Author Archives: Woody

‘The Butterfly Tree’ and enchanted Table

by Woody

“The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

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A kitchen table, it has long seemed to me, is arguably the most valuable, regardless of monetary worth, piece of furniture in a home.

A fancy hutch, for example, is for displaying things safely out of harm’s way and itself not to be touched; a bed, where dreams are dreamt, is a private retreat out of sight; an heirloom rocking chair soothes mother and child, but is outgrown too soon.

A kitchen table, however, brings families together for years and decades, even lifetimes. It is where the day’s events are touched upon; where dreams are shared, and celebrated when realized; where tears are soothed. At a kitchen table we eat and talk, laugh and play board games, do homework and hobbies, have birthday and holiday parties.

I bet dollars to Sunday morning pancakes if you close your eyes you can see your own kitchen table from childhood, still remember the seating positions of every family member, with memories as warm as fresh-baked cookies.

Author E. A. Bucchianeri wisely observed: “There are times when wisdom cannot be found in the chambers of parliament or the halls of academia, but at the unpretentious setting of the kitchen table.” At the unpretentious kitchen table of my youth I don’t remember dreaming of writing a novel—but at a similar table in my adulthood, many years later, I would one day sit and write one.

Two bolts of inspiration occurred between these bookend tables. Firstly, Chuck Thomas, my late mentor, friend and predecessor in this space, two decades ago planted the seed by encouraging me to write a novel. Intrigued, I did not feel ready.

But the seed had been planted—a black walnut it would prove to be—and was later given water when a reader of my sports columns, someone I did not even know, sent me an out-of-print novel, a novella actually. “The Snow Goose” by Paul Gallico was instantly, and remains, one of my all-time favorite books.

Importantly, the gift-giving reader—shame of me for losing his name—enclosed a letter praising my writing for having the same heart and emotion as “The Snow Goose” and, echoing Chuck, implored me to try my hand as a novelist. Serendipity added this wink: Mr. Gallico was a sports columnist before leaving the press box to write “The Poseidon Adventure” and “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris” among other literary gems.

And so I began thinking about writing a novel. Thinking, only, for a good long while. Until a few years ago when serendipity winked again and I happened to catch an episode of “Antiques Roadshow” featuring a handsome kitchen table that had been in a family for a handful of generations. It proved of only modest value, yet naturally was priceless to its owner.

The very next antique profiled was a handmade basket, two centuries old, and my thoughts transported back to a class on Native Americans I took in college. Specifically, I recalled that when deliberating an important matter they consider the impact the decision would have seven generations into the future.

Ka-Boom! A third lightning bolt. I would write about seven generations of a family that have sat around one kitchen table. Moreover, the Table itself would be a character, hence uppercase T. Too, it would have magical qualities, hence its wood must come from an enchanted Tree.

Fittingly, perfectly really, it was upon my current kitchen table this week that I opened a box filled with my newly published debut novel. Next week, an excerpt from “The Butterfly Tree:An Extraordinary Saga of Seven Generations.”

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            Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

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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.

Monstrous Beauty at Loch Ness

by Woody

Woody’s debut novel “The Butterfly Tree: An Extraordinary Saga of Seven Generations” will be published on March 19 and available at all online stores or ordered at local bookshops.

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Like John Muir’s Scottish boyhood home-turned-museum in Dunbar, “The Writer’s Museum” on the historic Royal Mile in Edinburg was once a three-story residence. Dating to 1622, as Lady Stair’s House, the latter is now dedicated to the lives of three favorite-son wordsmiths: Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, and Robert Louis Stevenson.

Time and again on our recent trip, My Better Half and I crossed paths with this famous literary trio—in parks with their statues, pubs with their portraits, even their footsteps in Edinburgh Castle where the 16th-century “Honours of Scotland” crown jewels are on display. Hidden from enemy forces, and lost, the priceless scepter, sword, and crown were found a hundred years later by Sir Walter Scott.

The Highlands, en route to Loch Ness, are gorgeous.

Mr. Stevenson’s words, meanwhile, can be found engraved on plaques and painted on public walls with commonplaceness throughout Scotland, including this popular quote: “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.”

And yet, with apologies to the author of “Treasure Island,” I found the opposite to be true on our day of treasured travel through the Highlands to Loch Ness. To be honest, I had not expected much; certainly I did not anticipate seeing the famous monster; but I was awed by the ruggedly bucolic scenery and immenseness of the bottomless waters.

Loch Ness is nearly a marathon’s distance long, 23 miles to be precise, and so deep that only two humans, in a diving bell, have reached its bottom. That is 10 fewer people than have walked on the moon and here is an even more jaw-dropping figure: Loch Ness is said to contain more water than all the lakes and rivers in England and Wales combined.

Perhaps most startling of all is the color of the water—black, coal black, black as midnight even in daylight due to peat tannins runoff from surrounding foothills. Underwater you cannot see six inches in front of your nose, our guide Brian noted.

Speaking of water, no sooner had our Loch Ness boat tour begun when Brian informed us that “whisky”—with no “e” in Scotland, he emphasized—means “water of life.” He continued, with a wink and a raised flask: “The more whisky you drink, the better chance you have of seeing Nessie!”

Nessie, of course, is the celebrated Loch Ness Monster. Truth be told, even sober as a saint, for it was barley noon and neither MBH nor I had followed the wee impish Scotsman’s breakfast example from the previous day by adding a splash of “water of life” to our coffee, we did see Nessie…

…on T-shirts, ball caps, refrigerator magnets, tea towels and a thousand more items in the souvenir shop.

Instead of a Brontosaurus-necked tchotchke, my favorite Loch Ness keepsake is a short story Brian, wearing long socks and a kilt, shared in a tartan brogue as thick as his build which was as stout as a refrigerator on which to put a Nessie magnet: “I had an investment banker on my tour, a bigwig successful guy, who scoffed at what a boring job I had giving the same tour day after day.

“So I asked him,” Brian continued. “ ‘Do you go to the same office every day?’

“ ‘Yes, with a corner view, for 35 years,’ he answered, proudly.

“And I said, ‘Well, this is my office…’ ”

Brian spread his arms wide, wide as the wingspan of the bald eagle we saw moments earlier floating on an updraft, then swept a hand across the stunning Highlands landscape.

“ ‘…and it gets redecorated every day.’ ”

Next week: The angel’s share and Titanic tears.

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Woody’s debut novel “The Butterfly Tree: An Extraordinary Saga of Seven Generations” will be published on March 19 and available on Amazon and other online stores or can be ordered at all bookshops.

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.

Travels Begin With a Wee Side Trip

by Woody

“You gonna have a wee splash of whisky in that?”

There was no “e” in “whisky,” but perhaps four in weeee, for the question was posed in Scotland and thus a perfectly normal one even early in the morning.

Indeed, the sun was barely awake, My Better Half not much more so. She had walked to a café near our hotel in Edinburgh, in Old Towne to be specific, for her coffee fix while I was getting my caffeine-like jolt with a run. The query had come from a gentleman, weeee as a garden gnome and seemingly as old as a folktale, so Scottish his skin had a tweed texture and tartan liver spots. He was sitting on a stool at the counter and readily produced a silver hip flask with which he gestured warmly towards MBH. To the libations offer he added a wink that was purely playful, not full of flirtation, and MBH played along, quipping quickly: “Oh, not today, I don’t think…

“…but maybe tomorrow!”

The Scotsman, however, was personally having none not of this waiting until tomorrow business. As MBH shared in her laughing retelling to me: “The whisky on his breath almost made me tipsy.”

A trip, if you loosen the reins, will escort you to wonderful places you had not planned to go. And so it was that our four days in Scotland, followed by ten in Ireland, began with a side trip that was not on our mapped out Scottish itinerary that included Edinburgh Castle, the Highlands and Loch Ness, and historic St. Andrews Golf Course.

“Where’re you from?” the Scotsman with the flask asked in follow up.

“California,” replied MBH.

The Flaskman told her the most famous Californian he knew was John Muir and asked if she was going to go visit his birthplace and boyhood home in Dunbar, a quaint coastal town only half an hour away by train.

We had not planned to do so, an egregious oversight on my part for I always make a point of visiting famous authors’ homes when we travel. Indeed, we have been to Muir’s manor in Northern California, but I had not realized his birthplace was so close at hand. And so it was that on only our second day abroad, our trip took its first serendipitous detour.

Two fifteen-minute walks sandwiched around a relaxing train ride through beautiful countryside brought us to the center of town. Heading towards the North Sea on High Street we passed a towering bronze statue of Muir as a boy, one upraised arm pointing at three gulls in flight just beyond reach, and half a block later arrived at address 128.

The John Muir Birthplace Museum is much larger than I had anticipated, a boxy, three-story white building with eight front windows and a red-tile roof, a grand home in the early 1800s.

Within, we were greeted by a docent with eyes bluer than the clear sky on this day, a sunny smile as well, and an accent thicker than local Cullen skink chowder. The latter made it easy to imagine one was conversing with Muir himself. Upon learning from where we hailed, Mr. Muir-sound-alike noted, “This is the first bookend of his life story,” and proceeded to cheerfully regale us with some early tales.

 That evening, raising a whisky – sans “e” and sans coffee – I toasted our travels ahead with a Muir quote I had seen on display: “The sun shines and the stars, and new beauty meets us at every step in all our wanderings.”

Our wanderings continue next week…

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Woody’s debut novel “The Butterfly Tree: An Extraordinary Saga of Seven Generations” will be published in late March.

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.

Hands of Time Stop, Tears Start

by Woody

The photograph is of two hands, right hands both, one holding the other. More specifically, the hand on top is wrapped around the index and middle fingers of the bottom hand, with the top thumb resting upon – in truth, gently and tirelessly caressing – the metacarpophalangeal knuckles.

Look more closely and you will see that the embraced hand is more aged and that the younger wrist wears two similar bracelets: a sunny yellow “Livestrong” cancer silicon band and a green-and-yellow swirly one.

The joined hands are resting on a red fleece blanket mostly, partially on a blue bedsheet, and if the photo were not cropped so tightly you would see an oxygen breathing tube running across the mattress – and suddenly the yellow bracelet would take on added gravity.

Pop and me…

For 20 years I have worn this Livestrong bracelet in remembrance of friends and family and colleagues, a roll call that has tragically grown far too lengthy, who have died from cancer. The swirly bracelet, meanwhile, is in similar honor of cancer survivors, the green, like spring leaves on a tree, signifying lives still blooming.

Two days ago, on the last day of February if this were not a Leap Year, the bracelet honoring my 97-year-old dad who previously defeated an array of serious skin cancers, and most recently battled bone cancer, switched from green-and-yellow to all yellow. On John Steinbeck’s birthday, just as the Pacific sun was setting on the Channel Islands, a sight my dad dearly loved to watch but for the past few weeks could not, Dr. James Dallas Woodburn II – a formal mouthful of syllables but just “Pop” to me – left our earthly Eden.

The eyes may be windows to the soul – Pop’s were blue and clear until the very end – but it is his hands I wish to focus on here. Those hands had magic in them. I mean that truly. Those hands saved far too many lives to count, and restored the quality of life to endless more, for they were a surgeon’s hands.

During my final visit with my dad…

Amazingly, those hands, quite large and strong, kept their skill and dexterity well into their ninth decade, performing their magic in the Operating Room at Ventura’s Community Memorial Hospital, where he joined the staff in 1972, in mid-career, until three years ago. That’s right, Pop was operating until age 94, albeit in the latter decade only assisting. It may not be a record for surgical longevity, but surely it makes the hall of fame.

Those hands, belonging to the son of a country physician, had the proud joy of performing their magic alongside his two eldest sons, my older brothers, general surgeons both.

“Are Jim and Doug as good as you were?” I asked Pop during our daily evening visits the past few months. With Midwest modesty, for he was born and raised in Ohio, he answered, “You’ll have to ask them,” but his wry smile revealed his true feelings of mastery.

Those hands, as a boy tossed, footballs and baseballs and shot basketballs with his friends and later did so with his three sons.

Those hands, as father of the bride, guided his fourth-and-youngest child down the wedding aisle.

Those hands blessedly held nine grandchildren, “The Grands” he proudly called them, and even more blessedly held “a lucky 13 Greats.”

Those hands did crossword puzzles in a flash, always in ink, up until the final few days when his razor-sharp mind finally became foggy from increased painkillers.

While heinous cancer and toxic chemotherapy, four rounds of three sessions each, a medical torture for a nonagenarian, seemingly stole every ounce sans his skin and bones, those hands amazingly did not become skeletal and knobby. Indeed, caressing the hand in the photo, I marveled at its soft and smooth skin.

Long, long ago on a blind date in college, on a hayride, those hands of a Navy veteran, back home from World War II, bravely held the hand of a beautiful blonde college coed for the first time, and would eventually hold that woman, my mom, through 38 years of marriage before she died three decades ago.

 I like to imagine those hands now gently brushing away the happy tears from the cheeks of my mom upon their reunion.

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Woody’s debut novel “The Butterfly Tree: An Extraordinary Saga of Seven Generations” will be published in late March.

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.

Endings Prequel: Opening Sentences

by Woody

Last week’s column featuring some memorable ending sentences I have “collected” while browsing bookstores brought numerous requests for a bookend prequel of opening lines that really knock me out, to paraphrase Holden Caulfield.

Speaking of Holden, J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” has this all-time great introductory line: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

Speaking of “David Copperfield” by Charles Dickens: “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.” Also, from his “A Christmas Carol”: “Marley was dead, to begin with.”

“The Satanic Verses” by Salman Rushdie: “ ‘To be born again,’ sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, ‘first you have to die.’ ”

Add death, from “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

From “Charlotte’s Web” by E.B. White: “ ‘Where’s Papa going with that axe?’ said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.”

Short but not so sweet. “The Color Purple” by Alice Walker: “You better not never tell nobody but God.” In “Beloved” by Toni Morrison: “124 was spiteful.” And “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury: “It was a pleasure to burn.”

Bookend numbers of note. “The Lord of the Rings” by J.R.R. Tolkien: “When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.” And in “1984” by George Orwell: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

Succinct trio. “I am an invisible man,” from “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison. “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut: “All this happened, more or less.” And “Catch-22” by Joseph Heller: “It was love at first sight.”

Poetically from “The Red Badge of Courage” by Stephen Crane: “The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.”

Speaking of fog, I love this darkly vivid opener from “Fog” by Venturan author Ken McAlpine: “They ran across the sloping deck like marionettes, arms and legs akimbo, and when the waves caught the sailors their arms jerked out, snatching at the night, before they disappeared without a sound.”

Also from the ocean. “Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston: “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.” And from “The Old Man and the Sea” by Ernest Hemingway: “He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.”

“Peter Pan” by J. M. Barrie: “All children, except one, grow up.”

Lastly, the first line of the first book I remember checking out long before I grew up, “Where The Wild Things Are” by Maurice Sendak: “The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another his mother called him ‘WILD THING!’ and Max said ‘I’LL EAT YOU UP!’ so he was sent to bed without eating anything.”

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Woody’s debut novel “The Butterfly Tree: An Extraordinary Saga of Seven Generations” will be published in late March.

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.

Sharing a Collection of Last Lines

by Woody

A while back, while browsing a second-hand bookshop, specifically our local treasure Bank of Books – by the way, is any perfume more lovely than the musty-woodsy-vanilla-fresh-rain scent that wafts up from the open pages of an old book?—I came upon a copy of “Anna Karenina.”

I have long meant to tackle this classic tome by Mr. Tolstoy, long being the operative word for it is pushing 600 pages, and on this encounter I simply read the opening sentence—“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”—and then flipped to the ending: “My life now, my whole life, regardless of all that may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only not meaningless, as it was before, but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in my power to put into it!”

And so began my habit of wandering through bookstores and partaking of the first and last lines, or paragraphs, of novels—ones I have already read and also those I wish to one day do so in full.

Just for fun, and to give myself the day off from writing my own last line for this column, here are some endings I have jotted down in my collection…

From “Where the Wild Things Are,” the first book I remember checking out of the library as a kid, the last page reads: “and it was still hot.”

“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”: “The scar had not pained Harry for 19 years. All was well.”

“The Catcher in the Rye”: “It’s funny. Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”

“A Prayer for Owen Meany”: “Oh God—please give him back! I shall keep asking You.”

“Beloved” concludes powerfully and unforgettably with simply the novel’s title: “Beloved.”

Two more succinct endings are “I’ll pray, and then I’ll sleep” from “Gilead” and “Are there any questions?” from “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

“To Kill a Mockingbird” closes: “He turned out the light and went into Jem’s room. He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.”

“The Great Gatsby” famously ends: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

No title is needed to identify this couplet finale: “For never was a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.”

From “The Road” comes this poetic prose: “In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”

“The Green Mile” ends: “We each owe a death, there are no exceptions, I know that, but sometimes, oh God, the Green Mile is so long.”

Death, the narrator of “The Book Thief,” concludes: “A LAST NOTE FROM YOUR NARRATOR. I am haunted by humans.”

“Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”: “I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.”

“The Sun Also Rises”: “ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’ ”

“The Grapes of Wrath” closes with this indelible image: “She looked up across the barn, and her lips came together and smiled mysteriously.”

“Travels with Charley”: “And that’s how the traveler came home again.”

And in “brown girl dreaming” Jacqueline Woodson ends with this verse: “gather into one world / called You / where You decide / what each world / each story / and each ending / will finally be.”

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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.

Friendships Reign in the Rain

by Woody

The harder the recent rains fell, the greater became the flood of phone calls and voicemails and text messages from friends, far and farther, asking how I was doing on account of our coastal paradise making the national news.

I bet you had friends do likewise—or maybe you were one.

The atmospheric river may have been Man Bites Dog worthy news, but friends checking in on friends is as common as Dog Wags Tail. And yet such acts of friendship, and family-ship too, are worth acknowledging—no, worth celebrating!—and not taking for granted.

A week ago in this space I chronicled how a Good Samaritan took 20 minutes out of her day, and drove quite a few miles out of her way, to personally deliver a package that had mistakenly landed in her mailbox.

If a kind stranger will go to such lengths, one can only imagine the distances our friends and loved ones will travel. I didn’t have to imagine the other day when, as the deluge hit full force, I received the following text from a relatively new friend, but already a dear one for some friendships are as fast and hearty as instant oatmeal, who lives in Northern California:

“Hey Pal, just checkin’ in to see if you’re ok. I’m just hearing and reading horrific stuff, and they start talking about Montecito, SB, and Ventura. I think the worst is over for us up here, but if there’s anything I can do, it’s only a four-hour drive. There’s nothing on my plate that can’t be postponed. Let me know. Stay dry, my friend – dj”

Only a four-hour drive! That, in a nutshell, is friendship, where distance and time are no obstacles. As Abdu’l-Bahá eloquently put it: “Where there is love, nothing is too much trouble, and there is always time.”

This quote often makes me think of my friend Scott and his now-grown son, Justin. A ballpark figure for how many youth baseball games Justin played in is 1,500, but father and son can both tell you the exact the number Scott missed: three—two of them because of emergency surgery.

Another sporting example of love being blind to trouble and always finding time is my longtime, and now long-distance, friend Randy who checked in on me from New York during the heavy rainstorm. In turn, I asked how his son Charlie’s tennis season at Merrimack College is going.

In a word, and befitting rising floodwaters, swimmingly! As a junior, Charlie is a team co-captain playing No. 1 doubles and No. 3 singles. And here’s the Abdu’l-Bahá-like best part of the update: Randy and his wife Debby, despite an eight-hour roundtrip drive to home matches, have attended 80 percent of them, plus most road contests too.

One final vignette of love and friendship, which are one and the same, ignoring distance. Not long ago, my college buddy Mikey was in Italy, in the coastal paradise of Sorrento, in a marketplace alleyway where he saw a man sitting with a typewriter. Knowing my affection for QWERTY machines, Mikey investigated, learned Paolo Grasso was a street poet for hire and requested one honoring my 20-year consecutive day running streak.

Titled “The Runner,” the custom creation is typed in Italian on one side, translated into English on the other, and is lovely. Even lovelier, however, is that Mikey thought of me some 6,000 miles away.

The poem includes this beautiful stanza: “This continuous running / towards a goal / makes the moment precious.”

Friends, shine or rain, make the moment precious as well.

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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.

Two Stories of Delivered Kindness

by Woody

The scene seemed so perfectly choreographed as to belong on a movie screen, not on a real city street.

A teenager, male and perhaps pushing age 20, was pedaling a bike while being pursued at a dead sprint by a young boy, no older than seven or eight, who in turn was being chased—flip-flop, flip-flop, flip-flop—by a woman in sandals.

A bicycle theft in progress was my first reaction, but in a flash I realized the bike was far too big to be the boy’s. No, the teenager must have stolen something else belonging to the boy, who surely belonged to the woman for she was calling out a name as a loving mother would. The boy, meanwhile, kept running and kept yelling “stop! Stop! STOP!”

Surprisingly, the thief hit the breaks and turned around…

…and turned out not to be a thief at all. Rather, he had dropped his hair pick and the boy had picked it up and raced him down to return it. I wish you could have seen the tall teen’s warm smile and the small boy’s big grin, and mine as well for having witnessed this feel-good deed.

Another good-hearted stranger gave me a broad smile the other day, except this time I was on the receiving end of the kindness. This tale begins with me sending a Priority Mail package to a dear friend. Alas, the advance copy of my soon-to-be-released novel “The Butterfly Tree” (more on this in a few weeks) flitted into the wrong mailbox.

Marcela Pearson, the unintended recipient, initially considered writing “Wrong address / Return to sender” on the front but instead decided to take matters into her own hands and fingers with a Google search.

“The picture of the typewriter on the return address label was a clue and it matched the graphics on your website,” Marcela explained as to how she found my email address and surmised I was the right Woody Woodburn to contact. She further asked for the correct mailing address so she could personally drop off the package.

I assumed my Good Samaritan would merely have to walk a few houses up or down her street, but this proved to greatly underestimate how far the mailing had missed its mark.

“Dear Woody, I just dropped off your package,” Marcela emailed me later the same day, and like an Amazon delivery driver even attached a digital photo of the parcel on the “Welcome” mat. “It was only 10 minutes from where I live, so no big deal. I guess (1234 Something Drive) somehow morphed into (234 Different Avenue). Have an awesome day, Marcela.”

No big deal? Far from it. It was an eight-mile round-trip out of her way, and 20-minute out of her day, big deal.

After I thanked her most sincerely, yet still inadequately, Marcela replied: “I am super happy I was able to help. It is really no big deal to drive 10 minutes to a very nice neighborhood; go to a place I have not seen yet. Sounds good to me. Life is about exploring.”

Her note concluded: “Just last week I met some really good people in Colorado. Finding good people sometimes feels like looking for a needle in a haystack—but they live and I keep searching.”

On the topic of good people, Coach John Wooden liked to say, “You can’t live a perfect day until you do something for someone who will never be able to repay you.”

In my book, Marcela and the bike-chasing young boy each recently lived a perfect day.

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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.

Tears and Smiles Share Same Date

by Woody

Today’s calendar page, January 26, plays Ping Pong with my emotions—tears doink-plunk! smile doink-plunk! heartbreak doink–plunk! joy.

Indeed, this date, more than any other of the year, in my family holds a story seemingly written in the stars and typed by the fingers of Fate. Coincidence alone seems overmatched in explaining it.

Coincidence, defined as “the occurrence of events that happen at the same time by accident but seem to have some connection,” is my sharing a birth date with my wife’s grandfather or my son and my daughter’s youngest daughter sharing their birthday. The odds are only 1-in-366 against these horoscopic connections.

Coincidence, mixed with healing serendipity, was my first grandchild being born on the one-year anniversary of the night, nearly the very hour, that the Thomas Fire razed my childhood home. For my father especially, who had still lived in the house, a date of gloom was turned into one of bloom in celebrating the birth of his newest great-granddaughter.

Multiple memorable events and coincidental anniversaries happen every day of the year, of course, which is why The Star and most newspapers run daily “On This Date In History” summaries. A January 26th coincidence, for example, is Michigan becoming a state (1837), Louisiana seceding from the Union (1861), and Virginia rejoining the Union (1870).

January 26, however, has surpassed coincidence for my loved ones and me.

Shuffling the chronological order, let me begin with “On This Date” in 2003 when a drunk driver speeding down a city street at 70 mph rear-ended me as I was stopped at a red light. My life, fast as a finger snap, was forever changed as I suffered a ruptured disc in my neck causing permanent nerve damage in my left arm, hand and fingers.

Still, it was not fully a tragedy. Fate, after cruelly cursing me, then smiled sympathetically and let me somehow walk away from a hunk of twisted steel and shattered glass that had seconds earlier been a Honda Civic. Indeed, two police officers at the scene told me they could not believe I survived.

The 26th of January 2015 offered no such blessed fortune for one of my daughter’s dearest friends. In India for a wedding, Celiné and her younger brother were passengers in a taxi when it was broadsided by a city bus. The brother walked away, the big sister did not, her 26-year-old life extinguished in a blink’s instant.

Two crashes on the same date can be brushed off as tearful coincidence. But there are three smiles, too. On January 26, five years before my car crash, my lovely niece Arianna was born; ten years ago, exactly one year before Celiné’s deathly accident, my daughter met her husband; and five years ago, another January 26th love story, when Holly, a college roommate and third “sister” with my daughter and Celiné, received a marriage proposal.

Holly’s fiancé, now her husband for she enthusiastically said “yes!” when he got down on bended knee, says he did not purposely choose the date for its significance in an effort to magically metamorphose an anniversary of sorrow into one with a measure of joy.

And yet it is possible that Justin’s subconscious helped guide him to the fateful date. Or, perhaps, January 26 magically chose the couple that is now a happy family of three.

I like to think the latter. As Mr. Hemingway wrote in the closing line of dialogue in his novel “The Sun Also Rises,” spoken in—oh, Celiné—a taxi:

“ ‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’ ”

Yes, it is.

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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.

Two Love Stories Sweet as Jelly

by Woody

February is just around the corner, and with it Valentine’s Day, which made me think of “The Shop Around the Corner,” the 1940 romantic comedy starring Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan, which of course brought to mind “You’ve Got Mail,” the 1998 remake with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, which also reminded me of meet cutes.

Like baseball cards in my boyhood, I now collect stories from couples of how they met. Here are two recent additions, the first prompted when my friend Wayne Kempton mentioned he and his bride were going to celebrate their wedding anniversary with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

PB&J? Not caviar and lobster and local strawberries dipped in gourmet chocolate? There had to be a story, and a good one, so I asked and Wayne answered thusly…

“Shari and I eloped with a deep love, but very little earthly wealth. We had her ’59 Mercury convertible, one suitcase and two tennis rackets. And very little money. So, we economized en route, buying a loaf a bread, a jar of peanut butter and some cheese puffs that served as meals—many picnics, actually—on our way from Iowa to California.

“Each year since, we have celebrated August 29th with a feast of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and cheese puffs. And champagne—we were not only broke, but also too young for wine then!”

Instead of in a bookstore around the corner, they had met in a grocery store where they both worked.

“It was in September 1966,” Wayne says, reaching back. “We were beginning our senior year, and I was the new guy at school. We became high school sweethearts and got engaged a year later on our first day of college. Our plan was to get married after finishing college, but we eloped a year later. We eloped because both sets of parents were dead set against us even seeing each other.”

Their parents proved as wrong as pickles on a PB&J sandwich, for Wayne and Shari have now gone through, at 26 slices in an typical loaf of bread, more than four loaves and quite a few jars of jelly and peanut butter with 55 anniversary feasts to date.

Earlier this month my friend Rick Estberg shared his own “Shop Around the Corner” love story in screenplay form…

“On this exact date, 44 years ago, a young man sat next to a young woman in a very attractive green dress. It was their first day on new jobs at their Agency. Soon they dated. And then they became lovers. And eventually they got married. For years they would joke about that accidental first meeting and the dress, which perhaps magically brought them together on Day One.

“About 40 years later the young woman, now not so young anymore, grew very ill. The young man, now not so young anymore, was beside himself, being unable to make things right again.

“Then, a year ago, the old woman died. And the old man cried himself to sleep. That night he had a dream. A dream about a wonderful and lovely young woman in a very attractive green dress. And for as long as that dream lasted the old man was happy once again, reveling in the magic that she brought to him. And the world. Which leads to the following mythical exchange:

“ ‘I don’t believe in magic,’ said a young man one day, very self-assuredly.

“The old man, with a small tear in his eye, replied thoughtfully, ‘Ah, but you will one day—when you finally meet her.’ ”

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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.