My Journey of States-19 California

A WRITER'S WIT
It kills me when people talk about California hedonism. Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.
Joan Didion
Born December 5, 1934 in Sacramento

J. Didion

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the nineteenth post of fifty.

California ('67, '77, '78, '97, '06, '08)

​When I visited California, in 1967, my aunt and uncle lived in Fullerton, Orange County. I was nineteen, and I had been encouraged by my mother to take side trips rather than hang around my aunt’s house all the time. I would negotiate such a concept much better later in life. The three weeks that I was there, my aunt drove me to Whittier to visit a friend I’d made while in college, also an organ student. My sixteen-year-old cousin and I took the train to San Clemente to the beach. And we made a similar trip to Disneyland. Finally, my aunt and uncle lent me their car so I could drive to Long Beach to see the S——s, a family who had once lived two houses south of us on Main Street in Wichita. Mr. S—— worked for a Long Beach newspaper, and Mrs. S—— was a registered nurse. Both of them smoked like chimneys at Christmas.
 
I made it my reading project to finish Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls,a summer read if ever there was one. You devour the pages just to see what happens, usually who does whom, only to feel less than satiated when it’s over­­—like eating a bag of potato chips in less than five minutes.

R. Jespers | Northridge CA 1977

R. Jespers | Big Sur, CA 1997

​In the seventies, I visited a couple, the wife of whom I’d gone to high school with. During another trip I stayed with a guy I’d met in Hawaii the summer before. There I got the gist of what my mother had tried to teach me. I made a day-long sojourn out to see the Queen Mary in Long Beach, and three of us guys would drive up the coast to San Francisco to march in one of the first gay pride parades in 1978. I also saw the Hearst Mansion in Big Sur before it became part of the California State Park system; I visited it once again in 1997, making the trip up the mountain three times in one day to see all three tours.

K. Dixon and R. Jespers | Tomales Bay, CA 2006

​In 2006 I attended a writers’ conference in Tomales Bay, and two years later I would return to the conference on one evening to hear the keynote speaker, Jane Smiley, a writer whom I admire a great deal.
 
I have a phobia of returning to California. I believe the Big One is slated to happen any time soon, and I just don’t want to chance it. Besides, it is one of those places long on beautiful sights and fabulous weather but also long on two-legged inhabitants, thousands of whom insist on being in the exact spot you would like to be whether it’s a queue to see Bette Midler or a trail in the woods.
 
California became the thirty-first state in 1850, thus celebrating its sesquicentennial in 2000.

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas                13. New Jersey
2-Oklahoma        14. Delaware 
3-Texas                   15. New York
​4-Louisiana         16. Connecticut
5-Missouri           17. Colorado
6-Illinois               18. Arkansas
7-Indiana
8-Ohio
9-Pennsylvania
10-West VA
11-Maryland
12. Virginia

NEXT TIME: My Book World