Celebrating 75
Our baby was born three weeks early at Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla. We live in Del Mar, and as we drove through Torrey Pines on the way to the hospital to deliver our son, we blared Andrea Bocelli because it was the most epic music we could imagine for his birth. He spent his first week of life in the NICU because his lungs weren’t fully developed, and we drove back and forth through Torrey Pines every day to see him at the hospital. Although we felt so helpless with him in the NICU, the drive reminded us how lucky we were to bring our son home to such a beautiful place. When he was released, we couldn’t wait for him to see the vast expanse of the ocean and the life that awaited him. On our drive home from the hospital, we stopped by the bluffs in Del Mar near our home. We asked a stranger to take a picture of our family, and we told him this was the first time our baby had ever seen the world. What a first look. Welcome home, Grant.
– Meghan, 37, Del Mar
To my beloved Balboa Park,
Our relationship began, like so many do, with pure infatuation. The first time I passed under your intricate arches and wandered your secret courtyards, I felt transported to the wonders of Andalucia’s ancient cities.
I was drawn back again and again, intoxicated by your charms. I sipped sangria at my first dinner out with my now-husband under the flowering jacarandas of your Prado, pale blossoms fluttering down to alight on our shoulders like a blessing. I’ve languished in sprawling afternoons beside the megaliths of your Panama 66 sculpture garden, where the bartenders seem always to have a more bitter palate than mine—a minor irritation of the kind inevitable with any true love. I’ve watched your carousel man caress the levers of his beloved machine with a tenderness that feels almost too intimate to witness. I’ve watched my sons, wide-eyed, trying to make sense of your men and women in booths hawking their street wares and ideologies. And when the world shut down, I treasured your open-aired, tree-lined boulevard as a place we could still go. You are an entity unto yourself, Balboa, and forever a part of us.
– Mariel, 37, Vista
66 AUGUST 2023
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