My first trip to California was in 1949. I was a kid from Alabama who had never been anywhere but Panama City, Florida, the Redneck Riviera. I spent most of that summer in Fontana, California, about 50 miles east of Los Angeles, and I never recovered. Southern California entered my bloodstream like an invisible parasite, settled in, and waited.
Later, I was to spend almost 20 years in Los Angeles, entering the Golden State through a double rainbow arching over Indio, California, then never living more than a mile or so from Sunset Boulevard. Though born and mostly raised in Alabama, I spent more years of my life within walking distance of the Sunset Strip that at any other place on this green earth.
Even in 1949, California was excess compared to Alabama. During this visit, I saw for the first time all day movies and cartoons on Saturdays. The children around me seemed happier than those I knew back home; at least they seemed to be having more fun. Excess! What a concept! I embraced it without knowing exactly what it was, and I've never looked back.
I yearned for California for years and years thereafter until I finally arrived for what I thought would be forever. However, I realize now that it wasn't so much excess that attracted me. In fact, I probably mislabeled what I felt in the moisture starved air of the Los Angeles Basin. It wasn't so much excess as it was total freedom, the freedom to be left alone, the freedom to be whomever I wanted to be with little or no interference.
And that's what I miss today as I look out over the Minnesota snowpack, the sun glaring off the frozen white canopy that covers the cold ground around me. I miss the freedom.
4 comments:
...and Kah-lee-fawrn-yuh misses you too!
It's good to read your writing again.
OK, freedom. When you walked down to Sunset and hung a right and tiptoed past the Chateau Marmont whilst carefully avoiding the homeless sleeping on the sidewalk out front were you singing "Free at Last"? I'm not sure of the freedom you're talking about. Maybe it's the physical. Sunny, sunny days, all that. OK.
But there is a territory within sunny L.A. that you and I could never enter. Er, uh, MoneyLand. Starting right at Chateau Marmont and heading west--almost all of the west side of L.A.: Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Brentwood, Santa Monica. Even Venice is being gentrified. It's a tough country, and you and I never made it across the border. I've been here so long that I've stopped going to the crossing, stopped trying to make conversation with the guards.
Er, uh. Britney what's-her-
name got a tattoo down the boulevard from me. The police stopped traffic so that her trashiness wouldn't be disturbed.
Freedom?
I'm happy to read your writing.
Hey Giddo
It is good to read your writing again.
Freedom is a relative term, for sure. I did not feel free in the South and did not feel free this time last year out West. I do, however, feel quite free in the M East. Go figure.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder and all of that. It also helps us to idealize what we no longer have. I'm sure if I venture back to AL sometime soon, there will be some familiarity but my heart will not be content--at least not as content as it is to just glorify my memories from 10,000 miles away.
It's ok to embellish. We are hard-wired to do so.
Welcome to the blogosphere.
I think the cold of Minnesota could never compare with the cold and indifference I felt in the narcissistic town of LA!
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