Danah and La Honda

 

Growing up on a street like La Honda (the road to Dixon Dam) was a delight.  As I got older, my bus stop moved away from our driveway and to the end of La Honda which seemed about 50 miles away.  Danah's house was about half of the way home and anytime I’d see him outside, I’d stop, rest, and chat.  I had a huge crush on Danah when I was young, but he never thought of me more than a little sister.  Growing up, he’d walk up the hill to see me; sometimes with a steer in tow. If he went inside, he’d leave me a secret “Danah” note hidden.  The “Danah” note trick continued to spread.  As a wedding present, Cliff and Danah got us a knife holder and carved on one side; Danah and on the other, Cliff.  My best friend, Laura loved the Danah note trick.  After our honeymoon, we came back to our condo and there must have been hundreds of Danah notes!  Laura and I got inventive; often giving each other gifts with “Danah” written on the bottom.  The best Danah note happened in the 1990s when both Laura and I lived in Minnesota.  Keith and I had helped Laura and her husband put up rain gutters.   There was a six inch section left over which Laura wrote “Danah” with a red tip marker and snuck into the back seat of our car.  For the next few years, the rain gutter would go back and forth between our houses.  I babysat her kids a lot, so every time one of them picked them up, or I’d drop them off, we’d hide the gutter.   Finally Keith and I found the perfect hiding place.  Laura’s car got into an accident and was being repaired in a body shop that the company that I worked for owned.  I got the workers to put the gutter inside of the bumper.   After I told them where it was, they tried so hard to get it out, but it stayed there until they traded it in.  I’m sure that someday it will be found at a junkyard and they’ll wonder how a rain gutter got inside a bumper and why someone wrote “Danah” on it! 

When I was in high school, Cliff and Danah took off one summer for a long road trip which left me devastated.  I missed them both so much.  Thankfully they wrote me a postcard or letter almost EVERY day.  I remember running into C.J. who asked if I had heard from them and I shared what I received.  C.J. was so upset because he hadn’t gotten any word from the pair!  I offered the excuse that maybe they didn’t have enough stamps, and C.J. complained that he had given them self-addressed, stamped envelopes and they still hadn’t written.  Hopefully he eventually got a letter! My relationship with my long-time boyfriend, Lee was failing and Danah would come up and we'd sit under the big tree outside my bedroom and talk. Our nightly chats eventually took a serious romantic turn for us. Danah and I fell in love, but there was one problem; we were no longer compatible like we were when we were younger. Danah had become deeply religious at a time when I was becoming more interested in the sciences. I had originally wanted to be a large animal vet, but although Danah had tried and tried to teach me to give shots to animals, I just didn’t have the stomach for medicine. Instead I became very interested in agri-business and developing better ways to grow food through better irrigation. It was after one of our dates to a Christian youth rally that Danah had the dreaded “talk” with me. It was obvious that I didn’t have the passion for Christ that he had developed and would never want to be a pastor’s wife. He was able to get me to admit that I wanted to travel and save the world. As I became more scientific and agnostic, our paths were no longer the same. Although I ended up not going to CalPoly as planned and switched from agri-business to accounting and computer science, I did end up traveling the world and 47 of the 50 states. I’m still working on the “saving the world” part, but for now just working on my little part of the world; my four granddaughters and my tiny backyard. As teenagers, when Danah would leave, I would complain and didn't like it when he said that it was time to say “Goodbye.” To appease me, he quit saying goodbye and replaced it with as kiss and “Later.” As a teenager, I was happiest riding around in the front of Danah’s car with Cliff and Danah on each side of me.

After I met Keith and he truly liked Cliff and Danah, it was a big factor of us falling in love.  Keith didn't feel threatened by my friendships with Cliff and Danah and picked both of them to be groomsmen at our wedding. Danah did become a pastor, but died in 1982 at age 30 of cancer. I hope that he was right and there is something after all this and if so, I'll never have to say goodbye again.

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