California

California
Walking out into the cold early morning, my sneakers soaking up dew from the grass, my mood black with my hurried pre-work routine, I'm stopped in my tracks by a neon pink sunrise blasting over the top of the sleeping black hills to the east. Cotton candy clouds backlit with gold and silver and a sky already kick-started powder blue by a youthful sun lift my dark spirits like a surprise visit from an old friend.
Superimposed over this grandiose scene like an old film photograph double exposed so one image lay ghost like on top of another was a memory of what had compelled me to make California my home.
A photograph of a coast line. It was black and white and the coast was rugged, like in the 60’s television show “Dark Shadows”. Jagged cliffs broke off into a waiting ocean. Black rocks the size of my home waded in the surf.
It hung on the wall overlooking the dining room table at my grandparent’s house. I found it so compelling that I stared at it through every Sunday lunch and Thanksgiving dinner. I imagined myself standing on those cliffs, pushed by the wind and thrilling to the roar of the waves. So different from the flat hot Texas plains just outside the door.
"What is that place again?" I would ask my granddad.
"Big Sur"
"Big Sir?" I would repeat back to him.
"That's right"
I don't know how a place came to be called Big Sir, but it suited it. Any place as majestic as that deserved to be called "Sir".
"Where is it?"
"California."
California. Open those golden gates. Don't make a stranger wait. Hippies and Beach Boys and loud guitars playing Wipe Out. Home to the Beverly Hillbillys and the Barkleys of The Big Valley.
"We got that photo when we went there on vacation," he would inform me.

California was a different world as far away and as alien as France. But long ago, when my dad and his brother and sister were still kids, my grandparents took their young family on a road trip to California. Every couple of years my grandparents would drag out the screen and slide projector and use the livingroom as a movie house.
In the silver light of the projector bouncing off the screen my sisters and I watched our dad and his siblings at play in a fairy tale land of giant trees, thundering surf and green forested mountains.
Here was my Uncle Dean pounding a tent stake in the ground under majestic pines. Here was my Aunt Betty laughing at the camera as ocean waves broke against her back. And here was my Dad - my perpetually sardonic father; the guy who made fun of everyone and everything; the man who found nothing delightful in this world- standing on a tree stump the size of a house. And again, balancing on a boulder on a mountain top, and here, wading through a rushing streams, all with a giant grin on his face. And in every picture his arms were spread wide, like he was trying to hug the whole world at once. I often wondered if this boy was really the same person as the man smoking a cigarette in the kitchen, bored with the slide show, bored with life.
One thing I knew for sure, California didn’t exist anymore. It couldn’t. Because if it did, we would be living there, where people were joyful, instead of Texas, where people plodded through the days of their lives in a kind of zombie numbness.
As I grew older, I came to realize that California did exist, but I saw it through the eyes of my fellow Texans. California was where the crazy people lived. California was earthquakes, riots, smog, crazy hippie cults and Johnny Carson complaining about traffic. No sane person would ever go there. No sir. Not on purpose.
Yet, as luck would have it, that was exactly where the Navy sent me for my first duty station. San Diego, California. I was nervous at first, all my prejudices stood between me and paradise. My guard was up.
In Texas, nature is adversarial. “Man against the Elephants...I mean Elements” my dad used to joke. Heat, cold, humidity, drought, floods, tornados, all were to be withstood, and battled against. A 120 degree summer day was a challenge to be overcome. What didn’t kill you made you stronger. Character was built by standing up to dust storms and mosquitoes the size of wasps. The caress of a tropic breeze made the Texan in me suspicious. It won’t last, it’s a trick to make me drop my guard. Hibiscus bushes bursting with red and yellow flowers the size of saucers, were only a mirage, trying to make me forget the reality of mesquite trees with their lawn dart size thorns that grew everywhere in Texas.
But day after day, the reality of California seeped through my jaundiced eye and worked it’s way into my consciousness. I began to relax. I began to believe.
“Why not?” I would ask myself. “Why not enjoy the cool ocean breeze on a summer night? Why not appreciate the roof high Bird of Paradise plants and exotic palm trees. Why not expect a winter that wouldn’t actually kill you if the heat went out in your house? Or a summer that you could survive just by driving down to the shore.
And that was that. Once you believe in California, it becomes your reality. You stop thinking that nature means to kill you. You stop believing that God wants you to suffer. Maybe God even loves you and made this nice place for you to enjoy. And you come to appreciate that adversity doesn’t always build character, sometimes it creates PTSD.
So this morning, when I was grumpy from short sleep and a long day ahead of me; when my feet were wet from the dewy grass, and I was rushing through my routine to get to work on time; this morning I was greeted by another luscious sun rise. Starlings and finches and sparrows and crows all said welcome. Roosters crowed in the distance and my horses nickered in anticipation of breakfast. This morning, like every morning, California lifted my spirits, and in my minds’ eye I could see my father, arms wide like wings and a grin on his boyish face trying to hug the whole world.