We're looking northeast, and it was sometime in 1984. Seated in a low beach chair on the concrete patio, Donald tempts Molly with a tidbit of guacamole on a chip. There's a firepit between the pine, whose trunk is visible behind Donald, and the huge Chinese elm tree right over to the east.

The patio was right outside the part that I rented of the house on the south side of Grandview Street, adjacent a door into my neighbor Billy's section of the rented house. Billy became a wonderful and intimate friend, with whom I loved to share the tiny patio on a rainy or a sunny day.

Donald and Bill were visiting me that day, or that weekend, having driven the Lincoln MKIII in from Almitra berthed in Ventura. The little house had a fine view of Catalina Island due south, whenever the marine layer was at bay. And it was a quiet little hideaway. Living there was nice, all except for nightly orbits by the Pasadena Police Helicopter Patrol, who never seemed to care much about how little altitude they maintained above the ground level of that anomalous Pasadena hill top.

Notice, sitting on the table behind my can of Tab, there's a group of tiny, nesting abalone shells. Don and Bill collected them while we were living at Catalina Island. I keep all eight of them on a shelf here in my house in Altadena, twenty-six years later.