CUL-DE-SAC

The memory is a big storehouse whose dusty odds and ends occasionally turn up by chance or strange coincidence. Why else would I have thought about Kevin Keegan last week?

I was hosting a live radio program when I interviewed a reporter named Keegan Kyle. It’s a strange name, which seems to have the first and last names turned around. So it was no surprise, as I was back-announcing his name after the interview, that I muffed it. I called him Kevin Keegan.

Kevin Keegan in his prime.

But who is Kevin Keegan and why did I give the name to Keegan Kyle? The answer soon came to me. Kevin Keegan was a British soccer star who played for Hamburg, Germany’s pro team in 1978 when I lived there as a high-school exchange student.

Kevin Keegan has not come to my mind for — literally — decades. But while groping for a reporter’s odd name he emerged from my subconscious and leapt effortlessly from my lips.

Kevin Keegan played for Hamburger Sport Verein (HSV) in the late seventies after being a star for Liverpool earlier in the decade. When he played for Hamburg he had a big fluffy perm (it WAS the 70s) and many Hamburg teenage girls fell in love with him.

Another strange coincidence comes from this story. A colleague who also works at KPBS in San Diego heard my interview flub on the air, and it triggered a series of memories for her as well. She grew up in England and says Keegan visited her school when she was a kid.

Afterward, she got her picture taken with him. He put his arm around her for the photo and she thought it was creepy. She claims she still have the photo somewhere.

I was at the Anderson Nursery a week ago with a cart filled with seedlings I planned to plant in my garden. An old guy looked and me and said, “You’ve got a lot of work ahead of you.”

“Everyone needs a hobby,” I said.

“Yup,” he said. “I tell my wife it keeps me out of the bars and the whorehouses!”

It’s funny that I tell people gardening is my hobby, but I don’t know what else to say. I used to train in traditional karate, but I ran out of time for that after having my second child. Now if someone asks me what’s my hobby, I say “gardening.”

I remember a story told by a friend who was soon to graduate from law school and was applying for a job. The boss of the law firm asked her several questions relevant to the law but then asked her what was her hobby. She thought for a few seconds then said she was going to school full-time, working part-time and she had a baby boy at home. So she really didn’t have time for a hobby.

But the managing partner pressed her, thinking there must be something she liked to do on the side. Unable to think of anything else, she said, “I shop!”

I decided a few years ago that “gardening” would be my fallback position in situations like that, because I have become interested in it. And it all started when I moved to Southern California.

When I lived in the Midwest, plants were simply part of the landscape. I would have been hard-pressed to identify and name even the most common trees and flowering plants. But then I moved to San Diego where nearly everything grows, provided you water it. Suddenly plants were strange and exotic.

After I had kids, I also noticed that gardening was very compatible with child care. It was something you could focus on while also entertaining a little kid by giving him a job of pulling weeds or digging holes. Gardening allowed room for talking, interacting and playing.

Hobbies are better-suited for early life and old age. Midlife is too filled with work and kids. But in case anyone asks, I have a ready answer for what’s my hobby that isn’t too far off the mark.