HOLLY DAYS

Today is courage. I’m a wimp. Always have been. I confess that my wishy washy lack of self confidence certainly leads me to be overly cautious and probably invites bullying. I’m an easy target, so maybe I need to muster my courage more often than the average guy. But courage, in this same context of negativity bias I’ve been talking about, seems essential for any of us to lead a full life.

Shortly after my marriage to the most brilliant and beautiful woman I had ever met, she asked me in which LA neighborhood I would live if I could choose any. I replied, “Topanga, no contest!” After our daughter was born and she lost the home she had been buying from Cal Trans (that’s a whole other tale) we visited an old friend of mine who lived in Topanga, and she set herself on moving our family to Topanga and began looking for rentals with my friend’s help. But Topanga is a very tight knit community where the only rentals that ever go public, rather than being passed within the community, are at sky high Malibu market rates which we had no hope of affording. Her clever and courageous solution was to she apply for, and get, a job as the director of the Topanga Coop preschool. She enrolled our boys in Topanga Elementary and starting commuting an hour each way with our three boys and her tiny baby. She reasoned that if she joined the coop community she could enlist their help in finding a place for us, and in no time she was indeed offered an inexpensive rental of a crooked old cabin perched on giant boulders next to the creek just above the falls, which we rented and renovated, irrevocably becoming proud Topangans.

Then when my mom died in 1986, my older sister and I each got a large life insurance benefit thanks to the foresight of her significant other/business manager who had managed to put her business affairs in order. They had been a disaster in the years before her death, willfully mismanaged by my younger sister in thrall of an unscrupulous con man. Flush with cash, we started looking for a house to buy in Topanga, but again found nothing we could afford, so my sister and I pooled our benefits and bought some vacant land, 8 beautiful acres at the end of a dusty dirt road including a lovely little valley with a seasonal creek and the state park as our neighbor. My wife bought a trailer from another coop family that they had lived in while building their home, and in an act of great faith, she moved us all onto the land were she began assembling a little compound adding a tipi, then more tents, more trailers, and gravel paths she lined with river rocks. She had, with stunning and admirable courage and wisdom dragged me into a situation where despite my general cowardice, I had little choice but to step up, mimic her bravery and build her a house.

It was by far the most difficult and rewarding thing I have ever done. We lived in her little compound for almost 5 years as I struggled to design, then permit and build our dream home: another compound that consisted of three houses where 9 of us, finally including my sister and her family, would live. By the time we finally moved in, the camping tents she had set up on plywood platforms to be our sons’ bedrooms had disintegrated around them. One of the proudest moments of my life was when our home won Metropolitan Home magazine’s Home of the Year contest. I shed literally gallons of blood, sweat, and tears in those 5 years of building, none of which I regretted, but none of which would have happened if not of the amazing courage and intelligence of my wonderful wife.

Most of what we achieve we only achieve by having the courage to step outside our comfort zones and challenge fate. I no longer own those homes, and my beautiful, then ex, wife died a decade ago. My nephew still lives in one of the homes, and the other two are well loved by someone who has made them even more amazing. They still remain an enduring testament to her courage and the way it inspired mine.