B is for Bodega

The little one (Mina who is 4) and I both have a love for odd words. There was a month or so where Mina would say the word Ming over and over. Ming is kind of an odd word but it is also the name of her cousins cat. Bodega is not a word you hear in Utah very often. My first real experience with common use of the word bodega was when I went to visit my sister in law in New York. There, of course, a bodega is a small market. It was of course no surprise to me that the word bodega was originally Spanish.

Upon my return from New York, Mina and I would use the word bodega randomly and excessively, much to the annoyance of our housemates. The usage faded over time until I took another trip to California.

On my way to San Francisco, I drove a road in the middle of nowhere that led to the middle of nowhere. Only the second middle of nowhere happened to be on the coastline of California. While traveling down the coast I happened upon a town called Bodega Bay. Wow, the combination of Bodega and Bay was even more lovely to say. I noticed in the shops in Bodega Bay that there were a lot of t-shirts and other items with the movie The Birds on them. It turns out Bodega Bay was the filming location of the Alfred Hitchcock thriller.

Funny enough, I spent a good share of my tween years in an old run down theater in a town not far from the one I grew up in watching black and white Hitchcock movies. There was Rear Window and Vertigo, along with The Man Who Knew Too Much and To Catch a Thief. I had not thought about watching these movies or the old theater in years. It was a wonderful bit of nostalgia for me.

When I told my husband about this memory he said, "God, no wonder you were such an anxious kid." To which I then pointed out that movies are not real and I was an anxious kid because my childhood home was real and almost as scary as things Hitchcock could imagine. Then we both laughed cause we are kind of deranged like that.