Lessons Learned in California, part 2

Lessons Learned in California, part 2

1999 -- Highland, San Bernardino, South Gate, Manhattan Beach, Hermoso Beach, Anaheim Hills, Yorba Linda, Corona, Corona del Mar, Redwood City, La Jolla, Rialto, Clovis

I had had enough of merely visiting the state so I moved there. I got a job with the San Bernardino Unified School District, mostly because they were the only ones from the whole state that came to the Indiana University job fair in April as I was sewing up my teaching degree and certificate (1999).

Lessons learned?

I got there in August, with a new roommate. I saw a celebrity my first day there, to live indefinitely with a job and ostensible career path set, when my roomie, Dave, of southern L.A., took me to an Italian restaurant near downtown San Berdu. I would not see celenbrities that often, but it is more likely to see famous people in California than a lot of other places.

2000 -- Ontario, Redwood City, Menlo Park, Yucaipa, Redlands, Long Beach, Newport Beach, Pomona, the High Desert,  Barstow, Palm Springs, San Pedro, Cabo San Lucas, Los Barriles, La Paz (Mexico), Crestline, Lake Arrowhead, Running Springs, Glendora, Hemet ...

I met the girl, lady, woman of my dreams. All wrapped into one.

Lessons learned? You only need one. And, it helps when you find (and marry) the best.

2001 -- San Ysidro, Chula Vista, Ensenada (Mexico), Culver City, Santa Monica, Bel Air, West Hollywood, San Fernando Valley, Carson, Point Magoo, Rancho Palos Verdes

UCLA accepted me, we got into graduate housing in Los Angeles, we had a baby (not all in that order) and the rest has been some history... And some political science, economics, geography, Portuguese, some business, some urban studies, and some other things in two years there.

Lessons, lesson, lesson, papers, and many lectures...

2002 -- Hollywood, Hollywood Hills, East Los Angeles, South Central L.A., Venice Beach,  ,

This was a fun, nice full year of living in West Los Angeles. The best weather that I have ever lived in, trying to obtain the degree that would propel my and my family's life ahead, to fill my head with a knowledge or skills that would put me in pursuit of my dreams, which in those months and years was to be a diplomat for the United States State Department and try to wage across the planet.

--- Now that I think of it all these years later, we as a nation are sorely lacking in the department or initiative in having "peace makers". I  wanted this, and still do, and unfortunately, I have found myself muted in this endeavor or these noble efforts, and like those of the Black Lives Matter movement of the the pandemic times of 2020, I feel muted and shunted from the chance to be a person who could lift up his voice, our collective voices, as Americans and as humans, concerned citizens of the planet, to wage peace, a pin that my older sister wore back in the 1980s.

I have not been able to do enough of it, to have a bigger voice and say in peace making, and part of that is my fault but I also blame my country, its institutions, the systems of the same old patterns of apathy or destruction that continue to this day.

Hmm. I did not intend to write this, but there it is. More later. ---

Lesson learned? After failing the first of a few foreign service entrance exams in the fall of 2002, an exam that I first took at the USC campus in south-central L.A., with visions of going off to foreign areas of conflict and being an agent of peace, a diplomat that could and would improve the world, here I sit in my nice home den and postulate that I would like to yell and protest that we Americans are so pathetic and apathetic, and inefficient and wrong in implementing peace in the planet. And if anything, this many years later, I realize that the younger me and I good or great aspirations have been way-layed and neglected, but still lingering. I am more the hammer or the axe of the tools of carving in and around the jagged parts of the human race than the life aiding stints or healing balms of my people, the human race.

That was 2002. Los Angeles, a large conglomeration of humanity. And me, a small bit of it. A cog in the great machine and mechanisms of this spinning orb. Learning, growing, but not necessarily achieving what I had wanted, which may be beyond my means...

2003 --- Los Angeles, Ventura County, Century Boulevard, San Felipe (Mexico), Bakersfield, Kings Canyon, Sequoia National Park, Fresno, Yosemite, Irvine

We finished up my degree in the great city, with a title of new promise and hope while we as a nation had entered Iraq in the former Mesopotamia to eliminate a despotic threat to his own people and millions of others in the Middle East, one place where I wished I could assert some of my hopes for change and stability. Saddam Hussein was removed, caught, and tried, but the problems of violence lingered on, far past my 17 years of California in 2010... Till this day, in late June 2020.

Lesson[s] learned? Government agencies have good intentions but many of us small underlings are easily forgotten. I was ready, I went to the interview promised another follow on in a month during the hot summer of 2003, but that did not happen till early 2004. And then I failed/they failed the follow up second round interview. Tales for another day.

2004 --- Fontana, Riverside, Ontario, Lake Elsinore, San Diego, Loma Linda, Grand Terrace, Adelanto, Beaumont, Big Bear, Yucca Valley, Palm Desert, Desert Hot Springs,Lake Arrowhead, Glendora

Living in my my wife's childhood home with her single mom in San Bernardino off of E Street, under the view of Lone Mountain and the Castaways Restaurant, the lone remaining single sister away on her mission in Spain, attending the Spanish Branch at the Waterman Building, teaching day and night classes for the adult school, one in the morning with all my keys of the building at the former Catholic middle school in the southwest part of town, the other at the main building at night. Busy with the members of the burgeoning branch, traveling to and from the homes, conducting and planning the meetings, the activities, participating in parties and weddings and funerals, baptisms and interviews and follow-up visits to the homes of the scattered membership, from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, or the couple from Mexico and Colombia, and other places of Latin America...

Lesson learned? Being a branch president is a full time calling.

2005 --- Muscoy, Mormon Rock, Cajon Pass, Verdemont, Colton, Buena Park, Laguna Beach, Aliso Viejo, Mission Viejo, 

My wife surprised me and bought plane tickets that removed us from California and the country a few month into 2005, even distancing us from the whole continent. We went to Chile for an undetermined amount of time. Like a lot of things, it takes a while to truly leave things behind in Cali. We came back after six months and a great experience. We prepared to leave California once again by traveling cross country to Virginia. But that story will be told in part 3 of this three part series.

Lesson learned? Moving on and away is sometimes necessary or inevitable. By compulsion or by choice we move and we grow; we were pulling away from the California roots that we had established together for six years as a young family (yes, Madhya born a year before we flew to Chile), but for me it was a streak of 12 years in this Golden place; all the same, the state was still clinging on to me and us... And there would be five more years to go before breaking the streak, forthcoming in the last installment.

End of part 2, years of the streak 7-12.