Snapshots of Memory in a Paradise Found

On a weekend not long ago, a call came from Balboa Island. The brother- and sister-in-law, freewheeling empty nesters, had taken a cottage on the bay. Chardonnay was uncorked in honor of the last night of their adventure. Skaters and lovers and sailboats glided by.

The dusk was hot, the wineglasses cool, the respite rare in this humming, clamoring place. People associate Southern California with leisurely glamour, but so often it’s more like some bustling, clattering, enormous backstage.

The weeks fly at you like something under perpetual construction, hammering and roaring and asking you to pardon the mess. You fling yourself from office cubicle to parking garage to front porch, to the constant accompaniment of radios and beepers and kiddie cartoons and car alarms.

Days fly by and you wonder how the boosters ever could have sold this as paradise, when there’s so little calm. But there are moments, even in nests that seem as far as a nest can get from being empty. Even when you don’t immediately see them for what they are.

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Forgive me if, on this Monday, I share one of those moments as we bid so long to another weekend. This one goes out to those folks who, like me, can’t quite face the workaday chaos just yet. The scene was Balboa: The grown-ups were toasting Jimmy Buffett around the patio table when a lone child sidled up. The second-grader wanted to go for a walk, please. Her blue eyes were soulful, as kids’ eyes get when they hit 7 and start to glimpse the clamorous ways of the world.

Wait, she was told. We’ll go after dinner. She heaved a soulful second-grade sigh. Then she glided away, into that zone kids melt into while their parents are sitting around toasting the tropics, watching sailboats glide.

She was born in October, on an evening like this, when the California dusk settled over the nests of suburbia like a sultry haze. Her big sister was the kid then, toiling that night over a geography project while the grown-ups bustled over supper dishes and last-minute things.

Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas were testifying before Congress, and the thought occurred that this could be something to tell the baby, that this milestone had happened on the day she was born. How like a footnote it all later seemed, as time stood still for her squirming, clamorous arrival. Funny, the things you think will be memorable forever, the middling dramas that, at the time, seem indelible.

Now she is tall and dresses like her big sister, and her interest in indelible memories extends mainly to whether her parents remember how to do the Hustle, the way they did in olden times. And whether grown-ups can be relied upon to recall that they promised to go walking when they were done chatting with Nana and Grandpa and dessert was done.

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Beyond the cottage, the promenade beckoned. The bay was quiet and dark. There aren’t many parties on Balboa by the time it gets to be autumn, and the farther we walked, the more silent it got. Before long, there was only the black night and the splashing of water, and the smell of brine and barbecue smoke.

Off on the horizon, the bijoux lights of the Ferris wheel turned. A little boat creaked. You could hear your own footsteps. The little girl spoke.

“Nana says that when you see something beautiful and you don’t have a camera with you, you can take a picture of it in your mind,” she said. “Just like this: See the lights and the stars? Just blink and remember. Click!”

Starlight. Water. Fragrance of firewood. One moment, a nurse is cheering, “Push! Now, push!” A moment later, your baby is up to your waist and wants to know how to disco-dance. A moment after that, she’s some miraculous grown creature and you’re toasting Margaritaville and the triumphant return of your white wall-to-wall living room carpeting, and all the while, life rattles and roars around you, a paradise under construction, humming, “Pardon the mess.”

The holiday backdrop of Halloween gives way to Thanksgiving and Hanukkah and Christmas, and New Year glides into New Year so much more quickly than you think. There in the moment, the night stilled and held us.

Hand in small hand--click--we blinked.

Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. She can be reached online at shawn.hubler@latimes.com