Paying off a debt
Oct. 24th, 2008 04:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumI have been asked to explain why I love California. My quick response, “what’s not to love?” is silly. And it’s not exactly true. There are things not to love about my state. But, as with the quirks of a beloved partner, love can conquer all and the painful bits (Kern County) can be abided, even; perhaps, ignored.
I came to California at eight years of age, beyond what the church calls, “the age of reason.” I did not love it at first. There was a lack of green, the autumn seemed dull, and there was no snow. Spring was anticlimactic. I was not merely strange, but odd. A skinny white kid in a brown neighborhood. It’s not that I minded the shades of non-white, in the places we’d lived before (Cleveland, the South Side of Chicago) there were blacks, and I had no problem with them. My best friend in the second grade was black, as was Ernie, into whose lap I preferred to climb when at Mass (it was a Vatican II parish, located in a school, with kids rambling about during the Mass to sit where they would. The classes preparing me for my first communion were both exciting (the mystery of the Eucharist is a funny thing) and painful, because they took us away from the rest of the church, but I digress), it’s that I was the minority, and got grief for being different.
We moved about LA. Maia’s family gives me grief about how many parts of LA in which I’ve lived; you can add the barren sweeps of the Mojave Desert to that. As an adult I’ve been in Monterey, Petaluma and San Luis Obispo, with ties to SF, San Diego and San Bernardino.
My dad lives in Eastern Tennessee. It’s lovely, and the people are more tolerant than they are given credit. When I had long hair I got more hassle in LA, then I did in Oak Ridge.
20 years ago I went out there and got a car. A couple of weeks getting the hang of it, the driving test, and four days later I was driving it back to California. As I crested the 15, coming out of Barstow and into San Bernardino, the radio started to play Randy Newman’s, “I love LA”.
And I realised I did. California, in which I’d lived for 13 years, was home.
Why? Hell if I can say. Why was Lee so attached to Virginia? It’s everything. It’s the people, who tend to start trends. Palimony happened here. Civil disobedience leading to the recognition that denying marriage to gays happened here (in that blessed bellwether of progressive thinking which is San Francisco. Sodom on the Bay, a mad mix of neighborhoods, hills, leftover history rolling on the streets [not just the cable cars, but the F-Line, which has old trolleys from around the nation; and BART] As SF Goes, so Calif. goes, and as Calif. goes, so goes the nation?). Cesar Chavez happened here.
So too did crazy people. McMartin happened here, and Manson, and Zodiac. The Hillside Strangler, and Richard Ramirez happened here (the latter in the area I was living in). I can see celebrities, and I do. When I was delivering pizza in Encino, we had Cybil Shepard and Wayne Gretzky as customers. Tom Petty has a great license plate on his green MG: YTTP MT. Imagine seeing it in your mirror. People think we affect to be blasé. Nope. We are blasé.
The sun shines all the damned time. We have seasons, but they are local, and temperate. Where I live (Pasadena, home of the Rose Parade... it’s an all week event in LA. Here in Pasadena its wake up, watch it live on television, should you wish, and then walk to the parade route and see them march by, tired and proud and happy and giddy. If you want to sleep in, that’s ok. It will be repeated, three times. Bands from all over the country showing off. The Friday before, go to the equestrian center and watch all the horse events showing off. The days after, go look at the floats up close. Go out to the roads in the middle of the night and see the floats, drift across the overpasses in ghostly glory, as they are staged for the start).
If I want snow... it happens. Come December (or at the latest, January) and the mountains north of my house, are whitecapped. Mt. Baldy will be white until March. It has the highest recorded numbers of avalanches in the nation; almost every year. I’ve studied avalanche rescue there. I love snow, but it scares me. It scares me because those mountains behind my house, are the steepest range in the world (they are also the fastest growing, and the fastest eroding... which is why they are so steep).
I live at 900 feet. Mt. Baden Powell (the highest peak in the Angeles Crest) is 9,892 feet. That peak is about ten miles, straight line, from my door. Go the Sierra Nevada, I can get to 14,500 something feet. I can have all the seasons I want.
The deserts.... oh how I love them. Sere, and splendid. With a modicum of preparation they are abundant (you have to know what to look for, but food is there). The first place I saw the Milky Way was in Joshua Tree. No moon and you can still see to walk. Rocks to climb, plants to see, more kinds of cholla than you really want. Barrel cacti, and desert tortoise, kangaroo rats and rattlesnakes, skinks and hummingbirds.
Humboldt: Famous for weed, deep and dark and dense with redwoods, and moss and shadow and sunlight. A parable written wood and grass and stone. If you've never been, there's nothing more I can say to describe it. If you have, you know what I mean.
The Central Valley: home of the most conservative parts of the state... Texas has nothing on Bakersfield for “C”onsesrvative. Put a seed in the ground, add water and stand back. They use more water than they should, but they grow more food than the mind can compass. Driving five is hours of nothing but serried rows of green flashing by. Grapes, lettuce, broccoli, spinach, cabbage, almonds, apricots, oranges, tomatoes, cotton, peppers, alfalfa, psyllium, you name it, someone is growing it.
The coast.... Land of balmy. This is what people think of when the think of California, Pismo, and Santa Monica Monterey and Malibu. This is where the seasons are really tempered. The summers aren’t too hot, the winters aren’t too cold and spring happens overnight... so too the autumn. February is when the hills go green here, and, most years, the riot of flowers, and grasses has faded to an infinite variety of browns. When Maia was in England, for a semester, she found herself staring at a dead tree, until she realised she was looking at it because it was homely; with it shadings of brown, the colors of summer.
There are people who wear shorts year round.
We get rain. Not rain the way most places do. We get it in torrents. Seattle only gets about three times the annual rainfall we do, but we get it in an average of about 21 days, they get it over 300. We get flooding, earthquakes and fire. Tornadoes are rare (thank God. If I never have to huddle in the corner of classroom, or hunker down in the storm cellar listening to the radio again, I will be a happy camper).
We have food. There are restaurants of every stripe, and street fairs. We have wine. A friend was in Missouri, under imported wine they had Californian. I’ve become spoiled. I can go to any supermarket, and find labels I’ve never seen before. I can gamble 5 bucks on a strange bottle and (eight times out of ten) get more than my money’s worth. Moonshine? I’ve had it in Tenn. Swell stuff... the guy had an old sherry cask he mellowed it in. I know some people here, who make their own grappa.
A limousine oak cask, and it mellows up pretty good. No need to pay through the nose for it in a bar, I can get it from a jug, and sit around as the sun fades, the bats come out, the chickens roost and the wildturkeys gobble: small tumblers of wine and grappa, homemade sausages; good cheese and some saltine crackers, passing the time of day with old friends and new.
This is my place.
What’s not to love.
I came to California at eight years of age, beyond what the church calls, “the age of reason.” I did not love it at first. There was a lack of green, the autumn seemed dull, and there was no snow. Spring was anticlimactic. I was not merely strange, but odd. A skinny white kid in a brown neighborhood. It’s not that I minded the shades of non-white, in the places we’d lived before (Cleveland, the South Side of Chicago) there were blacks, and I had no problem with them. My best friend in the second grade was black, as was Ernie, into whose lap I preferred to climb when at Mass (it was a Vatican II parish, located in a school, with kids rambling about during the Mass to sit where they would. The classes preparing me for my first communion were both exciting (the mystery of the Eucharist is a funny thing) and painful, because they took us away from the rest of the church, but I digress), it’s that I was the minority, and got grief for being different.
We moved about LA. Maia’s family gives me grief about how many parts of LA in which I’ve lived; you can add the barren sweeps of the Mojave Desert to that. As an adult I’ve been in Monterey, Petaluma and San Luis Obispo, with ties to SF, San Diego and San Bernardino.
My dad lives in Eastern Tennessee. It’s lovely, and the people are more tolerant than they are given credit. When I had long hair I got more hassle in LA, then I did in Oak Ridge.
20 years ago I went out there and got a car. A couple of weeks getting the hang of it, the driving test, and four days later I was driving it back to California. As I crested the 15, coming out of Barstow and into San Bernardino, the radio started to play Randy Newman’s, “I love LA”.
And I realised I did. California, in which I’d lived for 13 years, was home.
Why? Hell if I can say. Why was Lee so attached to Virginia? It’s everything. It’s the people, who tend to start trends. Palimony happened here. Civil disobedience leading to the recognition that denying marriage to gays happened here (in that blessed bellwether of progressive thinking which is San Francisco. Sodom on the Bay, a mad mix of neighborhoods, hills, leftover history rolling on the streets [not just the cable cars, but the F-Line, which has old trolleys from around the nation; and BART] As SF Goes, so Calif. goes, and as Calif. goes, so goes the nation?). Cesar Chavez happened here.
So too did crazy people. McMartin happened here, and Manson, and Zodiac. The Hillside Strangler, and Richard Ramirez happened here (the latter in the area I was living in). I can see celebrities, and I do. When I was delivering pizza in Encino, we had Cybil Shepard and Wayne Gretzky as customers. Tom Petty has a great license plate on his green MG: YTTP MT. Imagine seeing it in your mirror. People think we affect to be blasé. Nope. We are blasé.
The sun shines all the damned time. We have seasons, but they are local, and temperate. Where I live (Pasadena, home of the Rose Parade... it’s an all week event in LA. Here in Pasadena its wake up, watch it live on television, should you wish, and then walk to the parade route and see them march by, tired and proud and happy and giddy. If you want to sleep in, that’s ok. It will be repeated, three times. Bands from all over the country showing off. The Friday before, go to the equestrian center and watch all the horse events showing off. The days after, go look at the floats up close. Go out to the roads in the middle of the night and see the floats, drift across the overpasses in ghostly glory, as they are staged for the start).
If I want snow... it happens. Come December (or at the latest, January) and the mountains north of my house, are whitecapped. Mt. Baldy will be white until March. It has the highest recorded numbers of avalanches in the nation; almost every year. I’ve studied avalanche rescue there. I love snow, but it scares me. It scares me because those mountains behind my house, are the steepest range in the world (they are also the fastest growing, and the fastest eroding... which is why they are so steep).
I live at 900 feet. Mt. Baden Powell (the highest peak in the Angeles Crest) is 9,892 feet. That peak is about ten miles, straight line, from my door. Go the Sierra Nevada, I can get to 14,500 something feet. I can have all the seasons I want.
The deserts.... oh how I love them. Sere, and splendid. With a modicum of preparation they are abundant (you have to know what to look for, but food is there). The first place I saw the Milky Way was in Joshua Tree. No moon and you can still see to walk. Rocks to climb, plants to see, more kinds of cholla than you really want. Barrel cacti, and desert tortoise, kangaroo rats and rattlesnakes, skinks and hummingbirds.
Humboldt: Famous for weed, deep and dark and dense with redwoods, and moss and shadow and sunlight. A parable written wood and grass and stone. If you've never been, there's nothing more I can say to describe it. If you have, you know what I mean.
The Central Valley: home of the most conservative parts of the state... Texas has nothing on Bakersfield for “C”onsesrvative. Put a seed in the ground, add water and stand back. They use more water than they should, but they grow more food than the mind can compass. Driving five is hours of nothing but serried rows of green flashing by. Grapes, lettuce, broccoli, spinach, cabbage, almonds, apricots, oranges, tomatoes, cotton, peppers, alfalfa, psyllium, you name it, someone is growing it.
The coast.... Land of balmy. This is what people think of when the think of California, Pismo, and Santa Monica Monterey and Malibu. This is where the seasons are really tempered. The summers aren’t too hot, the winters aren’t too cold and spring happens overnight... so too the autumn. February is when the hills go green here, and, most years, the riot of flowers, and grasses has faded to an infinite variety of browns. When Maia was in England, for a semester, she found herself staring at a dead tree, until she realised she was looking at it because it was homely; with it shadings of brown, the colors of summer.
There are people who wear shorts year round.
We get rain. Not rain the way most places do. We get it in torrents. Seattle only gets about three times the annual rainfall we do, but we get it in an average of about 21 days, they get it over 300. We get flooding, earthquakes and fire. Tornadoes are rare (thank God. If I never have to huddle in the corner of classroom, or hunker down in the storm cellar listening to the radio again, I will be a happy camper).
We have food. There are restaurants of every stripe, and street fairs. We have wine. A friend was in Missouri, under imported wine they had Californian. I’ve become spoiled. I can go to any supermarket, and find labels I’ve never seen before. I can gamble 5 bucks on a strange bottle and (eight times out of ten) get more than my money’s worth. Moonshine? I’ve had it in Tenn. Swell stuff... the guy had an old sherry cask he mellowed it in. I know some people here, who make their own grappa.
A limousine oak cask, and it mellows up pretty good. No need to pay through the nose for it in a bar, I can get it from a jug, and sit around as the sun fades, the bats come out, the chickens roost and the wildturkeys gobble: small tumblers of wine and grappa, homemade sausages; good cheese and some saltine crackers, passing the time of day with old friends and new.
This is my place.
What’s not to love.
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no subject
Date: 2008-10-25 12:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-25 12:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-25 12:25 am (UTC)My son was born here.
Thank you for a lovely soliloquy of some of my favorite things...
(Don't forget 10,000 year old Redwoods towering over the dark earth, or the chasm of majesty that Yosemite is).
We invented the wonderful water bed, the western 'hot tub' and Frisbees. Surf boards owe their souls to the Southern Ca. beaches.
i have a lifetime of memories of Santa Cruz beach nights, San Francisco day tripping, Napa wine tasting, Modesto farming, camping everywhere.
Most people forget that while they might decry the "California Lifestyle" they seem to love our movies and the very values that we produce on celluloid are emulated world wide.
We haven't had any more or less than our share of serial killers- but i once did a check and the VAST majority of those who committed crimes here CAME from somewhere else. We cannot be responsible for migrant nutjobs. We are an attractive place.
Great wads of American cash were pulled out of our hills in 1849, and the last of the wild west slowly strangled in towns with names like Bodie, Sonora, and Angels Camp.
Ansel Adams documented our state at her greatest. John Muir worked his whole life to save it.
We pay more in gas taxes than any where in the nation VOLUNTARILY because we were the first state to want our air clean and our children's lungs healthy and felt that money and business were not the end all be all of life.
When i say "we", i don't speak just for the natives. Everyone that lives here is California. We tend to collect the best of the best.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-25 12:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-25 01:09 am (UTC)He hasn't yet. While Arkansas is often dead last in a lot of polls and measurements, we have nowhere to go but up. I lived in California for three years, and the thing I missed most was thunderstorms. Yes, we get tornadoes- but we have some of the best warning systems in the country.
I visited the Bay Area for the first time in 20 years in 2003. It was strange- all my old landmarks had disappeared, and the horrible traffic I remember was even worse. There are more people in San Jose than there are in the entire state of Arkansas. We have 2.8 million people in this state, and sometimes they all want to get to the same place at the same time and bunch up- but we're still years away from even a light-rail system.
We have four seasons: Football, Basketball, Tornado, and Damn, it's Hot!
There are a lot of CA/AR connections- people whose grandparents went to CA during the Depression have come back to settle in AR. They are astonished at our cost of living. Hey, poor states do have reasonable prices, for the most part. We've skipped the worst of the housing crisis- but there are still eight pages of foreclosures in our local paper.
I dream of going out to CA and raiding the wine shops. The liquor area in Sam's club in Bakersfield made my eyes tear up. I'd love to experiment with funny little wines- but that is years away- if not, never in AR. Sometimes I wish I could afford to move out there- I'd live north of SF, if I did. They have actual seasons in NoCal, I've heard. Gotta have autumn.
Our mountains in AR are some of the oldest on the planet- and they show it- they're worn down to nubs, but are still beautiful. If you know where to look, you can see the old coastline in the Mississippi valley.
I love visiting CA- but home is here. Southern hospitality is genuine, and I enjoy it. We're becoming a 'go-to' place, at long last. Our governor wants to take us into the 21st Century, so we're getting all sorts of sustainable industries. If you get windmills, they'll be made in Little Rock. We're finally doing good- and I have a ringside seat.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-25 01:39 am (UTC)It's always nice to be home.
-- Steve's enjoying the autumn colours and the apple harvest, in his home.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-25 01:40 am (UTC)As a California native I love it here and I believe I'm truly spoiled and blessed. This has much of what I love about this state.
Zhaneel
no subject
Date: 2008-10-25 01:52 am (UTC)I've lived here 8 years now and still don't terribly like it. I stay here because the love of my life is here and that makes it better than anywhere else.
Until my recent move, there was one month of green and then summer was when all my patio plants would die from the heat. The hills all appeared dead any month other than March. I can't get enough water in me to hydrate the natural dehydration of the desert around me. I miss the stars as there seems nowhere I can go locally and get away from the light pollution. There are rattlesnakes and black widows axing regular camping (allergic reaction... funnily enough, I've been bitten mostly by wolf spiders in my house and not any time I ever went camping).
I think it's funny that it can't be more than a year ago that my husband was "heckled" from a passing SUV in LA with the words "Cut your hair, you damn hippy," while he was wearing a button down shirt and looking his typical white collar tech worker.
Now Washington... I could go on forever about what I love about there.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-25 02:12 am (UTC)Mind you, that doesn't preclude daydreams of being able to live, at whim, for a month or so at a time in a great number of other places -- London, some village in Kent, Paris, Kyoto, Nara, Minneapolis, Toronto, NYC, Seattle, and a vast number of other places not yet visited. But yes, very solidly, (Southern) California is Home.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-25 02:24 am (UTC)I could happily spend months in England, the Scottish Highlands, Bavaria and Galapagos.
Because I have fallen in love with pieces of them.
And I miss the huge palette of Green which the midwest has (so too do I miss thunder, and just try to tell folks 'round here about hail.... they think the slushy pellets which melt on the windshield are hail. They can't fathom the insane ping-pong match which was my grandmothers covered porch).
But this is my place. It took a long time to know it, but, no matter where I roam, a modified version of Dougie MacLean's Caledonia sums it up..
Oh, but let me tell you that I love you
That I think about you all the time
Caledonia you're calling me
And now I'm going home
If I should become a stranger
You know that it would make me more than sad
Caledonia's been everything
I've ever had
(I first heard that song in a mix tape sent to me in Iraq... I noted that it scans with the substution. Two years later I went to Inverness, and fell it love with the song all over again)
no subject
Date: 2008-10-25 02:41 am (UTC)My places are different places, but I still like visiting other people's place-loves through their words.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-25 03:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-25 02:57 pm (UTC)The amazing olive orchards north of Sacramento. Though the almond orchards are pretty wonderful, too.
And the oak forests that run from the northernmost point of the central valley almost to the Oregon border.
Ah...and Half Moon Bay's Pumpkin Festival, though I know it is tourist-like, the food is great.
Not to forget the Pacific Coast Highway.
I am from Oregon, but my mother lives in Venice, three blocks from the boardwalk. And how I ended up in Ohio, which for me is in so many ways torture, can only be attributed to love. But your description of your home, along with the description of my friend ladiesbane, who lives just south of SF, has me longing for the West coast in a very big way. I miss home. I miss the ocean. I miss real mountains.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-25 03:55 pm (UTC)I moved out here at 15, and there is still a "home feel" when I go to the Northeast, but I can't imagine ever leaving California. (My wife, a fourth-generation native, thinks she wants to leave when we retire.) California has everything, including things we don't want, and I love it.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-25 04:29 pm (UTC)Grocery stores... The ethnic stores show just how boring the American grocery stores really are. Stores that dont bother putting signs in English and where its not at all clear what some of the food or wares even are. Asian stores for seafood, rice and ramen... Mexican for meat and various other goodies... Indian for spices and incense...
And the local produce. Its all local here... 1 lb peaches. Growing your own 1 lb tomatoes... Strawberries and cherries from roadside stands..
And the history... Military, railroad, marine, aviation and aerospace, gold rush, quakes, computer and electronics, GLBT...
And people from around the world... Speaking in foreign languages everywhere. Confusing perhaps at times and yet, somehow, communication gets worked out. And quickly it becomes clear some things are the same in all languages...
Yea, there's a lot to love...
Now if someone would just unlock the bathrooms ;)
no subject
Date: 2008-10-25 09:05 pm (UTC)My mother, who was born in Eastern Kansas, quickly became a committed Californian. My father, also born in Kansas, never did. Now that my mother is dead and gone, my father is retired and eager to sell his home and move back to Kansas. I don't get this, and probably never will... anymore than he can understand why I love California.
There are people who don't "get" California, and I suspect they never will. I love the people, the politics, the tolerance, the diversity, the micro-climates, the awe-inspiring natural beauty... I just love California.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-26 02:25 am (UTC)It has almost everything, and is like no place else on earth.