Notes From Home

Joan Didion once wrote something about wishing she could provide for her daughter the sort of childhood she had had in Sacramento--a sense of home--knowing it was impossible. Lately, with a second child filling our house with love and noise and complications, Didion’s lament keeps paying a visit. Our closest family member is more than 1,000 miles away, and my childhood--so simple in retrospect, and seemingly so much larger for it--feels all too distant.

We live in the Los Feliz area now, below Griffith Park, so “the woods” are not far. But I grew up on the fringe of the real thing, on the suburban outskirts of a town-turned-city cut out of the Northwest forests. The woods were literally our back yard, the natural playground in which we constructed forts and rope swings and, no doubt, a few dreams. Many valuable lessons--in botany, biology, even nubile anatomy--were learned there, along with some of no value at all, such as how to inhale Dad’s Lucky Strikes.

I still have a notebook filled with samples of life culled from these woods. There were mostly Douglas fir, but also beeches; and there were painful thistles, snowberry bushes (whose pasty white berries provided fodder for many a major kid fight), the beautiful and rare and thus-presumed-to-be-lucky trillium, more skunk cabbage than anyone could ever want, and, best of all, there were huckleberries. Lots of huckleberries.

Our huckleberries were small and red, delicate and sweet. They were good on their own, but they were even better added to Saturday-morning pancakes. In fact, there may be no greater earthbound experience than watching pancakes on the grill firming up around a dozen hand-picked huckleberries. Except, of course, eating them--with a little butter, no syrup.

We were closer to real food then, it seems, and to the land that produced it. There were my grandmother’s blackberry pies, made fresh with berries my sisters and I picked from the bramble in the side yard. There were the strawberries and green beans most of us local kids picked for pay during the summer. There was the Newtons’ cherry tree, and the fresh corn bought on the way to my grandparents’ cabin and, once you got there, our very own oyster bed. If you didn’t like oysters, you could walk a mile and buy fresh shrimp right off a boat. If you didn’t like fresh shrimp right off a boat, you were an idiot.

We were closer to our family histories then, and to family recipes. Montana may not have been a center of gourmandism, but it’s where my grandparents came from--and thus the pancakes we threw those huckleberries into. I never knew my grandmother’s sister, Nannie, but I ate her buttermilk waffles a few hundred times over the years. And then there was Unky’s candy. Nannie and Unky ran a homemade candy and ice cream store in Arcata during the ‘40s, and after she died he continued to make several varieties each Christmastime. Helping out was an annual event for my sisters and cousins and me, and one year the Seattle Times ran a photo of us kids pulling taffy.

So many of the good, simple memories involve food, and not all of it was healthful: buying Chicko Sticks at the lake in the summer; walking to the Yew Street Store for candy, or down to the Atlantic Richfield (that’s ARCO to you kids) station for a Payday bar. Or driving across town with the family to Bunk’s Drive-In for a cheeseburger and a--gulp--butterscotch shake. One of the last great independents, Bunk’s belongs to my past, not everyone else’s--it’s no McMemory.

These are lost experiences. My kids will not pick wild huckleberries or pull taffy with their cousins or watch their grandfather barbecue oysters right off the beach. And if they eat Nannie’s waffles or meat loaf, it will be for purely nostalgic reasons, because most of our old basic recipes have been replaced by those from Marion Cunningham or “The New Basics” ’ Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins and their relatives. (My new “great aunt” is one Rose Levy Beranbaum.) Our palates are happy for it but at the same time it feels as if we have forsaken something . . . important.

My wife doesn’t share my concern; she thinks I view my childhood through huckleberry-colored glasses. Well, maybe I am just getting old, failing to see the pleasures of my son’s youth. (Already I hate his music--Raffi--and he’s only 2 1/2!) After all, Cal enjoys walking down to the local coffeehouse for a good if virginal caffe latte (sipped beneath a lot of really bad art). On the way home we might stop into an Armenian market for some homemade baklava, or into one run by Asians and Latinos for fresh-baked empanadas , or we might head over to Yuca’s Hut for some great carne asada tacos. And on special occasions, he likes to take his Radio Flyer to pick up pizza from one of the neighborhood’s many Italian restaurants.

Maybe we are creating good, simple memories for Cal and baby Nola. We go to the Farmer’s Market for pancakes, to Larchmont Village for ice cream, to Glendale for burgers at the “Hamburger Train” (Carney’s). Occasionally, we drive far out into the Valley to a fresh produce stand, and more often to the farmers markets in Hollywood or Santa Monica, where we can buy snap peas and kiwis and entire husks of Brussels sprouts to the sounds of Russian or Peruvian musical groups. And when we visit Cal’s friend Echo in Santa Barbara, we eat down the street at the incomparable La Super Rica.

With his’s friends Tano and Jack and Maesa and their families we trek to a Santa Ynez Valley winery to eat Cabernet and Chardonnay grapes right off the vine and to picnic under an oak tree. Cal likes to help Tano’s mother bake bread. He buys his staples (dried apricots and oat bran-covered date bits) at Trader Joe’s--one of the good, simple pleasures of living in Los Angeles. And, when he’s very lucky, he gets to spread clotted cream on a currant scone at Campanile, and watch the fish in the old fountain, and afterward, eat the good stuff from La Brea Bakery.

I have to admit--this is not bad, even for a kid who likes Raffi. Now that I think of it, I’m a little worried: What do my children have to look forward to? Maybe when they’re older, we’ll take them to Campanile at night, for ginger shortcake with a compote of black and red huckleberries. Then I can tell them about the old days, back when . . .