Day 22, Part I: Santa Barbara, California

14 October – My abode for the night was Sister3’s high-school friend’s grown-up daughter’s bedroom.  High-school friend was not actually home, but left a key outside, under some dog toys.  Her home is lovely, orderly, tidy.  Why are everyone’s homes lovely and tidy?  What is happening when a generation of children is growing up, or has already grown up, without the full measure of home-life chaos that was the norm for my siblings and me, and at least some of our friends?  Then I remember that three of my nieces grew up in the same 18^th-century farmhouse that I did, but instead of seven dogs of various breeds, they had a full-scale bull-terrier breeding operation taking place around them.  So those young women at least know how to roll with the waves of domestic disarray.  Not that any of the others will be worse off for thinking breakfast shouldn’t have dog hair in it, and this daughter has done a primo job of creating a distinctive, personalized room that is inspiring and comfortable.

Santa Barbara means beaches, and my GPS points me to one that’s less than three miles away.  As I drive past the airport, I wonder if the GPS programming was scrambled.  Beach by the airport?  Yes, indeed; there’s a beach near everything in Santa Barbara, and Goleta Beach Park is a lovely one.  Long arc of pale sand, gentle waves, big rock formations jutting into the water at either end of the arc, a handful of people footprinting the shingle.

Random stranger.

One of those people stops to ask whether I’d like him to take my picture with my camera, and I ask to take his instead, holding a Betty Neels novel.  He’s agreeable.  He’s very agreeable, and chatty, so I learn he’s from central California but served at Fort Belvoir outside DC many years ago, with the Army Corps of Engineers.  In the private sector, he spent seven years in Anchorage, building the airport parking garage there amongst other projects.  He now lives in Seattle, though not right on the lake, which property seems to go more to folks like Bill Gates – and my godmother.  His companion (probably wife) is not nearly so genial, and seems to disapprove of his outgoing ways, or maybe just the quantity of information he’s sharing.

Successful balance pose suggests
he's done yoga on sand before.

Another woman, in her 50s or 60s, is striding into the ocean as I stroll past in the edge of the surf.  She’s wearing an athletic-style two-piece and goggles, and asks whether I’ve been swimming.  I’m in a suit, but entirely dry.  When I respond that I have not been, she seems to lose interest in me and strides on.  There’s a man doing a series of yoga poses on the sand.  I already had this idea, given the serenity of the scene and the still-rising sun.  I have done yoga outdoors before, but never in sand.  A sun salute on the beach concentrates the mind in a very different way than one done on a surface that doesn’t slide around.

Gorgeous, glorious weather – did I mention? – and back at the house I remove my swimsuit on the back deck, mindful of the lesson of Gold Beach.  Very little detritus.  Leaving my sister’s friend’s house, I pause to sniff one of the roses by her front walk.  It smells divine.  So often roses have no perfume, it’s a little gift to come across one that does.

It is less of a pleasure accidentally to hear some news on the radio as I drive into town.  Yikes!  Strife and confusion and a world in conflict; but also the announcer tells me that stocks are up in mid-afternoon trading.  But it’s morning!  This starts all sorts of mental associations.  I worked in the capital markets for about twenty years before quitting my career this summer.  I was always on the east coast, where the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq are, and despite frequent travel across time zones, always thought of New York time as ‘real’ time.  Plenty of my colleagues worked in the Pacific zone, and I think for many of them, New York was ‘real’ time as well.  Po Bronson wrote his first novel, Bombardiers, based on his experience working in institutional bond trading for First Boston in San Francisco.  It is an absurdist, and therefore realistic, look at that environment in the go-go 90s, before the derivatives-market meltdown of the mid-90s (and long before the derivatives-market meltdown of the late 00s).  His depiction of a world where people start work long before sunrise and knock off in mid-afternoon is surreal but real.  Many of my colleagues in investor relations would work eight-to-six in Silicon Valley, and just miss the first few hours of stock trading.  One of them moved to Hawai’i, and started a consulting business with most of her clients on the east coast, so she would often be starting work at 2:00 or 3:00am.  I’ve never been to Hawai’i, but from all I’ve heard it would be worth a challenging schedule.

I used to love going west for business.  I could, usually, wake a bit later than usual, and it would still be 4:00 or 5:00am.  So I’d have a couple of hours to get things done before starting my round of meetings for the day.  Ah, luxury.  Maybe I’ll go back to that kind of work some day.

Baby palm (so cute!); downtown S.B.

For today, I am exploring Santa Barbara a bit before heading east into the desert.  I figure this town will have the poncey breakfast Napa failed to provide.  There’s a shop called the Juice Ranch, and remembering my Iowa City smoothie of excellence, I peep through the window.  They’ve got a sign on the wall advertising a lavender-liver concoction, and I amble nervously away.  D’Angelo Bread gives me eggs and toast, and my craving for ponce fades away, un-regretted.

And now I point the Honda east for the first time in over three weeks.  My psyche is deeply confused.  There’s an ocean to my west, and I’m driving away from it, into the driest part of the country.  This makes no sense to me.  I shall explain that in a Day 22, Part II post since this one is getting a bit long and there’s a lot to consider when the subject is oceans.