Achey this morning. Not sick: just tired from too much hiking around.
Crackpot neighbors are hollering at each other. Shut UP, folks!
Waiting for the toast to brown. Thinking….thinking back over my family’s life in Berkeley, California. Wishing I were still there.
My relatives’ little house was right down the road from where the lightrail train came in from San Francisco and then shot through a tunnel to the other side of the hills.
My great-grandmother and her widowed daughter, my great-aunt, lived on Hopkins street, a long and mellow road that climbed up the side of a steep hill and ended where that tunnel carried the city train through from the far side of the Berkeley Hills.
Such a handsome place! I do miss it.
Their charming little house looked a lot like this one. CAN YOU BELIEVE that price!! Over a million bucks for an ancient, termite-ridden two-bedroom bungalow!
One thing you had to say for the neighborhood: it would keep you in shape. Where the relatives’ house stood, that road was mighty steep!
The relatives didn’t own a car, so just to go to the grocery store, they got a nice workout. And yea verily! Both of them lived well into their 90s, in excellent health. Without ever seeing a doctor.
Two blocks up that road stood what we today would call a gourmet grocery store. They didn’t: to them, it was just the corner market. WhatEVER: my great-grandmother (by then in her 90s) walked up there every day or two to pick up food and whatnot. Her daughter (my great-aunt), hiked up that hill five days a week to catch a train into San Francisco, where she worked for Crocker-Anglo National Bank.
On any given day, either one of them got about 20 times more exercise than we do. And it showed: they both lived into their late 90s, in excellent health. As Christian Scientists: they never went to doctors!
Heh. I guess the hill was their doctor, eh?
It was populated with pretty little houses. Walk the three blocks to the top of the hill and you came to what we today would call a gourmet grocery store. To them, it was just a corner store, a rather ordinary grocer.
Also on that corner were a dry cleaner and a set of concrete stairs leading up the hill into Sausalito, where my cousins lived. Next door to the cleaner’s was said gourmet grocery store: on the order of a Sprouts, only not so commercialized.
They were nice folks: the great-grandmother and the great-aunt.
Heh! Imagine having relatives who don’t think you’re a Communist because you’re active in the Democratic Party!
Yeah: the idiot woman my father married after my mother died dwelt somewhere to the right of Adolf Hitler. So did her her rabid daughter, who — Arizona being, after all, Arizona (Home of the Right-Wing Crackpot) — attained to the rank of Superior Court Judge. Both of them wild-eyed right-wingers, who regarded me and my husband as COMM-YOU-NISTS.
Yep. Our family life went straight to Hell after my mother died. 😀
My step-sister Marilyn, who merged into our family after my father married her mother (in the wake of my mother’s death), must have thought we were the next best thing to Communists. No doubt she and her mom just l-o-o-ved having us treasonous bastards in their home. But I enjoyed her and her kids. Politics aside, they were nice enough folks.
Dear step-sister died in 2018: IMHO much, much too young for a journey to The Other World. But that’s only from my point of view: in reality, she was some 15 years older than me. And a good 90 degrees further to the right than me! :-d
Seriously: I did enjoy Marilyn. Her mother, Helen: not so much. And ultimately my father turned out to be pretty miserable in that marriage. He was afraid to divorce Helen: “She’ll get all my money!!!”
Yeah. Well. Some things are worth more than money, eh Daddy?
Actually, what I should have said to him was Daddy! I’m married to a partner in one of the most powerful lawfirms in the Southwest. She’s NOT gunna get all your precious money!
Probably not so much as a penny of it…
Oh well. I was too stupid to think of that. So was he. And so they lived miserably ever after…
