Strawberries with Sugar

Los Angeles, California

When I was twelve years old, my family moved from the city of Burbank out to the suburbs of Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley near the campus of San Fernando Valley State College which my sister would be attending the following year.  It later became California State University, Northridge, where I eventually graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in English. Back when we moved there, the college was small on a big property with rolling, grassy hills. Once I made friends, we rode our bikes, played, and wandered around the campus and through the orange and eucalyptus groves which would eventually become parking lots as the college grew into a university. When the trees were cut down, my parents bought the remains as firewood to burn in our home's fireplace.

It was the suburbs, but it was also ranch country. There were no curbs and on many streets no sidewalks. Friends I made at the local junior high school had ranches and horses. Most had family swimming pools, as did we. Summers were hot and languid and summer nights were comfortably warm enough to wear shorts to the drive-in movie theaters. I'm not sure we appreciated how lovely that time and era was, and how it would slowly disappear as cheap and cheerful housing tracts, shopping centers and eventually strip malls moved in. Little by little the ranches were subdivided and the horses were moved farther out in the Valley.

On the college property there was a corn stand called Paggi's. My childhood nickname was Page and I was always too intimidated to ask if Paggi's was pronounced Pageys or with the short A. There, we bought corn, shucked it at home, and my dad grilled it on his Weber charcoal barbecue. It was mere hours from picked to eaten. We also bought fresh strawberries there, and my mom would hull them (yes, hull them. Have you ever seen people just lop the tops off and leave the unappetizing white hull?!?). Mom would load the berries into a basket and put it in the middle of our patio table which was covered all summer by an oilcloth table covering. We would shake sugar into little candlewick dishes and dip the strawberries in the sugar. Did they need the sugar? Nope. But it was what we did. Probably odder was our ritual of eating peach and plum dumplings which were boiled, then cut up and eaten with cottage cheese, sugar and cinnamon. And even odder than that, it was a dinner meal for us. My maternal great-grandparents emigrated from Prague, Czechoslovakia, and this summer culinary treat endured.

I have lately been dealing with a health issue that has been taking up too much of my thinking. Today I took off early to buy lunch and dinner. I bought a tray of dungeness crab at Costco, and threw it and a bottle of french chablis into the refrigerator when I returned home. I bought three ears of yellow corn (which I prefer to the white and the opposite with peaches), a basket of strawberries and bunches of watercress and radishes at my local corn stand, Tapia Brothers. I stopped at my local market for a baguette of sourdough, a pound of Irish butter, and an artichoke. I don't generally eat much lunch, but I heated up a chunk of the baguette and ate slices with the butter, sliced radishes and a sprinkling of coarse sea salt. I had a double-handful of strawberries, no sugar. But the strawberries reminded me of those summers of my past. Solstice is in three days. I don't look forward to summer as much as I once did. The heat gets to me. While we always had these heat waves, there were less homes, less cars, less people. All this packing in makes it seem hotter. And of course, we are told that weather is our enemy. That doesn't help. But eating those fresh radishes on fresh sourdough and chasing them down with the sweetest of strawberries makes summer quite welcome.

I will have the crab, corn, chablis and more sourdough at dinnertime tonight. With these summer repasts, the only thing that was missing is my first red bandana bikini and the soundtrack of The Beach Boys. We've been having fun all summer long. Living just a short trek away to Malibu reminds me of the bliss of growing up here. Summer always brings so many memories triggered by sounds and scents and flavors. The fresh fruits and vegetables helped me remember those days filled with those treats, and, of course, all the boys of summer.