Need for support never more apparent

For about five years, from 1993 to 1998, I owned a small import

business. I started the business not with the hope of making lots of

money but to be able to have a very flexible schedule that would

allow me to spend a lot of time with my kids.

The business was successful and after awhile, Cay and I thought of

parlaying our success into a better lifestyle.

Our thoughts turned to Lake Tahoe, where we honeymooned and had

visited many times. My business could be located anywhere and

although I had a lot of customers in Southern California to whom I

delivered orders myself, I knew that with a little planning they

could be served just as well by a commercial freight forwarder.

The plan was to live in Lake Tahoe and commute to Sparks, Nev.,

where I would have a warehouse. So I started to make inquiries. Real

estate in Lake Tahoe was not cheap, but neither was it out of our

range. The cost of the warehouse space was practically a gift.

Then something happened that would make me change my mind forever

about moving away. One of our kids had an emergency at school and in

one of those rare instances in which neither Cay nor I could make the

pick-up, we enlisted the services of Cay’s mother, Catherine.

Last Sunday night, grandma was back helping us, this time to

baby-sit while we went to an evening concert.

The times when friends and relatives have bailed us out and the

times we have helped them remind me that children need the network of

family and friends as much as parents do.

Moving from Chicago to Los Angeles when I was 8 left my parents

without this network. So I grew up not going to grandma’s house for

holidays or enjoying Sunday barbecues with Uncle Jack and his kids,

my cousins. There was not much talk about family lore or the passing

down of family traditions because there were none.

When I met Cay in 1985, I finally realized what I had grown up

without all those years. Her life was filled with family gatherings

and of happy memories of earlier gatherings from her childhood. The

extended family was large and the annual family reunion was a time to

trot out old photographs and compare notes on the various members of

the family tree.

I was reminded of the importance of this family supply system by

two recent incidents. The first was the resignation of a famous

columnist in a town, far, far away. Turns out that this columnist was

unfaithful 10 years ago and someone decided it would be good to let

the world -- and the family -- know about it. The caliber of writing

required for this job is not one that I possess, but that would not

have stopped me from at least applying for it.

What did stop me was removing our children from the friends and

relatives they have come to know and love.

The other event was the inability of a parent we know to find a

reliable person to look after her child while she worked. This is not

the first time this has happened with this child and this parent, and

I believe that the support system for this family does not exist.

The family support system is more than watching the kids when you

get stuck on the freeway. Kids need lots of relatives nearby to

reaffirm the concept of family; to let them know that they are

connected and that many people love and care about them. Besides, if

there are no grandparents around, who is going to spoil them?

I have never second-guessed my parents’ decision to move to Los

Angeles from Chicago. The thought that I would have grown up in the

gritty part of town in which we lived sometimes makes me want to kiss

the ground here in Costa Mesa.

But I can’t help feeling cheated by not having any relatives

around. I wonder what it would have been like to have eaten one of my

grandmother’s fresh baked cookies or have my uncle teach me how to

throw a curve ball.

So I guess I won’t be leaving town anytime soon. And that’s OK

because my kids will have what I longed for all those years, whether

it’s Christmas at Aunt Nancy and Uncle Lew’s, Thanksgiving at Aunt

Linda and Uncle John’s or being led on a private tour of the Bowers

Museum by Cay’s mother.

It’s strange. The dream of establishing deep roots is being

challenged by a job I know I can’t get in a town in which I’d never

want to live.

* STEVE SMITH is a Costa Mesa resident and freelance writer.

Readers may leave a message for him on the Daily Pilot hotline at

(949) 642-6086.