Real California Dreaming

Posted on August 22, 2005 in North Carolina

Amber light flowed through the windows as I listened to the crowd at a Durham Bulls game yelling for their team. I never cared about the Durham Bulls, though their field stood only four blocks from the house on Trinity Street that I shared with four roommates and a calico cat who was mine. She would come in and out by the windows. And I would tell her about California.

My dreams of California did not pave the ground and throw up strips. In my head, I cleared all the car lots, fast food places, chain stores, supermarkets, bars, and odd businesses. Or I just turned my back to them, floated out to my California.

Once, in a bookstore inside a converted brick tobacco barn, I found a greeting card featuring an Ansel Adams photo of a live oak tree. I still have that card, somewhere among my things. Though rendered in black and white, the Adams image captured the true image of California. I painted in the colors: the hazy, pale blue sky, the rumbling dark green of the leaves, and the singing gold of the grass. Oaks on rolling, bowl-shaped lomas represented California for me.

When you can’t stop dreaming of a place, you have to go there. Like Santiago who lulled himself to sleep seeing the lions on the beach in Africa, you feel the pull. A friend of mine dreams of the streets of New York City. She desperately wants to go back. Some tell her that she should just forget about the East Coast, that her place is here. I say to do as I did and, at the first opportunity, rush back to the place that spawns these images.

I returned to California twenty one years ago. I have heard all the bastardized half truths about what it is like to live here, about what I think, and what my neighbors are like. This California where I live on the edge of the metropolis, echoes the dreams I had at the crack of a bat in North Carolina. I do not have to walk far to rest in the shade of a live oak or grasp the yellow stalks of wild oats. This is Home.