Arkansas & California

I had forgotten about this series I started. It was a thing back in January. The mind is a terrible thing…

Arkansas

I’ve been there once, one summer in the late 1960’s (probably 1968). I was twelve, we were living in the Chicago area, and my father was going to visit a couple of his aunts in Jonesboro. One of the aunts was a nun and was celebrating her Golden Jubilee, i.e., fifty years as a nun. For reasons that still elude me, I got to go along on the trip while leaving my seven siblings behind.

I remember a long drive, stopping in Springfield, Illinois to see Lincoln’s home, and driving by the Gateway Arch and Busch Stadium in St. Louis. I remember it being incredibly hot and muggy, with mosquitoes the size of quarters. I remember an incredibly long, hot, and uncomfortable Mass in an oven of a church with no air conditioning and tons of incense.

I was the completely “fish out of water” distant relative kid who knew no one and was known to no one other than “Jim’s kid.” They were all old, stern, “South Dakota dirt farmers” and I was terrified of doing anything wrong or getting in trouble.

In this situation made awkward as only a twelve-year-old pre-pubescent mind can make it awkward, I met the matriarch of the family, a great aunt of mine, for the first and only time. She was a hoot and could see what my problem was. On the first day when I had nothing to do, she gave me a fishing pole and sent me down to the creek to see if there were any catfish in it. (I think I caught a couple of small bullheads and threw them back.) Then, at a huge family dinner, when I was desperately trying to be ultra polite and not make any etiquette faux pas while eating fried chicken, she saw me trying to figure out the proper way to cut it and eat it with a knife and fork.

She (politely and with humor) hollered at me to just pick it up and start eating. The gist of it was, “This is the South. If it had wings and we fried it, just pick it up and eat it with your hands! And don’t you dare go away from this table hungry!” I liked her, she was a gem.

California

In a paragraph or two there is no way to say what I want to say about the state that would be a top ten economy in the world if it stood on its own, and the place where I’ve lived for almost forty years. I went to college here (Irvine), got married here (twice), had kids here (three), and saw them all grow up and go to school here, along with little league, plays, amusement park trips, concerts, trips to the beaches, trips to the mountains, trips to the desert, trips to SF conventions…

San Diego is wonderful, a great place to go kayaking, to the world-class zoo or wild animal park, or to see my beloved Chiefs lose to the Chargers. Out in the desert to the east of Los Angeles there are some neat things to see, some fantastic places to get a dark sky for astronomy, and a lot of places to fry and die like a lizard on a rock. Up the coast from LA you have Ventura, Santa Barbara, and the Central Coast, all of which can be charming and beautiful. Or not. North of that is the San Francisco area with all of it’s charms and quirks, plus Napa and the redwoods. Inland from there you have Sacramento and Davis, both of which I’ve grown to like a lot as I’ve visited my daughter in college. North of that I have yet to go, at least by car.

There are scenic wonders and parks all over the place. Yosemite, Muir Woods, Big Sur, Monterrey, Death Valley, all are spectacular. All are easily accessible to folks living in some HUGE population centers, so all are generally crowded, which can really harsh their mellow.

In the middle of all of that is Los Angeles, by which I mean the “Extended LA Metro Area.” Orange, Riverside, LA, and Ventura counties all included, with parts of San Barnardino County as well, it’s a wall-to-wall megalopolis that stretches for a hundred-plus miles in every direction except to the west, where the ocean prevents that spread (so far). I have often flown in at night from the midwest or east coast and had people on their first trip to LA sitting in the window seat. They start seeing the lights out around Palm Springs and Ontario and want to know what freaking huge city that is that they’re not expecting. I tell them it’s LA. “But we’re not supposed to land for another thirty or forty minutes, we’re not even descending yet. That can’t be LA!” Welcome to La-La Land.

Talk about a love-hate relationship. It’s so pretty from the air at night. There are great museums, theaters, plays, concerts, entertainment venues, the beaches, the mountains, the surfing (which I don’t do, but I’m on a roll here), the skiing (ditto), my beloved LA Kings and LA Angels… And there’s the mind-numbing traffic, the congestion, the sky high cost of living, the droughts, the brush fires, the earthquakes…

Yeah. La-La Land. We can’t wait to get out, and then we’ll probably be dying to get back. At least to visit.