These are not the ladies from Tijuana; they are Woody Burns and John Wise, who, with Caroline and our Aunt Ann, are spending the weekend together in Goleta doing not much at all.

Well, there is this pot of chicken soup underway that I’m hoping Tata (Aunt Ann) learned to make from her mother, Luba, and that it’s the same recipe her sister/my grandmother Amelia used to make. There are those foods from our childhood that really defined our expectations, and from my grandma Wise (Amelia), it was chicken soup, homemade noodles, and tapioca pudding.

More than 30 years ago, my Uncle Woody and Aunt Ann picked up this once beautiful statue from across the border in Tijuana, Mexico. As she rode back to the U.S. in the passenger seat of a convertible, she turned heads – yeah, right, it was her stunning beauty and not those odd multi-directional breasts.