I’m not originally from California. I was working at a record store in Columbus, Ohio and pitched an idea to the president of the company for an inhouse newsletter. He was jazzed on it, and after a few months of cranking it out, he called me up one night and said – why wait any longer, the thing is a success, let’s move you out to California! At this point I had never been to the West Coast – never seen the ocean, never had an antipasto in a pricy restaurant in Manhattan Beach, never had a dumpy apartment in someone’s garage in Hermosa Beach, walking to the pier every night and stopping on the way back at Bestie’s for a quick pint.
I was born in Ohio. When I was a kid, we’d have winters so fierce that my mom had the radio on as soon as we got up in the morning, listening for the list of school closures. Snow days were a real thing. She’d feed us a bowl of cornflakes and a glass of Tang, and then we’d get bundled up and go out and shovel snow for an hour. A path on the sidewalk for the mailman, a path to the front door, then onto the driveway, digging out enough room for my dad to park his car when he came home for the day.
I remember some snow storms that were so serious that as soon as we were done shoveling snow, we’d go inside, change into dry clothes, gobble down some lunch, and go back outside to keep shoveling. When I got a little older, my mom sent me down the street to shovel out Mrs. Staedhouse’ walk. She was a widow, lived by herself, and as far as we knew, had no family that would come over and do this kind of chore for her. If she offered me a dollar when I was done, my mom said fine, take it. But don’t knock on her door and ask her. Spring in Ohio is not like spring in California. Spring in Ohio means that winter has given up. You’d wake up one morning and the snow would be melting, until all that was left was some nasty black chunks of snow and ice by the curb. A week later, there’d be robins hopping around your front yard pulling worms out of the ground, and you’d see crocuses and daffodils pushing their way out of the ground. There would still be nights in the thirties, but winter was over.
Spring was also where you’d have the worst thunderstorms and tornados you could
imagine. When I was still in elementary school, we had the air raid sirens go off, and that
meant – get your kids to the basement, a tornado has touched down somewhere close by. One night, we sat in the fruit cellar when a tornado roared down the street. It knocked out all the electricity, and we sat by candlelight while my mom played around with a transistor radio trying to figure how bad things were. The next morning we went outside and there were over a dozen trees knocked down, pulled out by the roots, all facing the same direction. A guy across the street died of a heart attack that night, and the paramedics couldn’t get through the streets and the downed electrical wires, and he stayed there, in his house, dead, for an entire day.
Summers in Ohio were uniformly miserable. A few people had swamp coolers on top of their house, but no one had air conditioning. You’d lay in bed at night with all the windows open, the brick buildings radiating heat until three in the morning, and the next morning it would just heat up again. And of course to make things worse, it was humid. Every now and then I ask my wife if she’d like to move back to Ohio. She looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. “You’ve forgotten what the weather’s like,” she says. Fall is beautiful. The leaves change color, there are crazy lightning storms that cool everything off, and the next morning, we’d go outside and rake leaves for a few hours, burning the leaves in a barrel at the far end of the property. It felt like autumn, and it smelled like autumn. By Halloween, there would be nights where the temperature would go down into the twenties. Football season. Another year of school starting back up. And soon enough, the furnace in the basement would kick on, and my mom would get out all of our long-sleeved shirts and heavy jackets. Getting ready for another winter. “You want to live like that again?” my wife would ask me. Before I could think up a really good answer, she’d say “I don’t.”
OLD MAN SHAKES FIST AT CLOUDS
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