Mission Viejo, CA
To many (OK, 4 of the 6 of you), the relevance of these photos and this post will be nil, but for me and people very dear to me, these photos have a tremendous amount of relevance and sentiment.
I was messing around on google maps with “street view”, couldn’t find any of the homes that I’ve owned but I found many of the homes that I lived in during my youth. This one (house on the right with the funky flat roof) was circa 1972-1974 and conjured up a lot of sentiment and introspection.
Memoir #1: It was in this house that my brothers and I got caught smoking cigarettes up in the garage rafters (don’t worry, we didn’t inhale, gross!). Dad sat us down (he and Mom smoked too) and said, “you guys want to smoke? let’s smoke!”. I’m not sure where he was going with this but it didn’t really matter, none of us had the guts to smoke with the old man and that was essentially the end of that. Well almost.
Around that same time, Mark Baldwin, a popular kid at school, learned that my friend Tommy Hildebrand and I were smokers, he then proceeded to mock us saying, “you guys probably don’t even inhale”. His scoffing hit a major nerve. He wasn’t a smoker and so his first jab was that we needed cigarettes to prove we were men. The second blow was that we weren’t even doing it like real men, and he was right since we didn’t inhale. He successfully made us feel stupid and childish at the same time, nevertheless we emphatically denied these accusations. Tommy and I realized the pickle we were in and knew the only way to save face at this point was to subject our nice clean lungs to the filthy toxins and become men. So we set straight out to inhale.
We found a quaint setting out back in the woods behind this Adriana house and did just that. He yacked up his guts like I’ve never seen anyone yack before. I got green, never actually calling for Ralph, but I most assuredly felt as miserable as Tommy looked. At that moment of near pukage, I decided tobacco was disgusting and I vowed never to touch the filth again, why would anyone voluntarily make themselves so sick to their stomach like that? Tommy went the other way, he was determined to become a man, barfing several more times before earning his stripes. I saw him years later, he was a yellow skinned, yellow teethed, throaty voiced hacking, full-on chain smoker. I became a very vocal adversary to smoking ever more (don’t believe me, ask my kids if there is anything in this world that I detest more).
Back to the more important Adriana memoirs. Memior #2: We lost our German shepherd Fritz, he was an old dog then but we had received him as a pup when I was just a little boy. He bit a neighbor girl in our backyard because she was messing with his tail while he was eating. Charges were pressed and we had to get rid of him.
Memoir #3: My brother Kevin and I threw a Frisbee back and forth to each other without dropping 732 times (or somewhere around there). Think it sounds easy? You try it! My brother is kind of a klutz and finally dropped a perfect pass (well, that’s the way I remember it, lol).
Memior #4: My brothers and I set up a huge tent in the back yard one summer. Somehow we got some pretty neighborhood girls to come over and we may have played truth or dare once or twice, and I may have kissed a girl for the first time. It was all fairly innocent really, except that I may have learned the art of kissing like the Frenchies that summer….
Memior #5: We didn’t have any religion at the time, but it seems that God took an interest in our family and He sent an angel to rescue us. That would be our next door neighbor (house pictured on the left) Kelli Smith, she was in her late teens if I remember right. She invited my parents to have the missionary discussions. My parents were reluctant but didn’t know how to say no, so along came the missionaries (Wagner and Clegg) with the fulness of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It didn’t take for all of us right away, and some of us it didn’t take at all, or it was lost later on. But for me it had a far reaching impact on whom and what I am today and the choices that I have subsequently made in my life. The most significant is the commitment I made to marry my best friend and eternal companion, Cathleen.
So this is where it kind of becomes interesting. My family moved from this Adriana house to the other side of town even before we got baptized (yes, all 9 of us were baptized). At some point, Kelli Smith and her family moved away too out of that house next door. Eventually, my future bride and her family would move into the Smith’s old house. My wife and I discovered this unique little coincidence when we first started dating. To think that our paths would have come so geographically close and yet be so chronologically far apart.
Or was it? Ironically, she and I would enter the waters of baptism within just a few months of each other in the same year, 1975. She was just turning 8 half way across the country in Illinois, I was a convert in California at age 14. Eventually our paths would cross. I was home from a mission and home for the summer break from BYU to earn some money, she was a recent graduate from
