Smartacus and I are in the middle of a serious discussion. I say he needs to man-up and make his own avocado toast. He insists not, saying he needs every ounce of energy for summer-school Spanish, which he is currently wrapping up before heading back to Oregon late next month to complete his studies.
As we noted recently, my son oinks when he’s happy, which usually means he’s eating.
Smartacus currently eats four lunches a day, a couple of dinners, a symphony of desserts. Think of him as a herd of livestock.
I don’t mean that in any disparaging way, for he showers and shaves more than livestock, and he’s far more verbal – in three languages now (if you count the oinking).
Still, between meals, my son is often weak from hunger. So I threw him over my shoulder the other day and carted him off to Fair Oaks Pharmacy, one of my favorite destinations in the free world. You can park right along the curb on Mission, which is always desirable (as you know, the “free world” often isn’t free at all).
At the dreamy soda fountain, I treated him to a strawberry milkshake, in a desperate effort to revive him from the searing August heat.
You know, sometimes I make fatherhood look so easy.
Here’s another parenting tip: Your kid gets a bug bite? Rub some watermelon on it. Does it work? As well as anything.
Parenting tip: No. 3: The beach.
FYI, I wander Los Angeles like Wordsworth wandering Inverness – frugally, often skipping my obligations, as I seek out waterfalls and quiet bogs in which to work on my dirty sonnets.
Waterfalls are rare here in August. As are bogs. But I’ve discovered a few beaches worthy of Wordsworth: Zuma, Crystal Cove, even Dockweiler.
A So Cal beach is the cheapest family outing you can find. These days, you can spend $100 easy on drinks and appetizers. And you go to the bakery, or the dry cleaners, and they demand a tip?
But the beach is a mere 12 bucks to park. Various marine interactions – stepping on a string ray, or lacerating your foot on a mollusk – are all free.
Love the beach.
It is where life began, right here on these bloody shores.
Parenting tip No. 4: It doesn’t really matter what you do as long as you all do it together.
When Smartacus was 6, I used to pay his allowance in doodlebugs, or other slimy stuff from the garden. Now, at 22, same thing.
FYI, the lovely and patient older daughter has loaned him her scruffy old Jeep for the rest of the summer, and the other night we washed and waxed it, as fathers and sons have been doing in the American suburbs for almost a hundred years: the hose, the bucket, the hard-shell Turtle Wax, the Beach Boys blaring from the radio.
Help me Rhonda, hep, hep me Rhonda…
Honestly, she never does. But it never hurts to ask.
Hep, hep me Rhonda…
As you know, there are lots of ways to love a summer night. Restoring a sun-baked old Jeep to its former glory might be in my top five.
How to love a summer night list
- Make a root beer float.
- Make another root beer float.
- Walk the dog.
- Watch an Angie Dickinson movie.
- Restore a beachy, sun-baked yellow Jeep to its former luster.
Please pass me that soapy sponge.
Final note: When I was Smartacus’ age, I bought a used Jeep Wrangler: denim seats, rag top. Worst car ever.
The test drive was so lumpy and unpleasant, the salesman and I fell to our knees when it was over, broken, crying and in need of morphine.
“Sorry, that was harsh,” the salesman apologized after.
“Don’t try so hard,” I told him. “I’ll take it!!!”
Many theologians say it was only the second time Jesus wept: 1) at the tomb of Lazurus; 2) when I bought a cruddy Jeep that started only half the time.
To be honest, it’s a principle I’ve since applied to choosing a dog, a house, a career: Find that special something no sane person would ever want or do, then dive into it with gusto.
So far, it’s worked out quite well.
You love football? Me too. Please join me tomorrow, Aug. 21., at the inaugural meeting of the Rose Bowl Quarterbacks Club (formerly the Pasadena Quarterbacks Club). The club will meet six times this season at the stadium. Please join me for the 8 a.m. breakfast/pep rally, no matter whom you root for. I will host morning breakfasts that will feature notable speakers from across college football, including former players, coaches, analysts, celebrities, and community leaders. Up this week: local legend John Sciarra, UCLA all-time leading rusher Johnathan Franklin and former QB and current N.I.L. expert Chase Griffin.
To register, please CLICK HERE or visit the website by CLICKING HERE. Walk-ups will be welcome, though since space is limited, advance purchasing is strongly encouraged.
Coming Saturday: 88 handy ways to totally screw up your life.
To say this post made me happy is a gross understatement. Rhonda may not hep, but your writing certainly does. Pass the turtle wax. Xoxo
Chris exaggeration is one of your charms, BUT that jeep is far from scruffy!!
LA beaches are almost free if you’re a senior & willing to shell out $20 for an annual pass. There’s restrictions on weekends & no holidays but dang, you can now afford an extra root beer float.
Close, but no cigar. I have the LA Beaches and Harbors Senior Parking Pass. It is $25.00 [not $20 – but no biggie]. I decompress at Zuma every Thursday all year long. What Chris could save on parking will pay for a lot of strawberry milkshakes.
Another great column to help — or is that hep, hep? — me get over hump day! I love the line about “a symphony of desserts” and Smartacus’s porcine post-prandial comments, but honestly, doesn’t he mind being described in that way? Even though he knows that you are a humor columnist? Just asking.
He’s a remarkably good sport.
I had never heard of Fair Oaks Pharmacy before but I looked it up and now I want to go there more than anything. Will you take me?
Oh my I can’t believe you have never ever been there…your life is not complete.
Not many places like that left…
Best car ever: Datsun 1600 Roadster, hardtop convertible.
Come to Redondo Beach for a walk along the Esplanade ~ free parking on all the side streets ~ ~
Rhonda, from my experience, can be very helpful. It helps to marry one. They have more invested.
Those pictures: you with that little girl—they have the glowing burn of magic! A different kind of magic: how much Suzanne looks like Angie used to look… maybe sorta still does. I think that is no accident, my friend; if you know what I mean… Drug store soda fountains were another kind of Summer magic to me when I was a kid, and still would be, if I could find one locally. Those cherry cokes; chocolate phosphates, banana splits, rainbow milkshakes and malted milks and sundaes ad infinitum. Starbucks is like watery coffee in comparison. I was a teen age soda jerk in Evanston and learned to make them all, inhaling them when younger—bellying up in the air-conditioned coolness to the shiny black marble counter with my friend the kid next door, a willing partner in sensory hedonism and wide open developing taste. We were co-conspirators in pursuing lengthy double-header Summer afternoon movies, too—definitely a bygone passion… And lived at Lee Street Beach, where for me much love blossomed in the later decade when I was a Summer lifeguard there for a number of seasons and taught swimming, the sun burning me to know more and more and more of everything sensorily lush and beautiful.
You always want to work with and within what you love. It is a judgment that sets you up for a lifetime of exploratory delight, and the richness of the embedded existence that necessarily follows. Soda fountains and beaches are love affairs that last a lifetime, and speak the intricately delicious language of Summer like few other passions do.
…and here is yet another passion, briefly briefly realized..
A Lovely Day
It is another cloudless August morn—
Eerily cool, pale blue, moderate
So beautiful one wonders what gives
Us this gift of pleasure here and now?
Existence is not something that is borne
By chance alone, yet a trick of fate
Seems often at work, and as one lives
Day to day, one asks who, what, when, where, why, and how;
But it makes no sense now to ponder
The loveliness or its unknown source;
Enjoyment is itself a wonder
And parsing it perhaps something worse;
Let each good day come and stand alone—
A stunning woman who wants a kiss!
Embrace her, squeezing to the bone—
Let moments flow in their loveliness
For time is love on a day like this
And love too precious ever to miss.
…and so you see that Summer this year makes me not want to work that hard. Follow a dog’s nose. They know where to go and what to do on a day like this.
…though four lines were left out, it still makes sense. That’s the way it is on an August summer day like this.
Thanks to Forrest Gale for that drug store fountain picture, but there was something wrong with the milk shake photo: what happened to the half-gallon (it seemed) steel container that came straight out from under the screaming whirly mixer machine and set before you next to a cut glass goblet that held about 5/8’s of the content of the steel container. That’s what I inhaled the last time I was there.
Matt Sweeney, formerly from South Pas, now in Altadena.
Your percentage is right on, Matt. When you refilled your empty glass it was about half full. That’s the can kicker on a milkshake or malt. Cherry cokes, Chocolate Phosphates and the rest came full up, ready to go. We didn’t do Fizzes or Egg Creams in those days where I worked, but I heard from folk at the counter then that they were doing them big time in New York City along with the Iced Tea, Iced Coffee, Lemonade, and strawberry and grape and root beer sodas everyone else did, ice creams in some way almost always in the mix. Refills of sodas from the fountain spigots et al were by request, accompanied by the biggest smile you could manage. Maintenance of a semblance of heaven was the province and solemn obligation of the soda jerk. Believe it. I felt like a magician, and maybe—in some small imitative ways—I was. That was a big boost for a geeky teen who knew so little about so much; and knew it. As now.