The Golden State

They say it is all about representation, when really it is about regression, anti environmental protections, anti immigration and the end of all progress made in the last century. Splitting the state is drinking poison and hoping the other person will die.

This from Brian Hendricks of Fairmeadow, thirty-five miles west of us. Go Brian, I think. There are a few other Pros, Big Government, regulation, taxes, blah blah blah. And then at the very end I start to see a letter from by god my uncle Rodney and it is so terse and Rodney-like I wish he was here so I could give him a hug.

People have been talking about this since the 1940s but it was true then and it’s true now that for every dollar the North State sends to Sacramento we get two dollars in services from the State.

Rodney Burdock, Quincy

I would be amazed if Rodney has ever strayed from the Republican Party in his life but I guess secession is a bridge too far. He does after all work for the Forest Service, which is the Government like the Foreign Service is the Government like the University is the Government, like every institution that has ever employed my family apparently. Honey’s cries have subsided to the point where I can assume she is happy enough being where she is and I look through the rest of the paper. There’s a rambling two-page op-ed from Davis Birgeneau concerning the benefits of letting cattle graze on a specific patch of scrub by a local water channel and the combination of the prose which is full of a cattleman’s reminiscences and my agricultural ignorance means that it reads like a foreign language, I mean I can’t even understand the basic terms of the debate at hand. But reading it, reading about the “Tour of Europe” night at the library and the hunting safety class and the Fourth of July parade gives me a comforting feeling, like things are happening and people know each other and do things and the social networks that hold the world in place are extant here even if I don’t have access to them and don’t know if I would want to if I could. There is a whole column of the paper for the churches and I’m astonished by the number of them relative to the size of the town, Mormon Catholic Baptist Seventh-Day Adventist and things with inscrutable denominations, Grace and Freedom etc. and this is not even to mention an actual full-fledged cult, not listed, that took over a neighboring town in the 1970s and started putting up life-size dioramas of biblical figures along the highway which are there still. Engin loved this town when we drove through and made me stop the car so we could take pictures.

I see the name of my grandparents’ Episcopal church, where I was baptized lo these many years ago. Services Sunday at ten and for no reason I can name I think we should go and just see what it’s like and pass the time. It will take half an hour to walk there so I think we can leave at 9:20 and stop at Sal’s so that we can communicate to Engin that we will not be available for our scheduled call until later in the day. I pause for my daily feeling of annoyance at the difficulty of communicating overseas and while the difference between what is available now and what it used to be like for example when we lived in Nicosia it is somehow more annoying now, the Skype calls with an echo or video but no sound or sound but no video or work in one room but cut off when you wander into an electronic shadow or the Wi-Fi relies on ancient copper lines that don’t really work. I should get an iPhone so we could FaceTime but my non-iPhone is half the price. I could theoretically get the Institute to pay for it; the Institute, meaning the taxpayers and the Saudis, pays for absolutely everything Hugo and Meredith put their hands on, but I don’t like the idea of HR somehow listening to my phone calls and what if god forbid I wanted to send Engin a sexy photo, should that urge ever happen to arise. Maybe the thing really is that now we have these tools there’s the expectation that you will always be in touch. Overseas we called my grandparents every two weeks and we wrote letters and that was it and it was just easier than doing this Skype dance with all its awful reminders that the person you want to be here is not here. But Honey has to see her father’s face as much as she can while he’s not here, I think, and start crying, and I’m proud of myself because I think it’s been about two days since the last time I cried.