But the family name is at stake
PETER BUFFA
I’m melting, melting! OK, Margaret Hamilton said it first, that
witch, but that’s how I feel sometimes.
Two things happened in 1976: America had its Bicentennial -- and
we bought our first house in Costa Mesa. You probably heard more
about the Bicentennial than our house, which was on the Eastside at
354 Magnolia.
It was a small house, and we use the term “small” loosely. It was
all of 760 square feet, which is not a lot of square feet, but it was
as cute as a bug’s ear. No one knows exactly how cute that is, but
apparently it’s very cute.
Our daughter was 5 and our son was 1, which is a good thing,
because if they had been any larger, one of us would have had to step
outside for the other three to fit inside.
Even at that, there was a lot of walking sideways, carrying things
above your head, and saying things like, “You go first. No, you.
Wait, sorry. OK, you go.”
Our fondest memory of the place was that our son slept in an open
space between some cabinets, which my wife has upgraded in her memory
to a “built-in crib.”
But it was great fun, as those things can be when you are
20-something and don’t have to double-pump to get off the couch yet.
Flash forward some 30 years. Whoosh, it’s 2005. Now try getting
off the couch. See? It’s hard.
Not long ago, I wrote a column about time capsules, and how I’ve
always been fascinated with them, and how I always put a little note
in the wall anytime we do some remodeling or repairing or whatever --
just a few words about who we were and what we were doing at the
time, so forth and so on.
In that column, I wrote about our mini-house on Magnolia and the
fact that I planted one of these notes, carefully wrapped in plastic
and tin foil, in one of the bedroom walls.
A few weeks ago, I got an e-mail from a nice lady named Cynthia
Johnson who just happens to live at 354 Magnolia, although that is a
fluid situation. She and her husband are in the process of
demolishing the place and replacing it with a house that is more
suited to actual, full-sized people, versus munchkins.
She and her family had read my time capsule column, saved it and
were bound and determined to find my note from those many years ago.
The house was built in 1947 and the Johnsons have been in it since
1993. They bought it from Cynthia’s aunt, who had owned it for about
five years as a rental before that.
Cynthia and her husband did a lot of upgrading to the place and
have had their share of homeowner adventures, including breaking up
two bee conventions and dealing with a genuine FDR-era fuse box --
that means that if someone was drying their hair while someone else
tried to nuke a burrito, darkness would befall the land.
When I stopped by the house to see the Johnsons’ handiwork, I was
surprised to see a large tree of the deciduous variety in the front
yard where a towering, and I mean towering, spruce tree once stood.
That’s because on a Santa Ana-windy day some years ago, Cynthia’s
husband heard a loud thud and stepped out front to see the giant
spruce lying on its side, with its top in their neighbor’s yard
across the street and most of the Johnsons’ front lawn still attached
to its roots.
All that aside, I feel terrible.
Not because the house is coming down -- but because my alleged
note hasn’t surfaced and, in Cynthia’s words, “ ... not for lack of
trying.”
The Johnsons have been bashing away at the house for a few weeks
now, with the final Smackdown-on-Magnolia scheduled for Monday.
The bada-booming started with the Johnsons’ daughter, who took the
first whack, followed by some buddies -- all swinging hammers,
crowbars and any other implements of destruction they could find.
No note.
Cynthia herself took on the bedroom walls, whaling away like a
rock star in the presidential suite on a three-day binge.
No note.
I don’t know what to say.
My wife reminded me that certain people should say as little as
possible about what they did 30 years ago when certain people can’t
remember what they did yesterday afternoon, and that if a certain
person did plant a note, it would have been in the bathroom wall, not
a bedroom wall.
But the bathroom is already toast. And still no note.
With apologies to the Johnsons, here is my real fear. The note is
there, but instead of being found, it will be carted off to the dump
where someone will find it 700 years from now and read a note from
some guy named Peter Buffa, who lived there in 1976 with his wife and
two little kids, and that person will say, “Geez, the guy lived in a
dump with a wife and two little kids. What a loser.”
Not exactly the legacy I had in mind. So keep looking, Cynthia,
keep looking. This is important.
I gotta go.
* PETER BUFFA is a former Costa Mesa mayor. His column runs
Sundays. He may be reached by e-mail at ptrb4@aol.com.
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