There is a restaurant in Indio that grows dates and sells very good and dense date shakes. The waiter said to order them for dessert, rather than with lunch. This tells you how dense they are. Waiters do not advise against ordering more, in my experience. The dates grow on 17 acres in the Palm Springs desert. There’s a restaurant on the property called The Café at Shields Date Garden where you eat under umbrellas, and look out at the desert and the date trees, and there’s an oasis and stone walls, and it looks like old Hollywood. There’s a walking path from the cafe through the rows of palm trees, for fun, if you want a self-guided tour. I walked part of it. It’s been around for 100 years, this year, and today we went for Ken’s 80th birthday. Floyd and Bess Shields planted their first date seeds 20 years before he was born, in 1924.
We’re celebrating tonight with family, and new and old friends. The new ones are dog park friends. In retirement in the desert, everyone has a dog. Greg and his husband Fred and their friends were all in the business years ago. Now they live in Palm Springs, Palm Desert, or Rancho Mirage. However back then they would come here. Hollywood has a two-hour rule for getting back on set. Palm Springs sits right at the limit, before there was traffic.
The streets are wide and straight and all the turns are right angles. They’re made for drunk driving, which happened a lot back then. It still might. I don’t drink much anymore. At lunch we talked about what’s changed in 80 years. Ken said “everything, but nothing, really.” I asked if all the technology made life better. He worked in technology his whole life, and said not really. “The biggest change to my quality of life was who I was dating, in the end.” he designed electronic weapon systems for Motorolla in the Arizona desert after college, then computers at Apple, and Photoshop at Adobe. He’s punched holes in tape to signal 0s and 1s for computing, when he started. But nothing’s changed, really, except who you’re with.
I think that’s a beautiful message. And tonight we’ll celebrate him in the Palm Springs desert.
Thanks for reading. I’ll send all new subscribers dates.
Happy birthday, Ken!