I never feel safe when walking alone. And now I know my fear is a good thing that should never be ignored.

Nathan DeHart photo

Once while hiking deep into the woods by myself, I came upon a man leaning on a log with a large walking stick beside him. “I hope I’m not too scary out here,” he said.

That was not cool.

It might not have been his intention to terrify me, but he did. Because reminding a woman walking alone that you are just another stranger who could attack her is not how to make her feel safer in your presence.

 

As soon as the man with the stick spoke to me, I went from feeling moderately concerned to being convinced he was like the killer in the movie Wolf Creek. You know, the very chatty guy who seems a bit off, but you decide he's probably harmless until he starts ripping out your friends’ spines.

 

As I walked by the man, who was about twice my size and barely more than an arm’s length from me while I passed, I readied my legs to run until I had moved a safe distance away from him, looking over my shoulder many times afterward to make sure he wasn't following me.

 

Several miles later I encountered another man on the trail, and this time I felt safe enough to ask him where he had come from and how much further it was to the next trail I wanted. He told me, then we talked a bit more about the beautiful waterfalls nearby before continuing on our hikes alone.

 

“What made that guy different?” my husband asked when I got home. “What made you decide he wasn’t scary? You know, I’m sure Ted Bundy didn’t seem scary to his victims.”

 

Fair point. But Ted Bundy chose and approached his victims. The first man had initiated contact with me, while I had initiated contact with the second man.

 

And that key difference, explains Gavin De Becker in his book, "The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals that Protect Us From Violence," is usually exactly what separates someone who intends to do harm from someone who doesn't.

He writes that humans almost always deploy charm with a motive, and therefore the charming stranger is almost always a danger. He describes them as predators whose words are bait, and how you respond to the line they dangle tells them if you are the prey they want.

 

For example, if I told the man with the stick, "Oh, no, you're not scary at all," with a smile and giggle, he would have known that I was an appeasing type that he could more easily control, likely allowing him to avoid a loud struggle that would attract attention.

 

De Becker argues that humans usually feel afraid of other humans for very good reasons, even if we can't articulate those reasons, and that if we want to avoid being harmed, we should respect our fear. All too often, he says, people are harmed after deciding their initial fear was unfounded, or, more disturbingly, that acting on their fear would make them appear rude or ridiculous.

De Becker also recommends that women be especially selective about who they ride elevators with, which reminded me of my first night alone in Philadelphia. After checking into my hotel, I stepped into an empty elevator to head up to my room, but then jumped out of it when a man got in after me.

Why? Because he showed no interest in getting on that elevator until the doors started closing. I had gotten on the elevator as soon as the doors opened, but the man had waited many, many moments until it was clear that no one else nearby was getting on and we would be locked in that small box alone. So I hopped out and waited for another elevator.

 

That was cool.

Because after reading De Becker's book, I know that listening to my fear very likely saved me from harm in that situation, as well as in many others, and I will never again feel I am being overly cautious by acting on my fear. For anyone who still does, I highly recommend reading his book.

But the scariest moment of my life? It was opening the door to a barefoot man crouched against the side of my house.

I turned down my first newspaper job and almost didn’t meet my husband. But luckily “Mr. Wrong” steered me to “Mr. Right.”

A month after graduating college, I had gone on three interviews and received one job offer. But the newspaper wanting to hire me was not the one I wanted to work at, so I declined the offer, sure another was coming. Once it clearly wasn’t, I gathered all my courage to call back the man who offered me the job, hoping it was still available and he still wanted to hire me. It was, and he did.

That was cool.

Cool not only because that job began my career in the business I have loved for nearly 30 years, but because the man who became my husband was working at that newspaper, and we never would have met if I hadn’t called back about the position they offered me.

And who convinced me I should? The man I was seeing at the time, a man I’ll just call “Mr. Wrong.” Wrong because I shouldn’t have been seeing him, and he certainly shouldn’t have been seeing me. Because he already had someone at the center of his life, only offering me a few hurried encounters scattered over one agonizing year, a year I spent hunkered like a fisherman on the ice, waiting for a pull on my line.

I used to think all those months straining for more of someone who could never share my life were wasted, but now I thank them for steering me to someone who could.

See, I hadn’t just declined the offer, I had lied. Instead of simply turning down the job, I claimed I had gotten hired at another newspaper, thinking that would release me without any hurt feelings. But of course my lie just made everything worse, as lying usually does.

While I waited for my invented job to become real, my roommate got hired and moved away with her furniture. For weeks after I sat on the living room floor next to a phone that never rang, my lie keeping me from using it to call that first newspaper back.

And my shame keeping me from telling anyone what I had had done (not even the roommate who was the only other person who knew about Mr. Wrong), until finally I confessed my sorry situation to Mr. Wrong, probably because all the shameful stuff we did together made me willing to admit another bad deed.

Which turned out to be a very good decision, because Mr. Wrong had enough life experience to know what I should do next, and cared enough about my future to tell me to do it.

“You have to call that paper back. It’s a job offer. You don’t know when you’ll get another one.”

So I did. And I got the job. But I didn’t tell the whole truth at first. That came a bit later when I felt more comfortable with my supervisor. And though he likely already knew, he was kind enough to act like he didn’t, and to say I was forgiven.

All that happened twenty-five years ago this month, and I couldn’t be more grateful that I called back for that job. And that Mr. Wrong told me to.

Of course, he’s not the only person who would have given me that advice. But he was the only person I gave the opportunity to do so. And he could have just laughed at my stupidity, but he decided to help.

And because of that I met not only the center of my current family, the man I’ve shared all my shames and successes with for the past 25 years, but my first newspaper family, as well.

 

Thanksgiving with my Times-Herald family in 1997.

My Grandmother's Journals: February, 1997

After my grandmother died at the age of 97, I found a large purse full of small notebooks where she recorded her daily activities: when she woke up, where she ate breakfast, what mail she received, what movies she went to see and what she watched on TV.

 

That was cool. 

 

Cool because I find these daily snapshots fascinating, and also therapeutic. Something about following in her footsteps, living the details of her day, soothes me. The routine. The normalcy. The predictability. I need it right now. 

 

And so I keep reading them, and transcribing them here, in case others might need some normalcy and predictability as well.

In February of 1997, my grandmother was 81 and still living alone in a mobile home park in Santa Cruz, Calif,  near the surfing spot Pleasure Point. I wouldn't describe her as lonely; she was an extremely independent and persnickety woman whom I never knew to live with another person or even a pet. (I wrote more about her life in an earlier post.)  

 

Since the Super Bowl was still held in January of that year, there were no more football games for her to watch in February, but she saw plenty of movies, walked often near the ocean, spent a lot of time checking her blood pressure and talked to me often as I searched for a newspaper job after graduating with a journalism degree the previous December.

January entries.

 

Saturday, Feb. 1, 1997

Cold. Stayed in bed til 8.

Washed towel, ironed apron. 

Coffee & donut at corner.

Home 10:30. Vacuumed, ate soup.

To show, "Three Lives and Only One Death." Marcello Mastroianni.

Mail: Bank statement OK, auto insurance $17.34 less.

TV: Siskel & Ebert, OK to 3. Watched "Groundhog Day" again.

Bed, read. Up 3 times. Last sleep is best.

 

Sunday, Feb. 2, 1997

Awake 6. Ear good.

Walked on East Cliff.

To corner. Lee there. Her husband slow today, from stroke.

Golf til 5 p.m. Very good, did various chores.

Crossword, started letters, owe everybody.

Bed, read “Murder at BP” til 2:30. 

Had soup, bread.

 

Monday, Feb. 3, 1997

Up 9. Breakfast Lyon's. Increased prices. (Made 2.69 to 2.99 for seniors, so total is higher. Accountant's suggestion?)

Gas, Drug Emporium, Trader Joe's. 

Wrote Mimi after news.

To Longs for Xerox, eye vitamins, envelopes.

Mailed letter to Mimi, package to Mina.

Went by Dunlaps [her neighbors]. Anna there, friend w/Ellie since '72.

 

Tuesday, Feb. 4, 1997

Breakfast corner. 

Some chores, wrote letter to Prudy.

Walked on East Cliff.

Two quakes north of SF, 3.5 and 3.8.

Verdict reached in O.J. civil trial, liable all 8 counts. $8.5 million.

Watched Geraldo, skipped Clinton's State of the Union.

Wednesday, Feb. 5, 1997

Awake 8:30, up 9. Chores, ate banana, cereal.

Walked, tea, croissant.

Library, got Jan. 17 Mercury News.

To Scotts Valley, ate hot dog! Ice cream!

To show, "Jerry Maguire." A section of life I do not relate to."

Home, dinner. Bed early, crossword. Couldn't sleep.

PBS, Living Edens. (Alaska, Denali, not McKinley.)

Thursday, Feb. 6, 1997

Ronald Reagan 86th birthday.

Appointment at 9:30. Hearing in right ear getting bad. Check again in one year.

Mall, coffee and muffin.

Home, news, various chores. Wrote Justine.

TV: News, Tiger Woods food poisoning. 

Saturday, Feb. 8, 1997

Slept til 9, at corner til 10:30.

Drug Emporium has BP machine. Mine 119/59? 

Got gingko biloba, another “slumber cap,” rat tail comb.

To library, returned 2 & 3 of “Silk Road.”

To show, “Les Voleurs.” Good. Catherine Deneuve.

To McDonald’s, chicken.

Started Hamlet, A&E.

 

Sunday, Feb. 9, 1997

Up 8:15, some cereal. To 41st for coffee, donuts.

To show, "Hamlet." Exciting. Spilled water on me, pants wet hours. I dropped glove, found a watch. They found glove, I turned in watch.

To Kmart, turkey sandwich.

Home, wrapped video for Mina, wrote small note.

TV: Mystery, Summertime, one segment from 60 Minutes, Helen Mirren. 

 

Tuesday, Feb. 11, 1997

Good sleep. To laundromat, sheets.

Ate cereal, banana.

To Gottschalk's, got 4 items: Liz jacket (denim), white t-shirt, blue silk, grey with sequins.

To Drug Emporium, BP. Talked to lady, said another machine at Kmart.

Ran "Silk Road." 

Quake, 3.0. Same area at Rohnert Park.

Wednesday, Feb. 12, 1997

Up 8:30. Chores here. Walked East Cliff.

Drug Emporium, checked BP, 146. Louden, 154.

Library, returned “Silk Road,” got French lessons.

Gottschalk’s, got pants & sweater!!

TV: News, Nova. 

Bed, read book.

 

Thursday, Feb. 13, 1997

Up 7:30. Pulled weeds one hour. To corner.

Home, wrote misc info gathered re "Maul and the Pear Tree."

To Drug Emporium, sports shop. (Fanny packs high.)

To Live Oak, sat with Earl, Mildred, Um? Jennings. Emilio or Amelio?

Home, news. Some Geraldo. Some "Secrets of Lost Empire."

Bio of W.E.B. Du Bois.

Friday, Feb. 14, 1997

Awake 7, then 9:30. To corner.

BP at Drug Emporium. 117/52. Then to Kmart, 142/68. Why?

Library, got Franc exchange. .07F difference.

To Cinema, line for "Absolute Power." Ate tuna sandwich.

Then to "Mother Night" at Nickelodeon.

Home, some weeding.

Mail: Letter from Mina.

TV: "Like Water for Chocolate" one hour, skating one hour.

Saturday, Feb. 15, 1997

Up 9:30. To corner, talked a bit.

To mall, looked for shoes. Sears, Penney, Gotts, etc.

To Kmart, returned Bone purse.

Justine called. Will be here tomorrow.

TV: Ice skating. Tara Lipinski won, Michelle Kwan 2nd, Nicole Bobek 3rd.

Sunday, Feb. 16, 1997

Chilly in a.m. Breakfast corner. Talked to Lois.

Read instructions on vacuum. Put batteries in charger.

11 a.m., ironed, various chores. 

Justine called 1:15. To Catalyst, I had veg soup.

Drove to UCSC, coffee at Starbucks. 

To Gottschalk's for business clothes for Justine. Two items, $87

Home 6 p.m., girls left.

TV: News, taped Emma.

Bed, read Iliad. Rained about 10 to 11.

Monday, Feb. 17, 1997

Up 7:45. Chilly, cloudy.

To Gottschalk's, no find any more.

Home, pruned roses.

Wrote letters: Mina, sent part of Mercury News to Justine.

To McDonald’s, got chicken. Gave man $1.

Home, news a bit. Ran "Emma."

Tuesday, Feb. 18, 1997

Awake 7:30, up 8:15. Coffee, etc at McDonald's.

Kmart, got TV Guide & nuts. 

Shell, got gas, car wash.

Walked on West Cliff.

Home 12:15, free paper!

Wrote three letters.

To Live Oak for BP. Mailed letters.

Home. Dinner. Income tax. Bed.

*Forgot to eat at Live Oak, Alice waiting. I returned later.

 

Wednesday, Feb. 19, 1997

Up 9. Showered/hair. To corner. To library. 

To show, "Sling Blade." Sad. 2 hours, 14 minutes.

Missed dinner, second time.

To Kmart for BP. To Safeway, got fish.

Mail: Letter from Prudy, Hugh has "mass" on left kidney. 

TV: Geraldo, new Supreme Court decision re police can order passengers out of car.

Thursday, Feb. 20, 1997

Slept pretty good. 

Ate Kmart, got mirror, small veg. brush, Maalox.

Mall: Bought hat at Mervyn's, bra and purse at Penney's.

Home, news. Snack, read some papers, rested. 

To Drug Emporium, BP. 

Home, some weeding. News, Geraldo.

Sewed sleep hat, mended t-shirt.

TV: Mystery, missed first segment.

Friday, Feb. 21, 1997

Cold. To corner.

Washed six t-shirts. To laundromat.

Drug Emporium, BP. Longs, pix.

To show, "Star Wars." [Re-release]. Wanted to stay for "Absolute Power," but parking space only two hours.

TV: Geraldo. Had [Mark] Fuhrman on as guest.

Some French. Bed, read 10 minutes.

 

Saturday, Feb. 22, 1997

Not great sleep. Windy today.

Up 9. Doctor on KGO recommends Gingko.

Drug Emporium, BP and ear plugs, new toothbrush.

Trader Joe’s, dried fruit, catfish, veg burgers.

Home, wrote Prudy. 

To bank, got $200. Worked on taxes. 

Watched two hours of “Jack the Ripper” with Michael Caine as detective.

 

Sunday,Feb. 23, 1997

Bed til 9:40! Drug Emporium, checked BP.

To Vibol's, Lois and Oscar there.

Kmart, checked BP. Sale on Bone flats, but no size 9.

To Scotts Valley Kmart, had 9s!

To Wendy's, got chicken sandwich, salad.

Home, some French. 

Watched second  part of "Jack the Ripper."

6 to 7:30. Ate with Mary Clark at Marie Callender's. Salad, wonton.

Slept til 1:30, watched "Pink Cadillac," Bernadette Peters, Clint Eastwood, til 3:30.

No sleep.

Monday, Feb. 24, 1997

Up 9:15. Breakfast corner.

Gottschalk's, got brown sweater. 

Drug Emporium, BP, TV Guide. Longs for Xerox.

No mail.

Rested, straightened sox, underwear drawer. 

Tired, but can't sleep. Ate a little bit of salad, threw away.

Bed, read, crossword. Finally slept.

Tuesday, Feb. 25, 1997

Cold. Up 9:15. Yard work til 11. 

To Gottschalk's. No brown Alfred Dunner, but did buy two blouses, 1 navy, 1 black. Classics.

To thrift shop, gave clothes, didn't make notes.

Library, home. Salad.

TV: "The Killers" AMC,

Drug Emporium, BP. Low?

Read, news. 

TV: Mystery, Law & Order, Frasier, Caroline in the City. 

Read til 1:30.

Wednesday, Feb. 26, 1997

Up 8:30. Cold developed! 

Had apple sauce.To 41st Donut.

To Kmart, checked BP. Low.

To Louden for BP, 162.

Home, some yard work. Made new money holder for travel.

Mail: Letter from Mina, liked  Summertime (1955).

Carol called, I called back. Talked 1 and 1/4 hour.

TV: Law & Order, dance competition.

Not good sleep.

 

Thursday, Feb. 27, 1997

Up 9:30. Breakfast corner.

Longs, got tissue and pineapple.

Library, returned book.

To Kmart, got blue pumps.

Windy, slight rain. Read. 

5:40, Justine called, was offered job at Vallejo. Has to take drug test at Lompoc.

TV: News, missed Jennings.

Friday, Feb. 28, 1997

Up 8:45. Breakfast Kmart. 

Shower/hair. Library, got book.

To show, "Absolute Power." Some good, but some "holes" in story or editing.

Sunny but windy. Home 5 p.m.

Mail: Newsletter from Masonic Home.

TV: News, shootout in North Hollywood. Bank robbers, two killed, 8 officers hurt and people in area.

Bed after 10 p.m. news. Crossword.

Listening to “The Catch” with my father made me a 49ers fan for life

We didn’t have a TV in my house growing up, so my father listened to local sports on a small transistor radio, rooting for the San Francisco Giants, the Oakland A's and the San Francisco 49ers.

Reception at our house was poor, so unless he was outside doing chores, he had to sit with his radio hanging next to the large kitchen window in order to make out at least most of what was happening.

But he didn’t want to miss a second of the game the 49ers played on Jan. 10, 1982, the NFC Championship match with the Dallas Cowboys. So since the radio reception was much better in our Chevy van, he decided to drive around while listening to the end of the game. And since I had nothing better to do, I hopped in the van with him.

I remember us slowly circling a flat, sparse neighborhood near the ocean as the game neared its end. I don’t remember any of the action or why it mattered, but I can still see my father suddenly throwing his fist into the air and crying out, the van swerving until he put both hands back on the steering wheel.

Now I know exactly what that moment was for everyone else: “The Catch” made by Dwight Clark to win the game and send the 49ers to Joe Montana's first Superbowl victory. But to me, it was the moment I became a 49ers fan for life. 

A 49ers fan who will always prefer to listen to their games on the radio, picturing my dad and me in our Chevy van, that usually quiet, reserved man suddenly exploding in joy. Forty-niners games will always help me relive one of my favorite memories of my childhood, and definitely my favorite memory of my father.

The Bird Club: Chapter Two

Chapter One 

The next morning when her mother wakes April up it is still dark outside.

“God, mom! It’s Sunday!” 

“Want to go to Wilder with me?”

“No, I want to sleep!” April whines, rolling over to face the wall.

Every weekend Evelyn goes to a beach about 20 miles away to help count Western Snowy Plovers, a small shorebird that was nearly wiped out because their nests of tiny, perfectly camouflaged eggs are built directly on the sand to be trampled.

 

A few birds were found surviving at Wilder Ranch because its beach forces humans to come by the water, or through miles of crops after crawling under a train bridge and over fences.

 

So the only people who know about that beach are surfers or banding volunteers like Evelyn, who usually goes to Wilder on Friday mornings when April is at school. But last weekend Evelyn went on a rare overnight trip with her husband to celebrate their 20^th wedding anniversary, so she was heading out to the beach on a Sunday, when she could drag her daughter out of bed.

 

“We can go to Ferrell’s for a donut afterward,” Evelyn coos, knowing April can’t resist.

“Alllriiiight,” April grouses, throwing off the covers.

April will do anything for junk food because her mother doesn’t allow anything that tastes good in her house. No sugar, white bread or creamy peanut butter. Except on Halloween or Easter, sweets and junk food came with barfing cousins, neighbors with nose drips or kitchen duty in the school cafeteria.

 

For a couple of summers when she was younger, April’s cousins began visiting from Denmark and created the childhood of her dreams. Her father drove them to fun places like Disneyland, and her mother couldn’t stop the visitors from buying candy and giving it to April in the back seat of their van.

 

And she ate everything they gave her, until one cousin threw up her sweets on the winding road to Yosemite, filling the van with the smell of sick for the rest of the trip. Even April didn’t feel like eating candy after that.

 

Another source of sugar came with a side of snot. The next-door neighbor was a WWI veteran named Bartlett who carefully pulled up his American flag at sunrise and back down at dusk, spending the rest of the day grooming the jungle of fuchsia bushes he won first prize with every year at the county fair.

 

When arthritis took over his hands, he started bribing April and Hannah with candy to help him prune, using their small, nimble fingers to pluck off most of the fresh flower buds to prevent all but a healthy few to bloom.

 

April enjoyed pulling apart the leaves and squeezing off the buds, she found it absorbing and satisfying work. But she didn’t enjoy that Bartlett usually supervised, because he usually had a drop of snot water glistening on the end of his nose. 

 

April would be reaching for a bud and see a drop slide to the bottom center of his large nose and became transfixed, watching the drop grow and droop until it became so big she could not believe it would remain on the tip of his nose one more second. 

 

Then Bartlett would finally take out his cloth handkerchief and wipe his nose so April could relax. But it was never long before another drop began forming, and she never would have been able to stand it if she wasn’t so desperate for sugar.

 

After about an hour in the garden, Bartlett would finally lead April and Hannah into his breakfast nook, a sunny room containing a round Formica table and his smiling wife.

 

He’d put a large bowl on the table and say, “Now, you can each pick two,” and the girls would look at the bowl, hoping each time he had gotten better candy. 

 

He never had. It was always hard candies like butterscotch or mints, and all colors of small, tart suckers. Never candy bars, chocolates or even fruit chews. But it was still sugar.

The most consistent source of sweets were actually the school lunches April started getting in the fourth-grade. 

 

The day their mother announced the girls would start eating hot lunches in the cafeteria felt like Christmas Eve, with April so excited she could hardly sleep. But instead of seeing presents under the tree in her dreams, she saw the woman in the lunch line refusing to take her money.

“Sorry, hon,” she said. “Your mom called. She changed her mind.”

 

When no one stopped April from paying the next day, she picked up a tray and stepped up to the counter, feeling like Charlie touring Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory as she gazed at the beautiful mounds of exciting new foods.

 

When she got her tray safely to a table, she nearly had to sit on her hands so she wouldn’t rub them together as she surveyed her bounty.

 

In the main section of the tray was a hamburger with a white, fluffy bun that April had only eaten in restaurants, plus some even more exciting french fries to the right. Above the fries were some boring carrot and celery sticks, but in the top left, almost hidden by the bun, was the most exciting thing of all: dessert. 

 

Thinking it was just a weird-shaped donut, she bit into it eagerly and ... Yuck! The outside was good, but the inside tasted like fruit cocktail, only worse, because it was warm and dribbling down her face. Whenever she saw a fruit pie again, she just nibbled the crust off the edges, even though that brought boys she didn’t know to her table asking eagerly, “Are you going to eat that?” Until they saw the teeth marks.

Her favorite dessert was the peanut butter bar, a dreamy square of everything she couldn’t eat at home. One bite made her eat anything in the dessert section first, since Hannah’s habit of grabbing things off her plate taught April to eat whatever she really wanted right away.

 

Her favorite main dish could have been a Wonka original: A crazy mix of tostada and pizza shaped like a Stop sign. It made no sense, but the soft dough topped with sauce, melted cheese and bits of hamburger meat was delicious and fun to eat. Once she learned its name, she circled every “Fiestada Pizza” on the monthly lunch calendar so she could get to the cafeteria extra early those days before all the other kids gobbled them up.

The magic of those lunches never wore off for April, even after learning she was eating them because of something called Aid for Families with Dependent Children, which required her to work in the cafeteria. 

 

Most days, she just presented a monthly punchcard and picked up a tray with no one but the woman who gave her the card knowing it had been free. But once a week, she had to go behind the counter and spoon up food or wash dishes like the other AFDC kids.

 

She always asked to wash dishes, because then you worked in a small room near the exit door where hardly any of the other kids noticed you as they hurried out to the playground, instead of facing them as you doled out their food. And you washed alone, free to just focus on cleaning the trays, which April actually enjoyed.

 

Her favorite part was rinsing off all the food bits by pulling down the hose hanging from the ceiling and blasting the trays with a jet of hot water, smiling as even the stickiest mess slid off. Then she’d stack all the trays on their side in a rack, slide them into the big, square metal dishwasher and push the big red button to scald them clean.  

 

Working in the tray-washing room was like being trapped inside a washing machine, but April found it soothing. All the noises and movements were predictable, unlike the constant chaos created by crowds of kids. And pulling all the warm and clean trays from the machine at the end always gave her a satisfied smile.

 

Of course she never told her mother how much she enjoyed washing dishes at school, because unless her father installed a hose that hung from the ceiling and blasted hot water, April didn’t want to wash dishes at home.

But April did want sugar delivered with deep-fried dough instead of barf, snot or a hairnet. So she got out of bed and headed to her dresser.

Chapter Three

 

New Year’s in New Mexico: Nowhere to eat after the last fun night with my sister

Karen and me posing at the state line.

At the end of 1996, three young women drove to New Mexico to welcome the new year. But 1997 didn’t feel welcoming to them when they woke up in a tiny town with nothing to eat because all the businesses were closed for the holiday. So they hit the highway with growling stomachs, wondering how far they’d have to drive to find breakfast, when they finally saw a building full of light and people: McDonald’s.

That was cool.

I remember sitting with my sister and friend Karen, for once feeling grateful for the hard chairs, bright lights and beeping noises of a fast food restaurant because that morning it meant warmth, food and coffee. And for many years, us sitting relieved and happy in that bustling restaurant was my favorite memory of our trip.

 

But now I treasure even more the night before, because it was the last time I remember having fun with my sister: A sister that was fully present, relaxed and happy.

The night began with us setting off sparklers, which we hadn’t done since were kids, because they had long been illegal in our home state of California. But New Mexico still allowed fireworks, so we bought a box of sparklers and set them off in the motel parking lot.

 

I imagine that for just about everyone else our age, standing in an empty parking lot setting off a box of sparklers sounded like the lamest way in the world to spend your New Year’s Eve. But I couldn’t have been happier because I was with my sister again, and holding the sparkler sent me back to our house, with our parents watching us set off fireworks on our quiet street.

 

After the sparklers, we became adults again and started drinking. We didn’t want to go to a bar, so in our hotel room my sister introduced me to something that sounded disgusting but turned out to be quite good: Root beer and Southern Comfort. Mostly I was just happy to be drinking Southern Comfort again with my sister, as both were there the first time I got drunk.

 

Once she was tipsy my sister decided she needed a cigarette, but we used all her matches for the sparklers. When they didn’t have matches at our motel office, we set out along the main drag, three semi-drunk young women in a small town on New Year’s Eve. I can’t remember how many gas stations and motel offices we went into, or how many cars full of men slowed down to inspect us as we walked along the highway, but eventually we got matches and we all got back to our room safely.

 

I had no idea that our mission that night was foreshadowing our morning, when we once again hit the road on a quest that took much longer than we expected. And I had no idea that setting off sparklers behind a motel in Carlsbad, New Mexico, would be a memory I would forever treasure. 

 

I spent two decades trying to get back to that parking lot, that feeling of being with someone who had always loved you and always would. For years I convinced myself that the person who didn’t take my calls, wouldn’t answer my emails and never really seemed to enjoy herself once I finally got her to spend time with me, wasn’t really my sister.

 

No, my real sister was locked away, and I just needed to find the right key to free her, find the right combination of me that she could love again. I couldn’t accept that she had always been free, and my problem was me.

 

Me not accepting that this was all the family I had left. With my mother dead and my father gone, didn’t I deserve a sister who loved me? And if I couldn't make her love me, this person who knew me better than anyone, how could I possibly hope that anyone else could love me?

 

But other people did love me, and wanted to be part of my life. They took my phone calls, answered my emails and enjoyed spending time with me. Yet I couldn’t stop chasing the person who didn’t.

 

I realize now I had been chasing her my whole life, forever the little sister begging my older sister to play with me. And instead of straining to go back to our childhood, I needed to finally leave it. To finally realize that I would never be happy until I let go of this dream of a sister, and instead focused on the people who wanted to focus on me.

That was cool. Because it is so much better for everyone that I finally let her go. Finally understood that people aren’t who you want them to be, they are only who they are. And that relatives are people who share your blood, but family are the people who love you. 

 

And while your relatives can love you, often the best families are the ones we find. Because what’s cooler than someone sharing your life because they want to, not because they had no other choice?

 Our trip was made possible by my grandfather, who bought me the car we drove.