Food, Family and Memory

As a little girl, I loved to swim, still do. Just about any chance I got to go swimming, I would. I dreamed of having my own pool. My bigger dreams were to be an Olympic swimmer and also to swim the English Channel.

Pools and water became an obsession as well as a love. I would look into my backyard and fantasize a swimming pool. It never appeared. My dad always lived in an apartment building with a pool so there was usually a place for me to swim. When I was older and using his for exercise, I would have to share it with his elderly neighbors. They could get nasty and it was tricky navigating around their crankiness. Some of them became my new best friends in life...as long as we stayed in our own lanes.

When I saw the David Hockney series of pools, I totally understood how the swimming pool was his muse.

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.

I had one hell of a shower for my first born.  Numerous gifts were given.  I had been to my fair share of showers, both for weddings and babies, and now I wanted a big, fancy one of my own.  Kimme had the best house, so she threw it for me with my other BFF, Kimberly.  Robin made the unforgettable-to-this-day desserts.

Two of the gifts were what seemed at the time like simple, not-too-much-thought-put-into-it gestures.  A white stuffed bear.  And a brown stuffed bear.

By the time Oliver was only a few months old, he clung to those two bears — they had become his best friends, his security bears.   Before the age of one, he would never leave the house without white and brown bear.

I was hired for a small part in a small movie, on location in Texas.  I would be gone a week.  Oliver, white bear, brown bear and I boarded a plane.  I hired some random local girl to watch my baby while I worked on set.  Things went well and I hired her for the following day too.  But when I came back to the hotel, brown bear was missing.  We went into panic mode, though the teenaged girl seemed way relaxed.  I grilled her.  “Where were you when you last saw brown bear?”  She did seem to recall something about the pool area.  It was now evening, dark already and we all went down to comb the pool area.  No brown bear.  As we were about to give up, I looked into the trash and there he was looking very forlorn, ready to take a trip to the local dump.  He would never have been seen again had I not peeked into the trash can.  What a relief.  Separation anxiety averted.

I have been piecing together my fantasy business in my mind for decades. Ever since I received a pint-size, hand-cranked ice cream maker for my birthday at age five, I have been obsessed with making ice cream. I’ve always imagined myself as soda jerk pulling my carbonator draft arm tenderly behind the counter of a polished chrome soda fountain. I had decided all the intricate details of what type of equipment I would need, period glassware, and the décor by the time I was 10 years old. I even concocted all the recipes for the gooey toppings by 16.

My obsession started years ago on my first visit to Scottsdale, Arizona. My parents treated me to my first period perfect ice cream parlor visit and I fell hopelessly in love. My first impression of the Sugar Bowl has never left me. I have an odd habit of spinning when I am overwhelmed by something beautiful. I spin to remember the whole picture - all 360 degrees of it. I spun that day taking in the whole Sugar Bowl ice cream parlor. It must have been someone’s dream because every detail was so perfect, and then it became my dream.