Santa Ana, Summer 1958

For Christmas, 1957, I'd gotten a copy of The World We Live In, and I loved that book better than any other.  It had thrilling pictures that showed how the world had been formed, how the world looked when the entire surface was covered with lava and how it was when the dinosaurs walked.  It said that there was a new volcano in Mexico named Paracutín that had started as a hole in the ground in a farmer's yard in 1943.  I wanted to see some lava and I passionately hoped a volcano would come up in our back yard, too.

This was unlikely but not completely impossible event.  California is one of the most geologically active areas in the United States.  It boasted more than one volcano and many geological faults, among them the notorious San Andreas fault that caused the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. In New York, we had routinely practiced fire drills in school, but in California, we enjoyed fire drills, nuclear attack drills and earthquake drills.  We had not been California more than a year before we experienced our first earthquake.  It was not a big one and did not last long, but the feeling was frightening and odd -- as if the earth was stretching and shaking itself like one of our cats after a dust-bath and we no more than fleas upon its back.

I knew from Jack and Jill and The Weekly Reader that 1957 was the International Geophysical Year and that there were plans to drill a deep hole called the "Mohole" into the crust of the earth.  I'd learned that the center of the world was filled with magma and that magma came out of volcanoes as lava.  I wondered if perhaps the hole would be deep enough that lava would come out like oil came out of the well on Cliff Drive.  If so, it would not be necessary to depend on ordinary tectonics to get a volcano for the back yard:  Roy and I could maybe save up and pay someone to drill us one.  However, by the end of the year, there was no news that the drillers had struck magma and I realized it was not to be. At least not that year.

That summer, I got to spend several weeks visiting Auntie Boo and Nanna in Southern California.   "Auntie Boo" is my mother's sister, Barbara Berg Berton and  "Nanna" is Alma Olesen Berg Green, the mother of both my mom and Auntie Boo. All the kids, even those who belonged to other families, called her "Nanna".  Mom called her "Mother" to her face and "White Fang" behind her back. Pop, the most prudent of the family, stayed quiet when she was around and called her nothing at all.

Nanna was a very beautiful woman and very kind to me, but she had the ability to marshal a tone of voice that could freeze lava in a volcano or stop a manic pre-schooler in their tracks.  She is not the only person I've known who had that knack -- Gary's mother, Donna, was a school teacher and possessed THE voice in full measure, as does my mom.  

The theme of the "voice of command" appears frequently in myth and in fantasy literature, notably in Frank Herbert's award-winning Dune series where the Bene Gesserit witches use it to compel their opponents to inaction or action.   I think that idea is based in reality and that THE voice is one of those secret powers of women that lies dormant until need: at one point in my college years, I was working in a crisis clinic when a very disturbed fellow with a long sharp knife showed up and started threatening one of our counselors.   Without thinking, I found the voice of Nanna speaking through me to him, saying "We don't do that here, put that down."  Instantaneously, the man was transformed into a docile and awkared three-year-old and, when told "I think it is time you go home now," he obediently walked out the door.   Needless to say, we locked it quickly and called the campus police, who found him and took him away, but the strange experience of hearing that ancestral voice speak through me remains.

The plan was that I'd stay with Auntie Boo the first week and then the family would come by and pick me up so we could visit the San Diego Zoo and have a vacation.  It was the first time I'd been away from home for any length of time and also the first time I'd stayed in someone else's house.  I did not know what to expect, but, carefully cautioned about being on my very best behavior, off I went.

Both Nanna and Auntie Boo ran nursery schools.  Auntie Boo's school was located on the edge of an orange grove.  Much of Orange County was, in fact, planted with oranges at that time and housing developments were often situated with groves on either side.  Auntie Boo had an orange tree in her back yard; it was thorny and the oranges were not very good, so they mostly rotted on the ground.  The plan was that Christine and I would spend the weekdays of my visit at the nursery school.  There was nothing interesting to read and it was extremely boring to spend all day with kids half my age; the only good thing was that there was a swimming pool that we were allowed to use in the afternoon.  Christine showed me a way to escape from the school yard into the neighboring orchard and we amused ourselves there, climbing the trees, digging in the dirt and eating oranges until we got caught and told never to do it again!

Although the days were deadly dull, the evenings were not.  Auntie Boo was divorced and lived in a little cottage in Santa Ana.  She was a very passionate person and deeply loved many things: her Persian cats, her flowers, her books, her cooking, her daughter, Christine and Nanna were all very dear to her.  One thing that Boo did NOT love was housekeeping.  Her house was a place of catastrophic and glorious disorder, even more so than my own room at home.  The room I slept in that week had not only my nighttime couch, but also heaps of ancient-seeming books in Latin and Greek, some empty used cages (perhaps for small griffins?), boxes with interesting ancient clothes in them and a lot of miscellaneous objects that had come from Nanna's mother -- all of which Auntie Boo cheerfully invited me to poke through and ask her about!  Things were dusty, but it was like being allowed to stay in the best-ever attic!

Nothing in the house seemed to have a fixed location: the sugar bowl might prove to contain sugar, Auntie Boo's pin money or Auntie Boo's pins.  Or maybe all three.  The Persians had to stay in the house or in their cages in the garage, but Auntie Boo also had a couple of "outside" cats.  One day when I opened the door, in walked a new black cat with long hair and a white stripe that started at its head and went all the way to its tail.   Christine called it by name and gave it food and -- yes, indeed -- it turned out to be a friendly, de-scented skunk.  Nothing could have been further from our tidy, well-organized home in Santa Barbara than Boo's and I relished the magical surreality of it all.

Auntie Boo knew that I wanted to see a volcano and very kindly took me and Christine to the closest thing she could think of -- the La Brea tar pits. In the museum at the Tar Pits, there were skeletons of ancient beasts: mammoths and dire wolves that had been trapped and died.  The pits stunk and seethed in a horrid way and seemed to be on the verge of erupting.  I imagined the boiling tar as bubbling volcanic lava and came to the realization that I probably did not really want to see a volcano. Although the tar pits were very interesting, I was happy to leave them and go back to her house.

While visiting Auntie Boo, we spent several evenings visiting Nanna and Gramps.   Nanna was divorced from Grandpa Berg and had re-married. Her husband, Gordon Green, was known as "Gramps".   They lived in Garden Grove and shared their house with Pappy, Gramps' father.

Their house was seemed very grown-up and elegant.  In Santa Barbara, all our clocks were electric and made no noise at all.  Not so at Nanna and Gramps!  In Nanna's blue-and-white kitchen, there was a strange old clock that had two doors on it.  When the odd hours struck, a little carved witch would come out one door; on the even hours, Hansel and Gretel would come out the other.   When the click struck twelve, both doors opened and the witch chased the children around while the twelve notes struck.  Gramps had served in the Coast Guard and had a clock in his study that rang marine time, striking eight bells every four hours in crisp nautical tones.  There was also a huge grandfather clock in the living room that that had a picture of the moon, the sun and a beautiful landscape on it.  Grandfather was powered by a weight that was set once a week and sounded the hour with deep vibrant "bongs."  It was wonderful when all the clocks struck at once and it was hard to decide which one was more interesting to watch. 

I never met Grandpa Berg and have no way to compare him with anyone, but Gramps seemed to me to be the best grandfather in the entire world.  Gramps was very handsome and probably one of kindest and warmest people I have ever known.  He had wonderful taste and adored all things stylish and beautiful: Nanna, his music, the elegant, immaculate sport fishing yachts that he loved and his red two-seater Thunderbird that seemed to go faster than the wind.  He had a mustache that tickled when he nuzzled your neck and had a wonderful way of holding a grandchild in his lap and making them feel like the most special kid on the face of the earth. 

He'd been a professional jazz musician, but stopped playing when,  "his hands got slow."  He loved fishing and held the world marlin record on and off for many years.   Even when not fishing himself, he piloted boats for other people, using his expertise to help his friends and clients catch marlin.  At first, he'd been able to take people fishing off Balboa and by Catalina, but over time, had to sail further and further from Los Angeles to find the truly large fish.

He had a little piratical twinkle in his eye and cheerfully told me that while he was a sailor, he'd been a boozer and a fighter.  I don't know about the latter (although his son, Salty, told me once that Gramps had considered becoming a boxer), but the 40-odd years that I knew him, I never saw him touch alcohol in any form.  He cheerfully described his adventurous youth and I don't think he regretted it one bit, but he was very clear that those things were for younger men and were behind him.  He was a stalwart member of AA and, over the years, served as a sponsor for many others, helping them on their journey to sobriety.

It was terrific to be able to cuddle up with him and listen to him tell stories.   He could tell wonderful tales of things he'd done and stranger things that he had seen.  I can still hear his soft chuckle and how he'd say "Now let me see, Nancy E.  Did I ever tell you about the time ..." and the story would begin.  Gramps told me that when he first came to Los Angeles in the 1920's, he could stand on the corner of Hollywood and Vine and smell orange blossoms in the wind.   He talked about about strange places he'd seen, jazz clubs he'd played in, great fish he'd caught and about once finding a giant tentacle floating on the surface of the ocean when he was piloting his boat MiHoney off the coast of Mexico.  He measured it against the length of the boat and found it to be 35 feet long.  He thought it had perhaps come from one of the huge squids that live miles below the surface of the sea and we both marveled about what the fight might have been like that could have torn that limb loose.

I loved him without reservation and envied Christine for being able to visit him all the time.

When I found I was expecting a boy, I seriously considered naming him "Gordon" after Gramps, but both my mom and my husband's mother said "No WAY, all the kids will call him 'Gordo'" and so I did not.  This was near the end of his life, when Nanna was fading and Gramps was feeling very lonely.  I would have liked to honor him that way and I think it would have pleased him greatly so, in many ways, I regret giving in on the matter.   Robby, however, says he is not sorry one bit -- that he would have been called 'Gordo' and would have hated it -- he is glad his grandmothers prevailed.