I’d spent hours mapping out a route that would take me to all the places I hoped to visit but once in the car, the map was inaccessible and we were at the mercy of Zombie Steve Jobs. Mapped route gone, I picked stops one by one, hoping I was remembering them in the right order.
And that’s how I wound up in Oakland and the site of Heinold’s First and Last Chance Saloon at 9 a.m. on a Sunday morning.
Heinold’s is a really small bar located at the edge of Jack London Square a short walk from the San Francisco Bay Ferry terminal. They’ve been around for 140 years, the slanted floor a reminder of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. It was there that Jack London once bought a boat and became an oyster pirate.
As long as I can remember, there’s been a Jack London thread running through my life. When I was very little, someone gave me some sort of abridged kid version of Call of The Wild. We made regular trips to Jack London State Park in Glen Ellen when we visited relatives in Napa. I don’t remember if the book or the first visit to the park came first. They’ve just always been.
When you go inside Heinold’s, it’s dark and small and the floor really, really does slant though, strangely, the bar top was level. Everything about it is incongruous with its location. It’s like someone dropped a large container of History Lesson/Time Machine next to a farmer’s market.
Back in the car, at the mercy of a maps app that clearly wanted me to go in circles all day, I headed north, but the wrong north so I ended up crossing the Golden Gate Bridge twice to get back on track to Glen Ellen. Looking at the map now, I can’t tell you for sure how I got there, just that the late summer had turned most everything shades of California tan.
I was stepping into an old photo album, one put away long ago. Everything felt familiar, but different. Everything in sepia tone.
The park was not as I remembered it. I remember as a kid climbing on a rock wall and balancing along the top, skipping under shady trees. What I found instead was hot.
I unwound myself from the car and headed up the path to the House of Happy Walls, the stone house where Jack London’s widow lived after his death in 1916. I don’t remember ever hearing stories about Charmian Kittredge London when I was little and, honestly, I doubt they were told then. The house and the museum it holds now are her love letter to Jack. After his death, she traveled widely, promoting his writing and securing translations of his works around the world. Everyone could do with a Charmian in their life: someone who loves them deeply and is exuberant in their support while retaining every bit of their own individuality.
I bought too many books in the gift shop, most of them written by Charmian.
Back in the car, down the hill and into Sonoma. My maternal grandparents both owned small grocery stores in Sonoma when my mom was very little, my grandmother’s just off the Plaza, and my grandfather’s a little farther out. It’s still there, now named the Broadway Market.
Somehow, in nearly 50 years of holiday and summer visits to wine country, I had never been inside the store. What better time than when I’m tired, hot, and haven’t really eaten in recent memory.
I took pictures of the outside and the inside and my mom tells me it looks much the same, though it’s more of a convenience store now. Where there once was a butcher’s counter, they now make sandwiches that have won awards for best deli sandwich in the valley for the last three years.
As soon as I opened the door, it was like being hit by a bus. It was like every family ghost showed up there to greet me. I was not prepared.
***
I was five when my grandfather died. I remember him as a wiry, bald man in a plaid shirt who played hand after hand of solitaire on the screen porch at the house in the desert. He was the first to tease you and the first to smile so you knew he was just teasing. He had a cabinet full of old, rusty tools and coffee cans full of nails. He would go every morning down to the cafe to get his newspaper and drink coffee at the counter with the regulars. When I retire, I will be exactly like him.
Before he was my grandpa, he was a truck driver and a WWI vet. In the 1940s and ’50s, he was a grocer. He met my grandmother when she was working in a diner in Long Beach and he would stop in for a piece of pie. My Aunt Vivian was brought into the family when he stepped in to shut her abusive husband down. He didn’t dance, but he’d take my grandma to all the dances because she liked to. Every woman in his world was royalty.
And there I stood in his store. The tears were immediate, followed quickly by the embarrassment of being the crazy crying woman in the convenience store.
“This is because it’s too hot out,” I think. “This is because I’m tired,” I think. “This is because I forgot how to feed myself at regular intervals,” I think and order a sandwich from the deli counter, wiping tears away with the heel of my hand like a toddler.
The lady at the register asks me if I’m okay and I answer with something along the lines of “I feel like I saw a ghost. Do you sell t-shirts with your logo on them?”
I take my sandwich (that weighs as much as a small child) and my soda, get in the car, turn the wrong way and take about four miles to go one mile to the Sonoma Plaza. Two times around the square to find a parking space that will accommodate the mile-wide doors on my racecar.
I found a little spot next to some sort of monument. It’s one of those monuments that’s something you’re just supposed to know about, so there’s no plaque or signage to tell me, an expat Californian, what it might be.
The sandwich is full of olives. I sit there, looking at this monument in this circle of shrubbery and I think about people I’m missing and about all the years we would come north into wine country for holidays and anniversaries and how we used to watch the hot air balloons land in the field across from my aunt and uncle’s house, a house my grandfather helped build. And I cry because there are too many people from that time that are gone and too many others I doubt I’ll ever see again. The passage of time feels heavy and here I am, crying in this park with this sandwich full of olives and now there are ants all over the place and two men on the other side of the circle are looking at me like I clearly don’t belong here and, really, I don’t. I’ve been gone too long.
I head back to the car, but a storefront catches my eye and I go into this little kitschy candle-and-tea-towel store that I’m sure used to be a hardware store a dozen lifetimes ago. I buy a candle with a sticker labeling the scent “Sonoma” and somehow, the lady at the register clocks me as a local and complains to me about the tourists who have crowded the town for most of the summer and will be here through the fall wine tour season.
The car has become a safe place by this point in the trip. Everything is weird and everything is emotional and a little bit different than I remember, but the car is a source of comfort. The candle goes into the trunk with Charmian’s books.
The next stop is Napa, to my aunt and uncle’s house. They’re both gone now, but my cousin lives there. I’ve sent her a couple cards to let her know I’d be in the area, that I’d like to stop by or meet her for coffee. There’s been no response.
When I was last there, fifteen, maybe eighteen years ago, I experienced the “it’s not as big as I remember it” sensation. This time, it seems even smaller. I park in the driveway near the side door that leads into the kitchen. That’s the door we always used. I knock, but there’s no answer. The front door also has no answer. I wonder briefly if this cousin is one who might have an arsenal and wander toward the back patio.
The gate is off the hinges and I call out my cousin’s name. I hear someone talking, but no one answers me.
It’s disappointing. Her mother and mine grew up together, as close as sisters. I harbor no illusion that we will ever be as close, but it would be nice to know how she’s doing, how her life has progressed. It would be nice to maintain some ties to extended family, even if we’re not having those huge Thanksgiving gatherings where the kids have to sit at tables in the family room with my uncle’s taxidermied squirrels looking down on us from the tops of the bookcases.
My next stop is Tulocay Cemetery. This is as close as my family gets to a family cemetery. There are, to the best of my knowledge, three generations of our people buried there. The folks from the cemetery have been kind with my email requests over the years, confirming who we have there and where, exactly, they are, but the maps I have been given do not seem to match the layout once I’m there. I drive in circles for an hour and it’s just by chance that I stop near where my mom’s cousin and her second husband are buried. It’s a beautiful spot, with a stone that is also beautiful, but seems out of character for the decedents. I wish I’d brought flowers.
It’s late Sunday afternoon and I’m surprised by the numbers of people there. Whole families with full cookout gear, gathered around the graves of their loved ones. My particular branch of the family does not do this. Rather, we let our passings happen quietly. In lieu of flowers, a donation to…some organization or other. No services will be held. Please remember us kindly.
I’ve been texting with Angie and my mom all day, updating everyone else via Twitter. Yes, I went to Grandpa’s store. No, my cousin didn’t call the cops on me. Yes, I’m on my way back to San Jose.
I stop at a Circle K on the way out of Napa because they’re rare in Portland. I back the car into a space because I’m never far from my Rockford Files-watching childhood.
Back on the road, I know I can’t just go back to the hotel. There’s been too much. How far is it to Santa Cruz? I’ve got time.
octoberthoughtspdx 