Who needs California?

I wander out to the hotel parking lot to retrieve my blazer from the rental car, so I can retrieve my reading glasses from its inside pocket, so I can retrieve my brains from wherever they went after a long flight from Pittsburgh to Sacramento. We’re out here for a wedding - my brother’s son - in the land where I grew up.

Idly checking the cars in the lot, I notice an old-school black and gold license plate among all the blue and whites. It’s a California plate, but it’s styled like the ones that were standard when my family arrived here to live in the late sixties, just before everything went so delightfully weird. Literally, a sign that I should spend a few moments reflecting on the nest that hatched me, looking from the perspective of the black-and-gold city of steel and fire (forever!) that has become my home now.

I put on the blazer as I walk back and notice that I’m the only one in the hotel wearing a blazer. Over baggy jeans and a wrinkled polo shirt, it makes me look like Kelly the Clown. I take it off. It’s a work day, and yet the dress code is, well, you know: sandals, and everything they entail from the ground up. The blazer may be too much even for the wedding, if I know my brother. I am so good with that.

Thanks for that, California.

Big, sprawling, explosive California has given us so much more than casual everyday Friday. People love to hack on the state these days for its excesses … taxes, wokeness, cheerfulness, ubiquitous crowds and the cost of gas. Not to mention The Eternal Beach Boys.

Please.

My California was different. It was NASA California. In the late sixties, President Johnson’s Great Society was booming, pouring money into public institutions of all kinds, including research, education, the environment, and the public good. Sleepy little enclaves like Santa Clara (pre-Silicon) Valley were feeling government love in the form of research grants, school programs, scholarships, and sky’s-the-limit opportunities for Boomer engineers. Although my dad wasn’t one of them, he was a pick-and-shovel merchant to this Gold Rush. He made a modest middle class living selling wall-to-wall carpet for the shiny new office buildings and plywood and glass mid-century homes going up in places like Cupertino, Mountain View, Palo Alto and San Jose.

While the buzz-cut whiz kids drove to work at Moffett Field in their T Birds to test things that ended up being the Space Shuttle and Tomahawk missiles in the WORLDS LARGEST WIND TUNNEL, we kids played with lasers and calculators in brand new schools that smelled like floor wax and … wall-to-wall carpet.

I thrived in this environment. When the time came for college, I ended up in one of the many elite schools that call California home, with enough government love to afford it … a fact that astonishes me to this day.

Thanks for that too, California.

But nothing lasts for ever, or even a decade. The Summer of Love happened, and along with it came a profound ambivalence over building rockets and bombs. My family bugged out of the Bay Area for a back-to-the-land life in Sonoma County. My father continued selling picks and shovels to the 49ers down in the City, just with a longer commute. Of all the folks to turn hippie, he was the last one I’d expect.

That was a whole different California. The wine boom hadn’t happened yet. The grapes were there, but they went into gallon jugs with labels like Gallo and Almaden. Wine was a blue-collar business tended by second- and third-generation immigrants from Italy and elsewhere. I’d swear that the same grapes and in many cases the same people are making different, better and much more expensive wines today.

Thanks for that, California; and for the revolution in farm to table food that came along with it.

There are so many more Californias than just the Bay Area and the Wine Country (do they even call it that any more?) I hear there’s a whole other state or two happening south of the Santa Cruz mountains. Have to check that out some day.

But I don’t live here any more. Why not? Because long ago, an urge to wander took me back East, where I met a wonderful girl from Pennsylvania. And we stayed. That’s all. California doesn’t have a lock on the spawning instinct, I guess.

Today, I’ve lived well over half my life east of the Sierras. I’ve spent a large part of that in Pittsburgh, a smart city with an affinity for Black and Gold, plus lots of trees, good schools, jobs, housing, and history. We were Silicon Valley when silicon was used to make steel while minting a generation of millionaire robber barons, just like the Golden State. And different.

So we know how this all goes. As much as California has to offer, we don’t crave much of it. A trip out West every year or so will cover it.

But we, that is, all of us, need this place. We need its willingness to be out of control, to commit to the wave and ride it. We need its endless thirst. Its passion to reach for the stars and its compassion to care for those who can’t. We need its poetry and its music. Its love for the land and for the nearly-lost richness that the land can give us if we just pay attention.

I realized this as I emerged from the doorway of the airport last night (or was it this morning?) Across the six lanes and concrete islands of the ground transport roadway I spotted some spring grass shooting up in a median strip. It had been planted there, of course, because, well, because concrete can’t go on forever, not even in California. Even across the lanes, when the diesel fumes cleared briefly, I could smell the sweet hay of late May, an aroma that brought back spring mornings of Little League ball, picnics, trail rides and mountain hikes. An air that has always promised a golden summer with endless sunshine.

That’s all I need from you, California. And I thank you for it.