If you opened the door to our little apartment in Monterey, you could barely hear the surf pounding on the rocks, and could just make out the sea lions barking their contentment as they laid on the breakwater in front of the pier. I say “open the door” because opening one of the two windows in the ancient fourplex would likely have caused permanent damage to that pile of sticks that we called home for nine months. The walls were so thin that you didn’t have to open anything to hear our neighbor calling Bogey the cat to come in for the night; but, if you did slip out that open front door, and if you stood on your tiptoes in just the right spot on the seashell-covered driveway, you could see a tiny sliver of Monterey Bay where the sea otters played their days away.
The miserable pile of sticks only lasted 9 months because, for reasons known only to my geriatric, dementia-ridden landlord, we could only get a 9-month lease, in spite of being assigned to Monterey for a year. So, 3/4 of the way through my Russian course, we had to find new digs.We were extremely blessed to be able to live in a 2-room gardener’s cottage on the grounds of a big house owned by some rich guy. The bedroom was big enough; but the kitchen/“living room” was so small that we had to sit on the bamboo love seat and eat on TV trays every night. When we were eating, no one could fit between the TV trays and the television. That was fine with us, of course. We didn’t need to walk around while we were eating, because we were sitting down.
It was wonderful. I was a Spec.4 in the Army, and Sandra worked at Carl’s Jr., so we lived on practically nothing; but we had each other, we had sea lions and otters, and we had a year to learn about life and to live in one of the most beautiful places in the world.
So what did we do with the year? A lot. The Army had me doing 7 hours a day of classroom work on Russian, and then 2 hours or so of homework at night. The weekends were free, but we had to do laundry. For months, we had to spend our free time on Saturday lugging our dirty clothes to a laundromat and sitting there while it washed and dried. We thought we had died and gone to heaven when we bought an apartment-sized washer that we could hook up to the faucet in the kitchen sink. We could wash clothes anytime we wanted! It was glorious!
Sandra worked at Carl’s Jr. until she got a part-time job at the Naval Postgraduate School teaching a Mother’s Morning Out-like class, which she loved. And the weekends / holidays were epic! We drove Highway 1. We went to Big Sur. We went to San Francisco. We went to Yosemite National Park. We went to Disneyland. We went to Marineland (which is now closed). We spent days watching the sea lions on the breakwater and the otters playing in the bay. We went to Carmel (which is the next town over from Monterey), where they had a big sandcastle-building contest on one of our first weekends there. Carmel was a great place to go for local color because some insanely-rich people live there. Sandra took a French class, and the end-of-class party was where the movie stars live. So we can say that we’ve been to a party on 17-Mile Drive … although in truth, the house the party was in was about 1500 square feet, and nothing to brag about; but still.
Speaking of Carmel, we were there when Clint Eastwood ran for mayor. He represented the rich business owners against the old-money rich people who didn’t want any change. We thought this was pretty cool, so we decided to watch the debate on the local TV channel. I mean, how often do you get the chance to see an A-list Hollywood star debating whether city ordinances should prohibit ice cream cones being sold on the sidewalks? We tuned in and watched Clint debate the establishment candidate. There was one other candidate - an old hippy who represented “The Party Of The Trees”. He had clearly spent most of his life stoned out of his mind; but I liked him because his answers were always consistent with his platform. The entire platform, as far as I could make out, was to be nice to the trees. Don’t cut down any trees. It was the most entertaining political debate ever.
One of the most important things we did while we were there was to get Buster. Sandra wanted a cat, so we went down to the local pet store, and there he was. He was a rescue, and the store didn’t charge for rescues, so we bought all of the stuff he needed from them and took him home. We talked about what to name him on the way to our little gardener’s cottage, but didn’t come up with anything. When we got there, we realized that we had forgotten to buy something, so I went to the store. When I came home, Sandra had named him - and Buster he was from then on.
The single most important thing we did while in Monterey was to get pregnant with Christina. Specifically, Sandra got pregnant with Christina within the last week that we were there. When we left Monterey and started the very, very, very long drive to San Angelo, TX, Sandra was uncharacteristically sick to her stomach. We put it down to all the hullaballoo of packing and clearing; but it turned out later to be Christina! That, however, is a story for another day.
I didn’t buy a coffee mug that says “Monterey”, but I don’t need a coffee mug to remember moving to the other end of the continent with Sandra - who had married me a year prior without ever suspecting that I was going to lead her on a crazed, magic carpet ride. An unreasoning sense of freedom and the firm belief that the world will turn your way are the province of the very young and the very foolish. I was both, and I didn’t care. I had my sweetie. I had my wits, and I had the confidence of a fool. The world was wide open in front of me, and I was on a roll.
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