Temecula, CA
It seems that Ivanhoe gets to be a full-fledged California resident before I do. Yesterday morning, as soon as the local Toyota dealership had installed the front-plate bracket on my Prius, I removed my single Arizona license plate and screwed in my new front and rear CA plates.
Unlike Ivanhoe, though, my residency is provisional. To be accurate, it’s my driver’s license that’s provisional, pending the road test I have to take next month.
So, I’m here and not here...officially gone from Arizona, but with only one foot in California. I wonder if that’s why being in California as a Californian — and driving a car with California plates — feels at the same time unreal and surreal.
I have now changed license plates (and driver’s licenses) nine(!) times over the past twenty-eight years. And in every instance until now, I’ve simply slid into the new US state or Canadian province without thinking much about it.
California is different, and not because I’m here without having landed at a permanent address. I was still on the road full-time, and would be for another eighteen months, when I changed home states from Arizona to New Mexico in 2005. Then, of course, New Mexico was more a convenience than a destination, even though I would ultimately make it my off-and-on-home for eleven years.
California was definitely a conscious destination, yet so were Hawaii, Oregon, Nova Scotia, Ontario and, one of the three times I settled there, Arizona.
In a sense, California has been more than a conscious destination. California has been a call, one that has urged me to it for nearly as long I have been in the US. Even the woman I married was from California, though we met and married (and ultimately divorced) in Sedona.
I have never fully understood that call, except, perhaps, in the most superficial of ways. I could say that, given my coaching and teaching skills and its population of creatives and aspiring creatives, California makes some sort of professional sense. Or I could say that because California is home to the motion picture industry, my Legend of Q’ntana stories have a better chance of making it to the big screen if I’m here.
Either could be true. Or both. But how many of the people who come to Southern California seeking fame and fortune actually find it? Moreover, in these technologically powered and creatively decentralized times, California is simply less important than it used to be as a home base.
Nor do I have any kind of network that has drawn me to Southern California for its support and/or professional potential. No family, no regular clients and only one close friend. And it isn’t as though I have a Fort Knox-like pool of savings to live off while I develop such a network.
Finally, although a giant miracle got me out here a dozen years ago, ostensibly to make a new life for myself, it wasn’t a big enough miracle to keep me here. I was scared but hopeful when I got to Southern California in August 2010. Ten weeks later, confused and not quite so hopeful, I was back in Albuquerque.
There is nothing about me being here and about me taking steps to stay here that makes any serious sense, nor is it buttressed by any conventional logic.
And yet...
And yet every time the call has seemed to weaken — and even die, as it did in 2017, which is what got me to Portland — it has always returned, louder and more forceful than before.
Besides, although I’m loathe to admit it, substantial gifts have emerged from each delay, detour and apparent setback.
Now, at last, I’m here and the dream has been realized. Sort of.
Unlike in 2010, when I was in and out of Southern California so quickly that I never took steps to establish residency, I’m officially a Californian, even if the required road test means I can’t yet flash a permanent driver’s license as proof. Still, that can’t even be characterized as a delay, let alone a setback; it’s merely an annoyance, if a stressful one.
I say the dream has “sort of” been realized because not for the first time in my life (and, likely, not for the last), it is not playing out in any way that I would have expected or could have predicted. It’s also not playing out easily or comfortably, and it’s pushing plenty of buttons along the way.
That button-pushing discomfort could be part of that unreal/surreal feeling. It certainly sparked some serious doubts and second-guessing through my DMV drama the other day.
Why, I’ve asked repeatedly, is this not flowing as easily and effortlessly as I think it should? Does that mean, as I feared through my DMV experiences, that I have made a huge mistake?
Every time I ask and however I ask, the answer is pretty much the same: I’m in the right place, taking all the right action toward a very happy landing…even if the ride to get there is somewhat bumpy.
The other answers I get are variations of “you’re not in Kansas anymore” or “you’ve asked to live large and play in the big leagues; this is what the big leagues look like.” In other words, I’ve traded the manageable rural communities, small towns and medium-sized cities I’ve lived in since leaving Toronto twenty-five years ago for the brusqueness, bureaucracy, uncontrolled mayhem and chaotic insanity of the Southern California megalopolis.
There’s a scene in The StarQuest, second book in my Q’ntana fantasy series, where the journeying protagonists must travel through The Coil, a series of serpentine underground caverns and passageways that force them to face their greatest fears. I don’t think Southern California is my version of The Coil, at least not in the extreme way that it is for The StarQuest’s Q’nta, Tom Dirqs and Mariah. Yet I’m sensing as I write these words that this phase of my journey, the one that began here in Temecula with my time at DMV, is an opportunity for a new layer of fears and feelings of inadequacy to be pushed to the surface to be dealt with. A major layer.
I can’t say I’m looking forward to it, even as I recognize its value and, if I’m honest, it’s necessity. Yet if that’s at least part of why I’m here, I will simply have to deal with it as it comes, in trust that, somehow, I will continue to be safe and taken care, as I always have been.
For all that, even if the button-pushing discomfort and accompanying potential for growth is contributing to the unreal/surreal feeling I mentioned earlier, I doubt that it’s the whole story. Rather, I think parts of me can’t quite believe that I’m here, that I did it, that after all these years and despite the fact that I’m still floating, California is now my home state. Officially.
I don’t know what that means, what it will bring or, frankly, how it will work. Those will require another set of miracles…or several. Yet I see evidence of the first miracle, the one that got me here and that has more or less installed me here, every time I look at my car and see those California plates. I’m home.
Read more inspiring stories from my journeys in in Acts of Surrender: A Writer’s Memoir and Pilgrimage: A Fool’s Journey. And watch for the tentatively titled Hello, Yellow Brick Road: The Fool’s Journey Continues, my upcoming collection of chronicles from this journey (which will also include previously unpublished material).
If you’re inspired by these chronicles and feel moved to offer some form of “energy exchange,” I welcome whatever you feel called to send my way, through Zelle, PayPal, Apple Cash, Facebook Messenger, credit/debit card or other means (reach out to me for the relevant links). Alternatively, pick up a copy of one (or more) of my books – for yourself or for a friend. Of course, the best energy exchange of all is your good wishes. I'm supremely grateful for those. Always!