TALES OF THE CITY once again

Last year, Armistead Maupin released the tenth volume in his TALES OF THE CITY series, MONA OF THE MANOR.  This completed the four subsequent volumes after the original six in the series:  TALES OF THE CITY (1978), MORE TALES OF THE CITY (1980), FURTHER TALES OF THE CITY (1982), BABYCAKES (1984), SIGNIFICANT OTHERS (1987), and SURE OF YOU (1989).  

Each of these four subsequent volumes was titled for one of his four major characters, MICHAEL TOLIVER LIVES (2007), MARY ANN IN AUTUMN (2010), THE DAYS OF ANNA MADRIGAL (2014),  and, most recently, MONA OF THE MANOR (2024).    

I was at the original CATEGORY SIX BOOKS store on Capitol Hill in Denver sometime in the mid 1980's with a former friend, Jon O'Neil.  He knew a big guy who worked there now and then (he may not have been paid by the much older owner and just enjoyed being at the store and selling gay books).  The fellow might also have been a flight attendant for United--if memory serves--and simply volunteered on his days off, to work behind the counter of the popular store on E. 10th Street, on the east side, between N. Downing St. and N. Corona St.  The building had been an old house at one time, with steps leading up to the front door of the store.  The owner of CATEGORY SIX BOOKS and his partner lived upstairs from the store level itself.  In the center of the store were wooden steps leading up to the residence.  The staircase divided the store into two, almost equal halves once a patron entered the front door.

Jon and I were just browsing at first, having driven up from Colorado Springs where we lived to Denver that sunny afternoon, probably in Spring.  This was the first time I had ever been in a gay book store, at least one that was not primarily selling porn magazines like the one my friend Bart Keeling worked at in Colorado Springs off of N. Platte Blvd. 

Eventually, perhaps Jon was making his purchase and I was simply standing beside him as his buddy behind the cash register rang up the total price of his books.  Somehow, I must have been asked if I had read TALES OF THE CITY, a series I had never even heard of since this was the mid 1980's and Maupin had not yet published the fifth volume, his breakout novel in the series, SIGNIFICANT OTHERS.  When I must have acknowledged that I had not even heard of TALES, Jon's buddy grabbed the four paperback volumes then in existence and handed them to me, confidently saying, "Do yourself a favor and buy these." 

This could have been in either late 1984 or 1985 since BABYCAKES was published in 1984.

I cannot imagine that I was anything but startled.  I almost never read novels, except in college.  And, of course, there were very few "gay" novels back then, at least none that would be included in a college class at Cal State Dominguez Hills circa 1970.  I reluctantly accepted the stack though I cannot now recall how I paid for the four books, whether in cash or, more likely, by credit card.  (I had an American Express card in the beginning of the decade, which was only the first company to issue me a card of any kind after my resignation from the Air Force in October of 1979.  One had to build up credit, then as now, to get credit cards.)         

These four volumes were first editions; and none of them, published by Harper & Row, were ever in hardback when they first appeared.
                                                                          

                                                                                  

                                                                                 

                                                                                 

I was, of course, working at Kaman Corporation (later Instrumentation) on Garden of the Gods Road in Colorado Springs full time since 1980 while I worked part time, weekday evenings and sometimes Saturdays, for Pikes Peak Community College at Fort Carson and, less often, Peterson Air Force Base, teaching English, Literature, U.S. History, Western Civilization, Communications, and Humanities.  When was I going to read them when I did work full time during the day and two or four evenings during the week and sometimes Friday evening and all day Saturday (for the Communications seminars)?  I had joined the History Book Club and was reading many history, as well as art and architectural, books so that I could get a stronger grip on U.S. and European history, in addition to art and architecture, when I was teaching history or humanities classes.   

At some point at Kaman, I had been transferred from the small Displacement Measuring Devices team (Rich Hostak, Shirley Overholser, Greg Smith, and our older supervisor, the inventor of the DM devices that Kaman sold, who kindly hired me in 1980 but whose name I no longer remember) to the larger Radiation Monitoring Division of Kaman.  My coworker and fellow technical writer at the RMS division was later let go, and then my job would also entail becoming the division's supply officer.  I was given a solitary office off of the main manufacturing floor.  No one else occupied that area of at least three separate offices. 

For anyone to find me, they had to enter double doors, take a couple of steps, turn right, take a few more steps, and then turn right again to enter my office, the single door of which I would often close for privacy.  I knew someone was coming well before they got to me.  

I started to read the novels then and there when I had nothing to do for work.  It took me three days to finish off TALES because it was something quite different than what I was used to reading, a day each for MORE and FURTHER, and a two or three more days because I knew it was the last one and I really wanted to savor it, BABYCAKES.  To say I devoured the series would be accurate.  I was totally hooked.

As the decade progressed, I would reread the series a couple more times, probably as SIGNIFICANT OTHERS and then SURE OF YOU were published.  (I specifically remember once when I was feeling unwell, had to stay home from work, and lay on the couch in the living room and read the books.)

I recall reading that SIGNIFICANT OTHERS did become Maupin's breakout book, extensively widening his fanbase and significantly increasing his book sales.  This would also be the last volume to appear only in paperback as the first edition.  While the edition was the same height and depth of the four earlier volumes, it was a much thicker book, definitely longer than each of the first four.  And, again if I am remembering correctly, this was the first book that no longer relied upon newspaper columns that first appeared in San Francisco newsprint before being gathered in book form. 
                                                                         

SURE OF YOU was, finally, the first volume to initially appear as a hardback book.  I not only bought it that way at CATEGORY SIX BOOKS, I learned that Maupin was going to appear at the store on Capitol Hill for a signing.  My other former friend at the time, Dino, and I headed over to the store on 10th street to discover that Maupin was, indeed, exceedingly popular, given that the signing line extended out the back door of the building and into a backyard that we had not known existed.  At least a couple dozen fans were ahead of us.  Once inside the main floor, we could hear a straight woman at the table set-up near the front door, while standing in front of Maupin, weeping when Maupin indicated that SURE OF YOU was likely the last volume in the series ever.  Maupin's partner at the time, the late Terry Anderson, was standing regally, almost protectively, behind Maupin sitting at the table.  He was chuckling at the obvious grief being expressed by this female fan while Maupin tried to soothe her disappointment that he had no more stories to tell about his beloved characters. 

His characters had strongly taken a hold of his now far-more-numerous fans.  We had actually come to love them as if they were real.  And Barbary Lane was as real to us as if it really existed in San Francisco.  When Dino and I finally arrived in front of the signing table and Armistead looked up at me expectantly, we asked, "Does Barbary Lane really exist?"  Maupin explained that he had based the location upon Macondray Lane, a real pedestrian lane.  (Dino and I would later visit the location, climb the wooden steps and walk the Lane, figuring where 28 Barbary Lane would be were it there and not just a soundstage in Los Angeles when the first film was shot.)  Maupin signed my hardback book and Dino and I moved off, pleased that we had gotten to speak with him even if briefly.
                                                                           

Here is a photo of Macondray Lane's steps:
                                                                                 

With TALES OF THE CITY apparently at an end in 1989, and my searching for the right kind of novel for me to create, I wrote a few single novels that I knew were not worthy to publish.  I was soon finally forced to move to Denver when the IBM job appeared.  I had already dipped my toes into the Denver stream after I was unable to get hired for a middle school or high school teaching job in Colorado Springs after I finished with my Secondary Education certificate program at UCCS in 1989. 

In early 1990, Dino was exiting a building in downtown Denver as a former, fellow tenet of a converted house on Capitol Hill was entering that same building.  In chatting Don Nolan up that afternoon, Dino discovered that Don was working as a technical writer on a project for Capital Federal Savings in the Tech Center of Denver.  The project needed a few more writers, so Dino was excited to offer my name for consideration.  Don was happy to hear that because, as a contractor, if he got another person hired, he would get a $1,000.00 check from Ciber, Inc., his contract company.  I would drive that Spring to the Tech Center each day from Colorado Springs after I got hired.  Sometimes I would spend Friday night at Dino's place and drive back to Colorado Springs in the morning.

Another Cap Fed contractor was Nancy Dille, and she got a tech writer job from IBM after the Cap Fed job ended in June.  Because they needed more writers on that project, she offered my name for consideration.  I was hired and she got a check.  That job in 1991 forced me to move to Dino and his partner's house in Thornton, CO, north of Denver for a few months.  Since the project kept going, and then I got transferred to another IBM project and, eventually, got the Sales Manual job that would last for 31 years eventually, I had to get an apartment and leave my part time teaching for Pikes Peak Community College behind.  I now had time to write something I truly believed in.  By 1993, I began writing what would become my own series, RAINBOW ARC OF FIRE.     

I believe that it was around 1998, after I had moved into my condo on Franklin St., that Maupin was on another book tour.  I bought a copy of that hardback 20th Edition of TALES OF THE CITY.  Maupin was at the new Denver library for a signing.  By then I had published the first six volumes of my own series that had been entirely inspired by Maupin's series.  While I created a super-hero series, I did use short, cliff-hanger chapters as he had.  And my series was based in Denver while his was set in San Francisco.  I decided in homage to present him with a set of my series, as well as having him sign my hardback copy of TALES OF THE CITY.  A handler at the library thought he would certainly accept my unusual gift, so he ushered me in front of Maupin at the signing table, I briefly told the now very popular what I was giving him and how he had inspired me to write it.  A bit puzzled, he accepted the colorful stack of books, though he seemed quite surprised.  He also signed my hardback copy of his book.   
                                                                                  

These are the covers of his subsequent four volumes, each named for a major character:
                                                                                

                                                                                  

                                                                                 

                                                                                   

When I learned that MONA OF THE MANOR was going to be published, I preordered it.  Then I decided to reread the series once again, ordering the three paperback omnibuses, each containing three of the previous volumes in the series.  These are what they look like:
                                                                               

                                                                                

                                                                                 

I did not want to potentially damage all of my first editions in case something untoward might happen during my rereading.  These omnibuses seemed a good bet.  I read the first Omnibus last year.  But when I started on the second Omnibus that begins with BABYCAKES, I stopped after reading only a few pages. Why?

I was a bit burned out.  The first three books, combined, made for a lot of reading.  Also, each was made into a series on PBS (TALES OF THE CITY) or Showtime (MORE and FURTHER) after an intolerant, priggish jerk overseeing PBS in the first Bush Administration had halted the possibility of any further TALES OF THE CITY books being made into video series for PBS even though the first was the highest rated PBS show of all time when it aired.  He thought it was obscene and not for general public consumption even though some PBS stations pixilated any slight nudity such as Mona's breasts when she was getting dressed in front of Mary Ann and a nude girlie poster on Brian Hawkins's fridge. 

Sadly, too, BABYCAKES begins with the reader being made aware that handsome Dr. Jon Fielding, Michael's previous love interest, has died of AIDS and his ashes buried under patio pavers at 28 Barbary Lane.  With the book being published in 1984, in major cities such as SF, LA, NY and even Denver, we had seen our share of dying gay men.  I had read the TIME and NEWSWEEK articles in the Kaman library about this mysterious new, and fatal, disease that seemed to be primarily targeting gay men. The articles began around 1981, again if I am remembering right.  Until the cocktails became widely available after 1995, gay men were still dying.  I had my first HIV test in Colorado Springs, but then I regularly got tested at a few sites in Denver after I moved there, once in a mobile testing RV parked at Cheesman for an annual Pride Parade.

Of those of us who had known one another at the Air Force Academy in 1979, George Gordy and Dan Stratford's partner, Dick Tuttle, would be dead in 1989.  Dan would hang on until 1995.  This was a decade and a half of funerals and notices in the paper and word of mouth gossip as to who had just died.  Trying to reread BABYCAKES before MONA OF THE MANOR brought it all back much too clearly.  And, of course, some of the survivors guilt also came flooding back.  Those of us who are still negative after decades sometimes feels as if we are survivors of the TITANIC.  We hadn't always played safe, we had not always been smart, so perhaps we were just preeminently lucky as we escaped in the life rafts and left others at sea to drown. 

Also, those who died back then have now been dead for years, and even for decades.  Many of them are now almost forgotten.  Even the United flight attendant who volunteered at CATEGORY SIX BOOKS and handed me those first four TALES books in 19984 or 1985 died in the 1990's.  I saw him shuffling out of a St. Joseph's hospital room in the 1990's after he had visited a guy whom I had briefly dated, who would die not long after the flight attendant died.  He was, physically, on his last legs that day with obvious sores clearly visible.   

Too many casualties and too many painful memories.

I had already shelved MONA OF THE MANOR for several months before picking it up to read a week ago, finishing it yesterday.  Now a period piece about that terrible era before the cocktails and the meds and PrEP, it brought back memories of those terrible years.              

Someday, we survivors of AIDS, like those survivors who were there for that night to remember aboard the TITANIC, will be gone.  If they read about our generation, they may learn that we survived Polio, The Cold War, the Vietnam War, AIDS, rampant intolerance and COVID.  We weren't The Greatest Generation.  We were their offspring, and the world we were handed to endure made us survivors of too many perils.  But many of us did survive, if just barely.
                                                                              



                

Q Con, Saturday May 3rd 2025

 Mark and I will again be there for our fourth annual participation.

Wonder Con 2025 Anaheim, 28-30 March

 Day One:

                                                                                    

                                                                                   

                                                                                 

                                                                                  

Day Two
                                                                                  

                                                                               

                                                                               
We both had a great time once again.  Gave away a lot of books and hero card packets.  

Droids invasion:
                                                                               

                                                                               

                                                                                 

1915 South Broadway, Santa Ana, CA, 1952-1954

                                                                                 

                                                                                  

When Dad, Mom, Ann and I moved into the house on South Broadway, the Korean War was entering its final year (June 1950 to July 1953).  Dad had been a P.O.W. in WWII after his B-24 Liberator bomber was so crippled on a Ploesti Raid in 1944 that they could not make it back to their Italian base.  The crewmembers bailed out, likely over Yugoslavia, and Dad was soon captured and interred in a camp in Southern Germany until liberated by Patton's troops.  Dad would later tell me his only camp story, likely to a son who might have been a picky eater at some point.  He told me the Germans would dump a pile of  potatoes in the camp, and the prisoners had to wipe off the mud and eat, to ward off starvation.  He never explained whether they bothered to cook the potatoes first or ate them raw.

While he--and we--were stationed at George AFB, Dad must have been ordered to fly to Japan, probably to become directly involved in Korea as a bombardier.  With a wife and two children back home, and the prospect of being shot down once again and becoming a P.O.W. of the North Korean communists, he decided to resign his commission and become a civilian for the first time since he attended Bombardier training school in 1943.  In later years, he would tell Ann that he regretted resigning from the Air Force, but at the time he must have felt quite differently.

With his resignation, we would have had to leave George AFB for the house on Broadway in 1952, which was originally built in 1947, in the first waves of homes constructed for returning WWII veterans.  Why Santa Ana? 

I have no idea what job Dad did while we lived in Santa Ana, but he was probably an employee for Fuller Paint, perhaps working in a store located there.  And Santa Ana was up the road from Newport Beach, where Grandma and Grandpa Sanchez owned a house on the water off of W Bay Avenue.  Grandpa had somehow learned to sail and owned a sailboat that he loved.  Here is the boat with Grandpa standing on their dock.  I have no idea who was piloting the sailboat.
                                                                         

Below, Ann is in the arms of Grandma Sanchez while I am wearing what looks to be a very primitive type of life vest.  I do remember being in the interior of Grandpa's sailboat as we cruised the harbor.                                                                            

Grandpa Sanchez is looking at the two of us on the sailboat.
                                                                              

Here is a different photo of Grandpa and me sailing aboard his boat.
                                                                             

Here are a few photos of Mom with one or both of us kids on the sailboat.
                                                                                 

                                                                                 

                                                                                                   

The Grandparents' home on the water along W Bay Avenue was only three doors down from a small, sandy beach where, I believe, the following photos were taken.
                                                                             

                                                                            

                                                                               

Here are photos of the front yard of the Grandparents' house, between the house itself and the dock.  The house was built in 1952.
                                                                                  

                                                                                  

                                                                               

                                                                                  

When I was born, Dad sent the telegram announcing my birth to an address on the water, but on the other side of the bay from Lido Isle and further toward the open sea along Newport harbor.  In between their living at that former waterfront address and Via Lido Nord, they had moved to Yucaipa, CA.  They owned a two-story house with some land around it where they grew apricot trees.  Below are the only two photos I have of a visit Ann and I made, likely with just Mom.  I do have a distinct and lasting memory of showing up there late one night by car with a full moon above and being carried up the stairs to the top floor where the Grandparents lived.  I slept on the floor that night with the moon peering in at me through open Venetian blinds.   

Mom would tell me a story of Grandpa Sanchez giving her eggs and other food items to take back with her, likely to George AFB while Dad was in Japan.  She said she would stop along the highway on the return home, to sell whatever Grandpa had given her while I played in and around the car.  Perhaps as a cash-strapped service wife with an absent husband away at war, she needed additional money to get by.
                                                                             

                                                                                    

Those couple of years of our living in Santa Ana before we would move to Whittier, CA, feature far more photos than I have memories.  Besides the death of the little playmate on the next block of Broadway, dying of diabetes and us kids climbing up a wooden step to view her tiny body, seemingly at peace, under a pink gauze fabric that covered her entire coffin, in addition to my venturing to Main Street of Santa Ana, two blocks over from Broadway, where an older man gave me a stick of gum, I remember little else of that time before Whittier.  (Mom would chide me when I got home after I told the tale of the elderly fellow giving me gum.  She would warn that I ought never to accept candy or gum from a stranger.  My response today would be, "Why the heck did you let a 4-year-old child hike alone two blocks over, to a busy street where the sidewalks had several strangers walking to and fro?")

Given the photographic evidence, I don't know whether it was a single visit by everyone, or there were a couple of separate visits by relatives, mostly on mom's side.  One of those visits involved both sets of grandparents, as well as Aunt Jean, Mom's one sister, and her son, our cousin, Doug Green.  I am not entirely certain, but this may have been the only time that both sets of grandparents ever met one another.  Below is a photo of Grandma and Grandpa Breeze and us three cousins.  Ann is on Grandma Breeze's lap, Cousin Doug is standing.  I am on Grandpa Breeze's lap.  Grandpa Breeze would die in 1956, two years hence, back in White Cloud, KS, at the early age of 55. 

He was not feeling well at the town gas station where he worked that hot July day.  He would attempt to hike back to their house to rest but would succumb to a massive heart attack while lying on a wooden picnic table off of main street.   Aunt Jean would later remark that it was such a hot day when they attended the services at a local church before they buried their father in the cemetery above the town.  Grandma Breeze would outlive him by more than thirty years, dying herself of a heart attack in her home in White Cloud in 1989 while Uncle Robert was in the adjoining living room to her bedroom, watching TV.  (Aunt Doris, Mom's youngest sister, and Uncle Robert would also die of heart attacks, while Mom would die of congestive heart failure in 2002.)

This photo is the only one that exists showing us three cousins with the Breeze Grandparents, the last time when Grandpa Breeze would see us and we would see him.  I simply have no memories of him or this final visit.                                                                                      

Below are the three of us cousins, posed together to the left.  The two girls to the right of us in the photo are Betty Jo and Nancy, second cousins to we three, daughters of Mom's cousin, Grace.  Nancy would die of cancer, as would her mother.  Ann and I would be saddened to see, when we visited the Hiawatha Cemetery not far from White Cloud after Mom died in 2002, that Nancy had not even been given a proper headstone on her grave.  She still only had the temporary metal one they place on the grave when someone is first buried.  
                                                                     

This photo is the only one I am aware of featuring the two Grandmothers together with Ann and me.  I assume that Grandpa Sanchez was also present, but we have no photographs.
                                                                              

The following photos are of Betty Jo and Nancy's parents, as well as Mom and Dad and Ann and me.  Again, was this during the same visit photographed above, or a different visit?   The reason I believe this was a separate visit is the appearance of a Christmas tree at the edge of the photo of their family and the holiday cards on the fireplace.
                                                                               

Here are additional photos of that visit with combinations of the kids and the parents.
                                                                                 

Uncle Robert joins us on the far right, standing, below.  I am not sure who is the couple on the left, standing.                                                                              

Here is the tree and living room unobstructed.
                                                                                  

Here are the women and girls but no grandparents.  Mom with Ann (?).  I am not sure who the woman with the frizzy hair and the nan sitting on the floor are.
                                                                               

Easter was yet another time to get out the camera and takes photos.  Here Ann and I are with our Easter baskets in the driveway with the garage in back.
                                                                                

                                                                                  

Not sure why we two were all dressed up and photographed, but here we are.
                                                                                   

                                                                             

                                                                               

                                                                         

Again, no idea the reason why we were photographed below, except that Ann has a new baby carriage.  I have no idea what I am holding (getting out the magnifying glass, I see they are some kind of old style cars.  I am wearing a rather spiffy jacket.)
                                                                              

                                                                                 

                                                                                 

   

These were photos obviously taken of the backyard in Santa Ana when we were younger than we had been in the later photos above, possibly just after we moved in.  Old WWII life rafts were good substitutes for wading pools.
                                                                              

                                                                               

                                                                                

                                                                                  

                                                                                

Here are some photos, mostly of Ann when she was younger and often dolled up.  The fire engine she is pushing has a story.  Apparently, Grandma Sanchez bought that for us kids but was appalled to learn that it had, at one point, been left out in the rain.  Mom used to tell that story years later.
                                                                              

                                                                                

                                                                                     

Mom could often take a glamourous photograph.  Here she is with Ann.  My sister appears almost to be in the way of Mom's studied pose.
                                                                                  

Here are the two of us, dressed up once again.  Rare, though faded, color photographs.
                                                                               

                                                                               

More backyard photographs:
                                                                                  

                                                                                   

                                                                                  

Not sure why Ann is dressed up and I am not.
                                                                                  

The following is a very rare, vintage photograph.  Clearly this is the two of us with Mom and Grandma Breeze.  We are at Knotts Berry Farm.  I have not found other photographs of that visit to the park.
                                                                                  

Here are we with some neighbor kids, including the Rousseau's in a wagon.  I am in the backrow and to the left.  Ann is in the bottom row in the center.  I had a later Christmas postcard that Mom kept of the Rousseau kids when their family had moved to Spokane, Washington, likely after their father had retired from the service.  Mom had kept up a continuous correspondence with their mother, Charlotte.  When we lived in Whittier in that first year, I believe, we journeyed up the California coast to visit them in Monterey.  Hwy 1 in those days was extremely twisty, and we two kids in the backseat often got car sick.  If Dad stopped to get us a coke to settle our delicate stomachs, we would have to keep the cups in case we puked again.

The three Rousseau kids had lived around the corner in a two-story clapboard house, likely built years before.  I see no evidence of their house in current satellite photos of Santa Ana.  Perhaps the front faced Main Street and their house was later torn down to make way for a business.  I am certain their Dad was in the Marine Corps.  (I later found Curly on Facebook; but while he confirmed the photo was of him, his older brother Tom, and his sister, he seemed entirely unconcerned about providing any further information about the family we had all been close to so many years before.  I heard nothing further from him and let the renewed contact drop.)    

Mom did tell the embarrassing story of Ann and me in the tub in the sole bathroom in our house.  She says the phone rang and she went to answer it.  For some unknown reason, Ann and I got out of the tub and hiked over to the Rousseau's house, to play in the dirt in their backyard.  Inexplicably, we two siblings decided to head over there sans clothing of any kind.  After Mom got off the phone, she got an immediate call from Charlotte, to say that we were playing in their backyard with her kids entirely naked.  Mercifully, I have no memory of that adventure.
                                                                            

I have one other distinct memory of living on S. Broadway in Santa Ana.  On Main Street to the north, on the other side of the street, was a Beany & Cecil's hamburger joint (named for the cartoon TV series) from 1949 to 1955.   After we must have gotten some burgers, Dad pulled around to the dirt parking in back where they featured a puppet show we could watch from the car.  

Apparently, Dad had gotten a job at a Fuller Paint Store in Whittier, CA.  We probably moved there, likely in June of 1954, leaving Santa Ana behind, to cut down his driving time to his job.  Many years later, we stopped by a house around the corner from ours on Broadway that faced W St Andrew Place.  An older, childless couple lived there.  The widow told us the story of how Ann would visit their house in the afternoons during the week and waited at the window for her husband to come home.  Ann delighted in seeing him and he in seeing her as he opened the front door. 

Mom did enter Ann in child beauty contests in those early days.  I remember a photograph or two of her holding a small trophy and wearing a tiny crown.  I don't have those photos, but I do have these two professional photos of me that can be seen on the mantle of the living room in those Christmas photographs.  (I don't know why the photographer or Mom did not straighten that turned under collar.)                                                                    

                                                                                  

And, of course, there was this one of Mom with us two kids.
                                                                                 

                                                                            
I do remember being taken by car to the new house in Whittier and being tucked in to a twin bed in our new bedroom, with Dad and Mom leaving the hall door ajar and the hall light on so we could find our way to the new hall bathroom.  We had not been old enough in Santa Ana to attend kindergarten, but that Fall I would be, and the idyllic life that we had known in Santa Ana--of life raft pools in the backyard and holiday photographs with our nuclear family--would eventually come to an end before the decade concluded.