Lunch With Marissa
I feel a bit like I am over-telling the story, but nonetheless I want to describe my lunch yesterday with my new-found half-sister Marissa. To begin with, we agreed to meet in Pasadena, so that choice deserves some attention since it seems to govern a great deal of my travel decisions here in Southern California. My main driving objective when heading north is to avoid Los Angeles traffic at all costs. While I am not enamored with LA at all, it is less about avoiding LA, per se, and more about avoiding its freeway traffic. The best tactic I have found is to stay as far east of LA as possible. Riverside county, which occupies the bulk of the area east of LA is no pleasure, but it is manageable. Since Marissa lives north of LA in the northern part of the San Fernando Valley, I thought that meeting in Pasadena would be the best option. Pasadena has always seemed to me to be a civilized place set in the middle of the wilds of LA and the monster trucks of Riverside. I know I can approach it through Riverside County and I know she can approach it across the top of Burbank and while it is closer to her than to me, by quite a bit, I felt it would work. To be honest, finding anywhere more central between us would put us in the middle of Orange County, which to me, is a lot like saying we should meet somewhere in the middle of New Jersey. That is a far more daunting prospect than just saying, “Let’s meet in Pasadena.”
My second issue of note in this minor travel objective is to figure out how I could drive my Tesla there since Kim would need her car for the day and I ain’t riding my motorcycle on the slabs of LA or Riverside if I can avoid it. My Tesla, being an early X version is used mostly for local errands and has a rather modest range of 230 miles (really more like 200 miles) and thus not quite enough to accomplish a full round trip without recharging. The one longer-distance trip I have taken with it to Las Vegas was, to say the least, an adventure in range anxiety. Since then I have decided that EV’s have limited use and will either be paired with a car that consumes either gasoline or, in the future, hydrogen, or gets somehow combined into a hybrid to accomplish the same range-solving solution. In the mean time, for this lunch meeting I will not reconfigure my transportation fleet, but will rather find a local charging station to recharge for my trip home.
The best news in this regard is that my time is very flexible, so if I need to sit and wait for a recharging, no problem. As it turned out, there is a Tesla Supercharger station in a parking garage in downtown Pasadena that is about four blocks from the restaurant recommended by Marissa. That meant that all I had to do was to find the station and hope that there were enough charging stations available on a late Monday morning to accommodate me. Since there are 24 charging stations there, I felt good about the prospects even though Pasadena strikes me as a Tesla kinda town.
So, to get logistics and travel wrapped up, I headed up with time to spare, having planned the timing to help me avoid the rush hour traffic. I found the Supercharger station with no difficulty and there were 17 available chargers. As an early adopter of Tesla, I have lifetime free supercharging, which is convenient, but let’s face it, saving $20 over four years on a $113k car shouldn’t even warrant a mention. My Tesla app tells me that my car will be fully charged in forty minutes so I can go have lunch and not worry about the charge state of my car.
Now then, about the restaurant. Marissa is a COVID nurse and while she hasn’t made a big deal out of it, I suspect her choice of a “health food” restaurant for lunch may represent some degree of thoughtful healthy eating, which generally isn’t something I worry about. In fact, in my advance looking at the menu I was a little concerned that there were limited choices that appealed to me. The purpose of this meeting was not about food, but about getting to know one another so I forced myself to not be concerned about the menu until I got there. We had recently dined al fresco in Pasadena and I longingly walked past the Italian restaurant where we had gone. However, when I arrived at the restaurant I was pleasantly surprised. To begin with, the facility was as nice or nicer than any other outdoor dining option I saw in Pasadena. Then a quick stop in the men’s room told me that this was actually a pretty high class joint and the facility really was first class. The menu was as advertised, but again there was a pleasant surprise. The butternut squash soup was wonderful and the chicken sausage pizza was as good as I could have asked for. Good choice, Marissa.
Marissa and I spent about 90 minutes having a leisurely lunch out on the terrace/sidewalk. Other than the passing traffic and the blowing drape curtain it was a pleasant ambiance for such a reunion. We spent the time telling stories about each other’s lives and doing a complete reprise of all of our siblings far and wide. It all makes for an interesting story in and of itself with all its twists and turns. There is the Italian-born father who left Italy at age 20, met my mother in Venezuela at age 25, immigrated to the U.S. at age thirty and cast his seed further across California and Mexico for the next forty years. We know of three of us spawned in the Venezuela days, five spawned in California and one in Mexico. We have located and I have met all but one California daughter. That makes me the most connected of the siblings for the moment though we have all agreed that the rest will get caught up eventually. Marissa and I also agreed that given the ongoing revelations that it is most likely that dear old Dad both impregnated other women across the Americas and that there are likely others in Venezuela, Mexico and California, not to mention the distinct possibility of some Italians that bear his DNA. Once 23&Me becomes completely ubiquitous and everyone has the willingness to toggle on their relations switch on that app, we may once and for all get the final tally of siblings, but until then the count stands at nine.
In addition to the topic of our father’s prolific ways, we each discussed other aspects of our lives as well as the next two generation we have all carried forward to advance and refine the Andre DNA. Marissa has three girls and I have my two boys and one girl. Adding the other known children of our siblings I get a total count on Andre’s known grandchildren of seventeen with great-grandchildren currently numbering nine and counting. I would suggest that we should expect that the great-grandchildren numbers will likely get over thirty before all is said and done.
I’m get tired just thinking about it, even though Andre seemed to be brimming with energy and enthusiasm for procreation if not parenting. I am thrilled that Marissa and I have gotten to know one another and look forward to future gatherings. In the mean time I will work on getting braver at extending the range of my Tesla since after four years of driving it, I still have less than 8,000 miles and I hate to see all that free supercharging go unused.