My Dad had a restaurant on Cannery Row called The Outrigger. The very edge of Cannery
Row is the dividing line between two counties – Monteray and Pacific Grove – and is where
the Monteray Bay Aquarium is. Monteray Bay is as deep as the Grand Canyon and that’s why
it’s pretty widely researched.
They took over what used to be Doc’s Lab in John Steinbeck’s book, Cannery Row. Doc was
one of the characters in the novl, but he was a real person and did marine biology research
there.
We had a whole class on just John Steinbeck’s books. That was driven by an English teacher
who had a real love for his literature, and the school let her run with it. When I took that class
my parents had divorced and I wasn’t doing well in school. The teacher decided to give me
East of Eden. She asked me to describe the meaning of the word ‘timshel’ – a Hebrew word
Steinbeck he talks about in the book.
‘Timshel’ means ‘to choose’. It has to do with twin boys and their mother ends up being the
head of a bordello, and one twin is bad, he thinks he had inherited his mother’s blood, while
the other son is like the father and follows the strait and narrow path. And there’s a Chinese
man who says you have a choice of what you do; you are not bound by your parents’ sins. I
think she made me read that to show me that my life was my own, that my parents were
putting me through hell but that I could live whatever life I wanted.
I married my high school sweetheart. About a year and a half after we were married his
grandmother died and as we were going through the house, which was nearby. We went
through all the books, and there was a first edition of East of Eden and it was autographed by
John Steinbeck. I said: ‘If I inherit anything from this family, I want it to be this’. My
husband’s mother put it under her bed for me.
I felt it was a message from God when I picked up this book and said: ‘This is my book!’ I
had never explained to my mother-in-law why it had meaning for me until I took care of her
recently after she had a fall and I went to nurse her. She brought it up: ‘You know where it
is,’ she said of the autographed copy of East of Eden. So I told her why it meant so much to
me.