Alan Fox

Last Saturday, Daveen and I enjoyed a lovely day on Catalina Island, which is located off the coast of California, 26 miles West of San Pedro.  I’ll bet I was one of the few people visiting that day who had lived there in 1944, more than 75 years ago.

My dad earned his living playing the French horn.  To avoid the draft during WW II, he volunteered for the Merchant Marine Band which was headquartered on Catalina.  In 1944, when I was four years old, my mother, father, brother, and I lived there for almost a year.

I still remember our rental house – which was only a half a block from the ocean.  Mom and Dad would let me walk to the beach by myself.

I remember the day I went fishing on the pier.  Dad used yarn to tie my fishing pole to a buttonhole in my sweater.  Being four years old, and therefore almost entirely grown up, I untied the knot as soon as I left the house.

On the pier, of course, I immediately dropped the pole into the Pacific Ocean, never to be seen again.  I don’t remember how I explained that to Dad.  Nor do I remember what punishment he doled out as a result.  But he didn’t trust me with a fishing pole for many years.

While on Catalina, my mom seriously injured her back and we had to return to Los Angeles. She slept in the upstairs den for nearly a year as she recovered.

After she recovered, I remember Mom crying one morning in the bathroom.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

She said that the President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had died.

I don’t have many memories from before I was ten, but the memories of our time spent on Catalina Island are some of my fondest.  And the day FDR died was one of the saddest.

Alan

My dad grew up in New York, in what I believe was the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn.

When Dad was nearly eighty years old, we were visiting New York City together, and he asked me to rent a car and drive him to see the home he had grown up in.

When we arrived we discovered what appeared to be a large beer brewing facility.  There was no trace of any house in what had clearly become a commercial neighborhood.

“Take me back to the hotel,” he said.  “I never want to see this place again.”

My dad and I never spoke about this day, which means I will never know for sure how he felt.  But I imagine that if I visited my own childhood home near Glendale, California, and found a shopping center looming over what used to be my bedroom, I would be distressed, maybe devastated.  But I know I would hide my dismay, especially from myself.

We each need a place where we feel we belong.  A place that remains the same, steadfast, even as we change.  We need a touchstone where we feel at home in this strange and scary world.

My own touchstone is my real estate company, which I established fifty-four years ago and have nurtured ever since.  I can only imagine my distress if, somehow, I was able to visit our small office building on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, California, ten, twenty, or a hundred years from now, only to find the building gone and a vacant lot the only reminder that it, or I, ever existed.

As I write this, I am sitting in the baggage claim area of SeaTac airport.  I used to own a home, as well as several investment properties in Seattle.  Now I own nothing here.  As other travelers pick up their luggage, a comforting bit of home to accompany their journey from wherever, I have the sense that I no longer belong here.

Dad, I wish you well.  You are no longer in this world, but perhaps you have, indeed, found home again.

Love,

Alan

When my parents were getting older, some of their long-standing friends began to die.

“Mom and I are going to have to make some new friends who are twenty years younger than we are,” my dad said. He was very pragmatic (a characteristic that he passed on to me).

And while he did indeed find younger friends, he also outlasted all of them – because he lived to be 104.

This morning, a close friend of ours for 50 years, shared that she has been diagnosed with inoperable cancer. Her doctor told her that she between has six months and a year to live.  There is an old joke in which the patient says to his doctor, “I won’t even be able to pay off your bill in six months.”  The doctor replies, “All right.  Then I’ll give you a year.”

But all joking aside, when a friend has limited time – we are reminded that it is more important than ever to appreciate every minute. Our friend has already begun to put her affairs in order and wants to spend more time with Daveen and me over the next months.  I’m glad she is giving us that chance. No doubt, we will all appreciate each other more, now that we have a deadline.  As in the song “Big Yellow Taxi” reminds us, “don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.”

Of course, during the past 28 months of COVID we haven’t been able to visit with our old friends, let alone new ones. And yet, more than ever I find myself contemplating, how can I squeeze more awareness into each minute of my life?  I’m not sure.  I’m reminded of the 2007 movie The Bucket List with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman.  Unlike them, I’ve already completed my bucket list, and more.  As my dad used to say during his last 20 years, “I give thanks for every new day.  It’s a bonus.”

Is your bucket list half full, or half empty?  How are you choosing to live your life? Years ago, Daveen and I were planning to vacation in Hawaii.  A friend suggested we fly first class.  “If you don’t use your money to fly first class today, one day your children will.”  Ouch!  That might be true.  We flew first class.

I’m tired of putting my “regular” life on hold for Covid.  So, Daveen and I are off to San Diego for a weekend getaway.  We plan to see Taming of the Shrew at the Old Globe Theater, and then relax and watch an NBA game in our room the next night.

Hopefully, we’ll all soon be out and about, adding check marks to our bucket list.  None of us has forever.

Alan