Sunny Days

It was my first job interview in Los Angeles, way back in the Roaring ‘80’s. As I shuffled into the interview room, before I even sat down, the recruiter fixed me with a determined stare, cleared this throat and asked, “Where are you from?”

My mind stumbled, having expected something more along the lines of a “hello” or handshake or offer of a business card before he started on the third degree. Thankfully I have a fall-back in mind-stumbling situations like this: I repeated his question back to him.

“Where am I from?”

“Your résumé says you live in New York and went to school in the East, but it doesn’t say where you grew up.”

“Oh, here, in Los Angeles.”

He smiled, leaned back and said, “You’d be amazed. I interview all these college grads from the East and Midwest, highly-accomplished young people making major life decisions, with tons of variables to consider and weigh, and what do they want to talk about? The weather. It always comes down to the weather with them. They’re not here for a job, they’re only here for sunny days. Amazing!”

He shook his head while he spoke, underscoring his disappointment and disdain, feelings I tried to mirror with indications of empathetic agreement, eager as I was to get the job.

The truth is, I wasn’t amazed at all. I had, after all, been raised by those sun seekers.

* * *
As soon as they left college, my parents fled the cold climes of their youth to bask in the Southern California sun. Families and friends were left behind to freeze. My parents weren’t alone. So many flooded into the state after World War II, like moths drawn to the sunlight, that it seemed every adult I met while growing up had traded snow for sun.

My parents and their fellow émigrés did not pine for the old country. Quite the opposite: they were rabid Southern California boosters, relentlessly giddy with delight in their new promised land, never missing a chance to compare and contrast their new Golden State with the Eastern hometowns they left behind:

“You think it’s hot outside, let me tell you, you don’t know hot until you’ve spent a summer back East. Don’t even get me started on the bugs....”

“You think it’s cold outside, let me tell you, you don’t know cold until you’ve spent an autumn back East. Don’t even get me started on the winters....”

“That’s the beauty of an earthquake, it might be bad, but only for a minute. Back East the cold grey days of winter never seem to end, and there’s the mud season to look forward to. Now that’s a natural disaster….”

They lived for our 85 degree Christmas days and those ridiculously sunny Rose Parades on New Year’s. The TV news would be showing blizzards back East, stranded travelers at airports, cities buried in snow, and they’d be on the phone, trying to get through to their frozen relatives, desperate to let them know the sun was still shining here, it’s such a shame to be inside, maybe this afternoon we’ll have barbecue out back. And a swim, it’s a little hot today. Oh, and by the way, how is the weather back there?

* * *
My parents never returned East, not even to visit relatives. They didn’t have to – the frozen relations they left behind were more than happy to visit us. And our sun.

And we never took up any winter sports, my parents convinced that only the feeble-minded and the insane would spend good money to freeze to death. The sun is free, they’d say. I didn’t touch snow until I was 14 and a friend’s family took me along on a ski trip. And I was in college before snow first fell on me.

So without any firsthand experience of cold, I had little choice but to believe my parents. They must be right: The East must be hell. Not hell in a hot way, of course, but hell in a cold way. Sort of the opposite of traditional depictions of hell but still real hellish, if you get where I’m going with this because I no longer do.

Anyways, I internalized the “Cold Bad” part of the message. Made sense to me. Everyone I knew hated the cold. And how else do you explain Phoenix? Over time the North would slowly drain South until one day we’d look up and realize there was no one left up there, other than those too old, infirm or feeble-minded to join the migration.

But the awkward part is I never internalized the “Heat Good” part of their message. I am melanin-challenged, my northern European pallor barely able to withstand a weak sun peeking through thick clouds maybe once or twice a week. Anything more and I burn. In the days before sunscreen, growing up in the land of constant sun and cloudless days, with wanton sun worshippers for parents, I burned all the time. Today my dermatologist calls me “The Annuity.”

My parents believed in heat so much they never bought an air conditioned car. We drove around for years soaked with sweat and sticking to the vinyl seats while the open car windows blasted hot air into our faces. And our house wasn’t much better, my parents springing only for a swamp cooler, a strange device that blew air through a wet sponge-like pad, managing to keep the house a degree or two cooler than the outside while infusing our interior air with the moisture-laden malarial miasma of a swamp. Hence the name, I guess. Some say it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity. With our swamp cooler, it was the heat and the humidity.

Not that it was easy to stay inside in the days before cable TV, computers, video games or the internet. It was universally understood in those pre-milk carton days that during the day adults stayed inside while kids vanished somewhere outside. When the sun was up, we were out. Whether we liked it or not. “It’s not healthy for a 10 year old to be sitting around the house all day,” my mom would say, pushing me out the door and into the smog-filled radiation-drenched frying pan we called the front yard, ordering me not to return until the street lights went on.

We rode our bikes everywhere. Had to, the role of “parent chauffeur” not yet written. I remember riding to a friend’s house on one of those triple-digit days, the sun burning my sunscreen-less skin and blinding my sunglass-less eyes, huffing and puffing as I struggled up his hill, my prematurely-browned lungs struggling to separate the oxygen from the smog, till I blacked out and came to in the gutter with a pounding headache and scrapes up and down my left side. Just a mild case of sunstroke, not to worry, they said. Memories of that ride, and the other Bataan death rides of my youth, are still seared in my mind.

My favorite destination was the public library, the only air-conditioned building within biking distance that encouraged loitering and didn’t require me to buy anything. Sometimes I think my love of reading is just a byproduct of my childhood need to beat the heat.

* * *
College offered my first chance of escape. By then I was ready to test the Cold Bad idea in person. As applications from schools in the Northeast started filling our mailbox, my parents were puzzled. How could he even think of leaving the sun, they wondered. Maybe he isn’t as smart as we thought.

I applied to a few California schools, but in the end I chose a college in the frozen East, as I knew all along I would. I didn’t choose it for the cold, of course. I chose it for a reason far more relevant to my higher education prospects: how to put the most distance between me and my parents.

My parents and their émigré friends assured me I wouldn’t be able to handle the cold. Everyone knew someone whose idiot kid left California for the East only to high-tail it back after the first frost, tail between his legs, vowing never again to forsake the warmth of the sun. Intelligent, highly-educated people would tell me, as a biological fact, that my blood was simply too thin to withstand a real winter. They assured me I’d be back.

And once I arrived at college, I began to think they might be right. Where were all the Californians? My school proudly proclaimed in its glossy admissions brochure that it drew students from every state – that explained the dork from Wyoming – so I naturally assumed that the most populous state in the nation would be better represented at my school than, say, Rhode Island, but it wasn’t. Maybe, I thought, I was the only Californian stupid enough to leave.

I wasn’t the only one, but we Californians were such a novelty that each of us was known as “The Californian,” as in “Were you at The Pit last night? Did you see that guy break the pitcher while trying to break-dance on the bar? The one who’d lost his pants? Well, later we saw him on the sidewalk passed out in a pool of his own vomit. Who was he? I don’t remember his name, but you know, he’s The Californian.”

In psychology there’s a useful concept called “social proof,” the primal sense of comfort we get when mindlessly moving along with the herd. One week at college and I realized I’d left my herd behind for a primal sense of discomfort. And I hadn’t even experienced the cold yet. I kept thinking of those idiot California kids who didn’t make it through the first frost. Maybe my parents were right.

It didn’t help that my classmates were amazed that anyone would voluntarily leave California for this place. They sounded disturbingly like the children my parents should have had, what with their longing to flee the cold and dreary East to bask in the blinding glare of Southern California’s fabled perma-sun. Surely these were the kids who, just a few years later, could speak only of sunny days at Los Angeles job interviews.

My classmates had these naive notions about Californians, based mostly on Beach Boys songs and those “I Love Lucy” episodes when she visited a Hollywood so stuffed with celebrities she couldn’t throw a rock without hitting one. So everyone assumed I surfed with celebrities. I didn’t, on both counts, but years of bike rides in the searing desert heat had browned my skin enough so that, while a Californian would see my library-bleached skin and assume I was either terminally ill or a vampire, next to these pasty white Easterners I could pass for a Laird Hamilton. Or even a George Hamilton.

The point was, there is this thing called the California Dream. There is not this thing called the Rhode Island Dream, or the Pennsylvania Dream, or the New Jersey Dream. The New Jersey Nightmare, maybe, but never the New Jersey Dream. And for some perverse and unfathomable reason I was born into the Dream, but turned my back and fled from it. What was wrong with me?

* * *
After all this the cold, when it finally hit, was anti-climactic. I’d prepared by ordering enough gear from L.L. Bean to outfit an arctic expedition, so if anything it was never cold enough for me. It’d be a breezy 20 degrees and I’d be sweating in my thermal underwear and flannel-lined trousers and down parka rated to 30 below. I quickly learned to shed these layers, eventually getting by on all but the coldest days with regular jeans and a thin cotton field coat. Maybe my blood thickened. Maybe it was an early flash of global warming. Or maybe my parents’ cold was much colder than the real cold.

When the first snow hit, I walked about entranced, marveling at the quiet beauty of the white blanket. It was love at first sight. My father said my love affair would end the day I had to shovel my own driveway, but that didn’t faze me at all, and not just because I was a feckless student without a heating bill to pay, or because the snow was forbidden fruit denied to me for so many years, or because loving the snow was a tangible manifestation of my late adolescent need to repudiate my parents, nor even because I somehow anticipated the day when homeowners of even modest means could afford their own gas-powered self-propelled snow blowers. No, I simply loved the snow, and still do, for basic reasons I have a hard time explaining, except to note that my ancestors must have felt it too. Why else would they have walked out of sunny Africa 30,000 years ago, not stopping until they reached the frozen north?

I loved the seasons. Not any particular season, just the fact that there are seasons. Where I grew up, they had this outdoor thermostat they’d set at 78 half the year, 72 the other half. Yawn. Back East there was always something happening outside, nature was always asserting itself somehow. It added a degree of interest to my days.

It wasn’t all perfect, of course. I had a hard time adjusting to the rain. I owned the proper rain gear, but a lifetime living in a land where it’s bone dry nearly all the time left me incapable of comprehending that a sunny morning could turn into a soaking afternoon. How many times did I leave the rain gear in my room only to return that afternoon soaked to the skin? Enough that over the years I got wetter than my rain gear.

And I never made my peace with forced-air heating systems, those arid blasts of hot air reminiscent of the arid desert land I’d fled. At night I’d either turn off the heat or open a window, sometimes waking to snow drifts on my bed and always finding it that much harder to leave the warmth under the covers, the last thing a late riser with morning classes needed, and a direct cause, I maintain, of some of my lowest grades.

* * *
And with those grades I nearly flunked out of college. I managed to graduate, but without a job. I moved to New York, figuring in a city of eight million jobs, one or two would fall between the cracks for me to find, and sure enough, after a some desperate months of searching, I managed to find the only job as pathetic as me, a job every other recent college graduate must have already turned down, the sort of job they gladly shipped to Bangalore as soon as it opened for business a few years later.

The job was, alas, more pathetic than me. In between hundreds of telemarketing calls to fast food restaurant managers – my job requiring me to shill food service industry trade publications to the functionally illiterate – I desperately searched for a way out. After ruling out homelessness, a life of crime and suicide, I realized I had to find another job. Any job. Doing anything. Anywhere.

Which led me back to Los Angeles, where my parents knew someone who knew someone who knew of a ground floor opportunity available to anyone who could get through an interview without mentioning sunny days, something I managed to do without even trying, being perhaps the only person to ever move to Los Angeles despite, not because of, the weather.

Twenty years later, I’m still here. Amazing.