San Bernardino’s Montecito cemetery sits at the southern end of Waterman Avenue, perched in the low hills just above Loma Linda. My dad made my mom traipse all over the cemetery in search of the perfect gravesite. He wanted the plot that had the best view of the family farm down at the bottom of the hill.

Unfortunately, the trees that were mere saplings when he chose the gravesite have now grown much taller and much fuller and they now block the view of the dairy even if you stand on your tiptoes and crane your neck. (And trust me on this, my mom and dad are in no condition to be doing either.)

We poured a “highball” over each side of their headstone. I’m pretty sure I heard him say, “Enough of this sentimental shit, kid. Get off your ass and get back to work.”

Jamie and I have finally severed our last tie to the once great state of California. We just sold the first rental home my parents purchased back in 1961. It was in the family for almost exactly sixty years.

On what sounds like a completely different subject but really isn’t, my dad wasn’t much of a drinker. He consumed a bit more alcohol than I do, but I’m damn near a teetotaler. I’ve always assumed he limited his alcoholic intake because his favorite drink was the most godawful concoction in the history of alcohol. Seriously. Think up the worst alcoholic beverage you can imagine and I guarantee you that his drink of choice was worse.

When friends came over for a visit, he would excuse himself, mosey into the kitchen, and mix up a highball for everyone in attendance. That was what he called a glass of Canadian Club whiskey mixed with chilled Welch’s purple grape juice.

Have you ever heard of anything so disgusting?

According to Wikipedia, “A highball is a mixed alcoholic drink composed of an alcoholic base spirit and a larger proportion of a non-alcoholic mixer. Examples include the Seven and Seven, Scotch and soda, and rum and Coke. A highball is typically served over ice in a large straight-sided highball glass or Collins glass.”

I guess my dad’s concoction met the strict definition of a highball. It did, indeed, have an alcoholic base spirit, the Canadian Club, and a larger proportion of a non-alcoholic mixer, the Welch’s grape juice. But what a hideous combo. Furthermore, our family had no fancy store-bought glasses, so I’m pretty sure he served his highballs in the repurposed jelly jars we used as everyday drinking glasses. To the best of my recollection, ice was unnecessary because the Welch’s grape juice came straight out of the refrigerator.

What does this have to do with us severing our last tie with California?

Well, Jamie and I decided to celebrate our final break by flying to California and visiting my parents’ graves. We picked up a bottle of Canadian Mist (We had no choice. When I asked the liquor store owner for a bottle of Canadian Club, he shook his head sadly from side-to-side and said, “Too old fashioned.” His alternative was an equally inexpensive plastic bottle of Canadian Mist) then stopped at a small grocery store to purchase a bottle of cold Welch’s grape juice, and then made our way to the cemetery. After duplicating my dad’s disgusting concoction to the best of my abilities, we choked down our drinks and poured two more over Bill’s and Helen’s graves, just to thank them for the head start in life they gave me.

And then we left California.

Jamie says she’ll return to visit friends, but I swear I’ll never return until god kids get married or have babies or I need to attend a funeral. Who the hell knows? Maybe I’ll go back for something else somewhere along the line, but the state in which I grew up has transformed into something I don’t recognize, don’t like, and don’t want to spend time in.

Give me Texas. Give me Madeira. Give me the Barossa Valley. Give me peace and quiet and politicians who are at least semi-rational and no more than semi-corrupt. Is that asking too much?

Let’s set the Way Back Machine for Los Angeles’ Griffith Park in late summer 1972. Here we are on the set of the first TV commercial I ever wrote. As you may be able to guess, the client was McDonald’s.

I (the scrawny, long-haired, bespectacled and bearded lad third from the left) may look as if I’m in charge, patiently explaining the intricacies of the storyboard to Ronald McDonald, Bob Elen, the ad agency account executive, and Carl Gruener, its broadcast production manager. In reality I was scared to death that one or all of them would figure out that I didn’t have the slightest clue what I was doing.

This was back in the days before McDonald’s introduced playgrounds to its restaurants, and this commercial was supposed to promote their precursor, a primordial traveling McDonaldLand playground that went from location to location.

I don’t remember much about the commercial and, sadly, no longer have a copy of it. It’s no great loss because there was nothing especially memorable about it except that it was the first one I ever wrote. But I do recall that we had a problem with one of the TV networks. At some point in the commercial Ronald looked at a couple kids and said something like, “Let’s get this show on the road,” at which point the action shifted to super fast motion to show the transformation of Ronald’s 18-wheeler into a McDonaldLand playground.

After viewing the completed commercial, some officious genius in the network Standards & Practices Department said, “No way. We can’t show kids running down the stairs. That wouldn’t be safe.” A long-forgotten ad agency executive, probably one of the two other guys in the photo, finally convinced His Officiousness that it would be impossible for any children to suddenly shift into super fast motion, so the commercial eventually received his blessing.

By the way, this is the real Ronald McDonald. Each large market around the country had its own local Ronald who made personal appearances in that region. But this commercial must have been some kind of big deal because King Moody, who played Ronald in all McDonald’s national commercials between 1969 and 1985, deigned to grace us with his presence at this shoot.

Did I really just write the sentence, “This is the real Ronald McDonald” and emphasize the word real?

Advertising is a very strange business.

Tawny Kitaen, 1980s sex kitten, has passed away. She was just 59 years old.

Not even my closest friends know about the long term relationship Tawny and I shared. But now that she has passed on to that Great Music Video in the Sky, it’s time for the truth to come out.

But first, let’s pause for 4 minutes and 31 seconds to remember what critics universally acknowledge as her greatest performance: “Hot Babe With Giant ‘80s Hair Rolling Around On A Jaguar Sedan” in White Snake’s “Here I Go Again” video.

Tawny and I first met back in 2001. Fate brought us together at about 11:30 a.m. on a misty Saturday morning at Starbuck’s at Fashion Island in Newport Beach. Our relationship quickly blossomed into something truly beautiful and lasted until 11:45. Maybe even 11:47. Longer, sadly, than many of my other relationships.

I love to take my iPad to coffee shops to watch people as I work, but I hate sitting in hard wooden chairs. This particular Starbucks had two plush, comfy chairs just inside the front window. I was seated in one and the other was empty when a beautiful, auburn-haired young woman approached me. She looked deep into my eyes — nay, my soul — and began a conversation that is etched into my memory.

Tawny: Excuse me.

Jim: Yes?

Tawny: I’m meeting a friend here in a few minutes and we haven’t seen each other in a while and I was just wondering if you would be willing to let us sit here.

Jim: Here in these two chairs?

Tawny: Well, yes, if that’s ok with you.

Jim: Sure. Have a seat. If you don’t mind, I’ll just sit here until your friend arrives.

Tawny: (sitting down in the opposite chair) That would be great. Thank you so much. What’s your name.

Jim: I’m Jim. And you are?

Tawny: Tawny.

Jim: (Still so stupid that I do not recognize Tawny Kitaen) Tawny. How do you spell that?

Tawny: T-A-W-N-Y.

Jim: Interesting. Is that your given name or a nickname?

Tawny: It’s a professional name. My real name is Julie.

Jim: Do you mind if I call you Julie?

Tawny: (laughing) No. It’ll just be you and my mom who call me that.

Jim: Well, I’m in good company then.

Tawny: (laughing and pointing to my laptop) What are you working on?

Jim: I’m just checking last night’s baseball scores.

Tawny: You’re a baseball fan?

Jim: Yes. I love baseball.

Tawny: My husband is a baseball player.

Jim: Anyone I would have heard of? What’s your last name?

Tawny: Finley.

Jim: Are you married to Steve Finley (a player for the Arizona Diamondbacks)?

Tawny: (almost insulted) No. Chuck Finley.

Jim: (sits silently for a moment, dumbfounded because I know Chuck Finley, a darn fine pitcher for the Los Angeles Angels, is married to Tawny Kitaen and suddenly realizing who I’ve been sitting there talking to).

Jim: Tawny? As in Tawny Kitaen?

Tawny: Yes.

At that moment another attractive young woman, obviously the one Tawny was waiting for, approached us. Tawny introduced us. I graciously offered her my prized plush chair, then walked away and found myself a cold, hard wooden chair on the other side of the store. I finished looking at the previous night’s baseball box scores, re-watched Tawny’s infamous White Snake video (a couple times), checked my email, and then packed up to go home. My car was parked outside the front door, so I had to pass the two friends on my way out. I walked over to them.

Jim: Just wanted to say good-bye. It was a pleasure meeting you, Julie.

Tawny: (laughing) You and my mom.

She jumped up and gave me a big, lingering hug. Well, truth be told I may have lingered a little longer than she did. Perhaps I even lingered into that hazy ok-we’re-strangers-and-this-is-getting-a-little-uncomfortable zone. And with that, our relationship ended. Although I must admit that I went back to that same Starbucks at about 11:30 a.m. every Saturday morning for the next couple months, just hoping that she would be there again. She wasn’t.

About two years later Tawny was arrested for using her stiletto heels to turn her baseball player husband into a piece of Swiss cheese. This is merely an assumption on my part, but I’m convinced the poor woman did it out of frustration caused by the sudden end of our relationship.

Rest in peace, Julie.

Bill Gates announced yesterday that he and his wife of 27 years are divorcing. We’ll get back to that a little later. Right after I seemingly go waaaaaay off subject.

Back in the early 1980s the small ad agency in which I was a partner landed a major software account located somewhere in Texas. Dallas, as I recall.

Sometimes client-agency relationships just don’t work out. It’s kind of like a marriage. Sometimes all the assembled guests watch the bride and groom exchanging vows and think, “This is a big mistake.” Sure, both sides go through the ceremony with the best of intentions, but then he finds out she only pretended to like baseball and she finds out he has an unnatural attraction to teenage boys. Or something like that. Nobody’s fault. Sometimes it’s just better that you get a divorce and move on with your lives.

That’s how it was with this client. Both sides knew pretty quickly that a divorce was in the offing but neither of us wanted to admit we had made a mistake. Luckily, we landed a huge account a few months later which allowed us the luxury of resigning the Texas account before they got around to firing us.

The bright spot in this otherwise mismatched marriage was a young woman named Ann Winblad. She had become part of this conglomerate when it acquired the software company she had founded a few years earlier. She was only in her late twenties, maybe her very early thirties, but that transaction had already made her a very wealthy young woman.

We liked Ann. She seemed to like us. And, personally, the two of us got along famously. She was very smart, had a great sense of humor, and knew good advertising from bad. Far as I was concerned, losing Ann was the only negative part of resigning the account.

Fast forward a couple years. I was attending the National Computer Conference in Las Vegas. Think of it as the nerd Oscars. Thousands of guys with socks that didn’t match, and with plastic pen holders in the pockets of their shortsleeved button down shirts, all scurrying from booth to booth to see the latest floppy disc drive from Shugart or the the new, upgraded Dumb Terminal from Lear Siegler. It was an almost exclusively male event and most of the attendees thought of women as alien creatures from another universe.

I stepped into the immense Las Vegas Convention Center, paused in the middle of the main aisle just long enough to get my bearings, and then surveyed my surroundings. A hundred feet down the aisle, a head of blonde hair caught my attention. A head of blonde female hair. This was something worthy of far more attention than any of the show’s incredible technological innovations.

Although I hadn’t seen her in several years, I immediately recognized that blonde head of hair as Ann Winblad’s. She had not yet spotted me, so I hurriedly weaved my way down the crowded aisle in her direction. By the time I approached her, she had turned in the other direction and was deep in conversation, probably negotiating another multimillion dollar software contract.

I approached her from behind, put a hand on each of her shoulders, then leaned in and kissed her on the neck. I don’t know why I did it. Ann and I had never done anything more physical than shake hands. There was no reason for me to think it was appropriate nor that she would appreciate it. But I did it. Blame it on my OCD. Or maybe call it temporary insanity.

Without missing a beat — and I swear this is 100% true — she blurted out, “Oh, my god. Is that you, Jim?” I have no idea how she knew who was doing the nibbling. I’d like to think she had sensed my raw animal magnetism, but it was probably something far more humdrum. The familiar scent of cheap cologne, perhaps. She spun around and gave me a big hug. We laughed. We talked. She told me she was doing well. I told her the agency was doing well. We both lied and said we’d get together the next time either of us was in the other’s area.

Then she said, “Hey, my new boyfriend is here at the show. We should go to dinner. I think you’d like him.”

“Sorry, can’t do it,” I responded. “I’m just here for the day. I have a five o’clock flight back to Orange County. Next time.” Truth is, much as I liked Ann as a client, I had no real interest in dining with her nerdy new boyfriend.

In 1998 Sean Connolly wrote a best seller called “Bill Gates: An Unauthorized Biography.” Gates had by then become The Richest Man in the World and it sounded like an interesting read, so I picked up a copy. It was revealed not too many pages into the book that Gate’s girlfriend of many years was none other than Ann.

Yes, I had turned down dinner with Bill Gates. What a moron. Me, not him.

Every article about Bill Gates’ newly-announced divorce mentions the fact that he negotiated a very unusual pre-nup agreement with his wife. Despite the fact that The Richest Man in the World was already a billionaire when he married Melinda, the pre-nup didn’t mention money. But it did spell out that he was allowed to spend one weekend per year in a North Carolina beach cottage with former flame Ann Winblad.

Now I’m pretty sure that if today you asked Ann about the time I nibbled on her neck at the National Computer Conference, her response would be, “Jim who?” I guarantee you that she would not remember me. Why should she? Very few of the women I’ve kissed in my life remember me.

I, however, would like to believe that I am now the answer to a cool trivia question in Ann’s life:

“Name someone not named Bill Gates who has nibbled on my neck.”

COMING SOME OTHER TIME: MY OTHER ONE-DEGREE-OF-SEPARATION-FROM-BILL-GATES STORY.

We miss Australia. We talk about it every day. I’m homesick for a place that isn’t actually my home. It’s getting so bad that I saw Australia in my purple potato chips today. Qantas is hinting around that it may start flying internationally again in late October. ‘Bout time.

This is Sydney, our cross-eyed little old lady cat. Her twentieth birthday is somewhere here in the middle of February. We don’t know an accurate date — her mother was a feral cat who lived on the docks of Newport Beach and we adopted Sydney as a kitten — but that was the vet’s best guess.

She’s the last of her litter. Friends adopted her two sisters and they are both long gone.

The poor old gal made it to twenty, but we know she doesn’t have much time left. Although she’s never had a sick day in her life, she’s now skin and bones. Her hearing is completely gone. She has cataracts in her right eye. She’s hunched over from arthritis. She no longer seems to understand what the litter box is for. She sleeps about twenty hours a day. She hasn’t left our spare bedroom in years. And she’s pretty much stopped eating, so we know her days are numbered.

I just looked up a chart that says twenty cat years is equal to about ninety six human years.

Happy birthday, Syd. It’s been a pleasure having you around for the last ninety six years.

We have some very, very odd neighbors. Someone built this in their front yard about two blocks from our house.

Ten points if you recognize the pop culture reference in the headline.

As I said in a previous post, I’d never seen an icicle until the other day. Seventy-two years on this earth including two years of college in the frigid northern climes of Oregon, yet I’d never seen an actual icicle.

That situation has now been rectified.

I jokingly told Jamie that the icicles hanging outside our kitchen door are “big as a Louisville Slugger.” Then I got to wondering if that was true. So I went upstairs, grabbed my Louisville Slugger baseball bat, and took it outside to compare.

This is not just any Louisville Slugger. This particular Louisville Slugger is more valuable than gold. It has an interesting back story. Which means, of course, that I feel absolutely compelled to tell it.

The Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1958 despite the fact that the city had no baseball stadium adequate for baseball at the major league level. Wrigley Field, the only real ballpark, was in a bad part of town and, even worse, it only seated about 25,000. So the new Los Angeles Dodgers opted to play in an oddly-reconfigured Los Angeles Coliseum, a converted football stadium, until they completed construction of the sparkling new Dodger Stadium.

The Dodgers drew immense crowds, so it was difficult to get good seats. In 1960 my dad gave me the assignment of sending a letter to the Dodgers’ ticket department to order our seats. Oh, how times have changed. Unlike today, when you go online and pick the specific seats you want, it was the luck of the draw back in 1960. But because tickets were so difficult to get, we were very happy to receive seats down the right field line near the Dodgers bullpen.

Another odd thing about the Coliseum, originally built for the 1928 Summer Olympics, was that it had bench seating, not individual seats. So there were the deYongs, sitting just behind the Dodgers’ bullpen, when a very attractive young woman walked up to us and very politely said, “Excuse me. I am Sandy Koufax’ girlfriend and I was wondering if I could squeeze in here with your family so I can be near the bullpen.”

Sandy Koufax is now known as the greatest pitcher of his generation. Maybe the greatest ever. But back in those days he was a marginal pitcher who was barely clinging to his place on the team. His pitching was so erratic that he rarely got into a game. He could throw about a million miles an hour, but no one ever knew where the ball was going to end up. He’d been in the big leagues for six years and had a losing record.

A couple innings later Sandy’s girlfriend walked down to the edge of the railing, called Sandy over and whispered into his ear. He walked away but came back moments later with a baseball bat in his hand, a Louisville Slugger. He handed it to her and she returned to her seat and handed it to me.

“I want to thank you for making room for me,” she said. “So I asked Sandy to get this for you.”

Of course, as baseball fans know, Sandy Koufax finally figured out how to be a major league pitcher the next season. He put together six absolutely incredible seasons in a row, a stretch unmatched in baseball history, retired at age thirty, and became the youngest player ever elected to the baseball Hall of Fame. He’s a legend, a living god who demands nothing of the world except privacy. He’s baseball’s answer to J.D. Salinger.

Here we are sixty years later and I still treasure that baseball bat simply because he once touched it.

I don’t care how big the damn icicles are, they’ll never measure up to this Louisville Slugger.

“A Christmas Story” is the funniest damn movie ever made. It was written and narrated by Jean Shepard, one of my radio heroes, who also wrote “Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories,” my favorite short story. (If you’ve never read it, do. I guarantee it’s laugh out loud funny.) One network or another airs a “Christmas Story“ marathon every year and despite the fact that Jamie and I have both seen it about fifty times, we always watch it one more time.

Throughout “A Christmas Story,” little Ralphie repeats that he wants just one thing for Christmas: “I want an official Red Ryder, carbine action, two-hundred shot range model air rifle.” Everyone — parents, teacher, even the department store Santa Claus — tells him it’s a bad idea because, “You’ll shoot your eye out.”

On Christmas morning his parents surprised him with the BB-gun. He ran outside and took his first shot, the BB ricocheted back, broke his glasses, and damn near put his eye out.

Thinking quickly, little Ralphie told his mother that his wound was caused by a falling icicle.

Hey, I was born and raised in California. I knew nothing about icicles. I’d never seen one until today.

Now I can’t go outside because I’m afraid one of those things will put my eye out.