Things I'Ve Lost

The Things I’ve Lost

On February 24, 1969 almost 6 inches of rain fell in Orange County, CA, overflowing dams and flooding parks and nearby canyons.   Storm drains and flood control channels were unable to handle the extreme water flow.   Rides in Cousin Jim’s big old Hudson ended that day, when he donated his car to shore up the rapidly collapsing riverbank in an attempt to save the houses built along Santiago Creek.   My friend Bob Dischner took his little brother Billy rafting on the swollen Santa Ana River, just for fun.   Bob Michaels took pictures for the school newspaper.   Despite repeated attempts to get him back in the raft Billy was lost in the river that day.    

On the 4th of July the next year I lost my glasses amongst the rocks when our baby Cindy was smacked by a huge wave.   I lost hold of her hand and she went under, being pulled out into the sea.   At 11 months it was her first beach camping trip at the campground in San Onofre.   John drove home to get my spare pair of glasses, so we wouldn’t lose our reserved camping space.  

At age five I lost a winning ticket at the Del Mar Race Track when I tripped and dropped it on the stairs where people had dropped hundreds of losing tickets.   The race track was one of my father’s favorite places to go when he wasn’t working at one of his three jobs.   Between races we made airplanes out of all our losing tickets and tried to land them in the holes cut around the sprinkler heads.   We spent two weeks each year nearby at the Big Tree Lodge in Escondido. My brother was a summer lifeguard at the YMCA camp up in the mountains near Temecula.  

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Walt Disney died in 1966.   Roy Disney changed the rules about employee’s families getting in free, halting the weekly trips to Disneyland we’d enjoyed since they’d opened in 1955.   My brother Ed went away to college in Oregon when I was six.   We moved across town later that year.   He never came home to live with us again.   Grandma Adele lived just...