FAIRFIELD, CALIFORNIA

I grew up in California and almost my entire family still lives there save for a few others scattered around the country, mostly in Texas. Once I moved to Seattle I hardly ever came home, not even for the holidays. I have my reasons but after awhile you start to see people getting older, more frail, and I realized the reasons might be perfectly valid but there needed to be a compromise. I could wish all I wanted, but people weren’t going to come and see me, they were either unwilling or unable and nine times out of ten is was the latter.

My dad has had some major surgery on his back lately, and a recent visit in September almost left him dead when the anesthesiologist screwed up after inserting a stint in an artery in his neck that almost had him bleeding to death. I can count the number of times on two hands I’ve seen him in the last decade and this most recent bout of hospital antics made it clear I needed to pay a visit, as well as my aunts and uncles who are all roughly in the same age range, that being their 60s and 70s. So when he mentioned offhandedly that the family was going to be attending some sort of crab feed in mid January, I thought I could make up for my holiday absence and get them all in one place. I told him I’d come out, he passed the word on, and I bought a ticket. Don’s death this week couldn’t have been a better reminder of how important it is to do this sort of thing, to take the time to see the people you love.

It was a rough week, I was doing stuff right up to the point of departure, and since I had to be up and at the airport so early on Friday morning for a 6:15am flight, I essentially stayed up all night. Ok, I slept one hour before I left and caught a few winks on the flight. But with the connection in Minneapolis and all, I showed up in Sacramento completely disoriented, my eyes so red I looked absolutely baked, and I kind of was in a way. To be honest I liked it.

My aunt and uncle picked me up, the same who’d visited me last summer. They drove me back to their place in Fairfield via Woodland down I-80 and past landscape I hadn’t seen in almost 15 years. I went to college in Chico about 2.5 hours north of Fairfield and drove that route through the Sacramento valley more times than I can remember. Back then it was totally rural, sparse desert like and dotted with rolling hills and scrub oaks, mostly grasslands for pasture. I enjoyed the sense of solitude I got when I headed down to visit my folks when they lived in the Bay Area, and that stretch through Fairfield was part of the ride home. I’d in fact spent most of my last two years in high-school in Fairfield paling around with my younger cousin Trevor (my aunt an uncle’s son) and his friends, going to high-school football games and meeting one of my first real girlfriend’s there. The place was an essential part of my youth.

Well, nothing looked the same at all anymore. Most of the area has gone from grassland to industrial parks, tremendous parcels of homogenous and grotesque strip malls that spread out like a malignant cancer on each side of the I-80 freeway. I’ve never seen anything like it, at least not this bad. It’s the absolute worst example of sprawl I’ve ever seen. I mean if this progress we’re done for.

Since I was already hideously numbed from exhaustion the ride was nothing more than visual distraction. Once we got to their place (done up in a kind of interior design I can only describe as country chic) more aunts and uncles showed up and then my dad and my stepmother. We had a big steak dinner with all the home-cooked fixing’s and I spent the rest of the evening in a kind of half daze listening to them spin stories until late in the evening.

They put me up in the rec room downstairs and place so dark when the lights were out I was sure I’d be visited by some unknown spirit. They keep the house at a perptual 68 degrees. It was so cold down there I had to wear a hat when I slept to keep warm. I was out so fast I didn’t have time to think about it that much.