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California Dreamin' by Cindy F. Ovard We arrived in Southern California the first week of January. It was winter and yet I couldn't tell. The sun was shining and the grass was green. Well, it looked green the night before in the moonlight as we drove to our new home. The next morning I found the green stuff I mistakenly took for grass was in fact, painted green rocks landscaped to look like a green lawn. This was my first welcome to California. I wanted to live in Southern California my whole life. My best friend had grown up in Southern California and visited her grandmother every summer next door to me in the small town of Springville, Utah. She couldn't stop bragging about the place she lived and how the sun shined every day. She never wore a coat to school and she was even allowed to wear shorts and sandals to school. SANDALS TO SCHOOL! That had been the clincher for me of my California dreaming. Sandals were like store bought white bread. The only time we got to eat the store bread was when my mom ran out of time to make her whole wheat bread straight from the Magic Meal wheat grinder and her Bosch Mixer. Store bought bread was a rare and priceless object in our house. But, California was the place I HAD to live. I wanted to wear sandals to school. I wanted to wear shorts to school. I wanted to do all the things my best friend did, but in our small Utah town that dress code just didn't work in the snow. Southern California was the rebel place. All the things I wasn't allowed to do I heard you could do in Southern California. Disneyland was there, Sea World, The San Diego Zoo and best of all, THE BEACH! I was destined to live in Southern California. The rebel in me won. I finally made it here! I had been married five years and the hubster took a job with a company in Southern California. I was so excited. We loved adventure. The only thing I wasn't prepared for was moving AND being pregnant. It was going to be a whole new adventure. We found a really cute townhouse in the rural city of Hemet and soon found out why the company hired someone from out of state. No one in state would take the job and actually LIVE in Hemet. It was farmland, old folk's land, and country bumpkin-ville. It wasn't the normal Southern California lifestyle. The nearest Mervyn's was in a city forty-five minutes away. The closest Wendy's fast food was again, forty-five minutes away, We had one beat up K-Mart, but even new K-Mart's looked beat up. There was nothing to be excited about. Golf courses were all around us. We had five within a golf cart's driving distance. I was almost mowed down by an older man (I won't call him a gentleman either) driving his golf cart down the middle of the sidewalk. A license isn't a requirement when operating one of those things. They are the HOT cars of Hemet. It was a total retirement town. Older folks to the left of us, older folks to the right of us: older folks everywhere. And they seemed mad that we were here. Imagine young folks and old folks living side by side. I didn't think it would be so bad. I liked older folks. I liked my grandma didn't I? During the evening as we sat with the windows open we caught the aroma of the dairy farms that lay on the out skirts of town. All ten of them lay outside of town. I felt like I was in Kansas more than my dreamland. This wasn't California. My view of California was changing rapidly along with my hormones and my waistline. This wasn't fair. Here I was and yet here I wasn't. Our church tried to make us feel comfortable, but it was hard fitting in to a church that had the majority over sixty years old, (blue hairs as we began calling them) and only a few under thirty. But, try as I might I began living life to the fullest. The fullest, biggest me I had ever seen and never want to see again! These people were missing out on the size seven me! The beach was the most depressing thing. Here I was ready to be the beach babe I had dreamed of running in the sand and being on Bay Watch. Yet, here I sat in a maternity swimsuit looking just like the plastic whale my hubby bought to ride the waves. I had to dig a hole to fit my stomach in while laying down when I'd do the beached whale look of sunbathing. I cried as the skinny, bikini clad young chic's walked by with their "healthy glow" all about them. It wasn't fair. I was supposed to be one of them! Working part time at dental office's gave me many things I care not to see again. Older people complaining about their teeth, or lack of teeth. Dentures were a way of life. Pain was a way of life. Mothballs were the smell of life. I had to get out. This place was driving me to drink. Drink WHOLE milk that is! People I worked with would ask me if I'd gained any weight with this baby. Gained any weight? I wanted to scream at them. I had gained nearly fifty pounds. I cried because I had a fat behind. I had a fat face. I was plain fat and I lived in my dreamland of California and couldn't do anything, but be fat and ugly! I couldn't go to Disneyland. I couldn't go to Sea World unless I wanted to feel like I should live there with the other giant whales. My husband was kind and would still reassure me that I was beautiful to him as he called me Mahona, his eight-cow wife. Except I knew he meant I looked like eight cows put together! I drank my daily eight glasses of whole milk with a shot of eight Oreo's on the side for added nutrients. I wasn't really complaining, I was just fat and found I enjoyed wearing short sleeves all winter. My flubber kept me plenty warm. At a local park on Labor Day we gathered for a neighborhood Summer evening potluck dinner, I began to feel uncomfortable and have severe indigestion. I stood up to let the food settle better in my small, squeezed out of place stomach. As I stood up my water broke and labor ensued. Friends gathered around me as a few ran to find my husband at the horseshoe pit. We gathered our things and I waddled to the car. I looked out at the crowd of friends waving and cheering us on our way. It was the scene right out of "Steel Magnolia's" where Darryl Hannah is whisked away on the motorcycle to have her baby with the whole crowd cheering and waving her on. Except I was whisked away in my trusty car. I had good friends here and my baby was going to be raised in Southern California. This was a California dream by it's self. My daughter was born at eleven thirty one p.m. September fourth, Labor day. How lucky can you be to have a baby born on Labor Day? I knew the real meaning of Labor Day.
California dreamin' had begun in a small town and I was now living that dream. I had a beautiful, healthy baby girl. We would be those beach babes I'd seen. She and I side by side with the healthy California glow all about us. Of course, after I put fifty pounds in the lost never to be found box in the town library.
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