Sometimes I miss California. Some of my family moved there when I was young and once we’d traveled west to see them, California became more than another state on the map; it became a state of mind. It was a place with gentler weather and attitudes that believed in potential as much as my home state believed in realism, or at least that’s how it seemed at the time. Granted, this was between the late 60’s and early 80’s when California was “the place to be” and I was getting trips to Disneyland but I still miss that pervasive feeling of “yes” that was the California I knew. The residents (very few of the people I met there were natives) might have seemed a little self-indulgent at times but most of them turned out to be very kind and I really loved being there. All those feelings rush back whenever I pick up Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City. Maupin was another Golden State émigré when he started writing a syndicated column about San Francisco and the other immigrants who found themselves in its embrace during the 1970’s. He wanted to report on the phenomenon of grocery-store cruising (think of…
Sometimes I miss California. Some of my family moved there when I was young and once we’d traveled west to see them, California became more than another state on the map; it became a state of mind. It was a place with gentler weather and attitudes that believed in potential as much as my home state believed in realism, or at least that’s how it seemed at the time. Granted, this was between the late 60’s and early 80’s when California was “the place to be” and I was getting trips to Disneyland but I still miss that pervasive feeling of “yes” that was the California I knew. The residents (very few of the people I met there were natives) might have seemed a little self-indulgent at times but most of them turned out to be very kind and I really loved being there. All those feelings rush back whenever I pick up Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City. Maupin was another Golden State émigré when he started writing a syndicated column about San Francisco and the other immigrants who found themselves in its embrace during the 1970’s. He wanted to report on the phenomenon of grocery-store cruising (think of…