My brother had married recently and was living with his lovely new family in Del Mar, a former fishing village turned surf bum hangout turned refuge for wealthy San Diegans. For anyone who’s not familiar with Del Mar, let me just say that this is one of those little slices of paradise on Earth: beautiful neighborhoods with Mediterranean and Craftsman influences and gorgeous, semi-tropical landscaping of flowering banana trees, birds-of-paradise, and the most scrumptious succulents you’ve ever seen … picturesque hills and bluffs overlooking sapphire-blue ocean, and clean, white sand beaches that are amazingly uncrowded once you get away from street access. Dolphins sometimes play with the surfers who dot the surf line, long-legged sandpipers chase and get chased by the surging waves; families sit on blankets and in beach chairs while children scamper about in a delirious frenzy, digging holes to get filled in by the waves, building sand castles, splashing about in the water, and just generally shrieking in delight, their cries chiming in with those of the gulls that wheel about in the skies.

 

As you can imagine, we were looking forward to spending time here, even though the work was going to be challenging. Hal generously put Richard and me up at his place while we worked, so that we wouldn’t have to spend money on lodging and provided us with board as well. We stayed down in a little alcove on the new story that had been added on to Hal’s house for our nephew Rich and our niece Rachel. The deck we would be building was for this floor. Because the house was built on a steep incline, and because all the neighbors jealously and understandably guarded their views of the ocean, he built below the two existing stories—which still had a beautiful view of the ocean.

 

When Hal bought the house several years previously, he hired a guy to build a deck and install a hot tub off his bedroom, which used to be the bottom floor but was now off the middle story of the house. Because of the steepness of the lot, this deck was supported by tall posts. Originally, we were simply going to suspend the new deck off of these posts, but by the time the landscape architect got through with the plans, the deck had doubled if not tripled in size and had two levels and a longish flight of stairs down into the yard. It also required 18 footings for the deck, plus an extra one for the stairs.

 

 

This was extremely unpleasant.

 

Oh, but I forgot to mention that when were laying out the new footings, we were having a devil of a time getting everything in line and square! It was so difficult I began to fear that I had either had a small stroke that I hadn’t noticed or that we had entered some new dimension where everything was a few inches off-kilter. Finally, we figured out what our problem was. We were trying to pull our measurements off the existing posts, and it turns out that the guy had merely eyeballed. The existing foundation was actually not square but an irregular trapezoid. And the rows of footings were not in a straight line.

 

Now I understood why subs who worked on our house sometimes cursed the preceding subs. If someone before you does slipshod work, they make your work twice as difficult. And they don’t have to deal with it; you do. Once we realized we were dealing with an irregular trapezoid with structural elements laid out with the precision of an unraveled skein of yarn, however, we were able to take this into account and plan accordingly.

 

 

It was a great time to get to know Hal’s new family. Rich, who was 15 at the time, would sometimes help us out after he got home from school, and he turned out not only to be handy but a great problem-solver as well. Plus, he had this terrific, subtle sense of humor; great company. One of my favorite visual memories of Rachel is the little 12-year-old sweetie-pie coming out with a tray of homemade lemonade for hardworking Richard and me on a hot, sunny day, walking carefully and keeping her eyes focused on the tray so that she wouldn’t spill anything. And Kim, Hal’s wife, was a feisty and funny firebrand from a large Mormon family who lived in SoCal until Kim’s senior year and then re-located to a teeny, tiny, town in Utah.

 

One of the fun things about spending this amount of time in the San Diego area is that we got to spend some time with my Dad’s oldest sister, Aunt Lillian. Lil and her husband Carey had moved to La Jolla before just about anyone else (any Euro-Americans, anyway) and bought some real estate on top of Mt Soledad. My uncle Carey had died quite a few years ago, but the White women in my family live to outstanding old age. Lil was an old party girl from way back, and a sweetheart, and a source of some great stories about my Dad’s side of the family. She was in her late eighties at this point and lived to her mid-nineties. I seem to be in some kind of genealogical mood right now; so I’ll take this opportunity to tell you about my aunt Lil and her stories in the next post … .