Pacific Pendulum
The Sunday edition of the San Francisco Chronicle is heavy. The sporting green, the arts and happenings, and real estate sections create what feels like a literal paper weight. The leisurely Sunday newspaper read becomes more of an organizational chore. Some months back when the bay area winter began to melt into spring, the plain blue sky morning found me looking for my horoscope. Instead of finding some words to live by, I was stopped by the headline, ‘Artist inspired by the shadow of Mt. Tam.’ The article profiled the artist Tom Killion who is from Mill Valley. The piece described the artist’s world travels, but what really stuck out to me was a quote from Killion, “If you are Californian you always want to return home to California.” I clipped the article and have had it sitting on my desk since February 23rd. There is something about the sentiment that being from this specific place will sink its teeth into you and leave its mark, branding and scarring you, for better or best.
I have only briefly lived out of California, but it was always on the precipice of knowing I am coming back. The only places I really imagine myself living are just different parts of California; different coastlines, different cities. I have been reading the novel Love Among The Cannibals by Wright Morris. At one point in the novel the narrator says to his lover, “This is California. You can’t have everything.” I I figured that we (who live in such a place as California) cannot have everything, because we already in fact have it.
Months ago, I was at a dinner in Los Angeles seated at a table full of strangers. I sat next to a woman named Nicolette. We got to talking the way you talk to strangers by asking each other where you are from. Nicolette is from a small Illinois farm town, but she is raising her son on the south western part of Pasadena. She told me, “My bedroom in high school was covered in Californian posters. I had never been there, but I was obsessed. As soon as I graduated college I drove to San Diego. Needless to say I never went back home.” Nicolette went on to tell me about her first week living in Los Angeles. “I got a job waiting tables at House of Pies, my car got broken into, and I felt my first earthquake.” Nicolette had a friend at the time who called her a few days into her second week of living in Los Angeles. Nicolette’s friend offered her a job to work on a television show. It was the most Los Angeles Californian dreaming story I had heard in a long time.
“If you keep your ear to the ground for clichés, as I have to, you get these shockers. First you hear it, then you meet it in the flesh.” Love Among The Cannibals
It feels navel gazy, both citrus and umbilical, to flirt with this place that I am from. Maybe I am ignorant of the Detroit, Michigan dream story stereotype or maybe there is not one? Or maybe the one that exists for every other place does not feel as gilded as the ones from the place in which I am from–and maybe that is the only reason they seem to be interesting?
One of my dearest friends visited me this past weekend. She has been living on the east coast for the better part of three years. I picked her up from the airport and we were walking through my neighborhood. She kept saying things along the lines of, “It feels so good to be back in California.” If you were to ask me it always feels good to be in this place. To me nothing feels as good as a faint pacific breeze glancing at your skin while the sun’s heat falls down over a closed eye face. There is a whole world to see and people to meet and bodies of water to slip under. I guess I am predisposed to coming and going, living a life according to a pendulum pattern that always ends on this side of paradise, California.
