Question: where is this little house? Costa Rica? Hawaii? Mexico? Nope. It’s on 5th Street in Berkeley, near our distributor’s (Publishers Group West) office on 4th Street. It’s a nice little unassuming neighborhood of modest small houses, adjacent to an industrial area and the train tracks. Of course as you head up toward the University of California campus, the neighborhoods and houses get more elegant and expensive.
In the cars-you-gotta-love department, this 1955 Oldsmobile 98 parked in San Rafael yesterday afternoon. I was 20 years old when this rolled off the assembly line. Check out the twin tear-drop spotlights; I had a pair on my ’46 Chevy sedan. Oh, don’t get me started talking about ’40s & ’50s cars!
Then around 6PM I was driving to meet my running friends, it was pitch black and cold. I was coming along the creek in Frank’s Valley and here smack in the middle of the road were two big buck mule deer, squared off with horns locked, duking it out. They were oblivious to me and my headlights. They were pushing against each other, antlers clacking. Finally one pushed the other across the road and the loser ran up the bank. What a vision! I pictured a demure doe, brown eyed with long eyelashes awaiting the outcome, and about to take off with the Big Guy and perpetuate the species with good genes.
I’m running alone these days, until I get up to speed to run with the boys, so I took off along the coast, climbing up on the coastal trail with my strap-on headlight. It was raining lightly: I love running in the rain—once you get warmed up, it’s glorious. The air was fresh and the ocean sweet-smelling. When I got to the lookout point, about 1000 feet above the ocean, I could see the lights of 8 crab boats; the season has just opened, and it looks like a good one, and the bigger boats pull their crab pots at night.
Great story.
My parents were walking down the plantation road late one night on Edisto Island, SC, when a car came up behind them. The headlights from behind showed two copperheads doing a mating dance about fifteen feet ahead of them, completely oblivious to anything else.