The Golden State

I buy the Recorder for fifty cents and feel that a treat is in order so I also buy a Starbucks Frappuccino in a bottle and Honey gets a string cheese even though she has twenty-six string cheeses at home and I curse myself for not bringing one but she holds the new one in her fist and gleefully bites the head off and smiles at me with a mouth full of cheese. I put her back on my shoulders to take the highway back to Deakins Park and the knowledge that we have seen what there is to see and there is no new route, no new view, adds length to the twenty minutes it takes to get back home. Once we leave the anxieties of the highway and the trucks that barrel down it I put Honey down to walk and I scan the headlines of the paper. The county supervisors are scheduled to vote on whether Paiute should join the fifty-first State of Jefferson and lobby the capital to secede, I read. I find it stunning that Cindy and her lawn sign are a viable political movement although I guess supervisors can vote on anything. What I understand to be the sentiment at the State of Jefferson’s heart is that nameless legislating fat cats in big cities cannot properly represent the interests of the sparsely populated rural counties. Which is probably true. But it seems that this probably true thing is also what dooms this movement to irrelevancy, it’s like if the Greeks and the Bulgarians started agitating to leave the Ottoman Empire but there were only ten Greeks and five Bulgarians. Moreover based on the way the main street looks it’s hard to believe anyone is just waiting for liberation from the yoke of the state to rise up and prosper. “Casualties of Capital!” I say aloud in Hugo’s pompous voice, and Honey pats my head quizzically.

When we are safely back at the house it is 8:45 and I think given Honey’s early start this morning perhaps she can be persuaded into a nap and I can read the paper and have a cigarette and recover from the walk to the store. I look at her until I find a gesture I can reasonably interpret as a rubbing of eyes and I tell her very cheerfully lovingly but authoritatively that she is tired and it is now time for a nap. I carry her to the closet close the curtains in the bedroom toss the comforter over the unmade bed put her into the Pack ’n Play with minimal ceremony say “It’s time to take a snooze” gently pass my fingers over her brow and in between her eyes and over the tip of her nose which sometimes makes her involuntarily close her eyes like a parakeet in a cage when you put a blanket over it. I crack the door and leave the bedroom and immediately her cries begin but I determine them to be a feint and not substantive. I pause to feel sad that this store of Honey-based knowledge I have been building up which is so insanely specific to this time and place and person will live and die with the versions of me and her that exist at this moment. And that Engin is missing his chance to amass this same knowledge, if indeed this knowledge has the same weight for fathers as for mothers.

I drink a glass of water collect the cigarettes from the top of the grandfather clock and go onto the deck with the paper. I scan the letters to the editor which are all Jefferson-related in honor of the upcoming vote. I note with a start that Cindy Cooper has written one.

Editor:

The people in the North State do not have any representation in California legislation and we are trying to get equal representation and that’s the long and short of it.

The truth is we are working to have less laws that keep us from living a better life, so our grandkids have a better life too.

People want the government to stop charging them taxes for everything they do. Los Angeles does not pay the fire tax and they are the ones that pasted it on us and building the train and tunnels we don’t need or will ever use.

We are working hard to make the North State a better place to live and have support from a lot of the people in it.

Cindy Cooper, Altavista

I would not have pegged Cindy as a community activist necessarily as she seems grumpy but sort of placid and immobile. There’s a dissenting letter: