Memories 2

This little endeavor of posting memories via photos isn't necessarily going to be neat or horribly organized or chronological. It will be kind of like Quantum Leap, you know, that TV show where a scientist goes from place to place within his own lifetime. His job is to help make history better. I really don't have a job here, just memorializing my and other lives. So here is the next in the series. Hopefully I won't exhaust myself with going through and scanning the photographs and give up this little project, along with the other I have been doing sporadically, posting some of my late father's short short stories. These two things alone could keep me busy for the rest of my life, and yep I do get distracted. So, we shall see. 

Today, I shall begin with cats. I have had a large number of them in my life. Here are two of them, Hollywood, and Trouble. Hollywood is the one whose face is being pushed by Trouble in the upper left. Trouble is the one on the window and the stool. Hollywood is the one on the piano bench. I got Hollywood shortly after I moved to Los Angeles in 1981. I had a bed I got at Ortho I think for 200 bucks. I had a small TV. I had my upright piano shipped from New York, which my parents bought in 1963. My uncle Steve had loaned me some motley furniture from his garage, a child's desk on which I studied for the California Bar, and a faux leopard chair that had rollers on it which I enjoyed on the bare in need of repair wood floors before I covered them with rugs. What I really needed was a cat! So off I went with another secretary at the law office I was working at (I worked as a secretary/paralegal until I passed the Bar in California) to Torrance to look at a litter of kittens. Hollywood was the one that climbed up my leg and so it was love immediately. He lived 18 years until 1999. Trouble came in 1989, appearing at my apartment door. I put up flyers to see if anyone owed her as she did have a flea collar, but no one came forward. She was with me until 2008. The two of them looked like siblings but they were not.

Above. My friend Carol at various moments in our friendship including her engagement to her now long time husband.  No doubt there will be more of her on these pages. The top left is Carol in Utah. The other photos are of her beloved Rosebud, a Springer Spaniel. The last two are of our mini trip to Coronado, sometime in the 1990s.

A variety. Photos of my college friend Len, my father, me (one in a kind of Piaf pose no?), and my Aunt Mary.

Gatherings also I think in the early 1990s with various Church friends and acquaintances and my late pastor. Several, Ken, Fr. Heany, Bill McKenna, Patrick Elliot (who became a priest), Daniel Donahue, Bill Parnassus, Gloria Haley Parnassus, Marie Whalen are long gone from our midst. A couple are still around, Donald and Pierre, and Fr. John.

Above, my brief enchantment with sailing. This was a day at Mission Bay with my friend Karen. After that I took lessons for a while down in Long Beach on a 12 or 14 footer without a keel. I learned to tie knots (can't remember one). I took my turn at the tiller. The other student who took his turn capsized us in Mother's Bay. I lost my shoes and my beeper. I was pulled into a motorboat, which by the way, is quite an undignified operation. I drove home without shoes, beeper or a change of clothes. The end of my sailing career, although later I did get a nice ride, with Karen, on a bigger version, that did have a keel, and when it heeled your butt nearly touched the water.