10-14-00 4:40 PM Sa

“We’re in Los Osos, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Tim calls from the kitchen. The pup was pretty cool during the three-hour drive. We stopped at a little park around Oxnard and she was so excited to be unconfined, she took off running and gave me a nice leash burn on my finger.

Around Santa Barbara, I remembered I forgot my fishing gear, duhr, about halfway through the sports page, which I got to read because Rochelle drove. The dog was climbing around on my head while I tried to read. We heard USC losing to Oregon on the radio, and we switched it to the Cardinals and beating the Mets as we sped past vineyards and orchards.

Once we got here, we took a walk down to the little lagoon at the bottom of Tim and Sarai’s street. The dog seemed to be having a heavenly time of it. I wished I had my camera or camcorder. Canoes decorated a sandbar in the reedy marsh near the lagoon. “We could canoe down to the bar tonight,” says Tim.

“Marriage Breakers?” suggests Sarai.

“I don’t know if my wife’ll let me,” I say.

“It’s not really called Marriage Breakers,” Sarai says. “It’s called Merrymakers.”

We walked along paths intersecting through weeds and ice plant. A white crane speared a wriggling minnow.

We came back from Cuesta, they call the lagoon. We started up the Mystery Machine (Tim’s van) and ran it in the driveway awhile. The house filled with carbon monoxide before we hopped in. The Mystery Machine has a fridge full of beer. We had one to go along with a smoke and rode up into some canyon leading to Montana de Oro. We parked and hiked down a path to a wooden boardwalk over a creek and through a marsh to a jagged, upthrust strata of rock. The dog splashed through tide pools.

We went to the store and got hooks and weights for fishing (Tim had some old poles). Then we went to some place that had wooden pirates our front and bar facing the sun setting into the ocean. I drank beer and wine and an Irish car bomb (Tim’s idea). We ate calamari, zucchini, filet mignon, and watched the Yankees beat the Mariners.