I think Dad Misunderstood California Dreaming …

It’s funny when you are born somewhere, like California, that has such a big cultural significance. California dreaming was an idiom and a song when I was a kid. I took it for granted. I knew nothing else, since I was born here, but California dreaming was something my dad experienced as a young man, and I wonder if you asked him in later years what he would say. Would he claim, as my son just did this morning, “California has some problems they need to address?” Or would Dad say, “Ah, yes, those were the days, the California days.”

The California of the 60’s … And the Beach Today

I remembered Dad late this morning when I was riding back from the bike shop. Stopping by the beach just north of Morro Bay, I sat for a moment looking out. Remembering how my dad had come to the Army Language School in Monterrey in 1961, and met my mother, and when he graduated he was stationed in Japan and Mom went with him. My brother Noah was born in Okinawa.

Today, I stared at the ocean and wondered what the Pacific had looked like to Dad, all those years ago. Just out of college, free from what he saw as the unbearable strictures of the Midwest, this limitless, infinite ocean must have been breathtaking. California dreaming must have taken his fancy. In 1961, surfers were still going on “surfing safaris” to look for big breakers. The Beach Boys had yet to start singing about it, but in cultural terms, the music about surfing would be far bigger than the sport. And California would be central to everyone’s thinking by the time the 70’s came.

I Came By California Dreaming Second Hand, Perhaps

For me, there was another angle. Dad was the parent who raised me, for the most part. Inasmuch as I had an ideological background, it came from Dad. Mom was mostly at work or shopping. And Dad certainly liked California, but I wonder if, by the time I was in grade school, he was suspicious of it as well. Raised in a small town, Dad was horrified by the violence the state witnessed in the 70’s and troubled by the incivility and even stupidity that came with the freedom California offers. I remember him being incensed by our town, Davis, having two mail boxes in front of the post office, both of which were stamped “local and out of town.”

“Why can’t there be one for local and one for out of town?” Dad fumed. He even wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper complaining. Already the state was unable to make distinctions that were obvious. And their lackadasical Lotus Eating Tendencies were only getting going.

When Your California Dreaming Turns into Life’s Little Tragedies

Trying to imagine your parent as a young person, engaging in California dreaming, is a mind bender. Trying to imagine them before all their life’s tragedies strike can seems poignant and sad. Now, today I look back at those years and wonder if Dad didn’t in the end feel enganado, deceived, by the California dreaming the entire country was doing in the 60’s.

For myself, today, I think those who assumed that the beauty of California was a sign of all that lay beneath were simplistic. California is an infinitely complex canvas. The Midwest is a simpler place. But to be successful in California, you have to be ready to take risks. If you’re risk-adverse, if you can’t stomach some negative outcomes, tragedies, even, you won’t be able to enjoy California’s beauty and grace. A Californian cannot be a softie. You have to be strong enough to weather some real negative things. If you do, you can enjoy all the positives.

When Mom and Dad divorced in 1982, it took him only months to move back to the small town where he was raised, and where most of his family still lived. He brought with him my stepmother, which was perhaps not the shrewdest move ever … but that is another story. And he didn’t enjoy the beauty of California in old age. Instead, he stayed in his little town, where he was born, and gave up on California dreaming forever.

California Ambivalence

I wonder, today, if my ambivalence about California started with him. There is my love for this state which I’ve talked of often, my own California dreaming. This is contrasted with my response in 1994 when Leo and I left to move to Canada, when I said “good riddance to all that insanity.”

I didn’t have to leave, but I did, and I was more than happy to at the time. As I remember it, I was like Joan Didion, leaving and never expecting to want to return, with a “Goodbye to All That” kind of gesture.

Today, as I stood on the beach and looked out across the Pacific in the direction of Japan, where our family officially started in 1963, I felt something shift inside me at the imagined memory of Dad arriving in this place as a very young man. He would have been charmed, thrilled, and then ultimately he would have seen that actually, not all that glisters is gold.

I Would Have Explained it to Him If I Could

I felt sad and protective of Dad, as if I could have, as a native, somehow traveled through time and said to him when he first saw the state, “It’s actually not quite like they pretend.” If I could, I would have picked up Dad’s hand and given it a squeeze. And then I would have said, with the greatest wisdom face I could muster, “And no matter how wonderful a new place is, always remember, the first person you meet anywhere … is yourself. And you, yourself, will be the primary determinant of your happiness. We have to accept some sorrow along with the happiness, there is no panacea.”

I suppose he could whip around and say “Wait a minute. Didn’t you just write that geography is destiny?”

A quick intake of breath. “Well … geography is destiny in terms of economics and culture. But happiness is an inside job.” And that’s not just California dreaming. That’s true everywhere.

Miss you Dad.