When I was a youngster we didn’t spend much time there. My mother spoke of it disdainfully saying, “It’s fine if you’re a Republican or play golf,” neither the party or the sport interested her. I did, however, have an aunt and uncle who had retired young and decided to make it their year round home. I know that my uncle had something to do with record distribution in the 50s and 60s and my big brother told me later, after his death, that Uncle X drove around with a pistol in his dashboard, and that we had lots of cousins we had never met. I don’t mean to be obtuse, they were children that were born outside his marriage. My aunt had been one of those willowy beauties of the 1940s, freckles, red hair, and a killer fashion sense. She never finished college but fast-tracked to a career as a buyer for a big department store, and later, after my uncle entered the scene on a visit to Manhattan in his Army Air Corps uniform they — hooked up mighty fast.
Now, be patient. I’m looping back around to feeling peaked and Palm Springs. When I went east for college it was the first time I had experienced winter in all it’s snowy glory. London got cold, but it only snowed once while I lived there, and Los Angeles? Babies, we don’t know from snow. As a direct result of furthering my education in a town that often had 14 foot accumulations of fluffy-icy-stuff from December to April, I seemed to have a perpetual cold. Spring break would find me flying home and then being shuttled straight out to the desert to recuperate at my aunt and uncle’s. Oh god, it was so warm there. I mean, the HEAT of the Sun, you could feel it in your bones. There was an orchard of citrus trees on one side of their house and on the other, a huge, heated, pool.
I’d wake up in the morning, grab an armful of oranges or pink grapefruit, and get to juicing. Then I would lie by the pool, looking up at snow topped Mt. San Jacinto, sip my citrus concoction, and wonder whether I would swim first, or read a few more pages of some deliciously compelling book. My cold would dissipate overnight.
That novel I’ve been yammering about opens in Palm Springs, and I guess it’s natural that my creative impulses come from places I’m familiar with. Now that I’m master of my own writing dominion, wanna see a page or two of my novel? Or maybe I’ll read a bit out loud and link to it…
Why, the more I think about it…
Here you go, poppets, story time…click here to listen to me read.
