Sandy and I occasionally take our daily walk at Marina Park at the San Leandro Marina where the spectacular beauty of the bay reminds me how lucky we are to live in the Bay Area. It’s particularly true at this time of year when hear about the East Coast getting hammered with freezing temperatures and blizzards. Here the smooth blue Bay waters, encircled by rolling green hills and the view of San Francisco is right out of a scene of Dorothy’s Emerald City.

My dad was an “old school” photographer. He didn’t use a cell phone, pad or tablet but rolls of either 20 or 36 exposure black and white film or an optical camera. We grew up in a home with a darkroom where dad, in addition to family pictures, would supplement his postwar income by photographing kids’ sports teams, youth groups and dance classes.

Gracious words are a honeycomb. Sweet to the soul and healing to the bones. Proverbs 16:24

John Muir began his trek by walking from Indiana to Florida and then hopping a steamer to Cuba with the intention of continuing to South America, reaching the headwaters of the Amazon and rafting its full distance to the Pacific Ocean. However, short of funds and recovering from fever picked up in Florida, Muir changed his plans and decided to spend a year or two in California and visit the fabled Yosemite Valley.

On the hill above church and just inside the gate to Garin Park are remnants of a rusty old tractor, its iconic yellow paint long gone, sitting in dry weeds among a collection of crumbling antique farm implements. It’s highly likely that my dad assembled or machined parts for its diesel engine early in his 47 year career at Caterpillar’s San Leandro factory and where I spent several summers in the 1950’s earning college tuition.

My grandfather lived near the corner of Lake Chabot Road and Seven Hills Road in Castro Valley from the 1930’s into the 1950’s where he operated a chicken ranch. Raising chickens in the valley began early in the century by Portuguese and Italian families and became a thriving business with dozens of ranches covering the rural countryside.