8 0 5 . 8 4 5 .1 6 7 3 | 1 3 3 E A S T D E L A G U E R R A S T R E E T | N O.1 8 2 | S A N TA B A R B A R A
1 9 M AY– 2 J U N E | 2 0 1 7 |
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downer, or do you yield and hustle on to the carob-flecked mashed potato rosettes? You yield. YOU YIELD. Example 3: You’re at Saturday’s farmers market. Sunshine is falling all over the place, and Santa Barbarans are milling about and chatting and gesturing. The crowd has about it the electric happiness of a community fully and consciously inhabiting its gorgeous Saturday morning. The sky is so clear and blue and cloudless, you begin to suspect a trap. Or maybe that’s just me. You bump into some friends you haven’t seen in a while and it’s marvelous! You begin to gab and hug and affectionately wrinkle noses, and you’re all standing in the middle of one of the sun-struck market lanes with puh-lenty of room to pass on either side. Despite the breadth of the lane and the ease with which the other happy congregants walk around you, an older couple in straw hats stop dead in their tracks and begin blasting Califorbearance©. It is simply too awkward a Next Move to pivot to them and give them the Marceau for “Walk Around Us, Angrily Patient Oldsters.” So you keep talking with your friends and gesturing and sharing news, and all the while the oldsters are standing there like the chilling couple in Grant Woods’s
famous painting American Gothic, except the man isn’t holding a pitchfork and couldn’t be more frightening if he was. They’re holding satchels full of nature’s bounty and staring straight ahead like Manchurian assassins. As you hurriedly wrap up your conversation with the friends you see once in a blue moon, the couple and their Califorbearance©
that afflict and improve our counterparts outside the dome. EXALTATION AT HARRY’S Some years ago at Harry’s, I carefully watched the restaurant’s costumed manager as he made the rounds in his superfluous, ceremonial red vest, rubbing shoulders and making polite
The sky is so clear and blue and cloudless, you begin to suspect a trap. Or maybe that’s just me. remain lodged in the pedestrian flow like an arterial blockage. You finally move to concede their victory, and they pass you with a glance that is as communal and loving as Karloff’s face in a rainstorm. What is behind these increasing instances of Califorbearance©? Have we got it so good here? Are we so blessed by the g*ds of easy living that the sleepy and sated citizenry simply must find SOMETHING to be rankled by, some rattling inconvenience to push back against? It’s just possible that in a town as stripped of fear, privation, and the ordinary tractions of everyday living as Santa Barbara is, we secretly yearn for the therapeutic workaday vicissitudes
conversation with the diners. He stopped along a highball-and-platelittered table to speak to a man dining gingerly, and somewhat embarrassedly, it seemed, with his elderly and fraillooking mother. In the sepia light of the chandeliers, the scene, some tables distant, was without sound, but not without effect. The manager engaged the man’s mother in conversation, at one point placing his hand on her shoulder as would a congenial confidant. She tilted her beautiful face to receive his attentions, and I saw that her expression was alight, suddenly. Her lovely eyes blazed at this sincere businessman,
blazed with utter, unshielded delight, not with a simple explicable smile, but with a clear, radiant expression of bliss, an absolute incandescence, a contagion. He was only talking to her, but I could see he wasn’t approaching the conversation like a mincing stranger in the presence of the “old.” How long might it have been since she’d been spoken to as a woman, as a person – and not in the lilting baby talk we reserve for our elderly? I watched her grown son’s own face as he followed their exchange. When the manager leaned laughing into his brittle and ecstatic and beautiful mom and she laughed easily in return, the son’s face became beatific. It shone. The three comprised a bliss circuit. I could feel it from across the room. I’ve never forgotten it. So, yeah. There is some full-frontal Califorbearance© afflicting our leafy little paradise by the sea. On the other hand, here and everywhere else – in our restaurants and parlors and living rooms, our classrooms and public parks, and on the day-lit street corners of this sometimes startling burst of color and feeling – we find simple love, simple beauty, and the means to be lifted. If there is a little trouble in Eden, so be it. Trouble in Eden is, according to some, the beginning of something better anyway.
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