Two times a week I have to find stuff to do for several hours in Old Town Pasadena. This is a part of Pasadena that is, well, the oldest. If you can imagine any part of California old, this is it. Many of the ‘old money’ resides here and the architecture reflects the Spanish influence tinged with Victorian
and Craftsman flavor. The reason I go is because my daughter Hannah is a competitive cheerleader. Not the kind connected with a school. She’s too young for that. The kind from Bring It On. The kind you see on ESPN. My little Westside dolly is the one they throw up in the air. The one who brings her leg back to touch her head while being hoisted aloft. Frankly, I’d puke if I ever had the guts to get up there, but she’s tough and fearless.
If you attend one of these competitions, which I’ve done for many seasons now, you hear sped up hip-hop for hours on end. I actually like hip hop to some degree, but after hours of it, I want to kill myself. This past season, her team; Explosion, had a sixties theme, so their music was a mash up of Sam and Dave, Buffalo Springfield, The Beatles, The Monkees, Steppenwolf etc. It was fabulous and they took first place nine times out of the eleven times they competed. Obviously, not because of the music, but because they ‘stuck it’ every time.
Daddy was everything to us. He was a lot to many and my mother's
whole world. He moved from Los Angeles to a small southern town in
Georgia when he was 16 years old and met my mother shortly after. Mom
was 15 and the rest is history. He left us, very unexpectedly on an
early Spring night. Nothing could have prepared me for it. He was the
pied piper, the epitome of a fine man, the definition of love, all the
reason I turned out to be me. He was kind and gentle, inspired me every
day to see the good in people. He inspired the adventure in me. It's
why I grew up in a small southern town on a cotton and pecan farm and
have seen so much of the world that most folks will never see.
In the chill air at 7:30 in the morning, I would head out. Heavy books that I never opened were piled high in my arms. They weighed me down, but I was used to it. These were pre-backpack years. Teachers required you to cover books then, and mine wore clumsy jackets of recycled brown Safeway grocery store bags. The covers barely hung on, despite the many pieces of Scotch tape randomly applied in all directions.
I had my first dinner party when I was twelve years old. I invited six girls. I can name them all now: Annie Kleinsasser. Katie Kleinsasser (her thirteen year old knowing and powerful big sister who wore a bra). Sara Bingham. Kathy Golden. Sue Cross. Dee Dee Ruff. We were just finishing the sixth grade. We’d be going on to Junior High School. 
My grandfather Mervin was an inventor. He invented hairclips. To make money as a lad, he got a job sweeping up hair in a beauty parlor. Soon he noticed a need for clips. Clips that held the hair in place while the barber cut, clips that put waves in the hair, and doohickeys that crimped and flattened. He had patents on all these. Some were profitable, like the Jiffy, the Teeny, and others weren’t. But I guess the successful ones more than made up for the duds because he did pretty well for himself.