We were lucky. This was back in late February. News of COVID=19 was still early and was still making its way from China and was still being dismissed as conspiracy theories. For the conservatives, the conspiracy was a liberal ploy to disrupt the incumbent’s presidential campaign. For the liberals, the conspiracy was yet another extension of the president’s wrongful and xenophobic nationalist agenda to close borders, and shutter America from the outside world.
So whichever camp you came from, the news of the coming storm was widely disregarded as hype. And so, under this weirdly reckless context, we lit off, my daughter and I, for the west coast to visit my parents. My sister and her girls were coming to join us, all the way from Germany. We’d rented a snappy beach house in Mission Beach, just off the world famous boardwalk.
San Diego, as always, was warm and easy. And this being late February., all the tourists were still in Arizona. Oddly, I feel little attachment to the city where I was born. I was born here, in San Diego. And some of my earliest memories are the sun kissed, sepia snapshots of orange trees, sandy beaches, old relatives that reeked of diapers and cigarettes and the impossible immobility of toddlerhood. Big dreams capped by a child’s unwieldy, clubby limbs.
San Diego, I am happy to report, still sounds the same. Nobody has yet turned off the waves. They are immensely soothing. So I was horrified when, on our first night in the rental, my daughter insisted I close the windows because the waves were annoying her. (I waited for her to fall asleep and then opened the windows.)
Oddly, when I hear the waves of San Diego, I recall a roommate I had in college. He would come home from classes in a huff. He’d put on Bitches Brew and turn it up to goddamn eleven and slump down in the couch and listen and groan in conspicuous satisfaction at the genius of Miles Davis. And I knew he was a douchebag because the ecstasy he was feigning for music he could never understand was the real moment I could not help but to swoon for the cool waves of San Diego.
More good news: on long daytime walks around the neighborhood I discovered the eucalyptus and the sweet vanilla blooms of magnolia have also not yet been whacked into submission. They still run wild in the streets, and mix drunkenly with the sea salt and the back-alley urine that bakes to a crackling and poisonous brine every day, and is replenished every evening.
I am glad I have have family in San Diego. Otherwise, I would probably avoid the place. Though not as one would avoid a Costco, or a virus. But as one would avoid a suffocating if well-intentioned old aunt whose smothering hugs are the reason you’re known as not a hugger, but a hand-shaker. But when you are caught up anyway, in one of those squishy and perfumed chokeholds there is no sense in being anything but grateful in knowing somewhere, someone may not know you, but loves you anyway.