California dreamin’

My most vivid memories of California are of the Monterey peninsula … 65 degrees and sunny almost every day of the year (and I’m exaggerating only slightly). That’s where my father grew up and where I spent most of 1973.

If you’ve ever been to Carmel, or anywhere on California’s central coast , you know how beautiful it is. Idyllic, really. The sort of place that makes a person stop his car, roll down the window and say, “Holy shit.”

Did I know the song “California Dreamin” in 1973? 8th grade. Maybe, maybe not. I do remember hippies in the park on Ocean Avenue. My mother was wary of them and my father thought they were funny. I didn’t know what to think.

When I think of them now, though, resplendent in their long hair and tied-tied shirts, playing their guitars a few cedar-lined blocks from the Pacific, they seem ethereal. To have been those people, there, then, doing that.
How I remember it … I’m walking down San Carlos to the Mediterranean Market where I buy a perfect French roll and the man at the deli counter slices it and fills it with sopressata and meunster. He wraps it in brown paper and I take it to the park across the two-lane street where the hippies are singing something about love.

An article today at CNN.com about patients invoicing doctors for time wasted in waiting rooms … and doctors paying those invoices. Amen, I say. (And a shout-out to Harry Delcher, the endocrinologist in Atlanta who not only sees his patients on time, but escorts them personally from the waiting room.)