As a child, I had no idea I was one exit away from being raised as a true country mouse. I also didn't grasp that John Steinbeck was anything more than a local literary hero who graced our bookcases at home, or that kids at other high schools in other states read Of Mice and Men. It only made sense because my dad was a lit major who liked the manly writers like Bukowski and Hemingway and Kerouac. We had also lived in Salinas for a year before moving down the road to Marina. Like my father, I am in spirit if not in fact, a Steinbeck country native. I did not understand this until now.
I'm stalling on the important stuff because I'm already uncomfortable about returning to the scene of my wicked youth, which is also the town where my mom died a handful of years ago. Someone else's pancreatic cancer is usually brutal and quick enough that you can't really emotionally prepare for what's coming other than to be properly terrified, but is mercifully slow enough for you to show up and get in the way as much as you can, but especially right at the very end to be present and sweet and dutiful and all the other filial good things you failed to be for the first three and half decades of your life, by which I naturally mean my life.
I nearly changed my mind about coming back because nothing required my attention and it seemed like a waste to drive back to the coast and then east again, but Ben wanted me to experience this place differently, not only now as an adult, but without obligation for the first time in possibly ever. The relief of it hit me about twenty miles away when we turned onto 156 and drove through the eucalyptus groves, where I started sobbing as though my heart had just broken for the first time. Billy's windows were down and I wanted to smell the eucalyptus, but I was all snotty, so I had to mostly remember the scent and try to catch a whiff between nose blows.
I had all but forgotten that the street up on which I grew (how's that for grammatical douche-baggery?), which was the main road in our tiny cul de sac neighborhood, was a dead end street with a giant pasture at the far end, perhaps a scant mile away (I'm being generous) from my house. I used to roller skate to the edge of my little world and chit chat with the cows. At some point, probably around the same age it stopped being cool to memorize Shel Silverstein poems (as if that's even possible), I stopped visiting them, and more housing developments sprung up, along with motels, a gas station, big ugly stores. I guess I assumed that in the decades since I had last skated to the end of the street, the pasture and the cows had been swallowed up by humans living their consumer lives.
We turned onto Cardoza Avenue and drove on past the old house, the old neighbors, the old obligations and expectations and all the old guilt and everything else I've held onto without knowing it and we made a bee line for the end of the street. And there they were just where I had left them thirty years ago, my innocent, sloe-eyed, quiet old friends in the field I had forgotten.
There is something in coming back here and feeling the past fold in on itself only to open again and offer a glimpse into that which only seemed possible in books I read as a child. This is Steinbeck country. This is where the sidewalk ends.
