“Honey, when did we move to Gonzales?” I asked my marriage mate as she (Rainy) flittered around the corner doing things that women do when their husbands feel like they have the busier schedule. Of course, I knew that all I had to do was to go to the safe and pull out all the paperwork I had been hiding to keep from having to put it away. However, if you are married, you probably are like me and feel that our wives are much better custodians of all things official.
The reason I was asking her is that the wind was blowing so hard the paint was peeling off our house. OK, maybe it was not that hard, but you have to admit we have the wind that King City wishes they had when summer comes in with all the heat one could ask for.
This is not a condemnation of the elevated temperatures felt in King City. There are times in the dead of summer when I wish we had a little less wind and a little more heat. It’s very difficult to wash your dog when every time you turn around the wind has blown him out of the tub we use to wash away the dirt that gives him his name.
Oh! You didn’t know? Well that’s the name I insisted on when we went to pick him up at the breeder’s house. Not that his actions cause him to be any dirtier, in fact he doesn’t do much of anything but lay around until someone comes into our yard or knocks on the door. That’s when I think we may have to call him the yodeler. He is better than a burglar alarm. Once he starts barking he has to be convinced that the perceived threat has passed.
I guess that’s one of the reasons we love him so much. He’s getting older now and I don’t like to see him getting too excited. He has always been our alarm system. Dirt is the smartest, prettiest and the most fearless dog I have ever known. There will never be another dog like him. Every day he does something to make us happy.
Now, his sister was a little different. She was the prissy one. Oh, she would chase a ball with Dirt until she fell over from exhaustion. But try to teach her a new trick and one starts to realize why the teachers were always telling my parents that I was too much of a butterfly in school. I guess that’s why my daughter got the same notes I did. Similar words from two different times.
Back to how long ago we moved to Gonzales. It was a long time ago. I had been working in the City of King and drove by Gonzales twice a day. I noticed the construction going on and got curious, so one day I just took the Fifth Street exit coming north and saw all the houses being built. I stopped at the sales office and asked the lovely lady working there how much the houses were going to cost. Not that I thought that Rainy and I could buy a house with the paychecks I was getting, but if you never try you will never know.
I brought Lorraine with me the next time I stopped by and with the help of the lady salesperson we discovered a way for us to get the house we wanted. It took a few months for everything to come to fruition, but in the end we became home owners. Now all we had to do was move all our stuff from Salinas, where we were renting, to the second house sold in the subdivision.
The only vehicle we had was her little GLC car and my pickup. It should be noted that my pickup had been under a tarp up in Salinas for a few years, but a couple of days later it was running and raring to go. Since we had very little in the way of accruements we got a couple of boxes from the Monterey Vineyard and started stuffing things in the bed of my truck. It took us three trips from Salinas to get everything we owned into the back of my truck and delivered to the garage of our new home.
It was like a movie. We were so happy. We would have some little problems what with the wind we have been discussing, but in the end, we would pull over about every three miles to retie down all our stuff. To be honest I can’t remember any of the problems, I can only remember the good parts.
We slept on a mattress a few weeks and some friends gave us some more items that are necessary to exist in a new house. Our next-door neighbors up in Salinas gave me some firewood since burning the sawed off boards the contractors told us we could have created too much soot. We worked on our house every day doing some little thing to make our home and opened a couple of bottles of Monterey Vineyard wine every so often…
Lorraine and I would walk to the Gonzales Park at least once a week, and folks would greet us as if they had known us for a long time. We would just look at each other and smile. Of course, being a Pedrazzoli, Lorraine had a head start greeting folks. Her parents had already lived in South County.
If you already knew our story, let me just point out that the wind we have been having the past couple of days reminded me asking folks if it always blew so hard, and the answer was always, “Oh! You think this is wind?” No, I guess not.
God Bless.
