Goodbye to all that
I was back east the past few days, visiting my parents in Michigan and my sisters and newborn nephew in Chicago. I can’t visit my family without some drama or another; everything is heightened there.
As my plane made its descent into O’Hare, two guys behind me, apparently native Californians, remarked on how green and flat the land was. That comment set the tone for me, in many ways, and I started seeing parallels between the landscape and my relationship to my family. The intensity of the colors mimicked the intensity of emotion; the flat land, my inability to hide.
The first night I was home, I called S. and I was still myself. I had gotten out of bed in California that morning, and there was California dirt on the bottoms of my flip-flops. The second night I was home, I called S. from under the covers in my childhood bedroom and cried. Cried not because I missed him (though I did) and not because I missed California (though I did that, too), but cried because my sisters were both in Chicago and I was alone in the house with my parents, cried because my parents are grandparents now and my grandparents are dead, cried because I felt guilty for all the ways in which I’ve let them down and all the ways I’ve hurt them, cried because my mom said she wanted to sell the house before my dad died, so she wouldn’t have to move from it alone someday, and though that was all theoretical (my dad isn’t ill), it was also frighteningly real.
I’d brought Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album with me, and on the way back I read nearly all of the former. Didion makes for a great traveling companion, particularly when your destination is California and California is home. On our descent into Los Angeles, I looked out and saw muted shades of gray and brown, green and purple, and I felt better. I can’t live my life against a backdrop of such intensity. I need the chaparral and the palm trees, the dust and the sand, the marine layer and smog, and the smell of jasmine in the air. I need the ocean out the window, and half a continent between my past and me. I need to feel, as Didion writes, “some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”
Copyright © 2008 Liz Kuball
As my plane made its descent into O’Hare, two guys behind me, apparently native Californians, remarked on how green and flat the land was. That comment set the tone for me, in many ways, and I started seeing parallels between the landscape and my relationship to my family. The intensity of the colors mimicked the intensity of emotion; the flat land, my inability to hide.
Copyright © 2008 Liz Kuball
The first night I was home, I called S. and I was still myself. I had gotten out of bed in California that morning, and there was California dirt on the bottoms of my flip-flops. The second night I was home, I called S. from under the covers in my childhood bedroom and cried. Cried not because I missed him (though I did) and not because I missed California (though I did that, too), but cried because my sisters were both in Chicago and I was alone in the house with my parents, cried because my parents are grandparents now and my grandparents are dead, cried because I felt guilty for all the ways in which I’ve let them down and all the ways I’ve hurt them, cried because my mom said she wanted to sell the house before my dad died, so she wouldn’t have to move from it alone someday, and though that was all theoretical (my dad isn’t ill), it was also frighteningly real.
I’d brought Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album with me, and on the way back I read nearly all of the former. Didion makes for a great traveling companion, particularly when your destination is California and California is home. On our descent into Los Angeles, I looked out and saw muted shades of gray and brown, green and purple, and I felt better. I can’t live my life against a backdrop of such intensity. I need the chaparral and the palm trees, the dust and the sand, the marine layer and smog, and the smell of jasmine in the air. I need the ocean out the window, and half a continent between my past and me. I need to feel, as Didion writes, “some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”
Copyright © 2006 Liz Kuball
Labels: books, California, family, Joan Didion, Los Angeles, marine layer, S., weather, writers
posted by Liz at 7:08 PM
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