Tag Archives: benches

Pier Bench Is My New Favorite

by Woody

Woody’s award-winning novel “The Butterfly Tree” is available at Amazon (click here), other online retailers, and orderable at all bookshops.

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Continuing the benches theme from the past few weeks, here is a column from my archives from four years ago…

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Do you have a favorite bench?

If so, as I reckon you do, where is it? A short walk from work where you escape for coffee breaks? In a park, perhaps, under a lovely shade tree in the company of songbirds? Or maybe in a cemetery where a bench becomes an outdoor pew?

I had a favorite bench in college, on the edge of campus at the University of California Santa Barbara, high on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Its wooden seat slats sagged a little from age and were a lot weathered by the salty sea air, but the view was anything but threadbare. Indeed, it was a beautiful spot to contemplate a poor test; brood a dating breakup; or simply rest and savor the panoramic scene after a run on the beach below.

Coincidentally, I found a bookend favorite bench on another college campus many years later. Specifically, the University of Southern California’s Founders Park which boasts one specific tree from all 50 states. In this idyllic setting, sitting on a shaded wrought-iron bench on a near weekly basis for nine years – my daughter’s and son’s four-year undergraduate enrollments overlapped one year, plus the latter’s two years of MBA study – I would wait with happy anticipation for classes to get out so we could have lunch together.

Now I have a new favorite bench, one of 49 skirting the historic Ventura Pier. This one is perhaps a third of the way out, on the right-hand side, and affords a spectacular north-facing view towards Surfers Point. Importantly, it has a brass plaque on the top wooden back slat dedicated to: Larry “Coach” Baratte.

Along with two of his “How To Live Rules” – Each Day Is A Blessing and Give Of Yourself And You Will Receive Ten Times In Return – the plaque features a compass rose. The latter is truly fitting because Larry was a human North Star for countless people before brain cancer, after a long war, claimed his precious life at age 60 on May 14, 2020.

The memorial bench was a gift this past Christmas from Larry’s widow, Beth, to their three adult sons, Chase, Collin, and Cole. Making it all the more special is that Larry and Beth talked about it before he passed.

Sitting on “Larry’s Bench” quiets my soul. As the timbers below shudder pleasantly in rhythm with the waves, I like to watch the world spin by. I watch beach runners on shore and dog walkers on the promenade and fishermen further down the pier.

And, of course, I watch the surfers. I watch them straddling their boards, waiting, waiting, rising and dipping as if sitting on an aquatic merry-go-round, then doing their water-walking magic.

Too, I imagine Larry in the distance, in the cove, in the curl of a wave riding a surfboard. Better yet, I see him directly below, swimming around the pier for a workout. Best of all, I feel him sitting next to me, sharing his wisdom and his laugh and his friendship.

Inspired by the myriad of pencils visitors continually place in homage on Henry David Thoreau’s gravestone in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Mass., on my most recent visit to “Larry’s Bench” I left behind a coach’s whistle hanging by its lanyard. Maybe this small gesture, or perhaps swim goggles, will catch on. It is pretty to wish so.

Pretty, certainly, is the view. Indeed, “Larry’s Bench” is a most lovely place to take a break from the world’s hustle and bustle and reflect on why “Each Day Is A Blessing.”

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

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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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.

Epilogue: New Free Book Bench

by Woody

Woody’s award-winning novel “The Butterfly Tree” is available at Amazon (click here), other online retailers, and orderable at all bookshops.

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Let me begin by borrowing the signature phrase of the late, great radio broadcaster Paul Harvey, “And now the rest of the story…”

Two weeks past in this space I shared the tale of a unique bench I happened upon while out for a run on a woodchip path in Redondo Beach. Situated in the shade of trees, with the salty perfume of the nearby ocean in the air, what made this bench special was that three mornings in a row I found a single book, different each day, resting on the wooden slat seat and bearing a Post-It Note reading: “Free! Good Book. Enjoy Me!”

The first two offerings – “Tuesdays With Morrie” and “Angela’s Ashes,” good books indeed – I had already read. The third book, on the final day of my visit, “The Old Man by the Sea” by Domenico Starnone – not to be confused with Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” – was new to me so I took it.

I also took away something else: inspiration to leave a free book on a bench for someone to take and enjoy.

And I knew the perfect bench.

It is about a mile, as the crow flies, from my front door and indeed has crows – and hawks and hummingbirds, osprey and owls, gulls and geese, on and on, even an occasional golden eagle – flying overhead, for the bench is in Ventura’s Harmon Canyon Preserve.

More specifically, this bench is a five-minute stroll from the preserve’s Foothill Road entrance, a relatively flat walk on a dirt pathway wide enough for hikers and trail runners and mountain cyclists. Tucked around a bend, and northwestward facing, it is an idyllic spot to sit and watch the sun set behind the foothills. Directly behind the bench is a sycamore tree, too young now to provide shade, but one day, Nature willing, it will grow into a Joyce Kilmer poem and afford a canopy of coolness to those who find respite here.

All of which is to say this is a most lovely bench, as it must be, for it is a memorial for a most lovely person, Suz Montgomery, who five years ago at age 73 succumbed to cancer after a lengthy courageous battle.

Not long ago, after a long fundraising effort, Suz’s Bench became a reality and a dedication ceremony was held with nearly a hundred family members and friends – Suz had a magical gift of making the latter feel like the former – gathering during a sunset that was so gorgeous it made you think Suz was somehow responsible, once more making those who loved her smile.

Suz’s Bench has become one of my favorite sanctums, a place to escape the busyness of life, a place to savor fresh air and postcard scenery and listen to avian symphonies and watch birds float on updrafts like feather kites and, of course, a tranquil place to read.

Inspired by the free book bench on the woodchip running path in Redondo Beach, I have started leaving books now and again on Suz’s Bench, one at a time, each with a Post-It Note: “Free! Take Me! Enjoy!” Because my dear friend died before my debut novel “The Butterfly Tree” was published, it was my wistful first offering.

I hope the recipients have enjoyed these token tomes and that other hikers follow in kind in giving so this becomes the littlest of Little Free Libraries – Suz’s Free Book Bench – because I think she would have liked that.

“And now you know,” as Paul Harvey would conclude, “the rest of the story.”

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

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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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.

Sauntering and Buddy Benches, too

by Woody

I have another bench I adore.

As shared here once before, I “collect” benches, storing them in my mind and heart, dating back to a salty-sea-air-weathered wooden bench, high on a bluff with a postcard-worthy panoramic view of the Pacific Ocean, that I made frequent contemplative use of as a student at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The sitting assemblage includes a steel bench in San Francisco with a look at The Golden Gate Bridge and another of wood tucked away in a secret cove in Kona, Hawaii, where I watched surfers at play; a green-painted cement bench with a plaque reading “The Drake Seat” at Vista Point on Saint Thomas Island, U.S. Virgin Islands, where Sir Francis Drake is said to have looked down for enemy ships of the Spanish fleet far below; a memorial bench on the Ventura Pier with a nameplate honoring Larry “Coach” Baratte; and a hundred more gems, near and far, where I have sat alone enjoying a quiet moment.

My friend “Larry’s” memorial bench on the Ventura Pier.

The new bench I have fallen in love with is one I have not experienced in person, but rather saw in a news story. Painted rainbow colors, it graces an elementary playground and has been christened the “Buddy Bench” and here is why: if a child is lonely at recess, he or she sits on it and waits and the other schoolchildren know to come offer an invitation to join them in play.

This simple idea fosters kindness and friendship so well that Buddy Benches are spreading far and wide at pre- and elementary schools, and public playgrounds as well.

Perhaps Buddy Benches for teens and adults would be a good idea, too.

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Speaking of upbeat stories, or “good little news” as reader of this space Judee Hauer calls them, she shared this with me in an email: “Every day we see, hear, sense bad news, but also the little blessings, chirps, colors of how good life is.

Example of one of my new favorite benches.

“So we need to celebrate the elderly person seen burying a fallen sparrow, digging the small hole with a found branch, covering and talking to the dead creature, marking the spot with a broken piece of asphalt; the house at the corner where somebody has set up two pink plastic chairs at a small table overflowing with 75 mini-animals, inviting a childlike response; smiling eyes under a mask at the doctor’s office; a you-have-the-right-of-way wave…

“There is good right here, right now, all over the place.”

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Coming full circle to column’s beginning, the gorgeous hiking trails in Ventura’s Harmon Canyon Preserve are dotted with a good many lovely benches, and by coincidence – or serendipity – on Earth Day last weekend I came across this quote from John Muir:

“Hiking. I don’t like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains – not hike! Do you know the origin of that word ‘saunter’? It’s a beautiful word. Away back in the Middle Ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going, they would reply, ‘A la sainte terre,’ ‘To the Holy Land.’ And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not ‘hike’ through them.”

In this hectic, busy, go-go-go world, maybe we all need to remind ourselves to slow down and saunter through our daily lives a little more often – and ask someone sitting on a Buddy Bench if they want to join us.

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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.