Twenty Four

1974

In the 1950s my aunt and uncle made a decision that was courageous even if illogical.  My mother’s sister and her recently wed husband were not making a ton of money in New York.  They decided, two children off the hard streets of Brooklyn, to travel across the country and go into the chicken business.

My aunt knew nothing about raising chickens. My uncle knew next to nothing, only that a cousin of his had also set off across the continent to raise chickens.  So they set off, with a child, along a non-interstate developed country driving to California.  They put down stakes in a town sixty miles north of San Francisco which now has three exits on highway 5, but then was a sleepy burg a little too far from San Francisco to be a bedroom community.  Not only did they decide to live in this very unBrooklyn like burg, they moved to a part of Santa Rosa that was way on the outskirts of a town that did not have much in the way of skirts to begin with.  They built and lived in a tiny house and when two new cousins came along, they built another larger home on the same land renting the first one to supplement income from the chicken business.

A few rides after I left Pacifica I was at an exit for Santa Rosa called Todd Road. All I had was an address for my aunt and uncle who were expecting me at some point, though not just five days after I had set off from Buffalo.  The driver dropped me off at a gas station. This was, of course, before GPS systems or smart phones or sophisticated street maps. In those days a gas station was a place to check for local directions.  The first fellow with whom I spoke had never heard of Walker Avenue and wondered if I had the right address. I’d been writing to Walker Avenue at my mother’s urging for years, so I knew I had the address right.  He called over Billy who had lived in Santa Rosa his entire life.

Billy was oiled up.  It was late in the afternoon and he had spent the day, apparently, underneath cars. His glasses were dirty and his hands did not get much cleaner after he wiped them for a good while on a rag that was gas station filthy.  His hat was oily as well. Guy is probably cleaning up forty plus years later.  You could read Billy on his shirt.

Billy asked where I was going.  I told him.  Billy shook his head and told me what I already knew. He had lived in Santa Rosa his whole life. And then, like his coworker, said he’d never heard of Walker Avenue.  I insisted I had the correct address. He suggested maybe the street was in another town and threw out some names none of which were familiar.  Getting to my aunts was the end of the way out here and I was anxious to complete this leg of the journey not so much because I was tired of hitch-hiking but to be able to say I finished the ride out.  It was now the fifth day since I had kissed with Becca at exit 50 by the New York State Thruway.  Billy asked me if maybe my aunt lived in New Mexico because there was a Santa Rosa there. This question I could not believe and likely had my mouth open when a woman who had used the restroom overheard the question and joined the conversation.

She knew where Walker Avenue was.  She had a friend who lived on Walker Avenue in fact.  Billy asked the woman to point it out on a map of Santa Rosa that was posted on one of the gas station walls. She did.  Walker Avenue was several miles west of where we stood on a parallel road to the interstate truly in the middle of nowhere. 

“That’s Walker Avenue?” said Billy.  “We call that the old country road. That’s Walker Avenue.” He squinted through the filthy glasses and said it again. “Walker Avenue. Huh”

The woman seemed very upbeat, new agey, as if she had just finished a seminar on how to be happy and the joys of extending a helping hand.  She said it had been a while since she visited her friend and would be glad to take me to my aunt’s house.  I would, as it turned out, not only make it to California but get as a final ride, a door-to-door lift to my mother’s sister.

The woman, I found out, was the co-author of a book that I found out later was a self-help best seller. I’d not heard of it at the time, but she was telling me without sounding boastful that it had freed her up both financially and emotionally.  I read the book years later and my recollection of her was that, at least then, she was living the lessons endorsed in her book.  Now she may be grousing that her co-author is getting more than her share of the loot, and upset that her husband has been snuggling with a woman twenty years younger.  But that day she was upbeat. And her friend, remarkably, was the woman who at that time, was renting my aunt’s first home.  The driver did not know my kin, just knew of them as the landlords of her buddy.

And so, I was dropped off at the very house I’d been writing to for years. I knocked on the front door and out came my aunt, crying like a child.  I had not seen her or my uncle in a dozen years.  I renewed my acquaintances with my California cousins. Then my aunt asked me to do her a favor.

“Call your mother.”