yet to evaporate. We could see the evaporation which had already occurred in the suspension of colored particles in the shallow pools of water between the crusts of salt, giving them all an odd pastel hue.
Death Valley is above all (or should we say below all?) a splendid natural world. Here’s more proof, if you need it.
The sand dunes which cover only a portion of the valley floor, looking east as the sun set behind us. The sunset was long and slow and a marvel of changing landscape.
The children also had a great time in this particular natural world.
In case you do not recognize our furry friend here, it’s a tarantula, about the size of the palm of your hand and definitely worthy of respect.
I know what you’re thinking: that’s not a child!
Alex and Brendan sated after running and rolling around in the dunes together for a couple of hours.
You’re absolutely right.
However, Charlie discovered this beast during a collective walk up a canyon with shattered rocks everywhere, jagged edges and flat faces, and stream beds in the scree moulded by the recent storm. Perhaps you can’t tell from the photo, but the spider was very well camouflaged on these broken rocks. I walked right by it and didn’t see it. Charlie did, and proceeded to take several pictures of his own. I kept telling him to keep his distance: don’t these creatures jump?
For obvious reasons, the tarantula was the highlight of the trip for the boys.
Charlie in a white shirt (still, after all that diving into the sand!) at dusk.
Which is not to say that they were bored. There was a swimming pool in the Furnace Creek Ranch, where we all stayed, which they enjoyed together in the evening. They were able to amuse themselves during the parents’ various tours of the natural world. Even the history of Death Valley was interesting for children. Have you ever seen pictures of the borax mining wagons being hauled by 20 mules out of the valley? That was worth a second look.
Thanksgiving dinner itself was served in the Furnace Creek Inn. It was pleasant enough, but dwarfed by the scenery. Here are some more examples of the visual feast that we shared in Death Valley: as ever, click to enlarge.
A natural bridge in the same canyon that Charlie found the tarantula in.
The mountains to the west of the valley reach 11,000 feet.
Another shot in the evening over the dunes. A different panorama whichever way you turn.
Alban doing his thing in the summer of 2004 at the Cabrillo College pool.
We start this second look at our family in pools with Alban diving. The end of this particular dive is in the next photo.
The smooth sleek end of Alban’s dive.
Whatever it is, if it’s done in the air, Alban does it well, and makes it look effortless: think trampoline or skateboard or mountain bike.
The only time he tried it out, he took to diving like a duck takes to water. The focus of this shot isn’t perfect, but he took just a one-week diving class through the Red Cross in June of 2004, coinciding with swimming classes at the same pool for Charlie and Alex.
Then, as tends to be par for the course for Alban, he did not want to do it any more. It’s hard work being parents!
I never understood why he wouldn’t want to continue sports that he seemed to be a natural in: diving was one of them, but he refused point blank to do anything more with it after that Red Cross class.
I constantly regret not pushing him harder, even over his maman’s objections. She thought that I was being mean to him when I pushed him. I don’t think so. He needed a dad at home, not just for his occasional vacations in France with Pierre.
The first step! In Carentoir, at l’Etang du Beauché, during our summer vacation at La Grée.
Water was high on the list of the children’s pleasures, at least until their respective late teens, that is. So we sought it out. As often as we could, we’d find a hotel or motel with a pool when we went on a trip or to an out-of town soccer tournament. Summer holidays in France and England were accompanied as a rule by pools or lakes. We even signed up for pool-related activities in Santa Cruz.
Step 2 in a great afternoon for the boys at the local swimming hole.
2004 included a mixture of water-related fun, and a fair bit of it is on this page. I had free time that summer, as much as any summer before or since, and profited from that to take a lot of photographs of the family.
Splashdown! Charlie asked for these pictures to be taken. This was real fun!
Actually, there’s water all over this website: at the Boardwalk in Santa Cruz, our little piece of paradise on the Pacific Ocean, or on the River Thames in Marlow, my home town, on the beach in St Malo on the Brittany coast north of Brocéliande, in Florida, at other swimming pools . . . the list goes on.
2004 also included Charlie in this cute series of pictures taken at l’Etang du Beauché, near La Grée, our favorite summer holiday destination, in August 2004. He and Alban took turns to jump off this bridge, Alban adding backflips and somersaults to the basic jumps.
England’s great white hope, about to create an enormous splash in Santa Cruz!!
Dropping below the children we simultaneously drop the level of elegance. First, a few words of explanation, to set the stage as it were.
Maman registered the four younger children for morning swimming or diving classes during the early summer of 2004. She then took them for more swimming most afternoons in June, when the weather stayed wonderfully warm for Santa Cruz (which, being on the Northern California coast tends to be cool in more ways than one). They loved it. For them, there was no such thing as too much swimming!
Alex’s turn to splashdown!
I periodically accompanied the four of them to their classes, occasionally trying to join in in my own modest over-50s way. Emphasis on modest!
I am the extremely white-skinned individual above, grimacing while flying through the air, determined to jump at least once from the springboard while the children were doing their endless jumping routines. Like I said, I just wanted to join in, and ignore the advancing years!
During all those afternoons in the month of June I plucked up sufficient courage to make a total of two jumps from the springboard. These two jumps did salvage my pride, although if the photo is anything to go by, they probably should not have!
Alex resurfacing. Check out his expression! He can’t keep out of the water, but is very focused on keeping the water out of him!
Next is a short series taken of Alex during the same long and wet vacation in Brittany in August 2004.
This swimming pool with its fun slide was on the bank of the Lac aux Ducs near Ploermel, a Breton town in Brocéliande and near La Grée. La Grée was always good for watering holes with fabulous names and in this case quite a history.
The Dukes here are the Dukes of Brittany, whose famous chateau de Josselin is nearby. Cardinal Richelieu destroyed four of the nine towers of that gorgeous chateau as a gentle reminder to its then occupant, Henri II de Rohan, that protestantism was a bad idea. Brittany overflows with the most fascinating history at times.
Maman did not register Daphné for the Santa Cruz swimming classes, because at almost 17 she was arranging her own summer itinerary. But by one of those flukes that enrich the mother-daughter relationship, she had arranged a swimming class for herself, which overlapped in part the classes of the younger children. Here she is learning backstroke after Alex and Charlie had finished their class.
The priest with his young charges in the church of St Anne de Tréal. A colorful Lord in the form of a stained glass window hovers above the trio!
On August 12, 2004, l’abbé Texier, until his retirement a catholic priest in Bordeaux for over 20 years, baptized Alex and Charles in the Church of Sainte Anne de Tréal.
Grand-père on the day of the baptism. Not a lot of joy in the event shows in this photo, but he was already about 82 or 83 years old.
L’abbé had retired to the land of his childhood, nearby, and Grand-père had retired to the land of his grandparents where he vacationed as a child. They did not know each other when they were young, but in their retirement are neighbors and have become firm friends. Both are devout, and Grand-père plays the organ every Sunday in the church. L’abbé tends to his garden and has a happy and untroubled face, with lines only of age.
He has visibly spent his life well.
L’abbé Texier, with a candle hovering over his right shoulder and the Lord hovering over his left shoulder. We saw neither until we viewed the photo, but this particular trinity fit together very well.
The interesting question is why we had the boys baptized. I’m a lapsed Catholic from way back: confirmed in the faith in 1965 or so, and lapsing in 1968 or so. Mum was the Catholic in our house: Dad was agnostic, and nominally protestant. As the short period practicing my faith shows, lapsing was not difficult. I didn’t feel strongly about it one way or the other, or about religion generally. When their mom, Sunshine, wanted to baptize Nick and Tom in her religion, Greek Orthodox, I was fine with that.
Before the main event, in front of the church. Okay, we don’t have to be saints the entire day!
Marie-Hélène is from a devout family, on both sides, especially her father’s. She was pretty clear from day one that she didn’t want any of her children baptized in any faith, especially Catholic. Neither she nor Pierre, their papa, had wanted Daphné or Alban baptized, and so they weren’t.
I briefly explored the question at home in Santa Cruz, and it was very clear that we couldn’t have baptized Charlie and Alex as Catholics there. We weren’t practicing the faith, and organized religion requires a demonstrated commitment. But in France was l’abbé Texier. I could see that grand-père would love to see some of his grandchildren baptized in his faith. He and l’abbé got along very well. I forget who asked him, probably Marie-Hélène during one of her occasional phone calls with her father: would it be possible to have the boys baptized at La Grée that summer?
Yoann, who his crutch reveals to be the perfect Godfather for our boys. He had hurt his leg playing soccer the previous weekend! Thank you Yoann, for accepting this responsibility.
It was. Grand-père approached his friend, probably giving him a pretty full picture of the context of the request. L’abbé was happy to help. A retired priest who has given his life to the Church in a major city has some privileges. If he wished to baptize our boys, the parish priest was happy to step aside and let him do so.
So was Marie-Hélène, oddly enough. Hers was the resistance that I thought would be the strongest. She made a few complaints, and let the boys know that she did not entirely support this ritual of the Church, but she let it go, and joined in.
The boys took it all very seriously, as you can see in a couple of the photos, including the first above, and so did l’abbé Texier. He made it quite clear to Marie-Hélène and me that the ceremony would mean nothing for the children if we did not follow it with a good Catholic education and regular Catholic rituals.
Emilienne in the cafe where we spent an hour after our little ceremony. She is the mother of Roxane and Yoann, the Godparents.
But I had the strange feeling that he was saying what he was obliged to say, and we were listening to what we were obliged to hear, and none of us really cared that much. He wasn’t browbeating us, and we weren’t laughing at him. There was nothing he cared about as much as bringing lambs closer to the fold he had spent his life working in, and we too were okay with them getting closer. Let them decide whether to take that final step, years later if that’s the way it happens.
All of us were doing a little preparatory work, in good faith, despite not following all the tenets of this particular organized religion.
I for one was very grateful for l’abbé Texier’s understanding.
A lovely shot that Marie-Hélène took in Emilienne’s garden while Daphné and Alban were still with us during that vacation. They then left to attend the wedding of their oldest brother on their father’s side of the family. Daphné is sitting between Roxane and Emilienne.
We did not seek to make a major family get together out of this ceremony. It was principally about Charlie and Alex, and our relative inactivity on the religious front might have made such a gathering of religious family members a bit awkward. In any event, the question was pretty much theoretical, because grand-père never proposed inviting any of his family to the ceremony. Or if he did, Marie-Hélène never relayed the suggestion to me.
All of the participants in the church afterwards.
Oddly enough, Daphné and Alban didn’t attend either, even though they spent a week or two with us at La Grée before the baptism. That was clearly arranged with their maman, and I left well alone: anything that I said or did about it would have been wrong!
Grand-père’s neighbors, Roxane and Yoann, friends of ours in the same tiny Breton village, were kind enough to become the boys’ Godparents. Roxane used to look after Daphné and Alban during their early summer vacations at La Grée. Yoann plays soccer for the village team and kicks the ball around with Charlie and Alex. All very apt in a Godparent.
Charlie getting back to real life that day in the café, with Indiana Jones and a pinball machine.
The scene of the reception afterwards was equally appropriate, the local cafe just up the road from the church. Our little group sat around and chit-chatted for half an hour, maybe an hour, and then quietly dispersed. No phony social scene, just a pleasant little get together. When things are barely planned, they tend to work out in a more satisfying manner.
We have a lot of special days in our family, not all of them milestones in our collective history like this one. Some bring smiles to childrens’ faces, but mean little more: though that’s enough in our house! Even if the boys did quickly return into their earthly world, their earnest expressions and l’Abbé Texier made this special day something more.
Earlier in the week, Daphné and Alban joined Charlie and Alex at Le Beauché. Alban and Charlie had been jumping off a bridge into the water.
Real life surrounds l’abbé Texier. He has a framed motto on the wall in the hallway of his modest home near La Grée, in French of course:
“If you want to be happy for one day, get drunk;
If you want to be happy for one week, get married;
If you want to be happy for the rest of your life, become a priest.“
Finally, a portrait of the two Godparents and their charges in the church.
In June 2004, after years of constant overwork, I finally had a little free time. Ah, the joys of being laid off! At the same time, Tom was on vacation with nothing to do but sit in front of the TV. There was only one thing for it: Road Trip!!
Map of our road trip, with the numbers denoting the nights (1 = first night, 2 = second, etc.) and showing where we stayed. These were the typical long day’s drives of the American West, across California, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado, and back to California across Utah and Nevada. The reason that we drove so far the fifth day, all the way to Tonopah, Nevada, was because the towns on the map in western Utah and eastern Nevada weren’t really towns, and had no motels.
In seven years in Santa Cruz, this road trip was the first. There had been a couple of weekend drives to and from tourist attractions in California (such as Yosemite and Disneyland), but no real driving for the sake of it, no driving even to another State, not even when we had Edgar, my much-maligned RV.
The old mill in Crystal. We reached this extraordinary sight courtesy of a four-wheel drive service in nearby Marble. The last five miles of the trip took over an hour, over a narrow and rocky mountain path! Was it worth it?!
Somewhat arbitrarily, which is the essence of a good road trip, Tom and I drove to Colorado and back, a 2500 mile round trip which we covered in 6 days, including one day for recreation (i.e. one day when we actually stayed still, spending two consecutive nights in the same place).
The longest day’s drive was from west of Grand Junction in Colorado all the way across Utah and over half the way across Nevada to Tonopah. We didn’t plan it that way, but there was nothing at all in the way of accommodation between Ely and Tonopah, notwithstanding the several towns named on the map. In fact, in each case there was no town there!
The first cabin on Crystal’s Main (and only remaining) Street, with Pat Gray. Her mother, Fogle Neal, first showed me her beloved Crystal in around 1972, shortly after losing her husband.
It being a true road trip, we screwed up at least some of the photos (by double exposing them), and so cannot show the pictures that we took of these sad and almost non-existent towns, with their abandoned gas stations and cafes. The frontier is still there, just back inland nowadays.
The trip had two destinations. One was Crystal, a ghost town in the Rocky Mountains that thrived a hundred years ago when silver mining made economic sense in Colorado, and then all but died, and the other was Durango, another mountain town also built on mining, this time in the San Juan Mountains of southwest Colorado, but one which has survived by being in the valley on major trunk routes and knowing how to attract tourists.
A high spot of the Durango part of the trip was a short afternoon’s rafting on the Animas River. I am front left, and Tom front right. That’s his hand above the spray, temporarily separated from his trusty oar. Casey, the owner/guide, the relaxed fellow in the stern, offered Tom a job when he comes of age because he was paddling with such vigor all the way.
My first visit to Crystal was a total fluke during the years drifting around North America (1970-73), a wandering hippy complete with backpack, pony tail and (sometimes) a pink ’59 Chevy Impala Coupe. The car wasn’t available for that trip to Colorado. No idea why. I just kept moving back then, whatever happened and however I moved.
I had followed a friend from Banff, Lauri Clegg, to Aspen, spent a few days with her and her roommates in an apartment there, and then left town. Fogle Neal picked me up hitch-hiking outside Aspen, it must have been around October 1972, and brought me all the way up the four-wheel drive road to Crystal. She was obliged to use the winch mounted on the front of her Jeep repeatedly to dislodge big rocks that had fallen on to the narrow road from the mountainside above.
Tom took this one of an abandoned mine between Silverton and Ouray, just off one of the most beautiful mountain roads in the US, the part of the San Juan Skyway called the Million Dollar Highway. Those mountains peak at 13-14,000 feet, which is why there was still snow on them.
I should have stayed longer than one night, but the next morning right after I woke up another four-wheel drive vehicle came through, this one with two students in it. Fogle had estimated that less than a car a day came through. The students were driving up the pass to Crested Butte, and in I jumped. Could have stayed longer, should have stayed longer. . . Didn’t. Just kept going.
Pat, Fogle’s daughter, told me during this visit that her mom had just lost her husband when I passed through, and so probably had picked me up hitch-hiking so that she could have some company. That would have explained why a middle-aged woman picked up a bedraggled hippy and drove him to her home and put him up overnight. I felt bad when Pat told me about her mom. I should have spent a few days with her, and maybe helped through her bereavement. But no, that was how it was for me as a drifter, moving too fast, never knowing when to stop.
By the side of the road on the Arizona – New Mexico border. The road is Interstate 40, which tracks US Route 66, America’s Main Street, throughout the Southwest. The trucks never stop coming in this part of the world.
Maybe we moved too fast on this trip too. It is somehow easier to keep driving when you have no room reserved for the night, no destination for the end of the day. But there was nothing to measure that against, at least not in the world outside. Tom was doing fine. I had been worried about going on this trip with him because he was not at the time the easiest of the children at home.
On this trip, he was a perfect travel buddy. As soon as we got going, he was cool, adaptable, easy-going, a dream fourteen year-old. One of the reasons why I hadn’t made a road trip since arriving in California was that our children don’t care too much for being locked up for many hours in a car. Remembering my own endless childhood car journeys, I understood. It was just as true for Tom as for the rest of the children. But not on this trip: normal tendencies were suspended.
Here is Tom next to a BNSF freight east of Bakersfield. Burlington Northern Santa Fe: it sounds like a history lesson. The line follows the Interstate, the old Route 66, more or less, and the freights never seem to stop.
I brought along videos and video games, so that he could retreat into his normal world and not claim to be bored the entire trip. He used them, but only now and then. Each time I pointed out the scenery, and driving through the West gives you nothing but scenery, he would watch it with me.
I’m a train freak, and the trip brought a lot of opportunities to feed that obsession. Tom joined in all of them. He put up with me stopping here and there to watch one of the freights up close. His hobby on this trip was placing pennies on the line before the train came, and then trying to recover them after it had flattened them.
Behind Tom here is the locomotive that pulled our tourist train up the Animas River canyon from Durango to Silverton.
The key train moment was one of the goals of the trip. Back in 1973, I had heard about the Durango to Silverton steam train, and even found my way to the Durango station to take a peek. I couldn’t afford to take it at the time, but it remains one of the few working steam trains in the Western US. Now I could afford it, and now that I could afford it, I was going to take that train.
We did. Originally built to serve the miners of Colorado, formerly a piece of the Denver & Rio Grande Railway, the line climbs a river valley which is all but inaccessible to cars. Insightful business people saw the attraction of a beautiful railway line in the mountains where the road can’t go. Only rafters on the river and train passengers can tour that beautiful valley.
This was taken from one of the rear carriages. Imagine yourself back in time a hundred years!
We shared a couple of other special moments on the trip that have stuck with me. Somewhere in the middle of Nevada, on a straight flat road, I showed Tom what 100 mph felt like. A bird, one of a flock that somehow appeared in the air in front of our speeding car, hit the windshield. Not much hope for its future. Both of us felt bad. I tried a high speed interlude again a little further down the road, and out of the blue cows appeared on the side of the road, a couple of them half on the road, very dangerous. I couldn’t believe it. Here we were in the middle of Nevada, miles from any visible signs of human life, and even there excess speed was dangerous. That was it. No more demonstrations for Tom of what you can do in a sporty car.
Here we are, with Tom looking a little uncomfortable with his dad’s arm around him, on the highway between Durango and Silverton. I was wearing an England football (soccer) shirt because Euro 2004 was happening during the trip.
East of Yosemite, and still in Nevada, the dead bird and the cows were in my mind when we hit a piece of highway with rolling bump after rolling bump. They went on for miles, a giant natural skate park on which the highway builders had obligingly laid a ribbon of tarmac. At close to the speed limit, which I was now trying to stick to, one or even two wheels left the tarmac on more than one occasion as the car continued up and the road rolled down, and our stomachs followed suit. It was a scream. We bounced up and down, giggling with each other, looking at each other as we hit the top of each bump. taking this surprise roller coaster as fast as we dared, and complicity was ours.
Recipe for a wonderful road trip: (1) mountains; (2) small Mercedes with a six-cylinder engine that powers much larger cars.
A road trip is for the spaces in life where the reasons are not entirely rational and you can just let yourself go. One of my reasons for this one was the pink 1959 Chevy that I had left in 1973 with some people in Durango and never found the time to go back and check on. Planning the trip, I was hoping to find one of the people I left the car with. Of course, I forgot their address! So I made it to Durango, but couldn’t check on the Chevy, and you know what, it didn’t matter. What mattered was Tom’s and my road trip together.
Justin took all these while Albion and he were having fun on their bikes.
One of the later hobbies to make an appearance, and not a long one at that, was Albion‘s alone.
During the spring of 2004, he graduated from soccer and skateboarding to mountain biking. Well, he didn’t really graduate from skateboarding, which he still did years later. Rather, he put it aside to try something different.
Mountain biking was indeed different. With his new friend Justin, he participated in three races with hills and drops and jumps and plenty of falls and broken bike parts and all kinds of other fun things for scaring parents half to death!
From the back, showing the ramp that he took off from.
We would rather that he had gone back to soccer, which he was always very good at. But that he would not do.
The photos here show him practicing jumps on the campus of UC Santa Cruz one weekend in May 2004. We have to admit that it looks like fun!
UCSC must know that local mobile athletes (with all the different kinds of biking and boarding, not to forget unassisted exercise, like running, there are lots of those in Santa Cruz) ride up to the campus to use some of the amazing pieces of equipment on the campus’s equally amazing trails. Kudos to the Administration for letting it go on, at least some of the time: great town-gown relations!
The UCSC campus is a former ranch, Cowell Ranch, which was turned into a UC campus in the halcyon days of 1965. It is beautiful land, criss-crossed with footpaths and cycle paths and bridle paths.
On the right is another of Justin’s photos, this time showing Albion in full flight with no feet. That’s Albion: if he can do it using his feet, then he wants to do it without using them!
The instructor strutting his stuff!
On the left is Justin, his mountain biking mentor. Check out the dust! Also, note that he is moving the bike out of the straight position which is the natural position for jumping. Just as Albion graduated to no feet, so Justin graduated to an acrobatice bike position. This is our little example of the birth of Xtreme Sports!
I also got into the act, albeit at Disney‘s California Adventure in Anaheim, as the following photo vividly demonstrates. What style!
With the help of a good old-fashioned optical illusion, I can do anything!!
Here is a great picture of Albion that Justin took after they spent a day doing these jumps at UC Santa Cruz.
Somewhere around the Utah Nevada border, early in the morning, looking toward the rising sun. I secretly want to buy a modest plot of land out there somewhere, where Nevada meets Utah or Colorado meets Arizona, with water and hook-ups and a concrete slab big enough to park a trailer on, and spend the rest of my days listening for the freights and writing.
My grandfather, great grandfather, great-uncle, great great-uncles and great great grandfather all worked for the Great Western Railway, or GWR, in England, as did the widow of one of them, for a total of over 250 years between them.
Trains are in my blood. Long before I knew about the lives of all those ancestors, the genes first manifested themselves in the countless hours I spent trainspotting as a child in Birmingham. Steam trains were my first passion, and I pursued them for years, even as they were becoming, inevitably, extinct in ordinary railroad life. They had too little power compared to the diesel and electric locomotives which replaced them. Until they expired, I sought them out. It was a great hobby, combining travel, exploration and the simple goal of seeing steam locomotives at work and at rest.
On a Rocky Mountain prairie an hour or so west of Denver, we caught our own locomotive crossing a rural road.
Back in those years, dad gave me a four volume set of railroad books, called “Railway Wonders of the World,” which his father had given him in the 1930s. One of those wonders was the building of the transcontinental railroad across the US, a monumental endeavor started by President Lincoln in 1862 and first completed in 1869. I marveled at what they had built and how they had built it, and studied the pictures of the land that the railroad crossed. In the back of my mind was a secret longing to travel those rails and see that land.
The Feather River Canyon, from dad’s amazing four-volume book. This was actually the last railroad built across the Sierra Nevada, completed in 1909.
Fast forward to 1997, when we fulfilled that childhood dream, taking Amtrak across the USA, from New York to California, on our way from a forest outside Paris to the shore of the Pacific Ocean. True, we had a lot of baggage as we were moving house, a total of 17 pieces on the train, and true, we did not know exactly where we were going to live or even how we would live once we arrived in Santa Cruz, but what a trip!
We were only required to change trains once, in Chicago, and had a family compartment from there all the way to Oakland. That meant four bunk beds and a bathroom next door! There was a restaurant car on the train, with a glass dome revealing the mountains and the sky, and longish stopovers in places like Denver to explore and grab a bite somewhere other than the train. There was air conditioning, a shower and stops in esoteric little towns in the middle of nowhere. I was in heaven, for three and a half days.
Alex thought that the train was the most fascinating part of Christmas 2000, and watched it constantly! He was not yet three years old. The train was our first Christmas train set, from Orchard Supply Hardware.
What someone who has never been to the American West cannot imagine, especially someone coming from one of the European or Asian countries where people are packed together like sardines in cans that won’t open, is the vastness of the land, the sense of space almost everywhere you go, everywhere you look. You may have heard of the great conurbations of the West, like Los Angeles or the San Francisco Bay area, but collections of cities of that ilk remain the exception to the rule of inviting and enormous expanses of open range and barely populated land, of mountains and desert, of prairie and lake.
It’s a GWR tank engine, as in “Thomas the Tank Engine, ” as in the company that my ancestors worked for for a quarter of a millenium, that Great Western Railway, running on the Paignton to Dartmouth Steam Railway.
As we crossed the wide expanses of the prairies, stretching almost all the way from Chicago to Denver, and then the Rocky Mountains and the Great Salt Lake, I could feel myself opening up. Partly I was coming home. Partly I was crossing the country on a train. Mostly, I was languishing in that land, drinking it in, singing it: “this land is your land, this land is my land, from California to the New York Island . . . .” Woody Guthrie. Yep, you’d better believe it.
Nobody loves the space here, the land here, like an immigrant from a crowded country! Marie-Hélène, Daphné and Alban may not have felt the same things as a train buff, but each experienced the sheer size of their new country, and glimpsed some of the cities that they had heard of in movies and on the news, in a way that they could not have done in a plane.
That was my train highlight of these years. But the great thing about trains is that you use them from time to time in daily life, at least in England and France. So I didn’t need to drag the family to some special train place to satisfy my urge to experience trains. We regularly traveled on them, maybe to La Grée to see grand-père, or to London to see grandma. The latter brought the excitement of traveling through the Channel Tunnel, which opened in 1994, the year that we all moved in together.
In the comfort of a TGV: five hours from Marseilles to Paris, city center to city center.
Our first holiday in England with the children was in August, 1994. I forget if it was before or after Marie-Hélène moved in, but she brought Daphné and Alban to spend a week with me in South Devon. Nick and Tom were with their mother in California. We made that trip by car and ferry, but spent a day on Goodrington Sands, a beach near Paignton. As Daphné and I bathed (no-one else would brave the water!), a steam train casually puffed its way across the top of the beach. We stood and stared. At least, I did, I was thrilled: the event was probably of less significance to Marie-Hélène and her children!
I was fortunate enough to be able to participate in the annual Happy Valley School Rail Faire in May 2004. Here I am with Mr. Mac, another train freak who is the Faire’s organizer and a much-loved teacher at Happy Valley School.
One of the sheer pleasures of living in France is traveling by TGV, le train à grande vitesse, which in one form or another has held the world speed record for real trains for most of the last 40 years, since it was first introduced in 1972. The French are way ahead of the US in two domains, childcare and trains!
We still travel on TGVs, on and off, when we return on vacation. One of those trips was during the summer of 2002. We were on our way from Six-Fours on the Mediterranean to Marlow, via the TGV and Eurostar. Marie-Hélène snapped Charlie and me in the TGV as he worked on his World Cup soccer stickers: it was a World Cup summer, the French were doing well and Charlie and Alex were fascinated by the Tournament. Two obsessions in one photo!
The 2004 Happy Valley School Rail Faire, an annual event inspired by Mister Mac when our children attended. I am helping uninstall the model steam train track at the end of the Faire.
2004 was one of those transition years which you only appreciate for what it was with hindsight. The trigger was my being laid off, not the best of feelings. The company treated me fairly, and I had plenty of time to reflect on what would be next. The first part was easy: I was going to take a few months off, doing no work at all! You can see how that decision was easy!
While we river rafted down the Animas River, just outside Durango, Thomas the Tank Engine obligingly rolled by!
The lay-off happened at the end of April. By June, I was on a road trip with Tom, to Colorado. When you take a road trip, you only have a dim idea of exactly what you’re doing: when you have a better idea, it’s not a road trip! We were Colorado bound: that became clear as soon as I started the planning. Haven’t seen those mountains for too long! As plans filled out, the Durango to Silverton railway, one of the last working steam railroads in the US (there’s another shorter line in the Santa Cruz mountains a few miles from us), came into view. Tom and I spent a fabulous day taking that train and a fabulous few days exploring the Rocky Mountains.
The real Durango to Silverton railway, splendid and scenic.
Trains just keep popping up! In our later years together, I again began to gravitate toward them. During the summer of 2007, I arranged a week in England traveling around the country from Northumberland to Devon visiting relatives and friends, all on a train. As a US resident, I qualify for a BritRail Pass, which in its most interesting embodiment allows you to take eight days of train travel within 30 consecutive days.
Much to my surprise, Charlie and Alex elected to accompany me on that trip at the last minute, rather than stay at La Grée with their maman as had been planned. The rural charms of La Grée were becoming less satisfying as they approached adolescence. Instead, they visited English family and met English friends, and I had the unrequited pleasure of wandering on trains with Charlie and Alex!
Saw this GWR steamer, Lydham Manor, during the 2010 trip, before the boys arrived. It’s at Kingswear station (for Dartmouth), having just hauled us from Paignton. This was the kind of steamer I trainspotted as a boy.
Charlie on the family computer in the office in 2003. He could actually be doing schoolwork here.
The most difficult activities to regulate in our house were watching TV or movies and playing video games. What we can all do with our various screens nowadays is a wonder, but they are simply too seductive for the children. None of them enjoy reading, not the way that we parents enjoyed it. Apart from soccer and socializing, none of them enjoy anything as much or as often as their screens.
We have friends who take extreme measures in an attempt to keep their children away from screens. Some have no television programming in the house: the screens then serve for movies alone or games. But ultimately, this isn’t going to work. Screens are simply too pervasive and satisfying in so many ways, even as they can numb the viewer. There’s no real way around them apart from an Amish lifestyle.
The problem with PCs is illustrated her: video games can be played on computers! Here is Alex, looking rather pleased with himself in 2006. Same family computer.
Plus, we don’t want to discourage computer literacy, because at a minimum their studies depend on it, and quite a few careers require at least some familiarity with computers. Nick began working, as in earning money, as a computer programmer even before graduating High School, and has been doing so ever since. He’ll still play video games with his brothers, years after leaving home, but his career is a testament to the value of those screens.
Much as we bemoan them, we furnished probably a lot of different screens and devices to use them, probably too many, as the children developed a taste for them. The PC in both the above pictures was initially my work PC when we moved in together, in my office with no children allowed on it. Tetris was my exclusive domain then!!
Alban watching TV in May 2001. The armchair had been grandma’s in Marlow.
But when I upgraded to a laptop for work, at Wilson Sonsini in 1998, this PC moved into the office and, as the photos show, the children shared it.
Then, beginning with Nick for his 13th birthday in 1999, individual children began having their own PCs. Nick’s was an eMachines, not exactly top of the line, with a cheap printer thrown in, and he was in heaven! Within the next year or two, Daphne and Alban each had her or his first PC from us, as did Tom from his grandfather.
Charlie, with the hypnotized expression evoked by the TV, and discretely lodged between two armchairs in 2001.
On the video games front, grandma had already started Nick on a console (I think it was a Nintendo 64) early on, don’t remember when but she died in 1996, and more consoles were acquired with monotonous regularity. There were a Game Cube, an X-Box or two, a PlayStation 1 and 2 (I think), you name it; if it was a hit at school, we ended up owning it.
It took only a few short years for the games to evolve from handheld consoles with their built-in mini screens, which already forcefully grabbed the children’s attention, to the handheld controllers for monster consoles with increasingly sophisticated capabilities and lifelike full-screen graphics: (think Halo or FIFA on X-Box or Playstation), not forgetting equally sophisticated prices! And of course, TV screen sizes were increasing at the same time
These latter monster consoles and screens filled their respective adolescent years and, along with cell phones (beginning in 2003 for the big kids), PCs and cars, created all sorts of budgetary challenges for the parents.
When I moved out, there were both an XBox 360 and Playstation 3 in the house, each as heavily used as their various Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony predecessors. These parents had no willpower!
Baby bottles and apples do not distract us from our screen. They add to the enjoyment! May 2001.
Needless to say, modern PCs also double as DVD players as well as video game consoles, and the slippery slope turned into a ski run. By allowing, even encouraging, computer literacy, dutiful parents effectively countenance watching all kinds of videos and playing all kinds of video games.
We tried to adjust our permissions to keep things under control, for example by rationing the TV and video games at times. But once the devices are in the home, the children could never get enough of them, one way or another, and it was a constant battle.
When the children’s friends come over, the principal activity is often video games. Charlie is with a group of hiss friends, all immersed in the Game Cube in the living room, in 2006.
Looking back, I’m not sure that it was worth it. Of our children, if any were going to lose themselves in video and video games, at the expense of being productive in other domains (and that was our real worry), she or he was going to do so anyway, at least to some degree. Those who were going to find other productive outlets and activities and fit the video games around them did so too.
It’s almost as if what we parents wanted for them by deterring their screen activities had nothing to do with how they turned out.
Tom and Alex on their Gameboys in 2003.
I’m probably missing something significant here. But looking back on our family’s life together, I sometimes have the feeling that the things which we did deliberately to improve our children’s lot, make them happier and point them in the direction of self fulfillment, were all but meaningless.
Not that we didn’t have an impact on them, far from it. But as they grew up and started spreading their wings, the impact which we had seemed to be much more about who we were and how we lived our lives, and much less about the directions which we intentionally tried to lead them in.
Our four younger boys all playing the video game of the moment together early in 2004.
Plus, and I didn’t really realize this as we were going through those years, video games were a key social catalyst for all of our boys. Daphné rarely used them with her friends, but all of the boys did to varying degrees. That’s the difference between video games and TVs. The latter are a personal and passive experience: not the games. The boys routinely hung out with each other and their friends around their and their friends’ video games, consoles and screens. You can see that in some of these pictures.
Over time they multiply!! Nick is in Charlie’s room here in 2007, adding his laptop to Charlie’s eMachines so that he can use two screens. Not sure why, but hey, double your pleasure!
They had their own language when they were playing, their own excitements and laughter, all built on a shared knowledge of the games that they were playing. If you caught something from outside their world, a group laugh, or a comment that made no sense to you, and asked for an explanation, just to know what was going on, there was an awkward silence. This was their world, and they were happy there. For us parents, it was best to leave well alone.
Marie-Hélène and Daphné on Mother’s Day, 2004, at Zelda’s on the beach in Capitola. The T-shirt says “Hi Mom!” Shortly thereafter Daphné excused herself to move her car, and we didn’t see her again until nightfall! Maman didn’t mind at all.
This is a relationship made in heaven, although it may have been forged a little in hell.
That’s often the case if you think about it. The more that you go through together, the stronger the ties that bind you. If you ask Marie-Hélène and Daphné what adversity forged their ties and made them so close, each would likely say me, at least now. Of course, I would beg to differ!
Christmas 2002. There’s a touching complicity in Marie-Hélène’s expression here.
I would point to Pierre, Daphné’s papa, as the source of the adversity which drew mother and daughter together. Here’s why.
Daphné was born while her mother was staying at La Grée, her parents’ summer place in Brittany, during the summer of 1987. Pierre was busy working, apparently, and only made it out to Brittany a few days after she was born. He did not make it out there for the birth. He then confirmed that he was Daphné’s father in the local Mayor’s office. If a couple is not married in France, the father can formally acknowledge the baby as his by confirming paternity to the government promptly after the birth.
Rock’n’roll! This was taken at Thorpe Park, an English amusement park south of London, in early 1997.
Pierre made his confirmation, just in time according to Marie-Hélène, because the government requires the confirmations to be made promptly after the birth.
Then he disappeared. Completely. For several months. Without explanation.
She returned to their apartment in Paris with her new baby and felt utterly abandoned. He could not have done it more cruelly if he had tried. I remember thinking “barefoot and pregnant” when she told me this: he knew that he had her locked up with baby Daphné, and so could do whatever he wanted for a while. Which he did.
Maman and daughter looking beautiful, as ever, this time in July 1995 near La Grée at l’Ecole de Saint-Cyr, Coetquidan.
When he came back to her, again unannounced, he explained that he had been “obliged” to look after some of his other children. Their mother, France-Lise, his prior live-in girlfriend, was not taking care of them properly, he said, and so he was forced to intervene to “protect” them. Of course, this intervention meant that he was forced to live with them for a few months. And with France-Lise, ostensibly his ex- at this point!
During this whole period, Marie-Hélène, supposedly his current girlfriend, looked after their baby daughter alone in her apartment, the apartment that she and Pierre had shared until he diappeared, not knowing where he was or even if he would ever return to her. I never did hear his explanation of why he was unable to even call Marie-Hélène while this was happening to let her know what he was doing and that he would be back. I didn’t want to evoke that miserable time again for her by asking too many questions.
In the pool at the Hotel Sonesta on Key Biscayne during our summer vacation in 2000.
That terrible story, which happened when Marie-Hélène was so very vulnerable right after giving birth, was to me the hell that forged her particular bond with Daphné, the baby who offered her maman almost the only comfort that she had in her hour of greatest need.
But no, Marie-Hélène didn’t even tell her daughter that story, at least not until she was a young woman, if then. Rather than doing so, as our relationship progressed, she joined in and supported Daphné’s own instinctive loyalty to her father. Daphné has always been very loyal to her papa, of course, commendably so.
Fooling around in our living room in March 1998. Are they ever cute, or what! Note the deck furniture being used in the living room pending the arrival of our furniture from France.
But why did Marie-Hélène go out of her way over the years to support her daughter’s loyalty, to the point of hiding and minimizing the very facts that explained why she left her father? What was she thinking? Wouldn’t Daphné have been better armed to handle a father who never paid for her in a meaningful way or gave her presents, let alone spoiled her, if she had learned over time how he had treated her mother?
Pierre explained their parents’ separation to Daphné and Alban as stemming from my seducing their mother away from his caring and love. No, seduction is not my forte! The principal goal of his simplistic and thus appealing expanation was to deny his own responsibility. A secondary goal was, I think, to interfere with my relationship with his children: understandable, from his jealous point of view, but not from theirs. And not even from his if you take into account his continuously expressed desire to avoid paying for these children.
Now this is an interesting one. Each of the children has gone through a phase of not wanting to be photographed. As you can tell from this entire website, I find each such phase distressing! Here is Daphné avoiding being photographed in front of the Mission at Santa Barbara in 2001, with no subtlety and her mother’s enthusiastic encouragement!
Marie-Hélène knew why she had left Pierre: because his straying was compulsive, frequent and increasingly indiscrete; because he had fathered another child, Arnaud, with France-Lise, between Daphné and Alban (remember France-Lise? She was the woman whom Pierre was “obliged” to live with right after Daphné was born, to “protect” her children: she just keeps popping up here, doesn’t she!); and because of his constant stinginess and incessant money problems.
She moved away from Pierre because of what she hid from Daphné, and not because of me. I was simply the escape hatch that she found.
Pierre was incredibly effective at inducing sympathy in women. Again, not my forte! Maybe that’s part of why Marie-Hélène hid the damning facts from his children. She felt that she had hurt him enough by leaving him, a hurt which he gladly portrayed whenever he could, and she didn’t want to hurt him any more.
Yep, maternity is not in question! Another from our first year in Santa Cruz. There’s another like this on the “About” page, with Alex also having the same expression.
The problem for me was that If I defended myself against Pierre’s ridiculous accusations, Marie-Hélène accused me of finding fault with Daphné and Alban’s father. She almost never found fault with Pierre in front of his children. And I shouldn’t either, to protect the image of the absent father.
Of course, that’s right.
But the perpetuation of this myth continued to plague relationships within our blended family. Pierre’s misleading version of its formation became the truth for Daphné and Alban. This viewpoint, that I had seduced Marie-Hélène away from Pierre, cemented the mother-daughter bond by rendering Marie-Hélène innocent of any wrongdoing and me guilty. Both ended up seeing me as the villain of the piece.
Wouldn’t it have been possible not to have demonized either father or stepfather?
Expressing unbridled shared affection for the photographer!!
“Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other.” Adrienne Rich, in “Of Woman Born.” I mocked that thought when I first read it at Cal in 1976. Is there any difference in the quality of a baby boy’s and baby’s girl’s experience of the womb? Bliss is bliss, whoever experiences it. Is there any difference in a mother’s labor giving birth to a boy or a girl? Each is torture, nothing more, nothing less.
But when you get beyond the gross physicality which Adrienne focuses on, and strange to say she does so in much the same way as men do, there may be something in that mother-daughter resonance, certainly in our family. But it’s based on relationships and how they evolve, not on our respective genders.
Marie-Hélène was the parent at home, and so she was in charge of family relationships at home. Daphné was her favorite, maybe because she was a girl, but also because of what they had shared when she was a new-born baby. I used to joke sometimes about how the two of them ran our household despite being only two among six of us guys.
The three members of Marie-Hélène’s contribution to our blended family, extracted from the last photo of the eight of us taken by a professional, in December 2005,
Unfortunately, that didn’t always work for everyone’s benefit. In around 2001 or 2002, I told Marie-Hélène that I wanted to adopt Daphné and Alban. I’d been thinking about doing so for a while, not just because I love them both as if they were my own, but also because it would have helped equalize relations between the older children. That was how I saw it. Since Nick and Tom had moved back in with us in 1999, Daphné and Alban seemed to feel left out of my life in some way. Maybe this would help reassure them.
The word came back from their mother a few days later: the children weren’t interested. Again, being adopted would pry them further apart from their father. Unspoken was the possibility that my proposal was a continuing attempt to do so. I had half expected that response, which was replete with Marie-Hélène’s misplaced maternal instincts.
Then in 2010, after I moved out, I discovered that Alban had never heard about this offer. At least, he did not remember hearing anything. He would have been 12 or 13 when the offer was made, and I think old enough to have remembered.
Here’s a shot from Thanksgiving, 2005, with Delora and Annie in the Hanlon’s kitchen. Russ must have been fooling around as I took the picture, which is how we caught those lovely smiles. Thanks Russ!
So what happened? Here’s my theory: Marie-Hélène took the proposal to Daphné, then 14 or 15, and neither liked the sound of it. The mother was still obtaining the daughter’s allegiance by supporting her father, and the daughter was in full-fledged adolescent rebellion. Rather than running it by Alban, just in case, they decided for him.
But the children were living with me: I was effectively their father by this point, and not just because I paid almost all of their expenses. I was the dad at home, warts and all. Unlike Pierre, I could and did provide for them and could and did do my best to educate them.
Love these group shots, even when several of us are making strange faces! Maman took this one on Alex’s fifth birthday in 2003.
Alban did have the benefit of being Daphné’s full brother by blood, her only one. This earned him her support, which did benefit him except when she misconstrued what he needed, as in the adoption story. Nicholas and Thomas had no such luck.
Daphné had a dubious boyfriend at around the same time as the adoption refusal, one her mother visibly disliked. Let’s call him Dick, not his real name. With Daphné’s blessing, Dick asked Nick to list some things that he wanted to sell, I forget what, maybe electronics of some kind, on Nick’s eBay account, or another account that Nick used to buy and sell things. Nick duly did so. He was always willing to help out, even Daphné, his constant rival for influence in the household.
Before we knew it, a Sheriff’s Deputy appeared. These items had been stolen. Dick was using Nick as an involuntary fence! Tell me that Daphné didn’t know this: why wasn’t Dick using his own account, or if his prior tribulations with law enforcement prevented him doing that, an account of Daphné’s?
Here’s another lovely shot from mother’s day in 2004, during brunch at Zelda’s.
How was Dick punished for using Daphné’s family member to fence her boyfriend’s stolen goods? You will be astonished to hear that he wasn’t! In fact, he was rewarded. Daphné convinced her mother and me to sell our old Mazda to him, for a good price. Let’s hear it for mother-daughter family management!
Tom reacted to the way that management treated him by returning to live with his mother in Paris as soon as he turned 18. I found this photo of him in 2008 on Facebook.
Tom suffered from that joint management more than anyone else. Neither Marie-Hélène nor Daphné liked him very much after he and Nick moved back in with the rest of us in 1999. He was difficult at times, but anyone excluded from the group becomes difficult at times, or all the time. Mostly he was a child who couldn’t really understand why he was so little loved in our home. When I began to realize how badly he felt, it was of course too late, and I felt terrible.
Let’s find the positive. One of Tom’s reactions to feeling unloved turned up trumps. He had wanted a guitar, and when I bought him one for his birthday, it became his life. Almost overnight, he played and played and sang and sang, all alone in his room with the door closed. And if he left it open, someone closed it for him!
As they get older, they find other things in common: on Mother’s Day in 2009, it was big sunglasses!
In a way, this form of sharing between a mother and her 16 year-old daughter was a natural outgrowth of defining their relationship by opposition to me. Sharing her mother’s feelings for the children I brought into the family was simply another step in the same direction.
But the regrettable consequences of a complicity misused should not negate the complicity itself, which was extraordinary and long-lasting. With only rare interruptions, the odd disapproved of boyfriend or failure to complete a quarter of junior college, Marie-Hélène and Daphné got along famously, a living breathing advertisement for mother-daughter affection and understanding. Much of the time, it was quite lovely to see and be around. Except perhaps for Tom.
D’abord, les plus sérieuses, Camille et Amélie en état de grace, halloween 1999.
Amélie is the nun with thighs: I didn’t know that nuns were endowed with thighs! That witch crashed into the tree on her broomstick was my favorite Halloween decoration at home.
We were spoiled by Amélie, as were the children. She was a student locally who moved in with us for the 1999 – 2000 school year to help look after them. She may well have stayed longer, at least if the decision had been entirely ours, but moved on to pursue her studies at Berkeley. Nick and Tom had returned to live with us during the summer of 1999, and at first blush six children seemed like an awful lot! But once we got over the hump, we seemed to get by: at least, we never again had an au pair or equivalent.
Amélie is with her good buddy Camille in this photo, and both remained friends with the family for years. In fact, Amélie, who now has a baby of her own, still occasionally keeps up with us on Facebook. Félicitations, Amélie, and aren’t babies fun!!
Most of Marie-Helene’s friends, logically enough, belong to her generation. One of her closest in Santa Cruz still surprises me. Annie is the wife of one of my better friends from law school: Russ and I shared a house on the beach in Milford and called it Hotel California! Annie has never particularly appreciated yours truly. She and Marie-Helene quickly became firm friends. Wait a minute: why does this suprise me?! There was common ground right away!
We went on regular Sunday afternoon trips with the Hanlons. Here’s Annie with Daphné during our first visit to Pleasanton in 1999.
Russ and Annie’s son Brendan was close to Alex and played soccer on the same team as him for the longest time. Marie-Helene and Annie remained firm friends throughout the marriage and after our separation. My guess is that Marie-Helene sees more of Russ at this point (years later) than I do: I haven’t been to the Hanlons’ house in years.
Annie made serious brownie points with both Marie-Helene and Daphne by confiding her son regularly to Daphné to babysit. Daphné is great with the little ones, and Annie’s choice made a lot of sense. It also cemented the friendship between the two mothers. Pour d’autres photos d’Annie, voir les Hanlons.
Joce and Alain, the father of her son, taken by Marie-Helene at La Grée in August 1998. I was in Yosemite with Nick and Tom that year.
Back to France. Oddly enough, during all the time that we were together, I only got to know two of Marie-Helene’s friends from Paris. Yet this was where she was brought up and lived all her life until we moved to Santa Cruz. It was almost as if she didn’t have other friends. On one occasion I expressed interest in meeting a guy friend in Paris whom she had described as hysterically funny, and no, that would not be possible.
She spent a great deal of time with a girlfriend at the law firm where we met and worked together, and then astonished me by saying that she didn’t particularly care for her. Why all that time together? The other woman wanted that time, not her. But she spent that time with this non-friend for years! All a bit confusing.
Here’s Fabi (in the middle) and her sister and one of her daughters with Marie-Helene and Charlie. This one was taken at the Chateau de Thoiry during the summer of 2002. Not sure where I was that year.
I had met Joce, the bridesmaid at our wedding and a very good friend of the bride, when courting Marie-Helene, and she had been sweet to me, offering me guidance on how to approach her dear friend. But as time went on she was far from sweet with Alain, her boyfriend and the father of her son. I was an outsider, and so could not comment on who was to blame or what had happened, but according to Marie-Helene she became increasingly dissatisfied with him over time. There was no particular reason that Marie-Helene could put her finger on, at least with me, but that was the way it was.
Her second French friend whom I knew was Fabienne, normally called Fabi, who was the daughter of a friend of Marie-Helene’s father. The girls had known each other pretty much all their lives. Fabi was married to Jean, and they had four daughters together. They are an adorable family, and have their own page here. I won’t repeat here what is there. But that family too pretty much broke up over time, and Jean is close to a saint. I guess it’s normal that couples break up as ours did, but I wish it wasn’t, just as I wish that we had made it through.
Judy at a Halloween party in 2004. Yep, that’s a costume, although in Santa Cruz it might not have been!
Most of the friends that Marie-Helene made in California came through school. That’s how it works, especially when your children are at elementary school. Fortunately, Happy Valley School was an interesting community of parents and teachers, with Silicon Valley engineers mingling easily with New Age explorers, all in our own backyard.
A gauche nous avons une “hippy pour un jour” de Santa Cruz, oû la race est toujours vivante, comme les dinosaures de Jurassic Parc ! Elle s’appelle Judy, et elle était maman à Happy Valley School.
Judy is good friends with Susan, who also became good friends with Marie-Helene. All three mothers had boys on the same soccer teams as well as at the same school. Judy had Anton and Susan had Ean, both on Charlie’s team. For years, maybe ten years altogether. Long after their boys had moved on from elementary school, they were still playing together almost every week on the soccer field, and practicing together several times a week.
Susan helping out in our kitchen during a celebratory meal in 2005. Forget which one. She is a serious ccok!
As a result, the mothers spent a lot of hours together on the sidelines as their boys played together. To be honest, the mothers were not always engrossed in the play on the field: elles papaotaient constamment! Endless chatter. Plus they would arrange carpools to get the boys to and from practice. That’s how friendships are formed.
Susan turned Marie-Helene on to a hobby of hers during the later part of our relationship, stamping. The fact that she sold Marie-Helene supplies for this hobby in no way diminished our appreciation! The hobby became a significant means of expression for Marie-Helene: the scrapboooks which she put together for Daphné and Alban around the time of their respective high school graduations were quite lovely.
Un des hommes de sa vie ! Que fait-il là, on peut bien se demander . . .
