and even further West

No, we're not moving to California; we are returning to New Jersey, where I have lived since 1974. I wrote the following in 1981, when I was 36. You can take the girl out of California but you can't take... And as a disclaimer to all my wonderful New Jersey friends: I wrote this 26 years ago, when I was just a callow yout.

LAMENT OF A CALIFORNIAN

I don't much like the East Coast sometimes. Sometimes it's OK. This is not one of those times.

Most of the time, the East Coast is tolerable for a transplant. The weather can be handled. The commute on congested highways can be transcended. The surly shop people can be put in perspective. The dingy, trashy roadways can be overlooked. The tendency of the natives to be suspicious of human nature can be understood.

But right now I would give anything in the world for a whiff of bright California air. I would love to drive down roadways riotous in Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter with color and life. I would gladly commute in rain instead of snow and ice. I would love to spend money in stores that assume your innocence instead of your guilt.

I would like to be around people not always looking for a way to gouge the other guy out of another dollar. I would like to not hear the word 'lawsuit' again. I would like to be able to discuss something without having to first prepare a legal defense for my position.

I have been here almost seven years, with a fifteen-month break when I moved home to Los Altos [1976-1978]. Coping with the Eastern psyche has gotten easier. But right now at this moment, I am overwhelmed with all the negatives. There are positives about the East Coast and I shall enumerate them: my fiance, Angel.

In my mind I am walking along a beach on the Monterey Peninsula. The sky is that pure blue that only a California sky can attain. The clouds are so high up that the Earth by contrast seems endless and spacious. The Pacific is its unpredictable self, the water having come in from Asia on some monster wave.

Instead, I am in New Jersey, listening to Easterners who have never been anywhere but Florida and the Poconos tell me how California is the land of fruits and nuts. How can any New Yorker make fun of any place else? A Californian can have the curiosity and openness to want to experience the Big Apple, to be able to appreciate the differences. A New Yorker can be smug, taking pride no doubt in rude cabbies and a frightened populace. A Californian still wants to go visit New York, but a Northern Californian will always want to return to only one City, The City By The Bay.

I would like to live in a place where diversity is accepted, not used as a way to label people. I would like to live in a place where groups are formed based on common interests, not on ethnic background. I would like to live in a place where people are as interested in the country in which they live as they are in the country from which their grandmothers came.

I would like to be around people who are not always trying to one-up you in clever remarks, thus forcing you into the gamesmanship trap. I would like to be around people who just say how they feel with respect for others' opinions.

I would like to be around people who share my state of mind, California.

Now, having lived in Italy for two-and-a-half years, I will be happy to be returning home to New Jersey .