My First Christmas Abroad

I think I've been dropped into the middle of a circus. We're making turkey pie. Without a bottom, because it's hard to make a pie "without a soggy bottom, and we don't want soggy bottoms."

This is after my very first English Christmas. We went to church in the morning, which is not something I regularly (or, frankly, ever) do (the Man opted to stay at home and help cook the Christmas lunch). The church was a beautiful English village church, wood-beams, stone walls, but inside, it had been carpeted, which made it feel too soft and comfortable; too much like the modern establishments of my own youth.

A pair of boys handed us a bright leaflet with carols to sing. Scattered amongst the traditional songs were photographs of smiling children from disadvantaged backgrounds in the Middle East. The children were all called things Mohammad or Mehmet or Moshe and in spite of having families from Islamic or Jewish backgrounds every single one was holding a cross, or decorating a Christmas tree, or pointing at a picture-book bible.

The other leaflet, a green folded paper, let us know when we were meant to say things like, "Glory be to God," and, "Jesus is the truth, allelulia!" Midway through the service a woman stood up to distribute gifts to a few children in the audience, each time asking the child, "and what have you done for me today?" and each time receiving the rueful mumbled response: "Nothing."

And she would say back, "Nothing, exactly. You've done nothing for me, but I'm giving you this gift anyway. So this is a token of my love." Like most good religious messages, it turned out to be a metaphor: God loves us, the woman was saying, even though we've done nothing to deserve it.

"Oh yeah," said the Man when I returned home, feeling I'd been suitably guilted for the day. "That's standard C of E. That's not really considered religious."
"Have we really done nothing to deserve God's love?" I said, forgetting, in my religiously-coloured guilt, that I'm not even sure what I believe about God. "And how on earth is that not religious?"

As it turns out the English have just as curious a relationship with religion as the Americans. As far as I can tell, the Church of England is not so much a Church-with-a-capital-c as an establishment with some tenuous and primarily historical links to some tenuous and primarily historical religious beliefs. But it's pervasive. If you go to a church wedding in England every single member of the audience will know not only the words to all the hymns but, more impressively, will know when to stretch certain words that don't look like they should be stretched, or when to take a very long pause that isn't written into the music, or when to forgo breath because everything needs to be squeezed into one beat. They all know this because regardless of whether their education was public or private, they grew up singing these songs in school.

You couldn't, on the other hand, logically sing a song with the words,

Remember, Christ, our Saviour
Was born on Christmas day
To save us all from Satan's power
When we were gone astray

in any American public school and not risk an uprising of mothers quoting the constitution. We have that famous so-called separation between church and state, you see; but actually, the English are the ones with the real separation. God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman (or any other carol) isn't seen, as the Man so aptly pointed out, as religious--just as traditional. If half the audience on Christmas morning had stood up and pronounced themselves Jews, or Athiests, I don't think anyone would have blinked--or thought it odd that they were sitting in on a Christian ceremony.

Our relationship with religion in the states, however, is just as bizarre. We claim to have severed the tie between religion and governance, but elect our leaders based on their religious ideals and affiliations (any political pundit will tell you that if you want to be president, you need to seem to have a good Christian family, regardless of how religious you are). We inspire an actual fear in our children that saying the words "Christ our saviour" means that we believe in something that might be objectionable to someone else, but one of our nation's most impressive artistic legacies, gospel singing, is a form of worship. What we forget, I suppose, is that we founded our country based on having the freedom to worship any way we wish, not on creating a secular society.

***

But regardless of the religiosity, or secularism, of English society, this was Christmas as I have never seen it before. For the first time ever, I set out snacks for Santa before going to bed (a glass of port, a glass of milk, two mince pies, two carrots--"why the milk?" I wanted to know; "in case Santa wants a choice," the Man informed me). The next day at breakfast we opened our stockings; after church we spent hours (no, I am not exaggerating) opening gifts, adhering to strict rituals of present-distribution. We commented on missing the Queen's speech. We took a very lenghty nap after a very heavy lunch. We played cards and sipped gin and tonics. We ate crackers and fruit and cheese for supper. We went for a starlit walk, our noses numb from cold.

Today I sit on the sofa in the lounge, South Pacific on the TV in the background. I hear a woman singing: "And they say I'm naive to believe anything from a person in pants..."

And because we are adults, but still not very adult, the Man and I giggle.

So yes, I missed my family this Christmas, and even the incongruous California warmth (when I was a child it angered me that Christmas came every year so hot and sunny); but here we are, and we're very, very happy, and we're together, which, as I told the Man when he suggested that Christmas was ruined because he had a cold (only a man would say that) is the most important thing of all.

"Here," the Man has just said to me. "Taste the beer-and-cheese sauce I've just made," and waved a spoon at me. I think it's time for me to rejoin the circus.

More California Island Hopping; and a Fire

"A society built on quicksand, where everyone is getting new lives every day"
Pico Iyer, on California, in The Global Soul

On a hot night, we drive to L.A. and back. I have never been to downtown Burbank before; it is two hours and a thousand worlds away from where we start. Entire city blocks taken up with lots for shooting films and television shows; the day dims its lights just as we enter the city and we get lost trying to find a single house.

On the drive back, we dip down through the San Fernando Valley—a thousand sparkling lights, my favorite view, as a kid, coming from Orange County to Santa Barbara. We stop at an In N’ Out Burger. I haven’t been to one in years but it tastes just the same, and I remember the night I graduated from high school, and we had fries and milkshakes in cocktail dresses. There are a group of teenagers behind us; one of them, in a green shirt, keeps getting up to refill his soda cup. They say disparagingly about where they live, “It’s Camarillo.” They laugh at everything; they refresh us.

When we get near to Santa Barbara a voice on the radio warns of a fire nearby. Soon I am following a line of ten shiny firetrucks from Ventura; at Glen Annie, the northernmost exit before the netherland between Goleta and Buellton, they turn off and we see great orange flames peeking up over the tops of the hills. The sky, even at midnight, has a strange glow. Ahead of us is the ghost of a car: covered in ash, it cuts through the night looking like a specter.

Today the fire still burns. We taste wine in the Santa Ynez Valley and then take the San Marcos pass to Santa Barbara. Midway through a movie, the power shuts off all across the city. It is strange to see what happens to people when the lights go out. Soon we are all pooled outside in the parking lot being covered by a film of ash. “It looks like you have dandruff,” he says, as I brush some dust from his beard.

At the train station, waiting to pick someone up, we can see the fire. It has spread along the ridgeline. The mountains are alight. Flames crest the hills. It glows red in some spots, orange in others. “Welcome to California,” I say. On the radio, most people are talking about the power outage. A woman calls in to the university radio station and gives her perspective on the fire—“All the traffic lights are out,” she warns. She adds, “I’d like to see the National Guard home from Iraq so they can deal with things like this.”

“Welcome to Santa Barbara,” I say.

Sometimes in a traffic jam I let slip that I hate it here. “I could never live here,” I say, and honestly believe it; but later I doubt it very much to be true. It’s only that I feel a stranger here, sometimes; being in California is like watching one big movie, so that you know the characters but not the actors, and though the landscape is familiar, it feels incomplete, unreal. All that feels real are the places I have touched: the creekbed where I used to leap from bank to bank before the El Niño rains changed the shape forever, the hill at the front of the canyon that we climb to see the curve of the earth from, the hammock hung between two trees that the cows now use to rub their backs against.

I am a stranger even there, sometimes. Driving through the gate that marks the entrance to the Ranch, I am stopped by a guard who asks my name (I used to know all of them, and they me, but not any more), and when I tell it to him, he asks if I’m an owner.
“I don’t know,” I tell him; my ownership is all tied up in legalities and family rights—somewhere, deep down, the paperwork says I am, but all that matters in that moment is whether or not I feel like I own something, and I don’t.

He gives me a visitor’s pass. “It’s just a formality,” he tells me. He’s new at his job and doesn’t want to get into trouble. I see the Ranch with visitor’s eyes. On the back of the laminated pass is a list of rules; “no nudity in common areas,” reads one of them. “I never knew you couldn’t be naked in common areas,” I say.

But once, I was driving along the Ranch road when a rat appeared beside me in the truck, so I pulled over to try to get it out (I thought: if I can get it out, it won’t chew the wires!—they were always chewing the wires). I am a fairly small girl and it was a fairly large truck. I stood beside it on the side of the road, one door open, trying to coax the rat out by telekinesis (I had no better ideas). One of the gate guards came along, in his official truck.
“You ok?” he said.
“Just trying to get a rat out of my passenger seat,” I told him, wondering if he might take pity and offer to help.
"Ah, you’re a ranch girl, you’ll be fine!” he said, smiled, waved, moved on. Then the rat took a flying leap out of the truck and I shut the door before it could rethink the move. That was it: I was a ranch girl.

Now I am a girl who is a ranch girl and something else, too. I don't know what.

The chaparral burns hot in the summer (50 years since it last burned, they say). And in five hours, on three quarters of a tank of gas, we can go from the wilds of a working cattle ranch to the urbane lots of Hollywood and back.

A Cooling Down

It has cooled down, finally, become duvet weather again overnight--windows open, we reach first for the sheet, which we cast away days ago when even the featherweight of the fabric was enough to jerk us sweating from a tossing-and-turning sleep. But a heavy wind, which persists through the day, causes us to get up and seek out the long-abandoned summer duvet. We awake as two duvet sausages, enjoying what it feels like to be wrapped in fabric come morning, not swimming in our own perspiration.

We go to a friend's farm for the day; on the drive over, we stop by the Parkway Market, a pillar of my childhood, to buy a bottle of impromptu champagne. In the wine, beer, and liquor section of the store (which is substantial), there is a line of champagne bottles atop a shelf. They have a few pricey varieties of bubbly, but these look dusty, as if no one has given them a second look in years. In the refrigerator, however, is just what we need: a chilled bottle of a $4.99 variety. The kindly Asian man who has been the sole employee of the store for as long as I can remember looks up from his lunch to attend to us.

We drive on, down Santa Rosa Road. We turn off at the farm. There is infrastructure now, and detritus, where once there was none; the way I remember the farm is very different from the way it is now, but I suppose this is because we used it merely as the backdrop to our own (mostly horse-related) adventures. My knowledge of the place is punctuated by remembrance: this is where we used to ride along the river to cross; this where we set up a makeshift arena, complete with a series of crossbar jumps; this is where it was flat enough for long enough to gallop full speed; here we had to wrinkle our nose at the smell of fertilizer, and here the trampoline used to sit, where we would sleep on hot nights. Now we walk down to where the sheep are kept; they look as if they might wilt under their wool in the burning sunlight. We think we can feel a heat literally radiating from them, so we feed them quickly and head to the strawberry field to pick some berries for our champagne.

"I read somewhere that strawberries have more vitamin c than oranges," says our friend.
"They do," says my love. "They're not actually berries. They're aggregated droops."
"Aggregated DROOPS?" I echo, giggling.
"Yes. Aggregated droops. D-R-U-P-E-S."
"Oh," I say. "Drupes."

Inside, we pour a small glass each and drop our aggregated drupes into the fizzing liquid. I have had something stuck in my eye since dawn, and it starts to wear on me. I retire to the office to apply eyedrops. I swoon into a chair and look helplessly around me. We decide that the only thing to do about it is to go to the cinema, so we head to town to catch the new Indiana Jones--which is more (and I don't think I'll be ruining it for anyone by saying this--I may even rescue a few helpless souls from the experience) X-Files-meets-Tomb Raider than hunky- Harrison-Ford-blunders-his-way-through-the-archaeological-mysteries-of-a-jungled-country. The good news is that a solid two hours of holding my eye in a certain way seems to have set free whatever was trapped, and I feel like a new woman.

"It seems Harrison Ford is easy on the eyes," someone says.

At dinner, we eat a little too much because it is just that good. And when we step outside to go home, a tiny chill has set in, so that I have to put my cardigan on.

California Island-Hopping

From the Ranch, which is wild and isolated, we went south along the coastline under cover of 4AM darkness. When I awoke we were going past the gray skyscrapers of downtown LA; I fell again into a restless sleep, and then we were in Santa Ana, Orange County, hot, sprawling, everything made to the scale of the car, nothing at all human about the wide-laned boulevards and the parking lots you could lose yourself in, if you aren't careful.

The next day we took a train, then a subway, then a taxi, from Santa Ana to West Hollywood. Along Melrose, the city transitioned in fifteen minutes without us even knowing how: first it was gas stations and Subway Sandwiches and a funky little shop with candy and soda behind a counter, and then it was Hip Boutique This and Hip Boutique That; we sloped up a hill and arrived at the shaded house of a weathered hipster-art dealer with Rolling Stones hair and a striped boating shirt and skinny jeans and a cigarette slumping out of his animated mouth.

Then my cousin picked us up and drove us to Santa Monica, and we settled into her little apartment, tucked behind a house and a hotel, across the street from the beach. I had a bowl of cereal. We all walked down to the 3rd Street promenade; we had a beer and some tapas and enjoyed the sea air, which cooled a hot day.

The next morning we pushed our way through the Farmer's Market and got a bus back to Union Station--an hour and a half along Santa Monica Boulevard, straight shooting but slow going along a desolate span of city. By the afternoon we were in Santa Ana again, with its thick, oppressive heat. I stood in front of the hotel air-conditioner to get cold beneath my skirt. We sloshed our way through the faint humidity and the overbearing sun to the mall, artificially cold, for a lemonade and a helping of gelatinous food-court Chinese.

By evening we were in Irvine, with its Stepford streets, its emptiness, its frightening placid air. We had dinner in the depths of an enormous Persian restaurant with our friend, an immigrant from Iran, and went back to her place for tea and to look at photos of her family, coffee-table books on Persian art through the ages and the Iranian mountains. We fell into a dense sleep at the hotel with the hum of the air conditioner in the background and awoke to a telephone ringing that called us each back from our respective dreamlands.

California is one big dreamland; populated not by cities but by islands, built not to the scale of the human condition (which would require downtown areas, and walkable distances, and a shrinking of the broadness of it all) but to the scale of industry, of the ultimate machine--connected by freeways and emptiness, full only of one thing: an unspoken ennui, a longing-without-knowing, a perpetual sense of the surreal.