Sequoia Park or Oaxaca, there's no place like home
© Diana Ricci, 2000
Tommy Thompson of "The New Lost City Ramblers" used to say that country songwriters were of two minds about "home": there were those who were away from home and wanted to be
there, and there were those who were at home and couldn't wait to leave. I resemble that remark.
Diana has a small house which her kids (daughter and son-in-law) built for her on some rural acreage near Sequoia Park in California. (The kids also have a house — much bigger — on the same property, but you can hardly see one from the other.) Being only a few years old, it's got all the modern conveniences. Being up in the foothills, it has its own well, with pure water, and the air is usually clean. True, it does get hot in the summer; and it is 35 miles to the nearest movie theater; but there is a video rental store a couple of miles away, and we have cable and a giant refrigerator, so we usually get by with only one or two trips to town per week.
Of course we miss the Zocalo, and the more active social life in Oaxaca; but we don't miss the bad air, the bottled water, and the noise level. We watch a lot of PBS here, catch up on old unseen segments of "Law and Order", take current books out of the local library, play movies on DVD at the kids' house, and eat oriental food when we go to town.
The shopping is different here. We go to super markets, super drugstores, super theaters with a zillion small screens, super malls with super discount stores, and super supply stores like Staples. Everywhere, it is over-airconditioned, too brightly lit, and sanitized to a fault. Shelves offer twenty-five different labels of the same thing, and finding a sales clerk can be tricky. Thing is, we love it. Just as we love the market stalls in Oaxaca, with their fresh produce and smiling personal service; the relative absence of packaging materials; the old-style movie theaters with big screens; the hours spent dawdling in the Zocalo with others of our expatriate tribe.
Sure, we miss the mod cons when we're there, but we don't fret about it: we are dealing with two distinct cultures, each with its own character, and each containing complex structures of good and not so good. I don't know if we have the best of both worlds, but I do know that we make the most of what we have, and that, for us, the most important thing is being able to make the changes.
No matter where we are, when something about our situation bugs us, we can say "oh, well, it will be different when we get to ...." It helps us to cope, knowing that nothing lasts forever, and knowing that we are there (here?) by choice, not by necessity.
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