I have no idea how this is is going to end up, so I might as well begin.

This place became, much later, Francisco’s Country Kitchen, which I came to love both for its biscuits and gravy and for the density of the newspaper racks out front. They will demolish it soon, and that makes me fearful. No so much for losing the building, which is a minor example of a style that considered Moderne sometime between Sputnik and Apollo 13, but because even the most transitory spark lit by the wreckers might ignite fifty years of kitchen grease with the explosive force of a typical B-52 payload.

I’m just glad we live on the far side of Grand Avenue.

But before it was Francisco’s, it was Sambo’s, a story that had always charmed me—imagine tigers spinning themselves into butter, I thought, at four, and imagine how delicious they would be!—but became politically inconvenient many years later after the summit of my time there. That was about 1969.

Ten years after, it was still one of my favorite places. When I was a newspaper reporter for the Telegram-Tribune, I interviewed Leroy Saruwatari there for a feature on the demise of Arroyo Grande’s once-vast walnut orchards. Leroy told me about the perpetrator—husk fly larvae, which are so voracious and pitiless that you wonder why the orchards didn’t collapse, on their own, into sawdust–but he also told me a little about his family, perhaps the first Japanese immigrants to the Arroyo Grande Valley. They came here about 1903. Leroy didn’t know this, but that interview in a booth at Sambo’s so moved me that it would pay off thirty-seven years later when I wrote a little about his family in the book World War II Arroyo Grande.

Sometimes, years after the interview, I would stop in for a coffee or even a breakfast, take a booth to myself if it was during the slack in the morning shift, and furtively stare at the men sitting at the stools along the counter. They were farmers, come in for breakfast and coffee and gossip during a slack time for them, at a midpoint between sunrise and lunch.

Some of them wore green John Deere hats, many more wore the same felt hats typified by Bogart and made unfashionable by JFK, who hated hats. My father’s, with a broad brim and a silk ribbon and bow, lived out its life hidden— neglected except by me, who took it down and tried it on as a child—in the upper reaches of a narrow closet in our home on Huasna Road. Dad’s hat was pristine. The farmers’ hats were dented and stained by the traces of loam that is a compound of Upper Valley soil and irrigation water. Perhaps they’d blown off their heads while they towed a harrow into a field to break it up for a new crop of peppers or cabbage or pole beans.

I was far too shy to sit among them. So I just sat in my booth, waited for my order, and watched them quietly. Had I been a teenaged girl and had it been twenty years earlier, they would have been my Beatles and I would have been screeching. Thank the Good Lord for timing.

I am, after all, the grandson of a farmer from the Ozark Plateau who wore overalls all his adult life, who raised corn and milo and soybeans and—he was considered odd for this—ginseng, who slaughtered hogs in December and who, even into his sixties, was the most graceful waltzer in Texas County, Missouri. The line of teenaged girls waiting their turn to dance with Mr. Gregory did not amuse my grandmother.

And years before I sat quietly watching the farmers at the Sambo’s counter, this was me.

See? I’m being pedantic already. I’m a senior at Arroyo Grande High School, in the Quad, and quite full of myself. Probably I’m at the midpoint of a book–you can see one just beneath my legs—and probably it’s Herman Hesse or Kurt Vonnegut. My victim—you can just see her kneecaps—is my girlfriend, Susan. Susan was—is— extraordinary. She was bright and lovely and, by God, she had tamed a raccoon. She was a horsewoman and she loved my little sister, Sally, so sometimes she’d appear in our driveway and ask to take my seven-year-old sister for a ride. She’d keep one arm around Sally, the other controlled the reins, and they’d ride through Kaz Ikeda’s cabbage fields and talk. My little sister is bright and lovely, too, and I think that a small part of her was formed on those quiet horseback rides.

The rear end belongs to Jack. Just beyond him, with a sandwich, is Clayton, a Canadian transplant whose family settled near the mouth of Lopez Canyon where they raised horses, too. Next to Clayton, the young woman is Lois. Lois was stunning. She had beautiful wide eyes with impossibly long eyelashes and a breathy voice—a little Marilyn Monroe-ish—that devastated every seventeen-year-old male within fifty yards of that tree in the Quad of Arroyo Grande High School.

They chopped the tree down, many years later.

But Lois brings me back to Sambo’s, because her boyfriend was Paul. Paul was my classmate and intellectual soulmate. He may have turned me on to Hesse—“turned me on” was a stock phrase in 1969— and, for a brief time, to psychedelics. Paul was kind of shambly and self-effacing; he sometimes threatened to disappear inside the clothes that seemed just a little too big for him. But he was also brilliant—not just in English but also in mathematics and science and all the other subjects in which I was not at all brilliant.

Lois adored him. So did I.

Paul’s family lived in the blocks of houses bounded by Grand Avenue and the 101. (Another family I loved, the Hirases, lived there, too.) So it was natural, when I visited him, that the meeting adjourned to the nearby counter at Sambo’s, just a short walk away.

We were quiet during our visits there. In 1969, after an AGHS football game, Sambo’s was besieged and had to surrender to hordes of teenagers who ordered enough cheeseburgers and fries to ensure the eventual but inevitable cardiac occlusions, who shouted at each other from three booths away and experimented with how far they could shoot—at each other— a crinkled soda-straw wrapper from the end of its plastic muzzle.

[I didn’t order a cheeseburger. My favorite was a short stack of pancakes with scrambled eggs and blackberry syrup. This might still be one of my favorite meals.]

But we must have been exasperating. I am not sure this is so, but I expect it is: The waitresses’ hair was tied into tight ponytails behind or lacquered beehives above to keep their hairdos out of the food. You could almost see the ponytails come undone or stray strands of beehive, like little blond flags, wander away under the stress of serving teenagers with no more discipline than your typical Capitol Hill mob.

But that was after games.

Paul and I were quiet at our counter seats—the bank opposite from the one where I watched the farmers so many years later—and all we wanted was coffee. I could be wrong, but I believe Sambo’s had a policy then was can be briefly summarized: We are the Marianas Trench of Coffee. For ten cents.

So Paul and I, no matter how different we were—he was far brighter and more worldly; he smoked Winstons and I smoked Camel Filters–would sit there, exploring the depths of Sambo’s Coffee Policy, and we would talk about Hesse and Vonnegut and Steinbeck, about Squares, which included Richard Nixon, about film, about the White Album and about the one passion that we shared above all others: Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, from the supergroup Cream.

“Ya need more cream for your coffee, Hon?” That was the waitress. I can’t remember her name. Since I was seventeen and she was in her mid-forties, she seemed to me a relic from Egypt’s Middle Kingdom. She moved noiselessly on white nurses’ shoes from one bank of the counter seats to the other; she pinned her orders to the cook’s wheel and spun it with great authority, she knew how much to talk and when to shut up.

And she called me “Hon.” [Yes, I know. ALL waitresses call you “Hon.”]

My mother had just died, in 1969, and this waitress was about Mom’s age. Gravity— and doubtless some heartbreak, which is none of my damned business –was beginning to pull the features of her face to the south but their counterpoint was the discipline of her beehive, Peroxide Harlow, which towered defiantly north.

And not only did she put up with us, the pretentious punks that we were, but she never failed to glide back to us for refills, which I always looked forward to. There I was, sitting next to a friend whom I loved and having my cup filled by a woman whom I loved, too. She didn’t know that.

But when she asked quietly “More coffee, Hon?”—I know now this was simply because she had no idea what my name was—for just a moment, Sambo’s restored my mother to me. I wasn’t the only one, either, looking for his Mum that year.