Tag: vibe

Finding Home

It’s March 1st or thereabouts, the point being that I’m moving into new digs, an apartment complex with the very 60’s, beach-y name of Surf Terrace. I love that I actually need to make my checks out to Surf Terrance, the owner having been either drunk or distracted when he filled out the paperwork for his newly-purchased investment property.

Despite its beige and brown exterior, the apartment complex brings The Pink Motel bubbling up into my mind. A novel I read as a 12-year-old, it was one of my favorites with Florida as its sunny and exotic backdrop and an eccentric cast of characters to meet. For some reason it continues to be fodder for the imagination of the girl born and raised in foggy San Francisco but who no longer considers it home. To this day, I’m drawn to the brightly painted houses I’ve seen in San Miguel de Allende and Lima. Much to my neighbors’ chagrin and eventual acceptance, I even had my home in Oakland painted and dubbed Big Green.

I never expected to become so attached to Long Beach with its oil rigs never far from sight, but its port city grittiness and diverse demographics are actually what resonate. On tour, the modest swimming pool and common areas of Surf Terrace are deserted, giving me the sense that privacy is prized over community. That in a weird way also says Home.

Then as I walked through the front door of Apartment #218, there is the full-on ocean view punctuated by palm trees, and the warmth and aesthetics of a tropical place pour into my heart. After all my wanderings this past year, I know that Home is inside me, not necessarily just “where the heart is,” but in every cell, put there by soul-stirring sights, experiences and memories.

California States of Mind

It’s real because we’ve made it so: Crazy California. We’re pioneers, thinkers outside-of- the-box, and dreamers who have escaped comfort to commit to an adventure. Flip-side, we’re fabulously busy just being busy, flaky beyond decency, and more sick and tired than healthy and happy. The more refined assessment from the outside world: Northern Californians Fake Real, Southern Californians Real Fake.

I’m a born-and-raised San Franciscan who three weeks ago piled necessities and niceties into the reliable old Accord, and floored it down the 5 to resettle in L.A. (County) for…time undetermined. I’m actually in Long Beach, but that reveal so takes the edge off my adventure. A 93-mph speeding ticket further sobered me up and brought my high-flying escape down to earth.

In the Bay Area, they say there aren’t many of us natives still around, but I think it’s that we just lay low. Many of us are actually firmly planted, prisoners of our homes and family holdings. By accident of birth to American-dreamer parents and outrageous property values, we have an affluence and sense of having made it just by having stayed in the fold. If we were immigrants previously marginalized, we are now the entrenched establishment, landlords holding down the fort against invading renters.

What’s more, as a wanderer by nature, the city so much of a magnet to wanderers had become a crab bucket to me. When you are part of a tribe, you are supported when you stay, and for your own good, pulled back in when you wander off. There was also something disquieting in the collective. I couldn’t put my finger on it, although the Fake Real thing was beginning to seem less name-calling, maybe even truth-telling.

Don’t get me wrong. This may feel like a battle of North and South, California and Everywhere Else I’m setting up here, but it’s truly an attempt at non-judgmental musings. It’s a new age – Aquarius – and a blog makes that possible. Stay tuned.

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