Rainy days and Mondays....

While at my core, I am forever the boy from New York City, it’s now been 50 years since my first trip to California and the stirrings within me that said sometime soon, home was going to be on the Lower West Side of the Country and not Manhattan. The combination of warm weather, palm trees and a spirit of forever young would prove impossible to resist. Being a Big Ten guy (THE Ohio State University), I had a yearly case of the Rose Bowl fever that would grip football fans watching from cold climes every New Years Day… where in Pasadena the grass was green, the mountains purple and the girls like the sun, golden and a welcome sight to behold.

When we moved to LA, now more than 36 years ago, for my wife it was a bit of a homecoming as she was a West Coast girl from her beginnings in Seattle to her College days @ University of San Diego. But for me, it was full immersion into what felt like I’d landed in The Promised Land. My first drives on the Santa Monica Freeway on the West Side had me almost believing that you had to drive a Benz or a BMW just to be allowed on the freeway entrance ramps. Beautiful people in beautiful cars seemed to be everywhere. This was not the Long Island Expressway! Of course my experience in LA, like everyone’s was linked to what it was I was there to do. A lousy job in what looks like paradise can be the lowest form of torture but I was lucky to be doing something that I had always dreamed could be my calling.

It wasn’t long however before it became clear that while Southern California had abundant blessings there were also costs involved. First there was drought. At minimum, we native Easterners learned not to shave or brush our teeth with water running and there were even toilet flushing protocols when things got really dry. And of course with the drought came the fires. When our turn first came we evacuated to a local holiday inn with our 2 little girls and hoped that the house would be there the next morning. Thankfully it was. When the ground shook for the first time in our new life, we trembled a bit as well. My East Coast pals were incredulous that l’d chosen to live here. For them Westbound life ended like it did in the Saul Steinberg painting…at the Hudson River. My reply was that after all of those years of terrible winters, cold springs and hazy, hot and humid summers I was happy to choose random calamities over certain drudgery.

There was a song that I remember that had a verse “It never rains in California, but man don’t they warn ya, it pours, man it pours”. Well, after the fires, when the trees are gone and the hillsides denuded, when the rain comes so does the mud. Six years ago that combination turned deadly here in Montecito and we lost over 100 houses and more than 20 lives. So, of course when the forecast calls for Armageddon up here, we’re fully rehearsed and ready for our close up. This last storm was forecast as yet another 200 year event…it seems the centuries are bunching up a bit as as the last one was only last year! As I write it’s still raining though after a break for most of the day.

So why do we do it? Because as Annie famously sang, we believe “The sun will come up tomorrow”. Despite what all the naysayers have to say there remains an almost indefatigable sense of hope and optimism that the future will be brighter and days will be better… because given just a little bit of time they always are. The clouds part the sun comes back out, we clean up the mess and we get on with it. It’s why despite the horrific disasters of 5 years ago, home prices here are at an all time high.

My sense is that while this wonderful place can at times feel like paradise, the Man/Woman Upstairs reminds us every once and while through the primal elements that we’re still here, on planet earth with real problems and that heaven can wait… and that in the interim it’s our job to do what we can with what we have to make life better for ourselves and those around us… and to be kind to one another while we’re at it. Call it West Coast myopia or delusions, but for me, it’s a wonderful life.