Thursday, May 5, 2011

As I compose this message, I am sitting in a motel room at the Best Western Fireside Inn along Moonstone Beach in Cambria, California. This incredible hamlet, with its maze of rustic boardwalks serving as a “cliff stroll” more beautiful even than the one in Newport, Rhode Island, plus its plethora of quaint shops lining the street, lies about half-a-dozen miles south of San Simeon and the Hearst Castle. You’re missing something if you choose not to come here.

Bride and I are here because of the new role that the notion of family now plays in our lives. It’s been a year now since my diagnosis and the commencement of my treatment, and like anyone who faces an event of that import, we’ve experienced an adjustment in our priorities and attitudes. Retirement has presented us the opportunity to reconnect with relatives and friends, and so we made a recent decision to trek to the west coast to visit with Donna’s niece, her husband, and her sons, as well as with my aunt, uncle, and cousin, all people who mean a lot to us. As they always say, life is short.

There are some perks that accompany a “relative quest.” The train ride from Albany to Chicago to Los Angeles to San Clemente was a first for us, and quite an experience. Overnight train travel can be arduous. Our first berth was, for instance, extremely claustrophobic and uncomfortable, and I wondered at first if we had made a mistake. However, the next room, acquired after a train change in Chicago, was a significant improvement, and we enjoyed the scenery out the window, especially the elk in the Rockies that were racing the train through the falling snow.

Our niece lives in a beautiful home in San Juan Capistrano, seconds from the beach. The weather was unseasonably warm and the sun ever-present, making our tour of the famed mission there quite a stunning experience. The gardens are the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. We saw one swallow, and lots of history. Later we had an exquisite dinner with drinks on the Fisherman Dock (which shook with each crashing wave), toured a luxury home high on a cliff above the ocean, and spied Casa Pacifica a short distance away, the former estate of Richard Nixon.

Speaking of presidents, we toured the Nixon Library and birthplace, nestled in a residential neighborhood in nearby Yorba Linda. The visit definitely gave me a new, more sympathetic impression of the man. I was photographed at his graveside, and got to listen to the famed 18 minute gap in a Watergate tape, with its notorious 9 clicks, all part of a display in the museum there. Two days later, we visited the massive Reagan Library, high on a mountain above the Simi Valley, north of Los Angeles. The views must equal Grand Canyon in grandeur, and the entire installation is awe-inspiring. Visitors can tour the Reagan-era Air Force One, nestled on pylons in an enormous hanger there, step into an exact replica of the Oval Office, and experience, in one display, what it must have been like to have been, on that famous March 1981 day, in the center of the assassination attempt on the President. If you come, expect to be over-whelmed. And for those who accuse this monument to be typical conservative Republican bloviation, I want to point out that one of its trustees, his name one of many I noted to be carved in marble in the lobby, serves as President Obama’s top economic advisor.

Tomorrow, we will visit the renowned Hearst Castle, built by the mercurial William Randolph Hearst, the famed newspaper tycoon, having this afternoon driven many miles north along the famous Pacific Coast Highway, its reputation for spectacular natural beauty well deserved. Later in the week, I join my brother and his wife for a visit to my treasured uncle, aunt, and cousin near San Francisco, before boarding Amtrak once again for the return trip home.

I feel like I’m making full use of the new life given me. I know I’m a lucky man.