Pigeons of shame!

For the last fifteen years or so of her life, my Grandma Mary lived in a small studio apartment on Laurel Street in San Carlos.

Now Grandma was pretty good about keeping herself occupied. She'd take the casino bus to Reno every now and then. And she was always reading and doing crossword puzzles.

And one thing Grandma used to love to do was feed the pigeons.

Now she wouldn't go to the park and sit on a bench and feed the pigeons. That was not her style. She liked to keep moving.

So what Grandma would do is she'd go to a deserted warehouse parking lot out on El Camino and just dump a bunch of bread or peanuts or whatever out there on the blacktop and sit there in her car smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee out of a thermos for twenty minutes or so, and then she'd drive off to the Rainbow Grocery or the Bell Market to buy a carton of cigarettes and some non-perishables.

Any non-perishables. Didn't matter what it was. Spaghetti, pork & beans, cocktail olives, muffin mix, Pear Ripple. Her apartment looked like one of those mini-marts you stop at on the way to Vegas.

I don't mean on I-5. I'm talking about one of those places out around Boron.

Anyway, the pigeon feeding really got out of hand because over the years, Grandma would attract more and more pigeons to the point where there were whole pigeon armies camping out on top of the buildings around Laurel Street waiting for Grandma's '72 Nova to go by.

And the Sheriff's Deputies went to see Grandma repeatedly and told her to stop feeding the pigeons because the buildings in the area couldn't withstand the weight of all those birds.

So Grandma just went underground. She'd go buy a 20-lb. sack of rice at the Bell Market, make a huge pot of rice for the pigeons, circle the block a few times to make sure she wasn't being followed, then SPLAT, dump the rice out by the warehouse on El Camino, take a couple puffs on her cigarette, and tear out of there.

So I was curious to see what Grandma's old neighborhood looked like, and I finally dragged Tony out there this afternoon.

Let me tell you something, the Sheriff's Department was not kidding! Holy Crap! There's hardly a building left standing from when Grandma lived there! Even the old Laurel Theater is gone.

That was a beautiful old place. I went there in 1977 with Grandma and saw "Star Wars." Grandma chain-smoked through the whole thing and kept telling me over and over again how much I resembled Mark Hamill.

Yeah, I know. I look nothing like Mark Hamill, but, obviously, Grandma had her own unique outlook on life from which even the threat of incarceration could not shake her.

Anyway, the good news is Grandma's apartment building is still there. I think all those canned goods stacked floor to ceiling kind of reinforced the structure somehow.

I imagine after she died, they just had to leave most of that stuff in place, kind of like the Watts Towers.

Kurt "big daddy" True
20 august 2006