California Dreamin’

I flew to LAX yesterday for a week.

I’m expecting fresh air on my trip, yet I’m afraid I won’t be able to breathe.

A magnitude 4.6 earthquake southwest of LA shook things up 1 minute after my flight landed. I didn’t feel it.

Tuesday through Friday will be a working vacation. As it turns out, it is to be my 243rd week of my 244-week vacation. It will be on a tiny island in the Pacific without a big volcano, where the rule is that big things get smaller and little things get bigger. The crew list includes my dear old friends Barry and Jerry, me listed as “Liz Badman”, and someone I’ve never met before whose name means “good wind”. How poetic.

I planned this trip in January, at the same time I had a strange burning desire of unknown origin to move to Boston. The coast was calling, and I picked the other one.

I’m bookending (and beginning) the ocean voyage spending time with a couple of dear friends, one of whom seems like my publicly personal psychic at times. I’ve never been to see a ‘real’ psychic. I’m not the only one for my friend.

Yesterday afternoon I just wanted to lie on the hard ground and nap in the sun in front of a beautiful mountain. So I did.

It’s strange being back in a place I lived for 8 years. I’m a mix of who I used to be and someone new.

Santa Cruz Potato Harbor

2 thoughts on “California Dreamin’

  • Posted on 2013-03-12 at 12:21

    You can’t swim in the same ocean twice, or so I’m told 🙂 I’ve often returned to familiar haunts, at times its eerily the same, often so different it not the same place. I never enter myself in that equation, I’m not sure why. Perhaps its because I am always me… Surely there are differences, but you can never know what they really are. It’s as impossible to discover who you were then as who you will be when. Memory is a most fallible guide, an often a flat out lie.

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  • Posted on 2013-03-12 at 18:25

    Memory is ‘often a flat out lie’… I found that once. Pretty unsettling! But then also there is a comfort in it, making me think accuracy of memory is not as important as I make it out to be.

    Reply

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