Anna never did marry. Never got around to it she’d say. But she had hundreds of kids over the years and countless intimate relationships that played out in beautiful, unexpected and deeply personal ways in places far, far away … right next door.
I worked on an account for a new kind of cataract lens. Traditional cataract lenses are monofocal, that is, they provide vision at only one fixed distance, still, for someone with the cloudy overall vision caused by cataracts, this rocks. But the natural human lens actually flexes a bit and this allows you to see things at varying distances and the lens I was writing about was supposed to give patients back their natural ability to see things near, far and in-between. I authored propaganda about this particular product on many fronts, including a few radio spots we were set to record.
I got a summer job at a lumber store in Bellflower. The company would end up getting its doors blown off by Home Depot and other more serious home improvement players, but in the late ’70s/early ’80s, this kind of mom-and-pop store, with maybe twenty branches, was doing OK all throughout the west.