California | Nine Cent Girl

Tonight I am traveling clear across the U.S. to see my three Cali kiddos. Why? Well besides the why the heck not, it’s time to get the party started! October is my birthday month, and as I intend to keep it as joyous as possible, clearly, being greeted by these smiles is the best way to start. Most of us, myself included, never find it easy to shift decades, to make the leap from one seemingly big number to another even BIGGER one, especially in our youth-celebrated and fearing-the-future culture. But in the spirit of all those fabulously daring women who were still dancing at their 80th, and have forged a colorful path ahead of me, I too plan to make an even bigger splash next year, and the one after that, until, well… I’ll be floating beyond all of this…

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My fascination with Los Angeles began quite young, younger than I can pinpoint. But my first visit to the West Coast occurred the summer after I graduated from 8th grade. My parents sent me to spend the month of July with my aunt and uncle who lived in a LA suburb with two of their four children still at home. This was fairly common practice in a large extended family. A few years either I had been sent for a two week stay with relatives in Montreal. But this trip, to California, made me the envy of everyone I knew in New Jersey. I pictured myself an overnight surfer girl. Taller, leaner, tanner, practically living on the beach, basking in the sunshine. It was the assumption of everyone I knew that I would return with golden hair and honeyed skin (despite the fact that my hair was a deep auburn and had skin that only reddened under the sun). Instead of this fantasy, my days were quite mundane: I learned to sleep to noon, eat drive-through burgers, and in fact, spend hours driving, for nothing was close in sprawling Cali. Strip-malls were everywhere and really there were as far as my aunt and uncle’s cultural foray drove me. I stepped onto a beach once. After the month, despite my friend’s disappointment over my pasty complexion, I vowed to return to the indigo sky lined with tall palms and air perfumed with night-blooming jasmine. Even that one could glean from the backseat.