A LITTLE BACKGROUND
When I moved to Los Angeles after college, I swore that I would never complain about the weather. After growing up with WINTER, what was there to complain about?
To be sure, Buffalo, NY and its environs have a reputation for tundra-like conditions that it doesn’t deserve. We’re not Inuits. We don’t dog sled to work and school and I never once saw anyone use a snowshoe. We had several pair in the basement, along with ice-fishing equipment and an ancient violin and none of these saw the light of day.
It snows, sure. It snows in a lot of the world. Buffalo is not only not the snowiest place in America, it’s not even the snowiest place in the State of New York. It’s not even the snowiest place in the county. But you’d never know that to watch the national news. Once, after I’d been in California for about five years, I read in the paper about a big snowstorm hitting Buffalo. The city was shut down. Animals were escaping the zoo. It was chaos. I called my college buddy, a public school teacher, who told me that not only was school in session and that the nuclear winter hadn’t hit. And the escaped animal? A rogue ring-tailed lemur (weight 5 lbs) was running amuck – which in the case of a 5 lb. small ape means it was searching for an apple. Or, considering the neighborhood the zoos in, it was looking for a beer at a preppy bar.
But it’s colder than L.A. and it does snow and there’s a certain displeasure in coming home from a hard day at work or school and finding the entrance to your driveway two feet high in snow caked with ice and you have to get out and chip away until you can pull in. Or the way the salt on the roads eats at your muffler until a couple years in you’re driving something that sounds like a 1926 John Deere and isn’t as useful.
Oh, I SWORE I’d love L.A. and the weather and eventually got used to people complaining about the “cold” winters in SoCal while I was ready to go to the beach. I eventually divested myself of so much warmer clothing that a business trip to Korea in January was a bell-weather event for local retailers as I outfitted myself with sweaters, a parka and boots that I never really needed.
It turns out I really don’t mind winter.
I didn’t move to L.A. for the weather. I moved there for work. I had a degree in theatre because when I was going to college degrees in film were for fancy-dancy kids whose parents could afford colleges where they taught things like that. And the equipment[1].
I always dreamed of being in the movies and television and so, with no specific plan, I moved to where they were made. To the entertainment capital of the world!
What a blazing shit hole.
Well, not at first. I kept a good attitude and persevered. I worked in retail for a few years, spent an urban Christmas alone, eventually met my wife and weaseled my way into a low-level position at Warner Brothers Animation where I eventually wound up working with people like Steven Spielberg[2] and on high profile projects like Superman, Batman and other shows where people in tights beat the crap out of each other. I got to wear tuxedos[3], go to awards shows, meet the occasional famous person and once got to see a guy walk into a wall because Raquel Welch was coming in to record a voice[4].
But even that glitz and glamour wasn’t enough to keep me in the Los Angeles area.
Oh. Yeah.
And I got laid off.
Some people say I got fired. That’s not true. I was laid off and I have the paperwork to prove it. True, it was sudden. But, as the President of the company said to me after HE was laid off[5] “You can’t tell your boss he’s wrong too many times before he gets this idea you shouldn’t be around.” He told me this because he had suffered a similar fate.
Truth is, we had been planning our escape for sometime. Tiring of the freelance life[6], I had been thinking of going back to school for an MFA that would allow me to teach at a collegiate level. Even then we had been tiring of Los Angeles, it’s environs, the ever-growing population and – yes --- the weather.
Oh, yeah. Sunshine. Blue skies. Endless beaches. Gorgeous.
And then there was the February day when my wife, the blessed Patricia, came home from work to our pre-baby apartment, threw he bag on the ground and pronounced:
“It’s February. It’s eighty degrees. This fucking sucks[7].”
You should know this: There are people who don’t mind the cold. I went outside on the coldest day of the year. Around five degrees. Not that bad without the wind blowing. Seriously. I’m not going swimming outside or sunbathing nude[8], but it was nice. Went to the bank. Got a latte. Nice day. Also there’s a slight snow shower and with the sun breaking through the trees it looks like rhinestones falling from the sky, so I guess maybe God’s in the mood to be a gay television dress designer right now. But it’s gorgeous.
Yes. You CAN tire of endless perfect skies. It got to the point where were prayed for El Nino[9] just for SOME kind of change. People continuously found and still find this amazing but it’s dull. “Oh, how can you leave that beautiful sunshine?” I don’t know…Fear of melanoma? The sainted Patricia is part Indonesian and I am part American Indian and neither of us seems to have inherited a single sun-friendly gene. Had we settled warmer climes the human race would have taken a very different turn, perhaps evolving into the underground dwelling Moorlocks of “The Time Machine”. As a matter of fact, living underground doesn’t sound half bad now that I think of it. No noisy neighbors. Moles and worms are pretty much silent. Well insulated. Hmmm. Maybe Bin Laden’s onto something. But I really don’t want to join him in his caves. There’s all that running with Kalashnikov rifles above your head and they do monkey bars in what look like burkas in their recruitment videos. I don’t know who they think they’re recruiting. I could never do monkey bars in gym shorts, let alone the identity hiding things they’re wearing. Plus there’s the ideological differeneces. No. It would never work out with Bin Laden and me. But maybe I can start a new underground race and 5000 years from now we can kidnap the Eloi and…hmm. Maybe not that different from Bin Laden[10]. Guess I should stay above ground.
It SHOULD come as no surprise that while many people enjoy the heat there are people who if they don’t enjoy the cold, at least don’t mind it. Yet everyone and I do mean EVERYone seems to think we’re nuts for wanting to come back here. Someone in Greenfield, Indiana asked us, upon being told of our plans, what “…turnip truck did you fall off…?” And I’m fairly certain just about any citizen of Greenfield, Indiana has fallen off more turnip trucks than I.
People like to ski, don’t they? Celebrities pay big bucks for vacation homes in Aspen. People LOVE New England. Is it THAT odd that we would enjoy the weather here?
And besides, the wife was right. Some things just aren’t right. Eighty degrees in February is one of them. Tumbleweeds on Christmas are another. Again, in the pre-baby apartment, I walked out on Christmas morning to get the paper and a tumbleweed blew by. I walked back in the apartment and said:
“It’s time to go.”
Chirstmas is trees, songs, fireplaces and the laughter of children.Tumbleweeds are for The Sons of the Pioneers, Marty Robbins and a cliché opening of a sixties TV western. They aren’t for Christmas.
We still opened presents. But our heart wasn’t in it.
Having a decent Christmas was one of the things we missed. Also a decent Thanksgiving. Easter was okay. When I was a kid, Easter was the family trip to some sunny clime[11]. Fourth of July was okay. But I’m a traditionalist when it comes to Christmas. The only place sadder than Los Angeles at Christmas is Florida. For some reason the inflatable snowmen and the ten-foot tall swirling snowglobes on the lawn look even more dumb there. Many years I hung Christmas lights on the front of the house while wearing shorts[12]. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
But then I started working steadily. What was supposed to be a temporary job as a production assistant at Warner Bros. Animation turned into a permanent job and as long as I was bringing home the checks clutched in my Xerox-toner stained hands, we made a family decision[13] to stick around. The gravy train got better and better, I kept getting promoted and before we knew it, we owned a house.
Well, it was a house only in the strict Webster’s dictionary way. Any place but Southern California, a three bedroom, one bath one-thousand and thirty-seven square foot house would be called a “cottage”. There are people with garages bigger than that.
It was a sweet little stucco ranch house with white shutters and awnings and it wouldn’t have looked terribly out of place in an episode of
But it was ours. We owned it.
[1] Which was, to the surprise of many, sound-equipped even when I was in college. And real sync-sound, too. Not the Vitaphone system that involved hand-syncing a record with film.
[2] who I’m sure wouldn’t recognize me, but he would piss on me if I were on fire ‘cause I’ve heard he’s a humanitarian and he was very nice the one time I met him
[3] Not to work.
[4] I was not able to find out if he was stunned by the fact that she is gorgeous or that she is STILL gorgeous given that she was born when FDR was in his second term. I would have asked him – but have you SEEN her?
[5] Good company to be in, eh?
[6] Which in the early stages of a showbusiness career is not really that far off homelessness.
[7] She insists that she only said “This sucks.” My memory states otherwise. And my memory more accurately reflects her feelings.
[8] Which would only alarm the neighbors in this fairly conservative area.
[9] A weather formation which can bring torrential rains to Southern California. Rains that the rest of the country would call “April”.
[10] To the Fatwah-inclined: It’s a joke. Okay?
[11] Clearwater. Then when we got more money, Bermuda and Jamaica. When we lost the money, a sunlamp and a potted palm in the basement.
[12] At least I have the legs for it.
[13] Really. It was mutual. Many think I am pussy whipped. Not true. I simply know which side my bread is peanut-buttered.
entire contents copyright 2009 by Shaun McLaughlin
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