Trip to Tomales

Trip to Tomales

My clangy calendar alarm clock jars me out of a restless dream into an extraordinary reality. It's 8:00 AM, July 3, 2008 – my birthday - I'm one hundred years old.

I toss off my quilted coverlet, swing out my legs, and put both feet on my oriental carpet. I’ll sit on the bed with my hands on my knees for a moment while I draw a long breath of the honey-suckle-scented air that's breezing through my veranda doors and ponder about the coming day.

My ranch-style home will be filled with family and friends, just what I had in mind when I designed it in 1957. The living room, dining room, wine bar, kitchen nook, and kitchen are in an open floor plan - perfect for large parties and get-togethers.

I’ll be surrounded by my three daughters and their husbands who are all in their seventies with middle-aged children of their own. Add three more generations of modern-day moms, dads, and kids ranging from rebellious teens to adorable toddlers and you get the picture - a five-generation family celebration at my Marin County domicile.

At noon a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle will knock on my door. The newspaper asked if I’d consent to an interview about my boyhood in post-earthquake San Francisco, my college days at the University of California, and my career as a structural engineer. I’ll enjoy blowing my horn about the tall buildings, dams, bridges, and offshore oil derricks my firm designed during our forty-seven years in business. 

The lady who phoned to arrange the interview said I might also be asked about my views on today’s world and how I account for my prolonged existence. I’m not sure I’ll have much to say about those things. A glance at the clock tells me I have three hours and fifty-seven minutes to think it over.

I hope I don’t come across as some cranky, old, codger. I’m going to wear my “Don’t Blink” sweatshirt to stress in a humorous way how quickly the years go by. I’ll vigorously rub some color into my cheeks and sit on the living room sofa rather than the wheelchair. I don’t want to appear feeble on TV with the whole world watching.

The wheelchair is fine for going out; dinners at Scoma’s in Sausalito, or conferences at the Engineers Club in The City, but I prefer my walker for getting around the house and for walks with Dinah, my dog, in our one-acre garden. My hearing is excellent when my aids are in, so I don’t worry about drifting off during conversations.

I wish Della could be here. She’d have some zinger about me being a hundred years old that would have everyone in stitches. I miss her hilarity, her laughter, her belief in me, and her heartening presence. The girls miss her, too. They couldn’t have had a better mom. Everyone misses her wizardry in the kitchen. I bought her a toque that said World's Best Chef after one of our Fourth of July barbecues.

Della and I exchanged wedding vows at the Mission in Carmel on June 7^th, 1932. I remember the vibrant colors of spring flowers, the fragrant scent of the patio gardens, and the happy sounds of friends laughing and throwing rice. When she said I do I felt like a finer, invincible version of myself in a beautiful new world. She died in my arms almost sixty years later. Our family is her legacy.

If the interviewer allows me I’d like to tell a story that’s crowding out all the other stories that are coming to mind. No one alive has heard this one - not even my daughters. Not that it’s any big secret. It just didn’t seem noteworthy until the newspaper called and I began thinking more about the events that determined my life’s path.

As I mentioned, I grew up in The City during the aftermath of the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906 that devastated San Francisco. A new city was growing out of the ashes and I was growing up with it. We had phones, electricity, radios, automobiles, and airplanes. The cars were fairly reliable but not used for commuting or day-to-day transportation. People who had enough money to buy an automobile used their “machine” for touring and country drives. Transport was still mainly horse-drawn, but the internal combustion revolution and the evolution of flight were on the move.

My parents and I lived in a diverse and vibrant neighborhood in the Haight Ashbury District. My boyhood haunts included an amusement park, a baseball stadium, and Golden Gate Park. We were connected to downtown San Francisco by a cable car line which my dad took to work at the Metropolitan Life Building on Stockton Street every morning.

Mom and Dad bought the new house in 1907, one year after the quake destroyed their apartment building on Valencia Street, and one year before I came along. I was born at Children’s Hospital, the oldest pediatric medical center in the West, and I went to Longfellow Grammar School where my mom taught fifth grade before she married my dad.

My dad, William Nichols, Sr., known as “Will” (just like me) was the best salesman in the Western Region for Metropolitan Life, one of the largest life insurers in the world.

To celebrate his big year with the company, Mama, Dad, and I went to a company dinner at the Palace Hotel Garden Court. He’d earned huge commissions as well as bonuses. That night he received an accolade from the Vice President of the Western Region along with a framed certificate which I still have around here someplace.

We sat on the dias while the Vice President spoke to the elegantly dressed dinner guests who were seated at round tables in the historic dining room. My dad wore a midnight blue Edwardian-style suit. I thought he was the handsomest man in the room and Mama was beautiful. I recall her look of love and pride when Dad stood to accept his applause. He was thirty-two years old.

Two months later he died at St. Mary’s Hospital – a casualty of the pandemic known as Spanish Flu. There was no funeral, and no one knows where he was buried. There were three thousand other San Franciscans just like him in 1919.

Mama and I tried to pretend that things could be okay again, but I saw her tears during the day and I heard her crying in bed, at night. My sorrow and gloom were added burdens because she felt the guilt of my unhappiness and loneliness. I missed my dad, but I missed Mama’s untroubled, breezy, lightheartedness, and reassuring presence even more − we didn’t know how to ease our grief by sharing our sadness and we feared catching the flu and dying. For the next three months, neither of us left the house; mandatory gauze masks hid our facial expressions.

The schools closed, but Mama, being a teacher, tried to teach me at the kitchen table. All I remember from those lessons is her voice fading and her staring at the walls as if she were in another universe.

The one bright spot in our lives was Mama’s younger brother, Uncle Nels who was our link to the outside world. He came for dinner at least three times a week, and he always brought a box of groceries, straightened up the house, removed the trash, and made me laugh.

The story I want to tell the world begins on one long, light-filled summer evening when Uncle Nels’ visit put our tiny family on the road to what it is today, ninety years later.

Mama cooked dinner. Through all her melancholia she found solace in preparing meals in our small kitchen. After we ate, Uncle Nels smoked his pipe and told stories about the guys he worked with at Union Ironworks where he was an engineer helping design boilers and engines for steamships and locomotives. To hear him tell it everyone at the foundry was a character out of the funny papers. He had me laughing, and he always talked about some project he was working on which kept me fascinated. Mama drifted around the house distractedly, as though hearing different voices but I know she found comfort and safety in the sound of her brother’s voice.

As a bachelor, Nels could afford to shop for suits, shirts and shoes at the swankiest men's wear shops. His well-trimmed hair and mustache were almost black, and his eyes were ice blue. He’d graduated from Cal five years earlier but he was still a big star on the alumni rugby team.

The main quality that set him apart; however, was his ability to fix things. My dad said Nels was never thrilled until he found something that needed repair. I think of him whenever I hear James Taylor’s I’m Your Handyman – especially when he comes to that part where he sings, I fix broken hearts.

We’d finished dinner and while I cleared the table and took the dinner dishes and tableware to the sink, Uncle Nels pushed his coffee cup to the side, lit his pipe with a wooden match he’d enflamed with a thumbnail, and unfolded a road map of Northern California on the kitchen table. He motioned for me to slide my chair next to his while Mama tied on her apron and put a pot of water on the wood stove.

When I got settled at the table, Nels announced that he was taking delivery of a new automobile and he could talk about his dream motor trip along the newly completed State Highway One to Tomales as a reality. He said he needed company on the three-night tour and he wanted Mama and me to come along.

Mama, lifting the pot of now boiling dishwater from the stove and carrying it toward the sink said, “Tomales? That’s a hundred miles from here." Her voice carried that disheartened pitch of loss and loneliness, but my heart leaped. Mr. Fix-it was on the case, and things were about to take a turn for the better. I could just feel it.

As she poured the hot water into a scouring pan filled with the dinner dishes Mama continued, “Why don’t you motor down to San Jose? They keep the roads up, and there’s help along the way if you have trouble with the machine. I don’t want Willy to go outside. Some people are refusing to wear masks.” Her lips quivered and she used the back of her hand to wipe her eyes, smearing her cheeks with salty tears.

Uncle Nels raised his index finger accompanied by a very sympathetic furrowed brow - a momentous hush captured the room as he reached into his briefcase and took out the Official Automobile Blue Book of 1918. The travel guide listed places to stay and refuel all along the way, and he’d already prepared an itinerary through Marin, Sonoma, and Mendocino Counties.

He said he’d paid $2,750.00 for a reliable, first-rate automobile. He had already motored all of the tours in the Bay Area in his 1909 Hupmobile Roadster, and he wanted to go places he’d never been before and say hello to people he hadn’t yet met.

“The folks up north don’t worry as much about the flu. They aren’t crowded together so they’re not breathing each other’s air. You gotta be smart and you gotta play it safe, but you can’t sit out the whole game, Beth.”

He said the trip would be a safe, energizing holiday and a fun-filled adventure. It would get Mama out of the house and away from her imagined fears, her guilt for unfulfilled responsibilities, and tortured memories “…which are just as dangerous to the body and mind as the goddamned flu is. Come with me, Beth. We'll start one week from tomorrow.” His pale blue eyes were comforting, reassuring, and persuasive. His mustache suggested authority.

As a final point, he said the trip would serve the practical purpose of delivering our grown puppy, Dinah, to a shirttail relative’s dairy ranch near Tomales. “You can’t keep a Border Collie cooped up in the city. Dinah needs to be in the country, doing what she was born to do, herding cows and sheep, or she’ll be unhappy.”

 Dinah, hearing her name, scrambled off the rug in the foyer and stood between the table and the sink; one eye blue, and the other one brown - both of them focused on Mama, The Superintendent of Table Scraps. 

As she raised her ears, tilted her head back and forth, raised her eyebrows, flopped her big tongue, and wagged her tail Uncle Nels said, “See Beth? She’s asking you not to stand in the way of her career opportunity of a lifetime.” Me and Nels laughed as Dinah bounded toward me for a pet.

Mama wiped her eyes smearing salty dampness across her reddened cheeks. Then, she extended both of her moistened hands toward Uncle Nels. He stepped forward and enfolded her in his strong arms. She buried her face in his chest. They hugged and swayed and hugged some more. I could hear Mama sobbing until she pushed him away at arm's length revealing his now soggy and snotty Stratford Style Van Cleef and Arpels shirt front.

If I close my eyes and concentrate I can hear Mama snorting up two full nostrilsful and squeaking, "Did you say one week from tomorrow? Let’s go, Little Brother.”

My mom, my dog, my Uncle Nels, a 1918 Packard, Twin Six, I-25, Salon Phaeton, convertible, and the open road - what more could a disheartened ten-year-old boy hope for? 

The End