Joshua Tree Taxi

The NCAA Brackets be damned. It’s a dumb thing to take seriously. Davidson? C’mon. Now the fact that I have been utterly humiliated in the first two rounds of my pool has nothing to do with this. Davidson. "Seriously," as Daughter would say. Had to get away from the this madness, election madness, work madness, Iraq madness, global madness . . .

Just back from a few days in the desert with Daughter and Son and Wife. Daughter just finished UCSD a quarter early and son was on his second week of school vacation. A trip to Joshua Tree, pictured above, was something of a celebration for the achievement for the Daughter, a way of diverting Son from falling in with hooligans during vacation, and a product of Wife’s observation, “I’ve got to get out of this freakin’ house.” She, who turned a year older than I the weekend before, planned the trip.

We drove out as a family on Tuesday. We played twenty questions. Daughter thought of “rubber band.“ We didn’t get it. Son thought of “nuclear particle accelerator.” We didn’t get that either. We listened to the Beatles. I said, “These are the mountains where the Marines train to find Osama Bin Laden because it’s like Northern Pakistan. Son answered, “And we’re here for a vacation?”

 

We stayed in a small, yellow cinder-block house so far out in the Wonder Valley north of Twenty-Nine Palms, we called it “Witness Protection Ranch.” Two guys pulled up in a blue truck for the garbage. They looked like Howard Hughes and Whitey Bulger. The desert winds howled at night. There were a billion stars. By day, with the desert in full yellow bloom after a wet winter, we did trails in Joshua Tree National Park, which exists, we discovered, thanks to Minerva Hamilton Hoyt, who was a dead ringer for our neighbor Marcia Bloom, who was back in Santa Monica making sure our cats were fed and their litter box empty. We climbed to the top of Mt. Ryan and we hiked into a palm-shaded oasis, where it was “like we’re waiting for Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck to show up, “ said Son. At twilight we drove an hour through the park listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. That was my idea.

 

Scrabble was Daughter’s idea; a ritual, perhaps, signifying her personal apogee as a newly-minted University of California Writing and Literature Honors Baccalaureate-Designate. And for most of the game she beat us up pretty good. A couple of three-syllablers and a strategic use of the x and a couple of o’s, and she had a 25-point lead coming down to the last letters. We were all tired and desperate to end the game, shooting two-letter outs and already talking about the next day and who would finish the dishes. Daughter was down to an I, and wouldn’t you know, she saw the same two P’s I was waiting for. Pi both ways, a slightly controversial seven pointer, which I would have protested more vigorously had I not been in the slough of loser’s despond, and banking on the same cheap trick.

Then it was I down to my last letter. An I as well. I couldn’t find anything , not even the savior second to last note, ti. But then, there it was, in the lower right corner. Somehow I’d missed it. As Daughter just had. Down where Daughter had earlier dropped a SEXY, from which Son saw AX, and Wife played that into, I am not making this up, TAX. But, now, right below TAX, a blank. And not just any blank but a Triple Word Score blank. I moved the I to the spot as, across from me, the University of California Writing and Literature Baccalaureate-Designate sank like a, um, Titanic into the desert. On the last letter of the game, one letter. On the last stinkin, beautiful letter, Father threw up a thirty-three pointer, TAXI, at the buzzer to win, and danced around like a, um, Davidson cheerleader on speedballs and Rebel Yell, which was not a good example, Father admits.

The games have been great and the hell with the brackets. Except, of course, for a UCLA-Memphis game that just has to happen. And of course, we’re following the NIT. Go UMass.

Tonight, it’s Son, Daughter, Wife, Father off to the Los Angeles Coliseum, an unlikely venue for a World Champion Boston Red Sox visit to play the local boys, the Dodgers, who moved out here from Flatbush Avenue 50 years ago. Last Dodgers game in the Coliseum, Sandy Koufax pitched all 13 innings in a win against the Cubs. “But he wasn’t a fastball pitcher, right?“ Son said. “Oh yes he was,” I said. Koufax’s arm pretty much fell off at the elbow, but oh yes he was. I remember that, believe or not, being almost as old as Wife and all.