One day in March of 1944, at 2626 P Street in Lincoln, Nebraska, Mother sat by the dining room door next to the radio, laughing along with her cousins and then in conversation with her Aunt Imo so that she didn’t see the car from Western Union pull up to the curb and the still-faced…
Tuesday nights in Redondo Mother goes out to eat at the Brewery, a nice two-story bar-bistro in the Riviera Village, only a block from our old apartment – in fact, from the second floor, one can just see the black roofline of the apartment building itself among the jumbled gloom at the bottom of the…
We were coming up the aisle toward the lobby in Grauman’s Egyptian in 1954 when Father observed, “That Dan Dailey certainly loves to sing and dance, doesn’t he?” Mother often didn’t approve of irony. “Oh I love Dan Dailey!” she cried. However, on the way to the car, I pondered Father’s tone. He was good…
I’ve always believed Uncle Bob grew up at a half-address, although I can’t prove this is so. The one time I visited his childhood home, when I was 8 and he was 41, the smallness and secret feel of the tiny bungalow in Inglewood had that half-address mystery. His yard as I recall it was…
In my mid-twenties, still living in Redondo, I met my wife and imagine my odd pleasure as I visit her home for the first time to find that she lives in an apartment in the village. A comforting familiarity lifts me along the narrow stairs of faux-marble cast concrete rising through the dark stuccoed tunnel…