So I just rowed for 40 minutes on this thing thanks to a 60s playlist on my iPod Nano (yes, I still have a Nano. I once had a FOUR-track tape player, too). Now that I’ve crawled back to the computer–I don’t look quite as pleasant as this young woman– I was connecting old groups/songs with old friends.

Neil Young and Crazy Horse: Joe Loomis (Joe and I also loved “Tusk,” Joe because of the song “Sara,” and that’s because of his little sister.) Oh, and “Crosby, Stills and Nash,” with them on the porch. I later took a photo of Crosby with his arm around Elizabeth’s shoulders only to find out later that I’d run out of film.

Joe Cocker: David Cherry. We listened to “Mad Dogs and Englishmen,” with Leon Russell (and Rita Coolidge) until you could see through it. I also owe David thanks for another album we played without mercy: Big Brother and the Holding Company, “Cheap Thrills.” Janis’s “Ball and Chain” is a kind of musical Chrysler Building or maybe Half Dome at Yosemite. Or, since she drove one, a Porsche 911.


The Beatles: “She Loves You.” Melvin Milton (I think I have the name right). He was an eighth-grade transfer to Branch and it took us awhile to get over the culture shock: He wore all black: Beatle boots, tight slacks, turtleneck under and a striped oxford shirt over. He took a lot of flak for that, but he was a kind and thoughtful young man.Totally Committed to the Fab Four. But you can’t run base-paths very well in Beatle boots.

Joni Mitchell: Oh, a girl I once knew.

Blood, Sweat and Tears: Robert Garza. He was crazy about “Spinning Wheel.” Robert was one of my best friends–still is–and we were fellow veterans of Kinney’s Shoes and the somewhat addled lady who was the store manager. Elbows flew when a girl in a miniskirt came in shoe-shopping. It could get ugly.

Cream (“Crossroads”) and Jon Mayall (“Room to Move”). No contest here. My old Sambo’s endless cuppa coffee buddy, Paul Hibbard.

Neil Diamond (Yes, I have Neil Diamond songs on my playlist–“Cherry, Cherry” is awesome): Linda DeVaurs. She was very bright, very funny and a total Neil Diamond freak. We dated, but just for a short time because there was no way I could measure up to Neil Diamond.

Simon and Garfunkel: Didn’t play any today, but Debbie Wizemann and Bonnie Silva (she’s no longer with us and I thought the world of Bonnie. I always will.) did a stellar speech presentation on The Poetry of Simon and Garfunkel for Miss Steigerwalt’s speech class. And we were all fans, of course, of “The Graduate.”

Eric Burdon and the Animals: Nobody in particular, but because EVERY LAST SCHOOL DANCE BETWEEN 1969 AND 1970 ended with “San Franciscan Nights.” Also, my ninth-grade art class collage (see below) was “We Gotta Get Out of This Place.” I still like The Animals. YouTube “House of the Rising Sun.”

The Beach Boys: Patsy Silva, Marilyn Machado and Carolyn Coehlo. These three were a year ahead of me at Branch and they’d have little dance parties at lunch in Mr. Lane’s room. And they KNEW HOW TO DANCE. They were so cool, and I think they are still cool. We were a little in awe of them–they were eighth-graders, after all. Okay, okay. Also, all us seventh-grade boys–all ten of us– had crushes on them.

The Rolling Stones: My big brother.

Linda Ronstadt: My big brother.

The Turtles: Liz Miller. Our ninth-grade art teacher asked us to make a collage representing a current popular song, and Liz’s was of two pairs of feet close together–a boy and girl sitting on a park bench–representing the Turtles’ “Happy Together.” Both the collage and the song were utterly charming.

My wife, Elizabeth and I had a post-quarantine movie date to see In the Heights at the Fair Oaks Theater. It was delightful and it was wonderful to see it at the Fair Oaks.

The theater opened in 1948 and by 1955, when my family moved from Taft to Arroyo Grande—the brick barbecue my father built still stands in the back yard of our old Sunset Drive home—it was kind of the center of a community that was growing rapidly.

Fair Oaks already had its own market—the building at the corner of Halcyon and Grand that includes a computer repair shop and a bookstore was the Fair Oaks Grocery, opened in 1939—and would, after the war,  add the Fair Oaks Pharmacy, across the street at the other corner of Halcyon and Grand. I remember, vaguely, Mr. Chuck Brooner coming in to fill an after-hours prescription when I was pretty sick.

There was a big hardware store just across Alder from the theater, whose ground floor also included an appliance store.  In 1955, Burkhardt’s Shoes, at 951 Grand Avenue, had its grand opening. Mr. Burkhardt was skinny as a whippet and was marked, as was Mr. Brooner, by his kindness: he treated my mother like royalty and was easy with kids who came in for their back-to-school Hush Puppies or Keds.

These places had a growing market because Arroyo Grande’s population more than tripled between 1940 and 1970—from 1,090 to 3,291—and an anecdotal study of new home purchases in the Arroyo Grande Herald-Recorder reveals that many of the new arrivals were, like us, refugees from the San Joaquin Valley.

Dad was a consultant to the founders of Mid-State Bank and got a job as comptroller for Madonna Construction, and, like many others of his generation, bought his home with a V.A. loan and, like many others, wanted a home near a school.

Arroyo Grande obliged with the September 1955 opening of Margaret Harloe Elementary, where my big sister finished her elementary education and my big brother began his. Harloe was one important anchor for Fair Oaks. The theater was the other.

We did not hit it off, the Fair Oaks and I. The first two films I saw there were deMille’s later Ten Commandments—I was distraught when Charlton Heston closed the Red Sea and the Egyptian charioteers’ horses drowned—and John Ford’s The Searchers, in the scene that traumatized me happened in the gathering dusk, when the Texas sodbuster family can hear the Comanche raiding party but can’t see them. It’s since become one of my favorite films, but it wasn’t then, not in 1956.

Forty years before, films were just as important a part of Arroyo Grande life as they were when the Fair Oaks was built. Silent films were screened Saturdays at Tanner’s Dance Hall, on the site where City Hall now stands, and young people were crazy about the movies.  I learned this from Jan Scott’s wonderful Readers’ Theater play, “Letters From Home: Keeping Him Close,” which told, through their letters, the story of an Arroyo Grande soldier and his family in the closing months of World War I.

The letters included the impact of the 1918 influenza epidemic and its closure of churches, schools and theaters, and the doughboy’s little sister was desperate to see the movies open again. The high school, maybe not so much.

By 1930, the Mission Theater—later the Grande—was boasting talking pictures in its ads. The newer theater—which also sometimes hosted high school commencements (including Stanford-bound Vard Loomis’s),  as Tanner’s Hall had once, for the five seniors of the Class of 1898—was housed in the Branch Street commercial building that now includes Posies in the Village.

Jean Wilkinson Frederick’s father owned the meat market on Branch that’s been a meat market since 1897. (Her classmates at the high school, fellow members of the Stamp Collecting Club, included the inseparable Haruo Hayashi, John Loomis, Gordon Bennett and Don Gullickson.)

Jeanne told me a  few  years ago that she loved the movies at the Grande. Her favorites were the Western serials, and her favorite cowboy was, of course, Gene Autry. It helped that Gene often sang to his horse, Champion, a beautiful sorrel with a blond mane that would’ve been every girl’s dream horse.

The Grande was ideal, too, for high school dates, because just down the street, in today’s Village Grill, was the Economy Drug Company, which featured Arroyo Grande’s soda fountain. Soda fountains were vital to Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland and seemingly, to most young couples in the 1930s and 1940s. My mother was a soda jerk in Taft in 1939 when Dad came in for an ice cream sundae. They were married in 1940.

I would survive the first two films I saw with my parents at the Fair Oaks and would see films my Mom loved (Lilies in the Field), films my big sister loved (Tammy and the Bachelor) and films that were more to the taste of my big brother and me (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Kirk Douglas’s epic battle with the giant squid.)

Since the mid 1960s, the Rodkey family have run what is truly is a neighborhood theater with all the elements I require in a theater: it’s clean, with comfortable seats and refillable popcorn. My family missed it when it was closed.

It’s like so many other places in Arroyo Grande I’ve found in growing up here: even when you leave your house you can find a place that’s home.

If I had a time machine, I’d take it to Cannery Row, Monterey, about 1935.

Ed Ricketts, “Doc,” of Pacific Biological already has steaks and oysters and a loaf of sourdough, the last neatly bisected and all of them bathed in garlic and butter, ready to grill.

He crosses the street to Wing Chong’s for a gallon of red wine. He crosses back to start preparing dinner.

The guests, who drove in together from Pacific Grove, knock perfunctorily and walk in unencumbered—one of them, with luck, might’ve remembered to bring loaves of hard salami and Jack cheese. Regardless, Ricketts offers them their wine, poured generously into laboratory beakers. Then they barbecue, and one guest, the writer, offers unsolicited opinions—the very worst kind—on the proper way to grill Spencer steaks. They sip.

The steak expert is the the the novelist John Steinbeck. His friend and co-pilot on the perilous journey tomorrow morning back to Pacific Grove is the mythologist Joseph Campbell, who bears a remarkable resemblance to my Grandfather Kelly.

When their time comes, the steak and oysters and sourdough are dispatched promptly, along with a perfunctory iceberg salad with Thousand Islands dressing.

Two-thirds of the wine is left.

I don’t want the wine or the salad or the steak or the oysters–or even the sourdough, dipped in steak juices. I want to be, for just a short time, a fly on the wall, a grass snake under a warm lamp in one of Pacific Biological’s glass terrariums or even a skate breathing noiselessly at the bottom of a tank, just to listen, in my animal disguise, when the talk that won’t end until sunrise begins.

And could they talk. There would have been a lot of laughter, but there would’ve been confrontational moments, too. Ricketts, especially, with the scalpel that is a scientist’s mind, would have sliced his friends’ theories— about sexuality, life after death, about God the Father-Creator vs. God the Prime Mover, about the Great Depression and Italian Fascism— into slices as transparent as sashimi.

I can almost see Steinbeck, from my skate’s tank, slumped disconsolate into his chair once he’s been bested by his friend. In the silence, the only sound might’ve been the waves crashing into the pilings beneath the floor. But writers never shut up. Steinbeck would’ve found his voice again.

When sunrise came, I am sure that they departed wobbly friends.

Ten years away from 1935, the Allies will liberate Dachau and Auschwitz-Birkenau and they will vaporize Hamburg and Hiroshima. Three years later, Doc Ricketts, will be gone, killed on the train tracks above the Row—a little later, The Log from the Sea of Cortez will be his eulogy [Sweet Thursday would have embarrassed Ricketts]— so talks quite like this won’t happen anymore.

That’s a sadness because they told each other such grand stories, made even grander because they were told inside such a homely building.

What they told each other, thought through and distilled and re-worded, was what they’d learned from each other.

They were a biologist whose mind was so profound but whose stock-in-trade was Pacific Coast specimens for high school biology classrooms in Minnesota; a frustrated novelist, who’d written a dismal treatment of the pirate Captain Morgan and an immature and condescending novel about a paisano named Danny from Tortilla Flat and a mythologist who occupied an academic stratosphere to which no living wage could ascend.

What they discovered in each other was an electric attraction—or what Whitman called a “necessary film”— that ties all of us together. Granted, the red wine helped. They talked about our antecedence as clarified by Charles Darwin and William Jennings Bryan, they talked about Celtic and Hindi myth, about human nature’s potential, found in The Buddha, and its tawdriness, found in Huckleberry Finn. They argued about every conceivable topic, from Jungian theory to St. Francis’s wolf.

If they agreed on anything by the time the sun came up over the Gavilan Mountains, it was that this place—this planet—was a living organism, that we were its subordinates and, at the same time, its most murderous and indispensable components. They agreed that we belonged to it, and so to each other.

All of this disparate business, of course, had been hashed out a century before and a continent away from Pacific Biological by the Transcendentalists at Brook Farm. And before that, an ocean away, the same kind of talk happened, but it was in German: the Romantics there called the “necessary film” that ties all of us together weltgeist: World-Spirit.

But they didn’t have barbecue.

The talk on Cannery Row would have disappeared with the Del Monte Express that killed Ed Ricketts, except for Bill Moyers’s marvelous PBS series, The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth. This was when we learned, thanks to Campbell, just how miraculous Luke Skywalker’s arrival truly was. Luke became even more miraculous when the mythologist helped us to understand, to our delight, that there was nothing new about Star Wars at all.

And then Campbell, thanks in great part to what he’d learned at Pacific Biological, told Moyers and all of us miraculous stories of his own that, of course, didn’t belong to him at all. He had learned them, too.

But that series was a long time ago. But now, against the hard edges of current events, it’s in our soft remembrance of myth where we find the deepest truths, and there we have the chance to find our way back from the desolate place where we find ourselves now.

In the myth that is American film, I look to Frank Capra and Howard Hawks, and, when I can stand him, to John Ford. In writing, I look to Steinbeck and Willa Cather and to Hemingway’s short fiction; from my generation, I look to New Journalists like Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese. I look to the historians Bruce Catton and Barbara Tuchman and Doris Kearns Goodwin, to young historians like Laura Hillenbrand and Lynne Olson and Isabel Wilkerson, to baseball writers Roger Angell and Roger Kahn. I look to documentarian Ken Burns. I rely on the stories they tell me because they are true.

There are some—a harpy in Congress— who hold that our destiny lies in hating each other. That is a monstrous lie.

One way we can counteract this lie is to tell each other the truth: We belong to each other.

Here is just one example of what connects us: Campbell told Moyers that his research had taught him that there is a version of “Cinderella,” in one form or another, that’s found in nearly every culture in the world. I once watched Wes Studi—so terrifying as Magua in the film Last of the Mohicans—read a Native American version of the story to little children on Reading Rainbow, and he was so open-hearted and read the story so beautifully that the children at his feet, wide-eyed, knew immediately that it was a true story.

So here’s a story that I invented. The fact that it never happened doesn’t make it any less true.

It’s day’s end in Monterey in the summer of 1935. I am shivering a little in the fog despite layers of sweater and jacket. I am sitting on the bottom step of Pacific Biological. It’s cold, but I can smell the promise of warmth: red oak burning on a grill nearby. Then, in my story, I see Ed Ricketts, dressed in indifferent shades of khaki complemented by a surplus olive Army tie. He is closing a worn leather jacket across his chest and against the chill as he crosses the street with a gallon of red wine, which he carries with care, because the bottle’s green glass is thin. Its bottom is lined with sediment.

When he sees me waiting for him, an immense smile transforms his face, always serious, except for now.

I have been undertaking a Serious Historical Study of the Andy Hardy movies that appear frequently on TCM. There were sixteen made between 1937 and 1958, during which Mickey Rooney’s Andy grew not an inch. Andy would go off to World War II but that part of his life is forgotten in favor of “I know what let’s do! Let’s put on a show!“

The films I’ve seen leave me with even more questions.

1. Did Andy ALWAYS wear a tie?

2. Did Americans once put that much sugar on their corn flakes?

3. Was that car as beautiful as I thought it was? Yes, it was. Andy’s high school graduation gift was a 1940 Plymouth convertible. Possibly it was a bribe offered Judge Stone, like the silver candlestick offered Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons.

4. Mrs. Hardy deserves far more credit. I think she irons Andy’s undershorts.

5. Judge Hardy is rarely in court. He mostly just hangs around and dispenses advice, like Ozzie Nelson did in Ozzie and Harriet. And, given Lewis Stone’s appearance, I would guess he was about 78 when his son Andy was born.

6. It seemed to take Andy about seven years to get through high school. Maybe that’s because in Andy Hardy Gets Spring Fever, he falls in love with his drama teacher, Helen Gilbert.

7. In one scene, Andy ties a BOW TIE while talking to Mrs. Hardy without the use of a mirror. That’s an Academy Award right there, as far as I’m concerned.

8. We need soda fountains to make a comeback. My father first met my mother in a soda fountain in 1939.

9. In Love Finds Andy Hardy, Andy offers to court a friend’s girlfriend while he’s away on a weeks-long family vacation so no other guys will Make the Moves on her. They haggle over the fee. They agree on eight bits (a dollar) or $18.36 in today’s money. Good Lord, money went a lot farther then.

10. In Andy Hardy’s Private Secretary, Andy and Polly go parking in what looks like Amazon rainforest in the 1940 Plymouth convertible. Judge Hardy and a good portion of the supporting cast suddenly pull up and hilarity ensues. If any OTHER Andy Hardy type had been caught by his Dad parking with Anne Rutherford (Polly), he would’ve been horsewhipped.

11. Judy Garland appears in only three of the films. Andy is dismissive of her, because she’s just a kid. I find that really difficult to believe. Donna Reed (below) appears one film, too, and that’s good, because that might’ve laid the groundwork for her casting opposite James Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life.

12. The girl Andy dates for his friend (for $18.36 in 2020 money) in Love Finds Andy Hardy is Lana Turner. He finds her spoiled and selfish and, in my mind, no competition for Judy Garland. He breaks off the pseudo-relationship, which is good news because Lana Turner grows up to get her husband murdered and John Garfield sent to The Chair in “The Postman Always Rings Twice.”

13. There are Black people in Andy’s hometown, Carvel, USA (like The Simpsons’ Springfield, it’s everywhere but nowhere in particular). They are all—all of them— Pullman porters, it seems. That part of the Andy Hardy myth is less appealing to me than Andy and Judy and their fountain soda.

Usually when I’m under the Brisco Road underpass, I reflect nervously on the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake, when part of the Nimitz Freeway pancaked. Or, as you wish, tortilla’d.

[We felt that quake in Los Osos. I was feeding John in his high chair and noticed, suddenly, that I had to move the spoon to track his mouth, because he was swaying. I snatched him up and dragged him, mostly but not completely out of the high chair, into the safety of the hallway. John was unfazed. The boy likes to eat.]

Thank goodness, I did not think about the earthquake today. What I thought about instead was the vision just beyond my windshield.

It was a silver 2019 Corvette that looked just like the one above.  It was beautiful and it sounded glorious, too. The engine purred and then, when the driver accelerated, it growled.

There was a time in my very young life when I wanted to grow up to be a 1963 Corvette Stingray.

The Corvette I saw today looked so futuristic I would not have been at all surprised to see George or Jane Jetson behind the wheel.

Amber Derbidge and I once took kids to Europe and one of our stops was in Monaco, where the biggest yacht in the basin was owned by a man in Ladies’ Underwear. That was his business, to clarify. Then we passed one of the biggest Ferrari dealerships in Europe, but there were so many Ferraris on display that they were kind of dull, like Ford Escorts in the Mullahey lot.

But if you see one good thing, say, Princess Grace’s grave, which was strewn with rose petals, or a shooting star Elizabeth and I once saw in an empty sky over Utah—or a silver Corvette you weren’t at all prepared to see—that’s a singular beauty. Oh, and as much as I love sports cars, there’s no beauty like Grace Kelly’s. None.