Fish Stories Are Delectable at the Bluewater Grill
My great aunt, Trudy, used to have this ancient black lacquered photo album full of alluring snapshots.
Old black and whites from the ‘20s of her brother standing next to a monstrous python somewhere in Africa. Or her father, who was Portuguese, as a young man hanging upside down from a trapeze in some traveling circus in Mexico.
My favorite was a blurry daguerreotype of her mother standing in front of the smoking ruins that used to be their home in San Francisco the day after the great earthquake in 1906.
I loved looking at that photo album. Sitting on Trudy’s lap while she told me about her twin brother, a merchant seaman who traveled all over the world. Or how her father, who came from the Azores, ended up in a Mexican circus. The stories were authentic--as far as I knew--but the photos were not.
Aunt Trudy’s house burned to the ground in a fire years before I was born, destroying the few family snapshots she had. So she collected others. Pictures that she found at garage sales or antiques stores. Photos that, somehow, reminded her of her family. Her saintly mother; her brother, who’d died in the 1930s; her father, who performed for a traveling circus.
My wife, Jan, and I are looking at the photos on the walls inside the Bluewater Grill as we wait for a table. We are playing a game. One my great aunt would no doubt be very good at. One of us picks out one of the old photos on the wall. The other has to tell a story about it.
When it’s Jan’s turn, she selects a black-and-white shot of a woman in her mid-20s wearing khaki shorts, a crisp white blouse and Ray-Ban sunglasses. It’s hard to figure out exactly when the picture was taken, but I’d guess sometime in the early 1950s. The woman, her hair pulled back, stands beside a large marlin hanging upside down. She looks at ease, her head tilted slightly, as if she were both pleased and amused to be here on this dock on such a beautiful day next to such an enormous fish.
“Her name is Lauren. That photo was taken on her five-year wedding anniversary,” I tell Jan.
“Her husband actually caught the fish, but they’ve been taking pictures of each other next to it just for fun. They divorced a few years later. For years this photo sat on an old wicker etagere in Lauren’s bedroom and whenever she looked at it, she’d think of her husband and how happy they’d been at that moment.
“She’d wonder if she has ever been as happy since, and knows that she hasn’t and this makes her bitter. Sometimes Lauren gets a little drunk and she’ll throw the picture to the floor, smashing the glass in the frame. But she always gets it fixed. That’s why it looks a little stained and wrinkled. She still has the photo and she still loves him, though she hasn’t seen him in years and doesn’t even know if he’s still alive or not.”
Our table is ready. The sun is a quivering orange hovering atop the rusted roof of The Cannery restaurant across the bay. We ask to sit outside on the deck because the late afternoon is warm and lingering and Jan wants to be by the water. It is so calm out, so lovely, that--for the moment--we have ordered nothing but two glasses of wine to go with the still-warm sourdough bread on the table. We sit quietly in the twilight, looking out across the water, afraid our voices might break the spell.
My camera is in the car and I’m tempted to get it, take Jan’s picture sitting here on the deck of the Bluewater Grill. A snapshot in time like those hanging on the walls inside. Glass of wine in hand, black sweater draped over her bare shoulders, a slight sunburn on her cheeks and forehead, the sun going down behind her.
Would she smile at me or not? And what emotion would her gray-blue eyes reveal if she didn’t choose to hide behind her sunglasses? And if the photo ended up here or on some other restaurant wall 40 or 50 years from now, what story would people tell to go with it, I wonder?
Thinking of my little Portuguese aunt and her strange black photo album, I order sand dabs, her favorite fish. Sometimes, when I was a kid, she’d take me with her to the Redondo pier to buy the flavorful fillets from a Portuguese fisherman, the two of them chattering in the strange language with the poetic lilt that was indecipherable to me.
Then she’d fry up big heaps of them and the two of us would eat them accompanied only by some cole slaw until we couldn’t eat any more. I haven’t had them in years. They are as flavorful as raw oysters, as sweet as stone fruit. The portions are large enough that I can’t finish them.
As the sky shifts from a pale blue to an ocher-tinged dusk, Jan starts to tell me a story. About the young woman in the black-and-white photo by the door.
“She and her husband didn’t actually divorce,” Jan says, revising my story. “It’s true that they separated for a while, but he eventually realized what an idiot he’d been and they reconciled, went on to raise two lovely children. They’ve been married now for 45 years and they sometimes bring their granddaughter here for dinner on Saturday night. And when they do, the little girl always likes to tell the hostess that the picture of the beautiful young woman on the wall is her grandmother, and the hostess always tells the little girl that she looks just like her. And it’s true.”
There is just a flicker of sunlight left in the sky as Jan finishes her story. I hurriedly stand up from the table, dropping my napkin to the ground. Jan, who has not finished her glass of wine, asks me where I’m going in such a hurry. “Back to the car,” I tell her, stumbling a bit as a I go. “To get the camera before the light passes.”
Bluewater Grill, 630 Lido Park Drive, Newport Beach. Open 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday-Saturday; 10 a.m. to 10 a.m. Sunday. (949) 675-3474.
Also at 1621 W. Sunflower Ave. #D50, Santa Ana. Open 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday-Thursday; 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Friday and Saturday; and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday. (714) 546-3474.
David Lansing’s column is published on Fridays in Orange County Calendar. His e-mail address is occalendar@latimes.com.