The Santa Anas, Joan Didion and Me

I Heart California

Twenty years ago I arrived in California with dreams as wide and expansive as the crests and peaks of the Sierra Madre mountains.

With scores of Joni Mitchell lyrics embedded in my brain from “Blue” to “Ladies of the Canyon”, I touched down at LAX December 5th, 2005, hopeful that one day I would run into Joni at the iconic Pace restaurant nestled at the foot of her beloved Laurel Canyon.

Everyday I would cross over Mulholland Drive into the San Fernando Valley and marvel at how lucky I was that this could possibly be my drive home. Charlie Chaplin’s sprawling estate sprawled to the right of me and rose covered cottages scattered left, winding up side streets that lead deep and dark into the heart of the canyon.

And the light. Every hour had a different feel. The dappled sunlight of midday, the freshness and promise of the morning run and the pink and purple bursts of sky that peaked through the oaks just before sunset.

No one can ever prepare you for the beauty of California; it’s just not possible. The Bird Cottages in the Hollywood Hills, the lavender and dust of Mandeville Valley or simply sitting still and silent under the stars of Joshua Tree letting the sky reveal itself to you one constellation at a time. It’s sacred space.

So you close your eyes at night and fantasize about owning a house in Malibu, wild and defiant in its ability to exist on cliffs and slivers of sand. This becomes your litmus test. You picture yourself there surrounded by endless tangles of fuchsia and orange bougainvillea with the Pacific ocean at your door, grey and charcoal in the evening and liquid blue and sparkling when the sun is high.

Then in an instant it is fifteen years later and your son somehow ends up in San Francisco for University. You visit and walk with him through Haight-Ashbury and the Painted Ladies and take all his friends for Dim Sum in ChinaTown. You leave happy and proud and marvel at the majesty of the Golden Gate Bridge until your phone rings and you get some of the worst news of your life. And so it goes…

In truth, my love affair with California is the longest and healthiest relationship I have ever had. It all began when I arrived on its doorstep, married and with a young family, fresh from the chilly wilds of Toronto Canada. We rent a 1930’s bungalow in Studio City. It is surrounded by orange and lemon trees and neighbors with sparkling pools and open arms who fold us into their lives like we are family.

Coming from North of the 42nd parallel I had never met such a group of welcoming and eclectic people with stories that stretched far and wide on why they had ended up in LA. I was even lucky enough to know several legit Los Angelenos who were generational, and not transient and that is a very rare thing. Like my friend Julie, a world renowned make up artist and a native of the Palisades whose father was a very famous child psychologist who treated all the stars fucked up kids.

Or Maria McKee, a brilliant musician I had idolized from afar who became a lifelong friend over years of five o’clock dinners at Da Pasquale on Santa Monica Boulevard. Dressed in head to toe vintage Gucci ( her, not me ) with her beloved greyhound Enni by her side, we would talk for hours about the golden history of the state and her shy high school classmates Nicholas Cage and Sean Penn who would eventually turn up at her concerts more than a decade later.

Plus my sweet friend Jane too. She grew up in Beverly Hills when it was a working town, a middle class neighborhood with an easy commute to all the major Hollywood studios. Her dad Alan, who has been a working actor since the early fifties, has become one of my best buddies and at 94 years of age remembers every single job he has ever had. From playing a dentist on the Partridge Family to staring in Sunset Blvd opposite Glenn Close to almost working with Hal Prince before he got kicked out of his audition for singing the wrong song.

California is also the place where my marriage ended, where I became a single mom and where I spent an evening in jail ( on Lasagna night no less ). I learned the harsher truths of its climate in weather and career very quickly, but not once has my love wavered for this incorrigible wild child I have called home for two decades.

So on the evening of January 8th when I was packing up for my return flight back to LA after a rather chaotic Christmas in Toronto ( supervising several rogue geriatrics, my parents to be exact ), the texts started to roll in.

“You do not want to fly into this. LA is on fire. Turn on the TV.”

And before I did that and I have no idea why, I thought of my favorite writer, Joan Didion.

Early in her marriage and career she had settled in California, first in Portuguese Bend, Rancho Palos Verde and then in Malibu, her favorite spot, with a rambling cottage one hundred and thirty two steps from the beach. All day long a roaring fire would keep the dampness at bay as the Marine layer would roll in and out and in again. Her daughter Quintana Roo would roam the Point Dume shoreline, while Didion, endlessly prolific, would create and create and create. It was like California was in her bones, even though eventually she lived out most of her days as a New Yorker.

She wrote firsthand of the Santa Anas, and describes in detail the whirling of ions and hot air that scrambles people’s brains and moods and moves rock and embers in a wave of heat and force that will ultimately destroy everything in its path. A trajectory of angry weather looking for release and resolve with winds that will brutally help fulfill its destiny. Yet, she notes, just before all the chaos sets in there is a suspension of time, a fragile moment of clarity, where the sun is buttery, the sea is still and the parrots get restless. All seems either perfect or catastrophic.

Just like California.

I reluctantly decide to turn on the TV. I see the roar of crimson flames and gold dancing on rooftops, jumping to trees and cars and just moving, moving, moving…..

Part of the Palisades, Malibu, Pasadena, Altadena and so much more, gone.

My daughter went to Pacific Palisades High School. She got in through the lottery, like a lot of kids did, as we were not in district. Every morning in the dark I would get her to the bus stop at 6:20 sharp so she could roll into class by 8:15. We were never late once. It was our California dream.

Because that is what California is; a dreamers paradise. I cried when I saw my daughter's school for the first time. How could a place be so impossibly beautiful? Classes in surfing, beach clean ups afterschool and a football stadium that overlooked the Pacific Ocean like a picture in a frame.

Perfect. But vulnerable.

So very, very vulnerable.

If you enjoyed this post, please share with everyone you know. Grazie MJ