Today is Take Your Dog to Work Day, so I thought I would share this photo of Darby, my Longhaired Dachshund, looking out the front door of our “office.” Today is also the one year anniversary of the day I left Los Angeles after calling it home for 20 years. It was a surreal day for me that started with a face-off with a coyote at 9am in the Hollywood Hills as I was packing up my car to leave my friend Kris’s house (where I stayed the night before I left). My hands were full, Darby was on a leash only a few feet away from the predator known for devouring many Hollywood dogs. And he just stood there on the sidewalk in broad daylight staring me down like it was his territory. I took it as a good omen that it was time for me to be getting out of town.
I surrendered.
Then, as I hit the road, news came that Farrah Fawcett had died. Few people will remember this because later that afternoon, I found out when I checked in with my sister by phone, Michael Jackson was rushed to the hospital and died too. Because all the radio stations I heard on the road were corporate owned pre-programmed national entities, there was no news about the chaos surrounding Michael Jackson’s last hours until his death. Then, the disc jockeys couldn’t help themselves. They went off script and discussed it, but none had his music scheduled on their playlists, so there were hours of a disconnect between the radio and reality. It was very strange that the King of Pop didn’t make it into the rotation of much of the news or music on the day he died.
As I pulled into Grass Valley to start my life in a small town that most people have never heard of, where there are no movie stars, and few corporations (we do have a K-Mart and a JC Penney), I felt like I was entering a new country. Later I would learn that the gold miners who founded the town often wrote to their families asking “What’s going on back in the States?” My sister, who lives here too and sent word that I should come and stake my claim, and I now find ourselves asking each other “Have you talked to anybody back in the States?” because that is how removed it feels. Ironically, it is also feels like the “America” brand that is sold in lemonade and Mountain Dew commercials. We actually swim in the river. We pick wildflowers. We go to parades and county fairs. And we know each other. Sometimes that means I think twice about what I put in my garbage because I know people who work at Waste Management. It also means that when you hear a ambulance siren, you worry someone you might know might be hurt. And when someone dies you discover that even though you lived here less than a year, you are connected to him or her in several ways. And as in the case of Jim Rogers who was killed riding his bike in January, you now have a sticker with his name on it on your cell phone reminding you not to talk and drive (courtesy of his wife who I met at the Tour of California bike race and Bicyclists Against Distracted Drivers).
Overall the most amazing discovery about small town living is that every cliché is true and every cliché is false. Meaning every corny fish-out-of-water-city-folk-goes to-the-country stereotype feels like it is playing out to me, but every preconception I had about rural people seems vaguely offensive. For example, now when I watch “The Office” I find myself identifying more and more with beet farmer Dwight Schrute. Manure is important.
I love the photo above of Darby looking out the front door because it has a Wizard of Oz Dorothy opening the door to a new land quality to it that I am grateful to feel every day here in my new home. Not to say that Los Angeles is not still a technicolor dream, I just couldn’t see it anymore.
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