Three Days in Malibu
plus a visit to the Academy Museum, and a few good beaches from Miami to San Francisco
Dear Wanderers,
It has been quiet over here at the Wandering Writer. Back in May, our son returned home from college for the summer. It’s great to have him home. As you may know, the first few months of empty nesting are no picnic. The house goes quiet. The groceries last too long. The piles of laundry diminish considerably. No one insists on watching UFC together, as a family, because “how could you miss this card?” Suddenly you find yourself with time on your hands. This feels discombobulating, so you throw yourself with renewed vigor into work. The downside is that it has been lonely. The upside is that I’ve finished a time travel novel (time being the one kind of book and movie I always want more of), and am nearing completion on the second book in the Lina Connerly series.
After a year in the southeast, our son is rediscovering the joys of Northern California: steamed dumplings, burritos, Amoeba on Haight Street, I-280 (that long, smooth ribbon of highway where no big-rigs are allowed), and 56-degree mornings even in the midst of a heat wave.
In June, we got out of town for a few days. We drove down to Malibu, a six-hour-drive on a good day that turned into a nine-hour drive. Our mistake was stopping in San Luis Obispo for tri-tip sandwiches at Firestone—although, can tri-tip at Firestone ever really be a mistake? The service was fast and friendly and the sandwiches were, as always, freaking amazing, but getting out of SLO and back on 101 was an adventure in patience.
We arrived at our airbnb, sandwiched between PCH and Carbon Beach, around seven on a Friday night. My favorite thing about Malibu is the sound of the waves. My least favorite thing about Malibu is PCH. Fortunately, the ocean is louder than PCH, so our place turned out to be great. After dropping our bags in our condo, we headed down to Ralph’s for provisions: cheese and crackers, fruit, ice cream, more ice cream, cereal and milk for the misters, wine for me.
There is not much to say about Malibu, really. The beaches are beautiful. Not sugar-white-sand beautiful, and not exactly hot, but beautiful in that less-rugged-than-NorCal but way-more-rugged-than-Miami way. Caffe Luxxe, a short walk from our airbnb, has good coffee with cold foam and a nice patio out back. I spent most of Saturday on the beach—beaches always being my happy place, from the age of my earliest memories— and then we went to a party at my brother-in-law’s home in the Malibu hills on Saturday night. It’s a lovely place high up a winding road, with a view of the ocean.
We saw an old friend —one of those entertaining, larger-than-life personalities who make a party hum. The way he tells stories reminds me a bit of my relatives down South—there’s always a beginning, middle, and end, the story is never too long, and the punch line is always funnier and weirder than you expected. Our son got to see his cousins. There is something really special about cousins. You don’t live with them, and you don’t share the same historical vocabulary-of-the-home, but the genetic link is powerful nonetheless (see Chapters 10 & 11 of Mean Genes, co-authored by my brother-in-law and the aforementioned larger-than-life personality).
It was cold and foggy when we woke up on Monday morning, so we drove down to LA to see the Academy Museum. There was a lot of great stuff, but the highlights were the Pedro Almodovar exhibit, the Agnes Varda exhibit, and the weird, wonderful, sprawling John Waters Pope of Trash exhibit.
I had been excited to see the Hollywoodland exhibit, honoring the Jewish founders of Hollywood, but it was a small space and seemed to only scratch the surface.
says it best in this post for “So much of the story of Jews in Hollywood feels held at arm’s length.” Lewis points out that the exhibit would have felt more complete if it included influential Jewish comedians, actors, directors, crafts people, and labor leaders. (I highly recommend this post for a deep dive into the exhibit, and for a weekly roundup of IP news from Hollywood.)Speaking of book-to-film IP: after the museum, we drove to Santa Monica to see the Screen Unseen feature at the AMC theater on the promenade. If you haven’t heard of Screen Unseen: you purchase discounted tickets for a movie that hasn’t yet been released, but you have no idea what the movie is until you get there. Our son, a film student at UNCSA, was thrilled when the movie came on and we realized it was The Bikeriders, adapted from the 1968 photo book of the same name by Danny Lyon, written and directed by UNCSA alum Jeff Nichols.
The Beach is the Thing: Gulf Coast to Miami to San Francisco
The thing about a beach vacation is that there’s not much to write home about. The beach is the thing: the ocean, the waves, the breeze in the morning, long walks on the sand. The happiest days of my childhood were spent on the beaches of the Gulf Coast. These are an entirely different kind of beach: sugar white sand, warm water, a terrifying undertow, and jellyfish littered along the sand.
The only beach I ever properly lived on was Miami Beach, when I was in grad school at the University of Miami. I lived on the seventh floor of a once-grand hotel that had been converted into condominiums. I left the curtains open on the floor-to-ceiling windows of my studio apartment, woke with the sunrise, made coffee and wrote for a while before going down to the beach and walking for hours. No cell phone. No camera. No shoes. No company. Just a hat and my thoughts and lots of sunscreen.
The beach that has figured most prominently in my life is San Francisco’s Ocean Beach. It’s cold and foggy and the waves are brutal and the seawall along the Great Highway is often covered in graffiti, and the scent of creosote from the previous night’s bonfires mingles with the smell of salt and sea. My family visited Ocean Beach when I was thirteen, and that is when I decided I would one day live in San Francisco. After the unbearable humid heat of Alabama, San Francisco’s cool, sweet-smelling fog was a revelation. Then I met a guy from San Francisco, and the rest of the story, the story of my-life-as-I-know it, began.
Back in the early 2000s we lived in the Outer Richmond, just up the hill from Ocean Beach. It was the beach of our son’s infancy and early childhood. Place has always been a driving force behind my fiction, and bodies of water have loomed large. While we were living out in the avenues, I wrote a book about Ocean Beach, released back in 2007 as The Year of Fog . The novel, originally titled Ocean Beach (a title that the Dutch publisher kindly let me keep), was a love letter to San Francisco in general and Ocean Beach in particular.
I still drive the twenty miles to San Francisco from our home on the Peninsula many times a year just to walk down to Kelly’s Cove, watch the surfers, and wander.
Just this week I drove just past Ocean Beach to Sutro Baths. I hiked the Land’s End path to spot where it ends at the Sea Cliff neighborhood, then walked through Sea Cliff and down to China Beach. It was empty except for one family having a picnic on the sand, and a lady braving the frigid waves.
Oh, and another Northern California beach: last week, my husband and I spent a couple of days in Aptos. I’ve lived in the Bay Area for twenty years and don’t recall ever going to Aptos. The beach goes for miles and reminds me a lot of Hawaiian beaches—minus about twenty degrees Fahrenheit. During our stay we only saw a couple of people in the water. Perhaps it’s because the water is so cold, or perhaps it has something to do with Aptos’s proximity to Shark Park, which has been “especially active this year.”
And that is all I have to say today about beaches. Thanks to my subscribers for sticking with me through the summer hiatus. I have quite a few posts in my drafts folder, including a forthcoming post about my long lost China memoir, which may or may not be languishing somewhere in a post office in New York City.
As always, happy wandering.
If you enjoyed this post, you might enjoy reading my novels. You’ll find them on Amazon and Bookshop.org.
It amazes me how empty the beach is - I can guarantee that if I lived nearby I would take every opportunity to sit on the beach staring at that magnificent bridge in awe. Gorgeous scenery.
Love the'Bu, especially Point Dume- hands down our favourite beach in and around LA