Saturday started out lovely. It was a brilliantly sunny morning.
As the family started to arrive, I felt the expectation of a wonderful family gathering. I had a pleased feeling of accomplishment that what I had organized (with Madelyn's help, as renting a beach house was something I had never had any experience with) was actually coming to pass. Well, as the old saying goes, "Pride goeth before a fall."*
Heather and Katherine and the kids drove up, all waving cheerfully out the windows and calling out greetings. Soon the kids were running up and down the deck, climbing up the ladder to the bunk bed, and filling the house with happy sounds.
With two cars on the driveway and one on the parking space at the front of the lot, we were able to avoid parking on the street, which we had been warned is strictly forbidden by the Oceana Marin HOA. Other family members parked down nearer the beach and walked up.
Madelyn had volunteered to bring lunch, and she set it all out on the counter. It looked gorgeous!
Then catastrophe hit, catastrophe in the form of a miniature Hulk Hogan muscled-thug-type guy pretending to be a hippie, red bandana over his long hair, wearing a tight black muscle tee and a silver and turquoise necklace. This person asked for the "contract holder" and I went to the door.
"I'm the contract holder," I said.
"Well you are in violation of your contract, because you are allowed no more than five persons on the rental property at any one time, day or night."
"There are less than five people staying here," I said, puzzled.
"No more than five. At. Any. One. Time," he said tersely.
"What???! Even lunch guests??"
He told me someone would be back in an hour to check and all these people "better be gone".
Devastated. I told everyone that they would have to eat up fast because they all had to leave. Heather and Katherine decided to take the kids to the beach. Sandy asked if I would be staying at the beach house and could he leave Mom with me as he'd really like to go to the beach.
"Sure", I said through my tears, I will be here three more days and I'll be able to go to the beach whenever I want, and you don't get to get out that much."
While at the beach, Sandy took these photos of Nancy's and Wendell's grandchildren:
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| Connor on a tractor at Joe's |
But as they all left, I thought, "Oh man, how am I going to be able to be good company for Mom when I can't stop sobbing?"
So I was very grateful that Madelyn said she would stay with Mom and me at the beach house. It really helped to have her stay and visit with Mom because I couldn't seem to do anything but burst into tears again. It also really helped that she called the rental agency and smoothed things over, and said we were now down to the allowable number of people, and they said they would not have to come and inspect.
Madelyn told me that when she had rented beach houses in that area for family gatherings in the past, she had let the association know that she would be having a family party there and made sure it would be all right. I just hadn't even thought to do that. It's true that though I had skimmed through the contract, it just had not occurred to me that these regulations would cover day-time guests as well as the people staying over night.
After they brought the kids back from the beach, they all went to Madelyn's house so the kids could change into clean clothes (as they could not return to the beach house to do so!!!!) and invited us all to come there also.
I just wanted to be alone, so I walked down to the beach. On the way, looked back at the Private Roads sign at the entrance to Oceana Marin.
As I got down to Dillon Beach, I walked past the row of old rather run-down trailers along the little road that led to the Dillon Beach Café. I realized I felt so much more comfortable around these old trailers than I had among the beautiful beach houses up on the hill. I thought of the line from the Bob Dylan song "The Ballad of Frankie Lee And Judas Priest":
Well, the moral of the story
The moral of this song
Is simply that one should never be
Where one does not belong
The beach was full of happy people, many of them Hispanic. There were kites flying and kids running and screaming in the waves. I felt like I'd left the cemetery and come out into the world of the living.
I had a beer and fried fish and chips at the Dillon Beach Café, so pleased that one of the tables by a window was available. I began to feel better.
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| View from the Dillon Beach Café |
"What about the limit," I asked.
"Oh, we'll just come in two at a time," said John.
So that's what they did, and we had a nice dinner with Sandy, Mom, Joseph, Greg, John, Kathy, Dale Sr., and I. Nancy phoned and said that it was actually quite a nice day for her grandchildren, as some of them had never been to Madelyn and Joe's, and also had not been to the beach in a long time. So that was nice to hear.
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| Joseph showing Mom the article about Mariah in the architecture magazine. |
So everything went well until we all went outside at once to see Mom and Sandy off. We all came back in, in a nice mood, and then there was a phone call "for the contract-holder". This time it was from the rental agency, the same woman Madelyn had had the smoothing-things over conversation with.
"You told me that everything was fine", she said, "that you now had only five people there and everything would be fine, and now we seem to have a problem again!"
"Well, that was my sister-in-law, and it's true that I did tell all my lunch guests they had to eat up quick and leave, if you call that fine," I said. (I'm not as nice as Madelyn.)
"Just tell me how many people are at the rental property right now!" she demanded.
"Uh....five I think?" (We had six actually, now that Sandy and Mom had left.)
Then she really got angry.
"Eight people were just seen rearranging three vehicles in your front driveway!" she said. (I got a vision in my mind of Hulk Hogan Jr., watching the house all afternoon with binoculars.)
So that was the bad day.
We had three more days there and they all turned out to be a lot of fun. The next day Kathy and John and Dale Sr. and I had lunch at Nick's Oyster Bar. We had to wait a while for a sit but John said he really enjoyed watching the parking valets trying to fit all the cars in to the cramped parking lot.
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| Views from Nick's Oyster Bar windows |
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| Dale Sr. at NIck's Oyster Bar |
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| Kathy and mussels |
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| My lunch |
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| (After seeing this photo, I decided to buy some different sunglasses for Mariah's wedding) |
That night we had spaghetti for diner and sat up late talking and joking.
The next day was sunny also. John showed me some better guitar techniques which didn't look all that more difficult (though when I feel like singing I just feel like singing and go back to the same strums I've always done). We also started packing up as the following morning we would be checking out.
The following day we had dinner at Madelyn and Joe's. She made tacos with a whole selection of toppings.
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| Madelyn's cat |
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| Such a peaceful, pastoral view from Madelyn and Joe's window |
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| Corner of Joe and Madelyn's |
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| Madelyn heating up tortillas |
blah
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| Kathy helping out |
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| Madelyn's busy calendar |
The next morning we finished packing up. Madelyn had given us directions to a bus line which would take me straight from Petaluma to the airport (either SF or Oakland). Dale Sr. was continuing up to the Northwest but I was flying home.
We did have a lot of leftovers!
As Dale Sr. drove me down towards Petaluma, I made a remark that despite the unpleasantness it had turned out to be a nice weekend.
"I read the contract this morning," he said vehemently, and it was very clear: Only. Five. People. At. Any One Time, Day. Or. Night."
He was right of course, but I felt that I felt bad enough already without his weighing in about how stupid I'd been. But I knew instinctively that the best thing for me to do was to bite my lip. I could see that he had been extremely embarrassed by the whole incident, but had kept silent until it was just the two of us...so he needed to express how upset he was. Understandable in retrospect. The two of us rode on in silence, until he asked if I'd like to stop at Starbuck's and get a coffee to go.
I was reminded of the line from the Jackson Browne song, "Don't confront me with failings, I am quite aware of them."
The bus service to the airports was very well run, a good thing to know about.
(Post-script)
On the plane I found a paragraph in an article in the airport magazine which made me feel better about the whole beach-house rental mistake. It was a quote from a young actress, Jenny Slate, in answer to the question, "What has showbiz taught you?"
"One of the first big jobs I had was with Saturday Night Live and I got fired. It was embarrassing and sad, but it was also one of the best things that ever happened to me. If you fail publicly and label it as a failure, you set yourself up for humiliation. That's fine if you feel the heat for a moment and use it to lift yourself up again, but you also have to realize that those labels are useless, and it's a very unkind thing to do to yourself. Acceptance is absolutely wonderful, but rejection allows you to reorient yourself and make sure your sense of self comes from within, rather than whatever community you feel yourself accepted or rejected by."
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| Typical beach house in the Oceana Marin neighborhood |
