Yet another of the assets of our little town (population around 60,000) is the Boardwalk, named after the American word for a promenade along the top of a beach. The walkway used…
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La Grée
La Grée will be our vacation home forever, in my mind at least. The first version of this page was written in French with a lot of help from Marie-Hélène. During the…
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“Our house is a very, very, very fine house. . . ” (Graham Nash, with CSNY).
From 1997 to 2010, home was in a forest, with trees literally growing through our deck! The house was built in 1979, the year I graduated Berkeley, on a knoll, with the hillside…
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The American Dream
Unlike RVs, cars are not a big deal for this household, except to those of driving age who for whatever reason do not yet have one. Then cars are a very big deal!…
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More Christmases: 2002-2009!
Christmas was always one of our family’s favorite times of the year! Christmas got a whale of a buildup each year, starting with decorating the tree on November 26th. That was Mamie Régine’s birthday,…
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“Fêtes!”
We just loved “fêtes,” special days of any kind, and with six children had more than our fair share. For starters, we celebrated a collective eight birthdays a year, every year! Which gave…
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2007: Adolescence
Here is our annual update from December 2007. It’s that time again: Best Wishes for the Holidays from Santa Cruz to you! Our adolescents remained determinedly adolescent again this year, which was not…
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25th Yale Law Reunion
25th Reunion of the Class of 1982 I had the good fortune to graduate from The Yale Law School (motto: don’t forget the “The”). In October 2007, for the first time in 25…
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Alex & Charlie’s Friends
Needless to say, all of Alex and Charlie’s friends can’t all fit here. But between Happy Valley School, Scotts Valley Middle School, Scotts Valley High School and soccer, there were quite a…
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Cutting the Umbilical Cord!!
They all have to leave, the children that is. We knew that, just as every parent knows that. But being forewarned was not necessarily being forearmed. First, the children become teenagers. That…
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Marlow in Bucks
Marlow is where I call home. I moved away for good in 1974, making my first move to California to restart college there, but always came back regularly to visit mum and…
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Marie-Hélène Berhaut (born and raised in Paris)
I have to admit that it would be very hard for me to paint any kind of complete and balanced portrait of Marie-Hélène at this point, even a miniature one. In part,…
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Grand-Père
Our children were a little short on grandparents. After my mother died in 1996, just two years after Marie-Hélène and I and the four older children had moved in together, just one year after Charlie…
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Maman
Being a mother is the center of Marie-Hélène‘s life. She was the office manager at Kevorkian & Rawlings, the law firm where we met in Paris, and has been at various times…
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2007 summer vacation
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in England’s Northeast, home of my maternal grandmother’s Irish side of the family. One of the lines on the Tyne and Wear Metro in Newcastle terminates at St. James’s Park, where Newcastle…
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Alban and Tom Graduate High School!!
Daphné with her graduate. Way to go, little bro! Made it!!Needless to say, both of our 2007 Graduates put the parents through some hoops before they made it. Their theory must be something…
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Stamping
During the course of our lives together, Marie-Hélène finally began to have some real time for herself as the older children became more self-sufficient. She had been the only taxi driver for all the…
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Skiing
We can’t really say that skiing is a family hobby, although Marie-Hélène’s and my first date was a ski weekend in Megève in early 1994. That weekend could have been the start of something great.…
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Family Groups
The hardest pictures to get were ones of all eight of us together. And it got harder over time for the simple reason that our four older children had better things to do than…
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2006: children 6 – parents 0
Happy Holidays, everyone! Starting with the youngest this year, Alex is thriving. He loves his soccer as much as Charlie, and is a star in his own right already. He’s played the…
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Music to our ears . . .
Music is one of those rare activities that both the parents and the children in our whirlwind of energy get into. The parents came first, of course. I inflicted what they now call…
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Teenagers with a capital T . . .
Charlie and Alex spent the week before Christmas in 2010 with me and Tom, who was visiting from Paris. They were going to spend the week beginning the afternoon of Christmas Day…
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Santa Cruz County Breakers’ 95 Boys Fall Season 2005
First, a little background. Santa Cruz County puts a lot of effort into organizing its youth soccer. There are several different structured recreational teams, and several different structured competitive teams, as well as more informal arrangements.…
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West Cliff, a Santa Cruz Esplanade
It’s a place for a Sunday afternoon stroll for us, the home of the Surfing Museum for others, the home of Steamer Lane and Lighthouse Point, and for the Hanlons, it’s a hundred…
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2005: starting to move on!
Here’s a summary of 2005, loosely based on the annual update circulated to friends and family around Christmas time. Greetings and best wishes for the holiday season from Santa Cruz! 2005 marked the…