Gomez

After church on Sundays when I was a little girl, our family ritual was to drive around the San Juan Capistrano valley gomezing, as my dad called it.

To my dad, "to gomez" means to be a busy body. A guy in my dad's high school class named Gomez was always getting into other people's business; hence, the term was born.

For example, when I was little, my dad would often take detours on the way home from Thrifty's or the horse stables, driving through the Kinoshita's snow pea fields, or into some new housing development, around the back roads and side streets of our town, always in an idle sort of way, just to see what was going on, even though nothing was going on usually. When, exasperated, I'd ask him what he was doing, he'd say, "I'm being a gomez; shut up." Likewise, if one of his children seemed too nosy or intrusive regarding his property or doings, he would tell us to stop being such a gomez.