An unintentional love letter to California

This will surprise you not at all:  I am not a southerner.

Here, in the self-proclaimed heart of Dixie, I am easily identifiable as "not from around here."  How many times have I heard that?  The total confusion on anyone's face when they encounter my last name (not that they would have an easier time with my maiden name), the reluctance to change and modernize, the continued identity as the self-proclaimed heart of Dixie--all of this I struggle with.

I have a hard time with ravenous mosquitoes and humidity that makes the air physically heavy.  Southerners' love of gardening and traditional home style are alien to me.  The old-timey elitism and entitlement.  The homogeneity of it all grates.

On the other hand, I can fully get behind the ancient spanish-moss draped oaks and the gracious hospitality.  I can readily "set" myself in a rocker on a porch with a "patch." (Bourbon and Coke, y'all).  I enjoy the smile and conversation I get from nearly everyone in the service industry.  I savor the warm nights filled with crickets and frogs and other things that chirp and hum.  I love fried shrimp, gumbo and white sausage gravy.  I may not be a southerner, but I have adapted to southern life.

The thing that I haven't adapted to is being considered a Yankee.  I am not a Yankee.  I am not about big cities and expensive clothes and cars.  I am not about high-falutin' art and opera.  I don't live for the electricity of the urban life.  Bright lights and skyscrapers?  The Yanks can keep 'em.

I, as I tried to explain to my boys, am from another country altogether: Southern California.

I have in my heart the ethos of nouveau culture.  I hug my trees, munch my granola, wear my Birkenstocks, and sport a toe ring.  There is no "culture" out there, as Woody Allen observed in Annie Hall--the only cultural advantage is being able to turn right on a red light.

California invented the word lifestyle--for better or worse.  Don Delillo argued that this fact alone warrants their doom.  On the other hand, can you imagine a place so abundant, so accessible that life is not a struggle or competition for survival, but rather a process to be done with elan?  While Yankees are eking out an existence attached to their ipods, ferried to their tiny offices on underground trains from their closet sized homes, face down to the ground, isolated from one another and yet physically crammed together like a hive of ants, Californians are driving on expansive, clean roadways into freestanding homes, stopping to surf, exercise, and coif their designer dogs.

The Yanks are hard working, there is no question.  Everyone you see in New York is industrious.  From the lowliest garbage collector to the uber rich pillars of Wall Street, New Yorkers are working hard.  The city grinds like a grain mill constantly--generating wealth, setting the global economy, running subway trains, painting, delivering, working in a way unlike any place else in the country, perhaps the world.  The men and women of New York have a toughness and resilience like the calloused hands of men and women who work.  They put their pretty shoes in their big totes, put on their sensible shoes and walk to jobs that keep the world as we know it spinning.  They make money.

Unfortunately, money in New York is money for money's sake.  It's impossible to have enough money in Manhattan.  When 400 square feet of living space rents for five grand a month, money must be carefully counted and only thriftiness stands between a man and homelessness.

Money where I'm from?  Money is a means.  Money buys lifestyle.  There's land, there's room.  Five grand a month could put you ocean-front with an endless view of the Pacific that represents the limitlessness of your existence.  California doesn't enslave its workers to the chains of money making--it says take your money and change everything.  The sun will still shine on you, the beach will still welcome you--dare and you will be rewarded.  You are not a slave to your money--your money buys you a limo so that you can step out in your sky-high heels without sensible flats in your totebag.

Saul Bellow, as Yankee as anyone, once said that in Los Angeles, all the loose objects in the country had been collected as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn't tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California. That's the way we like it out there.  There's room for everyone.

Anything goes out there.  The Midwest shakes its head in disapproval of the lack of moral center and the opulence of it all.  The Midwest was built on the hard shoulders of farmers and businessmen.  Chicago, central, distributing all the goods and food and necessities of life to all points east and west.  The south falls to its knees and prays for the lost souls of California.  The heathens, the hippies, the unchristian souls leading wayward lives.  The south barricades itself against the openness to change that California epitomizes.  New Yorkers chuckle to themselves as though they were the wise parents to California's vexing teen.  The indulgence, the casual work ethic, the plasticine waiters and waitresses waiting for their big break in Hollywood.

But Cali, precariously and boldly sitting on the San Andreas continues its adolescent zest for life, its sense of invulnerability, its unwillingness to be reined in.  California, to whom all chemicals are known to cause cancer (and thereby warning everyone else on labels everywhere), California where pot is a cash crop, California where French wines are looked down upon, California where the bottle blonds wear sunglasses as large as dinner plates and drive cars the price of houses.  Where surfers can ply the waves, skaters navigate the boardwalks and snowboarders carve the mountains with the same easy gait.  It truly is the land of fruit and nuts and granola.  Where we can see what we all will be doing in 10 years--recycling EVERYTHING, driving plug-in cars, and eating organic whole wheat, gluten-free, hormone-free, sustainable foods.

The Yankees will keep the world spinning, for sure.  Californians keep it tilted on its axis.