A Trip to California (Part Seven)

This section will cover our stay in California. After three days in a van, a part of me expected a real revelation in that well-known state of the union. I knew Hollywood and Disneyland; Ronald Reagan was president and I knew it was his home state (at that age, he was my first real experience of an American president, so I was well-informed). I had heard of Los Angeles, San Francisco, the redwoods, UCLA, the 1960s counterculture, Laurel Canyon (through references to it in the same era’s music and art) and its idea of celebrity and glamour. Very little of what I knew became any sort of reality.


We travelled through the desert of Death Valley to more desert in southern California. Ontario was a dry and burned out and spare town in the middle of expanses of dust and dirt. I never forgot how the patches of dirt were strange next to all of those expensive homes. Front lawns were a true rarity (they seemed to belong to every fourth home). After our stay, we travelled through Los Angeles to reach the airport to take us home, the vision was just as bleak (more so with the poverty and the haze of bodies). This return trip passed us through East LA and I remember it as a film of sepia and human traffic on every available space on the sidewalks and roads.

A Trip to California (Part One)

The year is not completely clear to me, but I do remember the right moments. My father had passed away at the end of 1983, a few days before Christmas, and my mother went through this loss with a determination to live her life as fully as possible. We moved not too far from our old place into a larger home with a larger backyard, basement and more rooms. My own room was the smallest one and had obviously been used for a baby boy (the bottom half of the wall was wallpaper with Paddington Bears in different poses). I did not care about how childish the room was or looked; it was a new place and a new start for us. And there would be more.


In the summer of 1984, a close friend of my mother came to visit us. Jennifer had worked with her in a nursing home for many years before she was seriously injured in a car accident and confined to a wheelchair. I wonder now how she was able to make her way around our new home so easily (there were many levels separated with stairwells). She had a very advanced wheelchair with a motor and a lever to control her motion. Her husband, whose name I cannot remember, was a strong man who helped her when he could. They also had a nurse who bathed and fed her. Finally, they had a younger daughter. Nathalie was a nightmare for a slightly older boy who had a growing interest in girls but no way of approaching them beyond awkward gestures and silly comments.

They now lived in California, in a city called Ontario. It was in the desert, not too far from the heat and aridity of the famous Death Valley area. I did not think it strange at the time that we had guests with such divergent backgrounds: Jennifer was black and West Indian; her husband was a black American with a deep southern accent; the nurse was a white woman who sounded like someone from the Midwestern states; and Nathalie was pure California to me, or what I would think of that state (I had not yet seen the film “Valley Girl,” a 1983 release, but I could guess what it would be like). The fact that they were now in another Ontario was a pleasant symmetry that would stay in my mind as we returned to their place in the West.