Writers & Where They Live

I wrote a Memoir of my early years in Chicago, and thus I’ve written about PLACE (the house, the streets, the vegetation, the traffic, the people on those streets)…Because PLACE colors so much of who we are. 

No one can write fiction, a memoir, a biography without PLACE becoming a major character. Think of the wonderful selection of memoirs that have become best-sellers: Black Boy, All Creatures Great and Small, Born a Crime, Becoming, When Breath Becomes Air, The Glass Castle….all filled with references to the place the author has lived, the streets, hills, prairies he or she has walked. The places they called home. 

And if during your lifetime you have moved (I’ve lived in Illinois, Iowa and California) or even if you have remained in the same place your entire life (New York City, Colorado Springs, Huntsville Alabama, to name a few) HOW DIFFERENT your life has been from the lives of others and from mine.

ILLINOIS 

Illinois is flat, flat. Even as a child, I knew that was in some way a detriment, as if flatness could be the butt of jokes. Then, after fourth grade, my amazing mother took me and my brothers to California! My uncle and cousins lived there, so why not! We traveled on the California Zephyr that runs from Chicago to San Francisco. WOW! Our train revealed parts of the country I had never seen: the plains of Nebraska, the Rocky Mountains (real mountains not hills), Salt Lake City (they washed our train there) and on to San Francisco: the trolley cars, the harbor, the steep streets.

Weeks later, after seeing the Grand Canyon and Albuquerque, New Mexico, we headed home on another train, the El Caspitan that runs between Santa Fe, New Mexico and Chicago. On that train I met a girl my age. I can’t remember where she lived, but in my mind it was a more glamorous place than what I was going home to. So when in turn she asked me where I lived (flat flat Illinois) I said we lived near the “hills and the flats.” (A truly fourth grade answer), though it wasn’t a total lie. Where I lived, Beverly Hills, Chicago, is called “hills” for the following reason:

High bedrock under the retreating glaciers left the most prominent feature in the area, the Blue Island Ridge in South Chicago, a 6-mile-by-1-mile table of land that sits 25 to 50 feet above the adjacent flatland. Residents often identify their community as “Beverly Hills,” a reference to that glacial ridge just west of Longwood Drive, the highest point in Chicago! 

Wow, the highest point in Chicago …Even as a fourth grader, I knew that was something, and I lived only two blocks from that RIDGE, which we called, “the hill.”

BEFORE…AND THEN BEYOND ILLINOIS

But after Illinois, there was Iowa (some hills) and then for seven years, California, where I could see the bottom of a mountain out my window. But how does a person, or a family gravitate to a place? Often employment, or joining family. 

My uncle moved his family from Chicago to California to become part of the aircraft industry: Lockheed. And  for the rest of us, that meant travel: visits, weddings, touring. Then my younger brother moved there, and much later one of my daughters. And now there are grandchildren! And so yes, we followed, not wanting to miss that precious time, when you get a child’s full attention and not just a wave as they hurry with a friend out the door. Our time in California time was wonderful. And thus, I’ve often written about it.  

JOAN DIDION: CALIFORNIA…HER PLACE

With my interest and love of the Golden State I am not alone. Some of our most treasured authors have written about California, Joan Didion being one of them. Her works include: Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Play It As It Lays, The White Album, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. The last two volumes are in many ways diaries, Didion writing to come to grips with the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and then later, the death of her daughter, Quintana Roo.

THINGS SO CALIFORNIA: The Santa Ana Winds 

If you’ve ever been in California when the Santa Anas blow, you too will feel them blowing in Didion’s passage:  

There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sand storms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to flash point. For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night. I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air. To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.   

WOW, Didion. WIND, FIRES 

So…what did I love about California? Besides being near my grandchildren…sunshine is ever present. It lifts your spirits, though there is something called June gloom, but that’s infrequent. The blue sky is full of dry soft winds, and now and then a jet stream (at least where I lived). There are pepper trees and jacaranda trees, roses everywhere…some people even saying their thorny nature helps hold back the fires. 

Because yes, there are fires. (And earthquakes, though in the 7 years we lived there, we had only two experiences: one when my desk kinda rolled; the other, hardly felt. But we bolted our TV to the wall, used museum glue behind art hangings. We also had two large emergency canisters in our garage which we never needed. )

But wherever people live, THEY ADJUST!! Joan Didion writes: “Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse.” For instead of “fire and rain”, California has fire and wind–“It never rains in California, but Girl don’t they warn ya…”