Waving Adieu to Redlands, California

January 11, 2007

My family no longer resides in Redlands, California. For 20 years.. since I was in the 7th grade.. my family has lived this unique little city. As of this week that is no longer true. My mom and dad took advantage of incredible real estate prices and moved to the Ft. Worth area. My sister Angela had moved at the beginning of fall to start a Ph.D. program at Texas Christian University.. in Ft. Worth, Texas. Only my youngest sister Joanna remains in California.. and she is in Hemet, not Redlands.

It has been hard for me to know what to say about this turn of events, actually. There is nothing one can ever really say about change. It just comes.. and the worlds we knew are gone. Next time I show up in Redlands it will feel like a very different place. The home I returned to for holidays is owned by someone else (the photo above is from our backyard). The church where my dad was a pastor will have someone besides my dad stand up and speak every Sunday. It will be a strange town.

Redlands is where I gained a love for place.. hiking in the mountains that defined our horizons.. seeing the orange groves that always seemed close.. feeling like I was in a self-defined little city with a neat history. Certainly it was here that I learned to think about the kinds of myth-making that goes into creating something as durable as "California". The public schools I attended had a sizable portion of Hispanic students, and then I worked with Spanish speaking immigrants during my time at Carls Jr. Here I learned to love the desert and its bareness.. and I am taking from Redlands an orientation eastward toward the great wide landscapes of the Mojave rather than westward toward the wealthy canyons of Hollywood and the rich beaches of the Malibu..

I remembered a poem by Wallace Stevens. Here are the first two stanzas:

That would be waving and that would be crying,
Crying and shouting and meaning farewell,
Farewell in the eyes and farewell at the centre,
Just to stand still without moving a hand.

In a world without heaven to follow, the stops
Would be endings, more poignant than partings,       profounder,
And that would be saying farewell, repeating farewell,
Just to be there and just to behold.

No matter my ability to "redo" or "undo" almost anything I do on this computer.. there is never any going back in life. And there can be no great "redo" in a future world. We have what we have.. and like Stevens, these endings, these wavings of goodbye, can be poignant.. profounder.. because of that permanence.

The following pictures are my waving adieu..

In my early twenties I wrote a series of essays on places in Redlands.. and I think I am going to find those.. I know they are buried somewhere in my stacks of journals..