My Robot Is Pregnant theme song!

Treasure found at a yard sale in Angel’s Camp included a 1912 fishing license and a block of handmade matches. (That’s the blob thing on the bottom. A chunk of wood was whittled into sticks and dipped in sulphur. You break off a match as you need it.)

Pay dirt is a funny term. Refers to striking gold. We all knew that, but we forget it. Then we head to Angel’s Camp, California – gold rush country – with our father. HE CAME ALL THE WAY ACROSS THE COUNTRY WITH A PLASTIC GOLD PAN. I didn’t mean to use all caps, but since it happened, I’m gonna let it ride. Because it is that dramatic. He came from New Hampshire with a back pack and a gold pan. It’s green and shaped like a small wok with some grooves stepped into one little pizza slice size part of it. That traps the gold flakes.

As I look at him and think, “How am I like my father? I’m not Republican. I’m not Christian. I’m not into marriage. I’m not into a safe 9 to 5 job,” I realize he is the reason I have all these romantic get rich schemes. He couldn’t even admit to me until this morning as we got in the rental car for the three hour drive from San Francisco that he wanted to stop and pan for gold.

“Where?” I asked.

“It’s legal on any federal land.”

He didn’t have any place in mind. Just wanted to stop the car and pan for gold alongside the highway. As if men were too busy building a road to notice nuggets glinting in the river seven feet away.

We reached Angel’s Camp, it’s a winding two lane through Live Oaks and hills. It was nothing but open land until the edge of town. (Population 3,100) There someone had set up sun-faded two foot plastic Mary and Joseph kneeling over plastic baby Jesus on a card table at the end of the gravel driveway.

Sometimes I think the Catholic Church goes a little overboard spending all the poor’s alms on stained glass and Gothic arches, but having witnessed that barbaric tribute in brittle plastic, I can finally understand. Jesus was trying to comfort the hopeless. That table with its crooked folding legs and Chinese made molded Jews perched on top almost made me lose faith in mankind.

Dad pulled into the Visitor’s Center, directly across from the Lode Hotel. “Better bring your own sheets,” he quipped. We went inside and looked through the tri-fold pamphlets lined up in a wooden tiered rack along one wall. There was a potter and vintner and some other hokey lost souls who tried through a half witted implementation of desk top publishing to lure us into spending time and money at their retreat from reality up here in the spent and hollow hills of former Gold Country.

“Any hoss-back riding?” The old man asked. That New Hampshire accent was coming through loud and clear. He spoke slowly in broken Spanish to every brown skinned person in The City, including the Pakistani at the corner store. Out here in the woods he was back at ease and made little jokes through his mustache and dreamed about gold.

Ostensibly the point of this trip was to find a place for he and my mother to come this summer. She wants to go horseback riding, he wants to go metal detecting. Then he showed me the gold pan. This three hour drive through windmill country to peruse brochures could have been done from the internet back in New Hampshire. It’s actually connected to the same internet that’s in Angel’s Camp. But his lopsided brain that leans heavily on the side of fantastical has us in a 2008 Pontiac with an Enterprise sticker halfway to Reno. Take a look.

See that man there looking for Gold? That is why I am in California today. It’s why I climb into dumpsters and haul garbage. I am the son of a dreamer. He has a wife and two kids, so his dream has been deferred, and here he is sixty one and out of breath trying to get on his hands and knees to dip his pan in the river, and moments before his diabetes swollen feet almost teetered him into the water, and moments later he will need my help getting to his feet, and he will stand there staring into a pile of sand and fish out an acorn and some pebbles and he will keep looking into the sand, and swirl the pan, and look again, and the childhood dream is coming true right here but the only gold in sight are the Golden Arches of McDonalds just up the banking and on the other side of the street.

“The dream is the biggest part,” he tells me later in the car. Every summer I go back to New Hampshire the biggest highlight is wading in the low tide muck of a brackish Piscataqua river digging around for old pottery shards dating back from the time when Portsmouth citizens as a whole threw their garbage in the water. I’m not a gold panner, but I understand him. I’m in Nature, with friends, and might possibly become fabulously wealthy.

I recognize how lucky I am to have parents that care about me, and I’m honored my pops came all this way to check up on me (and pan for gold). When he told me yesterday in the Pupuseria down in the Mission District that he was worried I was lost, I understood his concern. That’s the curse of a dreamer. I am lost and far from home, but I don’t stop looking. I don’t stop believing that if I buy a crude instrument and go off into the hills, I will find what I’m looking for. And the dream is the biggest part, so when I come up empty handed, I know how lucky I am to never stop believing anyway. And he and Mom believe in me too. Thanks.