January sucks. Seriously. Sucks. It's not just the bitter, cold, cheerless, grayness of it or the fact that it follows on the heels of the (generally) Happy Holidays. January exists solely to remind me how little my current life resembles the comparatively blissful life I used to have.
Over the past few years I've noticed that as soon as the Christmas tree ends up Tango Uniform in the back yard, I am almost immediately possessed by an almost irresistible urge. Sometimes it's all I can do to resist the impulse to toss the essentials (toothbrush, drugs, and laptop) into the back of the car and point 'er West. Where? Doesn't matter--ANYwhere west of Kansas will do. Screw the house, screw the job, screw the sort of half-life that I live these days and just keep driving until I can actually see the sun dip below the horizon. I want to see sagebrush, cactus, dirt roads that are BROWN, not RED, ski racks, surfboards, and blue skies that are really blue, not so full of humidity that they look like nonfat milk.
So this got me to thinking about where I grew up and spent my "formative" years and why the West still has such a hold on me.
I was actually born a Yankee--in Lansing, Michigan, on April 1, 19... whatever. Anyway, we moved to Canoga Park, California, when I was a baby so SoCal is really all I ever knew. The picture above is of our house on Baltar Street and my Dad's beloved 1964 Impala. I lived in Beaver Cleaver's neighborhood--well, it might as well have been. I had a German Shepherd named Duchess, two big brothers I idolized (and annoyed the hell out of), and a street full of mulberry trees that I loved to climb. There was an empty house across the street from my elementary school that we all thought was haunted but it never stopped us from peering in the windows, hoping to see something awful. I LOVED horses and actually belonged to the "California Cavalry Command," which was sort of a quasi-western cavalry for little girls that taught me how to ride and take care of a horse. My brothers used to build forts, put me in them, and then throw rocks to see if the fort held up. Sometimes it did. When it didn't, they bribed me with army men to keep me from telling on them. I LOVED army men....but my most traumatic childhood event was when I was accused of pouring glue all over the school typewriter when I was in the 3rd grade. I didn't, of course--the girl who accused me was actually the culprit but they believed her for awhile and it was my teacher who stood by me and championed my innocence. We had all thought Mrs. Daneker was the meanest thing on the planet so it was a good lesson for me to learn in the 3rd grade that people are not always what they seem to be.
Mother and Daddy (well, especially Mother) had a passion for Native American culture, so we three kids were dragged to every single Native American historical site in the entire state of Arizona. Naturally, our trips took place most often during the summer when we were out of school so they travelled with three kids in the back of the Impala with no air conditioning and vinyl seats in 125 degree weather. Modern day moms and dads who travel in air conditioned minivans with built-in DVD players, coolers, Pampers and box drinks are just weenies. But I digress.....we also checked out other places...including Tijuana....I'm wonderin' if they painted that donkey to look like a zebra....
We moved to a bigger house further west in Canoga Park when I was in the 5th grade and my best friend there had her own horse. I thought I'd died & gone to Nirvana and was completely appalled when my folks announced that we'd be moving yet again when I was in the 9th grade. This time, though, it was to the desert near Palm Springs--where my Dad grew up. They promised me another German Shepherd (Duchess was long gone by then) and I agreed to make the move with only token sulking. This was my back yard--with my ADORABLE niece, Jennie, and my new German Shepherd, Mona.
Palm Desert turned out to be an excellent move for a million different reasons. Here are two of them with me in Laguna Beach, circa 1977. On the left is one of my oldest and dearest friends, Peggy Johnson (Wagner) who saw me through those gawd-awful high school years and introduced me to the faith that I follow to this day. On the right is my BYU London Semester Abroad room-mate, Melanie Mendenhall (Roundy) who saw me through my first "real" love, a hopelessly sexy Welshman I met in London, and who did not laugh at me when I thought I was suffering from appendicitis only to have the young, attractive English doctor who examined me reveal that it was gas.
But the biggest blessing of that move came when I came home from semester abroad in December of 1975. My old boyfriend, Jared Fenstermaker's brother Mark, introduced me to this obnoxious, sarcastic, wise-cracking jerk by the name of Randy VerHoef. I thought he was the biggest turd on the planet. Ten months later we were inseparable, hopelessly in love, and engaged to be married.
On January 22, 1977, I married my best friend and the love of my life in Santa Monica, California. Twenty-five years and six and a half hours later he left me alone on a bitter, cold, cheerless, gray January day in Atlanta, Georgia.
Which sort of explains why I hate January. But it also sort of explains why I want to head West every year at this time. There's something deeply comforting about those places I lived when the best of my life was still ahead of me. I am still blessed, to be sure, with perfect children and perfect grandchildren, meaningful work, and most of life's essentials. But there is also no doubt that my life is colder, grayer, sadder, and not a little bit scarier without that wise-cracking jerk.
