The last good summer before coming to California was 1990. I was out of high school, the whole promise of college lay before me, I had no girlfriend or trauma to deal with, the future was perfect. And then summer became an endless sea of heat and humidity and no escape for my life (and made doubly worse after 1998)…until 2002, the first California summer.
I’ve written about it endlessly, but 2002’s vacation week in California – cool, green, not humid, days spent among Apple stores and GSM cellphones and free pervasive Wi-Fi – was what really started the clock on “yes, I need to be here.” And summers here have been better ever since. There was 2004, where I arrived halfway through and had all the fun/terror of exploring my new home. There was 2006, also known as the dull moment, which in fact turned out to be a pretty damn good year top to bottom. The summer was spent in my office, out of the sun, doing a desk job with no manual labor required and banging my work out on a fast new black 13″ MacBook, when I wasn’t watching the World Cup or the Premiership. Lot of pub searching, lot of finally using the light rail, lot of enjoying my excellent new house. There was 2009, where the cousins came out to start the process that ended in summer 2011 with them becoming our new housemates. In between, there was 2010, loaded up with a 20th high school reunion and two weeks in Europe.
This year feels like it’s going to be a good summer. There’s European Cup soccer at one end and the Olympics at the other. There’s fog over the hills and it’s pleasant all day (for the moment). The job is manageable, Vandy baseball is in the postseason again, we have friends here and more moving in, and if I could just sort out my damned shoulder everything would be actually pretty cool.
Still, with the breeze from the open patio and live Irish music strumming away as I type this on an iPad with a pint to hand, it’s hard not to think that this is, in fact, the life.