Aprilbaby's California Life

Stuffed with Turkey & Awkward Family Photos

I hope everyone had a really nice and un-awkward thanksgiving! My only cringe-inducing moment came while my husband sliced my perfectly bronzed, brandy-basted turkey and discovered that I had accidentally left the little baggy of gizzards inside the turkey as it roasted. He then pulled the bagging from my bronzed turkey in front of my horrified family. Oh well... at least this year there weren't any kitchen fires!

After sitting around with family, I did a little surfing on the internet and discovered my new favorite site: Awkward Family Photos. I looked through the photos for nearly a half hour laughing out loud, maybe because I could relate. What is it they say about tragedy mixed with comedy?

I sent the link to my sister, knowing she could relate. She then wrote back mentioning some of our own family photos that would qualify for the site. But my first thought went to this photo below of my just-out-of-the-navy father spending a little quality time with me.

Recently, I did a little Photoshop work (below) on the photo and emailed it to my dad. He still has a twisted sense of humor.

 

One Giant Leap for Mankind...

Last night, 40 years after US astronauts landed on the moon, I watched a great show about that amazing feat into space. Mouth hanging open, still all these decades later, in awe - I wondered what was I doing as one small step for man was taken for mankind, that July 20, 1969. Then I remembered - this is what I was doing!

Memories of Morocco - 1969

We left Agadir at night to head toward the camel market. I remember looking out the car window thinking the full moon was following us. Eventually, we parked and tried
to sleep in the car. 

Up at dawn, we arrived at the market when the sky was still blackish-purple, which faded to purple-red and then lavender. Finally, the golden sun spilled out over the reddish dirt, leaving shadows stretched across the earth.

I'll never forget the color of Morocco, with its baskets of bright yellow saffron, cobalt blue tiles, that red dirt and the color of the dawn skies. And always in the background was vibrant music - sitars and prayer wails, and Beatles' songs like "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"...helped to embed the colorful images in my head.

I'm in the right corner wearing my black and white djellaba (Moroccan robe). My mother is to my left holding my little sister; they're watching the baby camel nurse from its mother. The man and woman are my parents' friends, Theresa and Bryce.

1970's Jug Wine = Good Times

While going through slides, I discovered a theme in many photos from the '70s involving my parents and their friends:  the ever-present (or nearly always present) jug wine - there it was at house parties, diving days, beach outings, camping trips... and even at a kiddie party at the San Francisco zoo.  No wonder whenever I see memories of the 1970s in my head, those bottles always seem to be clanking around there somewhere.

I guess you could say jug wine was to the 1970s what Scotch was to the 1950's Rat Pack crowd; what Martinis were to 1960's cocktail parties or what Bartles and Jaymes wine coolers were to the 1980's.  Yep, jug wine is just as '70s as mood rings, shag rugs and Pong.  The combo just somehow went together - like Sonny & Cher, the Captain & Tennille, Shields and Yarnell...  Okay, I think I've taken that whole thing too far, haven't I?

Hey, let's play Find the Jug O' Wine (You might have to click to enlarge in order to see... I guess the "wine" in each photo might give away the answers, huh.) -

 

Tales of a Little Sugar Freak

Yeah, I know - most kids like sugar.  But I liked it a lot.  Like I think I was obsessed with the stuff.  Here are some examples:

1) Look at this photo (circa '68) - one Pixie stick and I look like I'm going to go on a rampage.  I mean, just look (I'm the leopard on the left) at those glassy eyes, the Jack-Nicholson-in-The-Shining eyebrows and that goofy smile.  Oh... my sister is looking a little crazy herself, there. My dad did my makeup and though I think I'm supposed to look cute... um, let's just say if I saw this in a dark alley, I'd run.

2) One Halloween in the 70s, I even went trick-or-treating the day after Halloween.  I figured people might have left-overs and they might as well give 'em to me.

3) My favorite part of eating cereal was coming to the sugar paste which inevitably oozed all over the bottom of my bowl.  I probably could have poured a cup of milk over sugar and just ate it that way.

4) I was so obsessed with Charms sweet-n-sour suckers that I wrote to the candy company in praise of their amazing lollipops.  I wrote every adjective I knew as a first-grader:  Good, nice, tasty, delishis, favrit.  I did this for two reasons a) Charms would send me a lifetime supply of Charms sweet-n-sour suckers, and b) they would think I was the perfect spokesperson for their commercials - if they ever decided to do that.  Instead, all I got was a letter, written on Charms stationery, decorated with suckers (of course), thanking me for buying their candy and for sending them a nice letter.

5) I developed the perfect latchkey kid snack called Fudge Toast.  Here's the recipe:
        *Toast bread.
        *Apply massive gobs of butter to bread until it melts into deep puddles.
       *Pour heaping spoonfulls of Powdered Nestle's Chocolate onto butter puddles.
        *Take back of spoon and proceed to mash chocolate mix into buttered bread until it becomes fudgey.
        Voila!  Fudge Toast!! (Nearly comparable with the delectable Pop-Tarts)

6) While living in San Francisco State University student housing, my bestfriend Cindy and I would walk up to Woolworth's in the Stonestown Shopping Center.  With our own money (usually money slipped to us by our grandmas or from selling comic books to college students), we'd buy bag loads of candy: Razzles, Astro Pops, Abba Zabbas, Charms suckers, Slap Sticks, Chick-o-Sticks, Wax lips, Pixie Stix, Wacky Packages, Pez, candy necklaces, Rock Candy, Sugar Daddies, Sweet-Tarts (the sandpaper-like candy we'd suck so hard our tongues would bleed).  And then we'd go home and sell every piece at double the price to all the other latchkey kids who were too lazy (or too busy causing trouble) to walk all the way up to the store.  We couldn't lose - 'cuz if we didn't sell it all, we'd just have to eat it.  So we'd either make some money or end up with queazy stomachs, bleeding tongues, aching teeth... in a deliriously, blissful kind of pain.

7) My father,  a man who found half our home's furnishings either "on the side of the road" or "off a truck," once came home with a trunk full of British chocolates.  He claimed a truck tipped over and spilled onto the road (a combo of the "side of the road"/"off a truck" scenario).  My sister and I had the whole neighborhood digging through our trunk full of Orange Aero bars, Smarties and other assorted English chocolates.  Most kids tossed it back when they realized it all kind of tasted like burnt motor oil.  But me?  I ate it anyway.

Because I was a little sugar freak.

Memories of Mexico - 1968

Below, as a writing exercise, I've written down scattered memories of my family's first trip to Mexico.

1968, our VW bug pulled our teardrop trailer as we drove to Hermosillo, Guaymas, Matzalan and San Blas.

Wind whistling through the winged windows of the bug.  Hot air whipping my hair.  When we will be there and where, where are we going and why?  I'm hot, hungry and thirsty.  Don't touch my side of the seat.  Tijuana, stores smell of leather; streets reek of donkey dung. Cold bottles of Coca Cola just like home.  Children, my size, selling Chicklets and beg us to buy them.  Churros, sugary with cinnamon and hot and glistening with so much grease, my sister names them "greasy fingers".  Houses patched with tin, cardboard and plastic.

Deeper into Mexico - more palm trees and jungle plants.  Smiling people. Children flock to us when we stop. Towns so quiet that all I hear are jingling bells of ice cream carts pushed by leathery men selling icy, sweet coconut popsicles.  Creak goes the door to the little store where coolers sell chilled bottles of orange Fanta.  Heaven is cold Fanta on a hot, hot day.  My hands wrap around the chilled bottled, a moment of cool before getting back in the hot car.

Beaches with thatched huts, happy children, bathwater warm, clear aqua-blue ocean water so shallow, where there are sandbars I can walk and walk like it's a huge kiddiepool.  I get so many mosquitoe bites, when bored in the car, I take a pen and play connect the dots on my legs.  In our rented hut, my dad sleeps on a hammock under a palm frond roof, while the rest of us sleep inside.  Scary, loud winds roar all night and blow the roof down around my father.  I think of Three Little Pigs and imagine a big bad wolf blowing down our house of straw.

Sleeping in the teardrop trailer, I imagine we are swallowed by a whale. I sleep on a shelf and feel like a loaf of bread. 

There are scorpions, donkeys and loud horseflies.  I try to clap my hands on the buzzing pests.  I'm glad I miss because it would be a mess.

Parents tell me we will ride horses the next day.  I dream that night I am riding a horse so well that I believe I have taught myself in my dream how to ride.  I insist I can do it alone.  A man rides with me, but I still believe I am controlling the horse.

In the jungle, we ride boats through clear water lagoons and swim (us kids with floaties on our arms - but I believe, of course, I could do it on my own) in swimming holes so pristine we can see the bottom.  Fireflies glow hot yellow in the night and flit around like tiny Tinkerbells as mariachi music fills the thick air.

   

 

Slideshow: Easters Past

1969 - In a park in Lisbon, Portugal, my parents hid Easter eggs for my sister and me.  My dad, the family artist, painted each hardboiled egg with slithering snakes, lady bugs, butterflies and other intricately created creatures.  We ran around in the sunshine, finding eggs in the bushes and putting them in shoeboxes my dad painted, in place of baskets.  Hmmm... funny how the Easter Shoebox didn't become a Miles family tradition.

1972 - Back in San Francisco, my sister and I hunted for Easter eggs in the yard of our cottage at 325 18th Avenue in San Francisco.  Here, with a grin on my greedy little face, I'm showing off my bounty of candy-stuffed baskets and eggs.

1974 - In my grandparents' backyard on 23rd Avenue in San Francisco, my sister and I strike Sears catalog poses.  We're wearing the patten leather shoes and dresses Grandma bought us.  In this photo, as I'm preening, I'm probably dreaming of the huge See's Bordeaux milk chocolate egg in my basket.

Happy Easter, everyone!!

Slideshow: Summer of '73, Guerneville, Russian River

As a kid, this was one of my favorite campgrounds on the Russian River in Guerneville, California. So when I pulled out this slide, I actually gasped to see what it really looked like through adult eyes.  To me, this place was paradise. 

What more could a kid want?  Hot lazy Coppertone-scented days spinning in a big, skin- burning, black inner-tube in the cool waters of Russian River; hot dogs and marshmallows heated on twigs over a campfire until they got charred;  Communal movies shown on a big white bed sheet at the front of the campground; of course, this elegant swimming pool...and!! Just across the street was a pee wee golf course with a super slide.  It was kid Heaven!

So, to see the campground pool now - the water the color of  algae, surrounded by weed-strewn cement and a trailer - is a little shocking; not that it seemed to matter to me at eight-years-old.  The way I'm lounging on that blue raft, head resting in hand, I don't think I could have been happier if I was in the turquoise waters of the Bahamas.

Slideshow: January 1969, Hyde Park in London

"Before there were blogs, I had my moment on Speaker's Corner"

Hyde Park in London is home to Speaker's Corner.

This man is passionately airing his opinions.  

So I figured I could do the same. Why not?  As a baby of the Dr. Spock era, I was raised to believe I had a right to be seen and heard; though I often took this idea to extremes.

Now if I was smart I would've used my soap box to plead for parents of the world to come to their senses and stop dressing their children in silly outfits, like lederhosen (the leather shorts and suspenders I'm wearing in this photo).

Apparently, I've always had a lot to say.  Some things haven't changed much.

Christmas Past: Pleasant Hill, CA - 1967

Me, before Christmas, slobbering over an Easy Bake oven and Doll houses in the Sears Wish Book   and making a goofy face with my mom and sister; inching away from my Dad's scary Santa creation; Dad fighting the jolly creepy man in red, and, finally, Santa sent to the top of our roof with a gun to his head.  My father appreciated Christmas in his own unique way.

Slideshow: Summer of '71, La Jolla, California

No Campground Fees and a Baptism as a Bonus!

Here my sister (on front of the horse) and I (the one with the goofy face) are with some little red-head girl on the porch of a religious commune.  Why are we there?

My father was (he's gotten better) a tight-wad.  His struggle to hang on to coins often got us into many interesting situations, like the time my entire family was held at gun point by a gas station owner in Belgium.  My father refused to pay their "ridiculous" prices after filling up our gas tank.  Even before this, my father already considered the Belgians the world's worst drivers.  Which is probably why he finally paid the gas station owner by throwing the money at him and yelling, "I can't wait to get out of your scum country!" (That's my father's opinion.  I actually liked Belgium.)

Anyway, back to the commune...and why we were there.  My father took any opportunity to save money.  No matter what that entailed (and sometimes guns were involved.)

So when we travelled to San Diego to go camping, and my dad met some guys on La Jolla beach who invited us to stay at their religious commune, he jumped at the offer.  Even if he referred to people who went to church as "Jesus Freaks," that didn't matter.  To him, taking the offer was a chance to avoid the campground fees.

The week we were there, the kids taught me to pray (something I hadn't done since our days in the suburbs.)  So I prayed for a bowl of Cheerios (their food was not good) and that my parents would still be the same after they were baptized.  I had some odd idea that their personalities would change. 

Yep, he got baptized; even though the only thing my father's ever been religious about (other than penny-pinching) is the environment.  I guess he figured, Why not? It's free.

So Long Suburbs...Hello, Mykonos Nude Beach!

As I said, my father's mustache freaked my sister and me out.  But snorkeling behind my nude father was way beyond freaky.

Here are my parents in 1967, just before they got the itch to venture beyond San Francisco and explore the rest of California with two small children in a tiny VW bug.

Then my mother got the idea our family should explore the world, but decided to test foreign travel with children by heading to a remote beach in Mexico in a teardrop trailer. 

Next, we left our suburban life entirely, bought a car and trailer in  England and traveled
the  world.  We lived in our trailer in and near many fascinating places: castles, villages, beaches... and we stayed outside the trailer, too, as we did on the nude beach in Mykonos.  We stayed there sheltered in the rock hut my father built.  And my sister and I spent the entire time averting our eyes from certain body parts...My mother's comment that these parts were just like our hands only confused me since I wasn't required to cover my hands with pants when out in public.

From Suburbians to Bohemians

I was going through some slides I have on disk...and this occurred to me, "No wonder my brain's a little skewed." Look how my family changed from 1966 to 1970. My sister and I were severely freaked out by my father's mustache.  Changes like that have gotta do something to a kid's brain.  Here we are (on left) in 1966....

And here's my family (dad, mom, sister & me) by 1970...

Slideshow: July 1969, Bakken Fair in Denmark

"Help!  We're out of control!"

At the Bakken fair in the Deer Forest in Denmark, I was convinced our car was about to fly off the tracks and hit that wall.  In the first photo you can see my sister looks like she wants to jump out.  And do you see the look on my face?

Here's a close-up:                                                                              

Is that a look of terror, or what?

Just days after this experience, U.S. astronauts landed on the moon.  As kids back home in America were huddled around their TVs to watch the moon landing, I was in Denmark throwing up - according to the journal my parents kept.

Slideshow: May 1969, a Riverbank in France

This picnic was so perfect - the air warm and sweet; the food (baguettes, brie, grapes and yogurt) so good that all picnics after this could never compare.

Little did I know I would spend much of my adult life trying to have a picnic like this one, only to end up running - sandwiches in hand - from bees, or pulling sand and dirt from between bread slices.  And who could predict then that I would marry a man who does not find any pleasure in eating food outside?

Slideshow: January 1969, England

"I refuse to curtsey...even before the Queen"

(Photo: My sister, a snow bunny and me)

My parents sold our car, our house and everything in it to buy a caravan (trailer) in England.  We then stayed a few weeks in our caravan in a trailer park in the Bracknell Forest outside of London, before exploring other countries.

That winter of 1969, I got my first taste of Europe (which I thought was “you’re up”).

“I like orange marmalade and tea, but when can we go home?” I wonder. Instead, my dad said, “We’re going to see the Queen.”  I refuse, imagining how I will have to curtsey before her.

My distorted vision:  I see it all in my head very clearly. I’m sitting in a lavishly decorated room of gold lamé curtains and red plush rugs. There’s an English Butler with a comb-over and a weak chin. He tells me I must drape a cloth napkin over my knees before the tea is served. The Queen enters looking down her nose at me, as if to say, “Where did this odd little girl come from?” I can’t take the humiliation and run out the big jeweled door, the kind I imagine a queen would have. I rush out into the sunlit (I know. It’s foggy England in winter, but It’s a fantasy) gardens of Buckingham Palace. I run and run, hoping to get back to America, where little girls aren’t required to curtsey before older women in silly little hats and white gloves.

Back to reality:  That dark and foggy afternoon, I pouted and shuffled my feet as my father pulled me along many blocks to Buckingham Palace.  Once there, we simply watched the changing of the guards. I never had to meet the Queen.  I didn't have to curtsey even once.  And that disappointed me.

Slideshow: December 1967, Pleasant Hill, California

"My Mother Could Sew"

But she only made one size dress, so my sister and I - nearly two years apart - are wearing (in this photo) the same size dresses.  Mine was short enough to show my underwear and her's was long enough to reach her knees.

And what's with the look of concentration on my face as I struggle with that Slinky?  Was it really that hard?

Slideshow: Summer of '66, Pleasant Hill, California

I know this looks creepy, like I'm some little drunken street urchin or a freak show exhibit, but I actually remember this day because I had so much fun hanging out with my dad.  I mean, who else but a weak little kid with a brain not yet completely formed would let themselves be scribbled on like this?  I guess I should explain the Naval theme.  My dad had been in the Navy a few years earlier. 

In this slide, my father's only twenty-one-years old, yet our living room was covered in his oil paintings and in our backyard were his carved, towering totem poles, a bridge he made over a koi pond and a play jailhouse complete with wanted posters. 

My dad couldn't sit still.  He always needed to create something; if it wasn't art and backyard play structures, he'd create havoc.  Life with my father was never boring.