“My dad kept asking me, ‘When are you going to make money out of your hobby?’”
February 17, 2005
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Stories by Matthew Lickona
Rough Stuff
“If we vinify like Australia has been doing, we’re going to end up with hedonistic wines.”
Trophy Exit
“I don’t want to stare at bottles simply because they’re that special.”
February 3, 2005
Always Answer
“I loved diving into a tank and having to scoop out 8000 pounds of expired must.”
January 27, 2005
All-Star Bar
“They don’t drink any white wine, and they don’t drink any cheap wine.”
January 20, 2005
Happy Triggers
“Nothing is complete — things are chopped off, or they run off the edge of the canvas.”
January 13, 2005
Cabernet Paint
“I was drinking these great bottles and saying to my wife, ‘This is out of control!’ ”
Career Explosion
“A client wanted something signed. He had this crate next to him, and he just started doodling.”
December 30, 2004
San Diego Christmas shoppers caught in the act
We used to decorate the outside of our house, but not anymore. We put a bow in front of our gate and we put lights up, that's about it. I always wanted the moving reindeer, but no.
December 23, 2004
Thirst Resort
“It’s not like he’s a control freak or anything, it’s just that he likes growing grapes.”
December 16, 2004
Extravaganza
“I was going to be a pseudo-lab-and-cellar guy. I thought, ‘I’ll get to see all the different aspects.’”
The Idea Is to Make Something Beautiful
The telapia is seasoned with Spike. “I don’t use pepper, and I don’t use regular salt. They scared you away from salt 30, 40 years ago. We get a salt from, what is it, Utah?“
September 30, 2004
Heart Attack House
“You or I could go to Sausage King and get the very same ingredients that Klaus gets, and yet there’s a little touch they give these Europeans. They know just how to do it. They won’t let you know.”
March 18, 2004
On a Street Named After Grandma
"The Hilton was a place you could go and meet people your own age. It was E Street, it was Johnny Love’s, it was all of the above.” And the crowd was precisely to his liking.
March 4, 2004
Family Circus
When I first visited, Craig was living in Escondido and Lisa in Valley Center. But Valley Center, says Shelby, “was a very small little farm town, and I got tired of it."
February 19, 2004
You Get More Boring, Unless You're Hugh Hefner
You can still see downtown, but a new condo complex blocks much of the bay view. “It’s not the same as one floor up, where you get the whole bay. It’s $150,000 more for the whole bay.”
January 15, 2004
Neighborhood: small towns of San Diego
I see Asian gang cars some nights, in a long caravan down the Mira Mesa Boulevard. They meet at In-N-Out Burger before heading off for illegal street races on Kearny Villa Road or in Sorrento Valley.
December 24, 2003
Mission Hills
As State Street crosses Laurel heading north, its name changes suddenly to Reynard, and a little blue street sign welcomes you to Mission Hills. Don’t be fooled. This is Baja Mission Hills, like Kensington too …
December 24, 2003
Gongolians
She split time between Orange County and Pacific Beach, where she had a boyfriend. She didn’t like PB much. “It was just college kids burning up their parents’ money. It was an interesting time.”
November 20, 2003
Lisa Makes Sunday Dinner
“There’s this one restaurant in Point Loma that makes this white jalapeño cheese sauce for their chips. They finally printed it out for me. I’m going to make some kind of pasta and chicken.”
November 13, 2003
Suburban Artery
“I saw a little bit of the receding hairline,” says Steve. Rather than take up the bitter struggle, he shaved himself bald. “You know, I’m married, I’ve got a child; vanity’s not really high on my li.”
September 25, 2003
The Door’s Open. Go In!
They came from assimilated, non-practicing families. They met at UCSD, then transferred together to UCLA. They spent a year in Israel. There — or rather, here — they met a young rabbi.. “We started asking questions."
June 12, 2003
Thirty-Year Love
"Everything in the Amazon Sweet Shop was sweetened with honey or maple syrup. We used to make green tea ice cream for the Prophet. Kung Food used to have us in their little deli. People’s in Ocean Beach...”
May 29, 2003
Domestic Spy
The period chandelier in the dining room hints at what the kitchen confirms: this is not simply an older house or “updated” older house. This is a total remodel
March 20, 2003
You Have to Know Yourself
“Amtrak employees are social people. Because it’s a travel thing, not many marriages work; most of her friends are single. Luckily, Laura got a steady route, so she has, more or less, a normal job.”
February 27, 2003
Now This Is Living
"Now that Encinitas is a city, it’s an historic building, When old timers found out we were restoring it instead, they first couldn’t believe it, and then they started bringing me books and articles."
February 6, 2003
Guess How Many Legs I’ve Got in My Closet
“I don’t want any help. Every time you involve another person, there’s a personal interaction: who they are, who you are, what they smell like, what they talk like, everything else like that.”
July 18, 2002
A Thigh for Everybody
Earlier, while we were discussing family, I had told Kim that I have three children. While plates are passed, she turns to George. “See, George, he has three kids. It’s a lot of work."
June 13, 2002
Charles Matson, San Diego's restaurant expert
“To the best of my knowledge, when you go to a restaurant-supply store to look at chairs, there is an idea of quick turn, medium turn, and slow turn” that influences the sort of chair …
January 3, 2002
Condos Invade Little Italy
"I'm horrified," says Quigley. "They're really not learning, I don't think, from the idea of making something that's unique to Little Italy. They're doing it in the most superficial way possible, which is stylistic.”
November 8, 2001
Tears for My Grandfathers
The first thing they did after he died was clean him up, an incredibly tender gesture It had been him, and they treated his body with kind regard. They removed his clothes and scrubbed him all over.
October 25, 2001
Ghetto Beauty
“I used to love me a pork chop, like I used to smoke cigarettes. Then I heard that my father lost one of his lungs, so I decided, ‘That’s enough Marlboros for me.' "
August 16, 2001
Swing the Boom
“These cranes are pretty nice rigs,” he told me. “They handle nice. It’s kind of like a car. [Just like little cars], the smaller the crane, the whippier it is — the quicker around.”
June 28, 2001
Our bed is never made
“I thought, ‘I cannot drive Aldine [a windy, canyon-hugging road] every day. It’ll freak me out.’ We looked in Normal Heights, and there were times we’d go to open houses, and I’d get this really uneasy feeling.”
April 12, 2001
Far From Empty
“Kaddafi was very well educated.” She was impressed with his success in preventing harm from coming to the Italians when they were deported from Libya and with his decision to leave a Catholic cathedral standing in Tripoli.
November 22, 2000
Survivors
His parents got divorced “after 37 years of marriage. Seven kids and 37 years later — it was like, ‘You’re what?’ It happened right in my salon back in Minnesota. I see my mom out there pacing.”
November 2, 2000
Gore Gave an Answer, Bush Gave a Smile
As the election looms on the horizon, abortion swirls in the cool fall air at San Diego State University, now enshrouding the entire spectacle, now skittering about the edges, now fading from sight, only to …
November 2, 2000
29 Reader writers on their fathers
To commemorate Father's Day, this issue contains a collection of reflections from Reader writers about their fathers: The Last Tag Sale — Jeanne Schinto An Air of Exoticism — Duncan Shepherd Kinder Than I Would …
June 15, 2000
Why the Tie, Why the Canoe
There is nothing better for a man but that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God. — Ecclesiastes 2:24 My father’s …
June 15, 2000
What Would You Do for Uncle Sam?
“I think I owe this country something. I think what I’m doing now, becoming a student, getting a job, doing the whole capitalism thing— I think that’s what I owe this country."
March 30, 2000
You're Going to Wait 'Til You're Married to Have Sex?
“My roommate is a diehard Catholic, and she gets all ticked off, because, like, I didn’t know that you had to be part of the Church to take the bread and wine, which I always did.”
New Yorker's Janet Flanner, my mother, and me
“Janet lived alone in a Paris hotel,” Murray tells me, “so she didn’t have to worry about housekeeping and chores and all of that; she could just concentrate on being a writer.”
February 10, 2000
Class Struggle
You go away to college, and you have a certain percentage of friends who don’t go. Well, within the first year and a half, you have nothing in common. You’re going to class full-time, they’re working at McDonald’s.”
January 20, 2000
San Diego: America's Mail-Theft Capital
“Honey, honey, don’t run! Please, honey, stay there!” The girl strains forward and yells from the back seat of the patrol car. But as the officer door-knocks, Honey bails through the living room window into …
January 20, 2000
Macho studies at UCSD
A story shared between men, both in their 20s, both fathers: “I’m coming up Montezuma, and I see a pickup truck in the left-turn lane with its hazard lights on. I pull over to help …
December 9, 1999