Tag Archives: California

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.

X Marks The Spot of Paradise

by Woody

The thorn in the Rose Bowl – parade and football game – is that the weather on New Year’s Day is invariably picture-postcard perfect, so sunny and warm it entices waves of people watching the telecasts in their Midwest igloos to pack up like “The Beverly Hillbillies” and move to Southern California.

Similarly, the downside of Ventura hosting the X Games last weekend is that the TV coverage with our gorgeous ocean backdrop and pastel sunsets that seemed painted by Monet were the equivalent of a skywriter spelling out: “Hey, world! Move here! The 805 is paradise!”

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Speaking of the X Games, the “Moto X Best Whip” competition – basically daredevil astronauts on motorcycles launching themselves into orbit off a giant ramp and doing dizzying spins and twists, and even front or back flips, before safe reentry back down on earth – makes Evel Knievel’s “death defying” jumps in the 1970s look like a kid riding a tricycle off a curb.

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Pulling into my driveway the other day, on four wheels not on an acrobatic motocross bike, it struck me that the instant gratification of today’s music platforms offering most every song on command have stolen the magic of hearing a favorite tune that makes you stay in the car after arriving at your destination and listening to the end.

Now you can just go inside and simply say, “Play it again, Sam/Siri/Alexa/etc.”

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Now in my 60s, but age 6 at heart, I still get a small thrill and a big smile when I’m out on a run near railroad tracks and a train comes rumbling along and I pump my fist up and down in the universal “honk!” gesture and the engineer, bless his soul, blows his LOUD! horn.

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I like the challenge of scraping, scraping, scraping an empty jar of peanut butter to get enough for one last sandwich. Even more, I love being the first to dig into a brand-new jar – and hate it when doing the former means someone beats me to the latter.

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Add gooey silliness. My wife and I have an unspoken challenge where we squeeze, squeeze, squeeze the life out of a tube of toothpaste in order not to be the one who opens a new one. For the record, I’m usually more stubborn.

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A note from a reader regarding my unromantic wedding proposal that I shared a short while back gave me a laugh. My recap…

College Girlfriend: “I’ll go wherever you go after graduation.”

Me: “I guess we might as well just get married then.”

She (Now-Wife-of-40-Years): “Okay!”

Wayne Saddler confesses he, too, popped his “inglorious proposal” in unacceptable “Jeopardy!” fashion of not being in the form of a question: “Well, I guess we should get married.”

To which his girlfriend responded: “Let’s do this right – go ask my father for permission.”

“I was nervous during my 45-minute drive to her parent’s home,” Wayne continued. “When I asked him he responded, ‘You’re asking the wrong person.’ That was almost 47 years ago.”

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Lastly, and bestly (not a word, but should be), thanks in no small part to so many of you dear and generous readers, Erick Aleman, a track and cross country athlete at Rio Mesa High School, will be getting a state-of-the-art $15,000 “blade” prosthetic and promises to be running faster than ever with it by summer’s end.

As Erick’s coach Garrett Reynolds relayed to me to relay to you: “A massive THANK YOU. Erick and I are at a loss of words for how grateful we are for everyone’s support.”

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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.

Part 2: Twain and Muir’s Meeting

by Woody

Part 2: Twain and Muir’s Meeting

Except for a story believed to be apocryphal, Mark Twain and John Muir, separated by only three years in age, never met. The two famous writers did, however, cross paths astrologically on April 21 – Muir born on the date in 1838 and Twain dying on it in 1910.

Following is Part 2 of how I imagine their conversation, using their own written words, might have gone had they shared a campfire in Yosemite.

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Muir: “A slight sprinkle of rain – large drops far apart, falling with hearty pat and plash on leaves and stones and into the mouths of the flowers.”

Twain: “A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.”

Muir, laughing: “Wash your spirit clean. Keep close to Nature’s heart – and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Between every two pine trees there is a door leading to a new way of life.”

Twain: “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”

Muir: “As age comes on, one source of enjoyment after another is closed, but nature’s sources never fail.”

Twain: “Lord save us all from old age and broken health and a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms. I was young and foolish then; now I am old and foolisher.”

Muir: “Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away.”

Twain: “If all the fools in this world should die, lordly God how lonely I should be.”

Muir: “Most people are on the world, not in it. In every walk with Nature one receives far more than he seeks.”

Twain: “There is no use in your walking five miles to fish when you can depend on being just as unsuccessful near home.”

Muir: “I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.”

Twain: “Now, the true charm of pedestrianism does not lie in the walking, or in the scenery, but in the talking. The walking is good to time the movement of the tongue by, and to keep the blood and the brain stirred up and active; the scenery and the woodsy smells are good to bear in upon a man an unconscious and unobtrusive charm and solace to eye and soul and sense; but the supreme pleasure comes from the talk. It is no matter whether one talks wisdom or nonsense, the case is the same, the bulk of the enjoyment lies in the wagging of the gladsome jaw and the flapping of the sympathetic ear.”

Muir: “Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.”

Twain: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”

Muir: “Going to the mountains is going home.”

Twain: “There is nothing more satisfying than that sense of being completely ‘at home’ in your own skin.”

Muir: “The mountains are calling and I must go.”

Twain: “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

Muir: “The world is big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.”

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   Woody Woodburn 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 books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Check out my memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and my essay collection “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” …

Thomas Fire Lesson A Year After

by Woody

Is your Club or Group looking for an inspiring guest speaker or do you want to host a book signing? . . . Contact Woody today!

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Lesson from Thomas Fire a Year After

It was bound to happen, sooner or later.

Had it been a year sooner, however, I believe I would have been far more upset – both at the loss and at myself for being responsible. Such is one tiny token given by the heinous Thomas Fire that – like California’s recent tragic wildfires – took so very much, from so many, a year ago come this Tuesday.

First, the backstory. For Mother’s Day a handful of years past, my daughter and son came upon the lovely idea of giving their mom four ceramic bowls – each unique in bright colors and design, one for each family member.

Because my wife is half-Italian, on her mother’s side, it was decided it would add meaning to honor this heritage with hand-painted Italian bowls.

Upon finding some imported dishes we favored, it was decided – by me – to get only one. This was because a single bowl cost about as much as airfare to Tuscany where one could meet the artisan and buy his or her pottery wares in person.

Before May even turned to June, the bowl suffered a chip beyond use. Mea culpa – rather, in Italian: colpa mia. Had I known any Italian swear words, I would have used them all. I made do with a few in English.

Prudently, a month thereafter the expensive bowl was replaced with a beautiful locally crafted bowl purchased at the annual Ventura ArtWalk. The bargain was extended with three more bowls to give us a full family table setting.

My wife was perfectly pleased and yet I still felt a need to replace the Italian-made bowl. A few months thereafter, for her birthday, I did. Perhaps it should be no surprise, however, that it went largely unused. We were all afraid of breaking it, most especially me.

Indeed, to eat salad or soup or pasta, or cereal or oatmeal or ice cream, from it seemed a little like hanging an original Picasso sketch on the refrigerator door with magnets. The new Italian bowl belonged safely inside a frame, so to speak, on display in a dining room hutch.

The dining room hutch in my boyhood home was filled with expensive bowls and more. It is where my late mom kept her good china and beloved blue-and-white Wedgewood plates. All were all destroyed when the Thomas Fire razed the house where my dad still lived.

Amid the heart-rending ruins, if one examined closely enough with rose-colored glasses, there was a sliver of a silver lining to be found: at least the good china and Wedgewood had been frequently used.

“A long life may not be good enough,” Benjamin Franklin noted, “but a good life is long enough.” My mom believed the same was true for nice things. She thought her good silver and china should be used and enjoyed regularly, not cautiously saved for special occasions. She considered every day a special occasion.

In the dark aftermath of the Thomas Fire, I decided to start using our Italian bowl daily. For safety’s sake, I never put it in the dishwasher but instead hand-washed it.

Perhaps the dishwasher would have been safer. The other day, a combination of soapy suds and carelessness caused it to slip from my grasp. It fell all of a couple inches before striking the sink, but that was still too far. It shattered like Humpty Dumpty after his great fall.

To be honest, my initial reaction was stubbing-one’s-big-toe-like anguish. Yet, quick as a finger snap, Zen calmness washed over me. People matter, things don’t – that important lesson from the Thomas Fire is an enduring gift.

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.

Wooden & Me Kickstarter Front PhotoCheck out my memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and my essay collection “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” …