Monthly Archives: November 2022

Faces As Memorable As Places

by Woody

Words fail me, and colossally so, in trying to describe seeing the Colosseum in Rome in person.

Since it is one of the iconic Seven Wonders of the World, here are seven adjectives to begin: spectacular, amazing, awe-inspiring, astonishing, breathtaking, magnificent, wondrous.

Meanwhile, seven full entries from a thesaurus cannot do justice to the La Sagrada Familia basilica in Barcelona. Designed by Antonio Gaudi, the towering cathedral is truly the most spectacular-amazing-awe-inspiring-astonishing-breathtaking-magnificent-wondrous building, outside and in, I have ever set eyes upon.

La Sangrada Familia from the outside…

To borrow Hollywood’s practice of pitching a new script by combining two known movies, La Sagrada Familia is Dr. Seuss’s imaginative drawings meet John Muir’s love of giant redwoods. Indeed, just as Muir believed nature was a church, Gaudi felt nature should be in a church and thus designed the interior marble columns to resemble a petrified forest of soaring trees.

As unforgettable as La Sangrada Familia and the Colosseum both are, two small scenes nearby will also long remain in my memory.

Leaving the Colosseum, my wife, who is half-Italian, and I squeezed onto a bench seat in the back of a hop-on hop-off bus. Lisa was next to the window and I was beside a young Italian boy, age 9 or 10, who was with his parents. Naturally, the boy was connected to his iPhone via earbuds.

Meanwhile, Lisa plugged the cord of her solo earbud into a console that provided sightseeing commentary in different languages. As she searched for English without success, the boy turned and said a number in Italian – cinque, I believe it was, which we translated to cinco in Spanish – and indeed channel five made Lisa flash a smile of thanks.

… and a breathtaking inside view.

My console, or perhaps my cheap disposable earbud provided by the tour, was broken as every channel came up empty. Content to view the beautiful city in silence, I suddenly felt a tap on my shoulder and the boy offered me one of his two earbuds.

Instead of sightseeing commentary, I was greeted with music. Italian pop, I presume it was, but understanding the lyrics did not matter for the boy’s act of kindness required no translation. For the next 10 minutes or so, we bobbed heads in unison and had a wordless conversation as he pointed at various sights.

“Ciao,” the boy said when his family’s exit came.

“Grazie,” I replied, handing back the borrowed earbud.

A few days later in Barcelona, Lisa and I were enjoying a lunch of tapas and sangria at an outdoor café overlooking a tree-lined grand plaza. Fortunately, our table for two was under a canopy because out of the blue, literally from a blue sky, it began raining fairly hard.

A rainbow soon appeared, not in the sky but on the walkway across the plaza from where we sat. A young man, who I guessed to be in his late teens, was walking with an elderly woman, who I guessed to be his grandmother. She shuffled slowly, holding his arm for balance, and I imagined he was escorting her home.

When the unexpected showers arrived, the grandson quickly removed his long-sleeved flannel shirt and held it over his grandmother’s grey-haired bun and stooped shoulders and continued patiently walking at her unhurried pace despite getting soaked in his T-shirt. I wish you could have seen this love in the rain that was every bit as lovely as La Sagrada Familia was in sunshine the day before.

Once again, the magic of traveling was found as much in faces as in places.

Onward in next week’s column to the French Riviera…

Woody’s Holiday Ball Drive: You can still drop off new sports balls or have online orders shipped to: Jensen Design & Survey, 1672 Donlon St., Ventura CA 93003. And please be sure to email me at woodywriter@gmail.com about your gift so I can add your generosity to this year’s tally and thank you in an upcoming column.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and  “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” are available at WoodyWoodburn.com

 

Making The Holidays More Perfect: Woody’s Ball Drive Kicks Off

by Woody

“You can’t live a perfect day,” John Wooden believed, “without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you.”

He taught this lesson by example. One such occasion remains as vivid as if it happened last week, not three decades ago. Actually, it is a series of remembrances that merge into one from every time I visited Coach in his Encino home.

In my mind’s eye I can still see the plastic postal bin, the size of a laundry basket, filled with outgoing fan mail: photographs, trading cards, magazine covers, even basketballs and UCLA jerseys people sent Coach to autograph. Requests for a signed Pyramid of Success were also common.

These gift balls are stacked in a real Pyramid of Successful Giving!

Surprisingly, most of these fans did not enclose return postage. No matter. Coach trekked to the Post Office once a week and footed the bill himself.

Once again, we all have a chance to emulate Coach’s example and live a perfect day by helping others who can never repay us through Woody’s Holiday Ball Drive that kicks off today.

The inspiration for this annual endeavor occurred 25 years ago at a youth basketball clinic when former Ventura College and NBA star Cedric Ceballos awarded autographed basketballs to handful of lucky attendees. Leaving the gym afterward, I happened upon a 10-year-old boy who had won one of the prized keepsakes…

…which he was now dribbling on a blacktop outdoor court, and shooting baskets with, all while perhaps imagining he was Ceballos with the game clock ticking down to the final buzzer.

Meanwhile, the real Ceballos’ Sharpie signature was quickly wearing off.

Curious as to why the boy had not protectively taken the trophy basketball home to put safely on a bookshelf, I interrupted his playing to ask.

“I’ve never had my own basketball,” he answered matter-of-factly between shots.

With visions of that boy – and other boys and girls who do not have their own basketball to shoot, soccer ball to kick, football to throw – dancing through my head that winter, I asked you dear readers to help brighten the holidays by donating new sports balls for disadvantaged kids. You responded like champions then and have every year since.

Are you up to the challenge once more? If so, drop off new balls (no batteries required!) at a local Boys & Girls Club, YMCA, Toys For Tots, fire department or house of worship. The organizations will pass them into deserving young hands.

You can also drop balls off (weekdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. through Dec. 16) at Jensen Design & Survey at 1672 Donlon St. near Target on Telephone Road in Ventura; or have online orders shipped to this same address (California, Zip Code 93003); and I will take it from there.

And please be sure to email me about your bouncing gifts at woodywriter@gmail.com so I can add your generosity to this year’s tally.

We are already off to an early start as Jim Parker, my old Star colleague, bought three basketballs way back in July. Jim is usually the first to donate, but this year he was beaten to the punch. In March, various members of the Somis Thursday Club donated 12 basketballs with John Vincent, a retired firefighter, adding 10 more, noting: “I didn’t always give to my church the way I should have when I was younger. Now that I’m retired and wiser, I’m trying to make up for it.”

And just before Halloween, Katherine and Frank Anderson gave an early treat with four basketballs while my dad tossed in five footballs.

Together, we can make the holidays a little more perfect.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and  “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” are available at WoodyWoodburn.com

 

Moved To Tears By Girl In Pompeii

by Woody

“We do not take a trip,” John Steinbeck wrote in his 1962 gem, Travels with Charley: In Search of America, “a trip take us.”

In 2022, in search of the Pompeii ruins in Italy during my Travels with Lisa, our 40th wedding anniversary trip took us to tears.

To learn that an estimated 2,000 inhabitants of this ancient city died in less than 15 minutes after Mount Vesuvius, less than 15 miles away, erupted two millennia ago is overwhelming. Indeed, imagining the horror of noon on August 11, 79 A.D. brings to mind the nightmare morning of September 11, 2001.

Strolling the cobblestone streets and alleyways, ducking into living quarters and brothels, seeing the basilica and amphitheatre and the massive main city square with a colossal statue of a centaur warrior, all brought on a sense of wonder.

A narrow alleyway in the ancient ruins of Pompeii.

And yet it was a single room, small and simple, that brought on misty eyes. Here, one story represented every story on that calamitous day. Here, in a sarcophagus-like glass box, was a plaster casting of one of the exhumed victims. Here was a 14-year-old girl.

She died lying prone, forehead resting on her right forearm and left hand covering her nose and mouth, as though she were pleasantly sunbathing on a beach while shielding her eyes from the summer sun and face from wind-blown sand. In truth, she was trying to protect herself from the aerial tsunami of falling ash and swirling gasses that suffocated the residents of Pompeii – in the streets, in their homes, in their beds – long before the molten waves of lava arrived.

A steady line of tourists, hushed and solemn in expression, filed past the plaster girl with many snapping photographs as if this were merely an art sculpture imitating life – or, in this case, death.

The following day, 150 miles to the north in Rome, the Pompeiian girl seemed to reappear on the beautiful Ponte Vittorio Emanuele II pedestrian bridge spanning the Tibre River and connecting the historic city centre with the Vatican. Midway across, and also centered widthwise, was a life-sized sculpture. Instead of white plaster, it was cast iron and grey; instead of a girl in her home, it was a homeless man lying in a similar prone position with his forehead pillowed on a forearm. Again, tourists took pause to reflect in thought and take pictures.

The amphitheatre with a stage of white marble.

Shortly past the end of the triple-arched stone bridge, less than a half-mile walk from St. Peter’s Basilica where the poor are daily blessed, was a third figure in a nearly identical pose as the ancient girl of plaster and the man of iron. But this was a real person, a man, in his fifties perhaps, lying on the sidewalk with his head turned to the side as if taking a swimmer’s breath, a raggedy blanket pulled up to his scraggy-bearded chin.

For all the attention given to the sculpture of a homeless man on the nearby landmark bridge; for all the reverence paid to the Pompeiian girl who died in a famous disaster long, long, long ago; the opposite was now the norm. The person still drawing breath seemed to draw only blind eyes, not empathy.

Homelessness is everydayness in most cities worldwide, yet the manner in which passerby’s collectively sidestepped and averted their eyes from a living person whereas they visually embraced a plaster girl and a cast-iron man, this juxtaposition was as silently heartbreaking as a thunderous Vesuvius eruption.

To be continued, more happily, in Rome in two weeks after the kickoff of Woody’s Holiday Ball Drive next week…

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and  “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” are available at WoodyWoodburn.com

 

Greece’s ‘Green Gold’ and Blue Word

by Woody

“It’s better, I think, when we all stay together,” said Nicolette, a green-eyed, olive-skinned, sunny-voiced, sandy-blonde, thirtyish-year-old Greece native who served as tour guide for our group of two dozen sightseers at the ancient ruins of Olympia.

It seems to me this is wise advice for life in general. As an African proverb puts it: “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.”

Our bus driver, however, wanted to go both fast and far and thus expressed impatient displeasure with the dawdling driver ahead of us by blaring the horn with one hand while making a gesture of anger with the other. With his mouth, he barked briefly in his native tongue.

“We Greeks, we do not respect speed limits and traffic signs,” Nicolette sang out with a laugh, perhaps as a hint to our coachman to not tailgate and certainly not try to pass on this winding two-lane rural road.

Champions at the ancient Olympics received olive wreaths instead of gold medals, Nicolette had explained earlier at the Games’ historic site. Now, on the 30-mile drive back to port in Katakolon, she talked about the golden value of olives.

“We call olives ‘green gold’ because 600,000 families make their livings from growing and selling olives and olive oil,” she said, further noting that almost every family with a backyard has at least one olive tree, and usually three or four – or even 30, as with her childhood home – to produce olive oil for their own use.

“It is not common for people to sell their private olive oil,” Nicolette continued. “If you have more than your family needs, then you give it to friends and coworkers who do not have trees in their family.”

Winter, from early November to Christmas, is olive harvesting season. The “green gold” is always picked by hand because mechanical culling is believed to damage the trees and bring bad luck – and bad taste – to the fruit.

“Picking” is not quite accurate. Men climb the trees and shake the ripe olives loose while women and teens accomplish this by banging the lower limbs with clubs. The fallen gems are then gathered from a tarp below. One tree produces 80 pounds of the stone fruit, give or take, which yields roughly six quarts of liquid gold.

“Olive oil is our culture. My father even makes natural soap from the olive mash – it is so healthy for the skin,” Nicolette said, her flawless fashion-ad complexion serving as evidence of the soap’s beautifying powers.

A few miles later, at a four-way stop, a car to our right came to a full halt and waited even though it had the right of way. This drew the ire of our bus driver.

Ho-n-n-n-n-k! – longer this time.

Hand gesture(!!) – made more wildly.

Two syllables!!! – even louder than before.

“Greeks lack patience,” Nicolette said, again playfully, trying to calm our driver and perhaps rescue her monetary tips. “We are always in a hurry, especially when driving.”

Further proving her point, our bus lurched through the intersection as the other car, its driver obviously not Greek considering his or her patience, remained at a standstill.

“What did our driver say?” I asked Nicolette. Ever the good sport, she repeated it, translated into English, then coached me in pronouncing it correctly.

Obviously, Nicolette’s gratuity from me was not only rescued, but increased twofold. After all, she taught me all about Greece’s “green gold” and also a Greek blue word.

Onward next week to Naples, Italy, and the ancient ruins of Pompeii…

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and  “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” are available at WoodyWoodburn.com