Ex-Californian Finds Himself in State of Disbelief

It rained here the other day. Actually, it rained three times in the space of five hours--pelting, cuff-drenching rain. But after each deluge, the sun somehow appeared and dried out the downtown streets.

Between downpours, as I walked down a bone-dry, sun-soaked sidewalk with an umbrella and a raincoat clutched incongruously under my arm, it finally came to me. Toto, I said, we’re not in California any more.

I am not a California native. I spent more than half of my 36 years on the East Coast, largely in Connecticut and Rhode Island.

I remember New England winters--and summers. I recall how to eat a quahog. I know that if you ask for a milkshake in Providence, you will be served an unpalatable concoction of milk and syrup, without ice cream. (If you want ice cream in your milk, you must request a “cabinet.”)

Despite this reservoir of knowledge, this collective unconscious of East Coast culture, moving to Washington after eight years in Southern California came as something of a shock.

I’ve been here a year now, a year this week. And there is much that still seems strange.

The supermarkets, for example. In California, even the lowliest neighborhood grocery offers a cornucopia of bright and beautiful fruit and vegetables pulled from the trees or the earth only hours before in one of the agribusiness capitals of the Central Valley. And it is there all year long. You pay dearly for fresh asparagus in January, but it can be had, nonetheless.

The produce in the markets I frequent in suburban Maryland does not measure up. The pickings are thin and the quality is spotty. The oranges are so faded you don’t even need to put on your sunglasses to examine them.

And then there is public transportation. I no longer have the pleasure of sliding behind the wheel of my yellow Karmann Ghia, summoning to life the powerful four cylinders and heading out on the freeway to do battle. When I arrive at work, I no longer linger with co-workers to share tales of the road warriors who cut me off or flipped me off on the hourlong drive to the office.

Instead, I take my seat on the subway for a half hour and read the Washington Post. Boring.

The weather, of course, represents the nadir of the East Coast experience. When we lived in Topanga Canyon, my wife and I planned outside parties weeks in advance without fussing over alternative plans for inclement weather. (That was well and good, as the floor space in our cute canyon home measured something less than 1,000 square feet.) Of course the sun would shine. This, after all, was California.

No more. Now that the cabin fever born of our first real winter in years is dissipating, we are venturing outside to discover a brave new world, a world in which it can rain, hail, blow or snow at a moment’s notice.

The winters in Washington are mild, they said. It snowed the day before Thanksgiving. By the last week in March, we were having a heat wave.

It topped out at 90 one day. I was preparing to mow the lawn. By the end of the week, it was snowing again.

There now, I’ve said it. The L-word. The foulest, four-letter curse in the English language.

Before I moved to suburban Washington, I had not cut a L-A-W-N in 19 years. I went to college. I lived in apartments. And when my wife and I moved to Topanga, we bought a house nestled into a hillside that was covered with live oaks and large plants from outer space. But there was nary a blade of grass in sight.

Out in the ‘burbs, there are plenty. In fact, blades of grass are everywhere. I have to look at them every weekend, as I spend a couple of hours trudging across them, back and forth, with a loud, noisy machine that undoubtedly is bad for both my back and the environment. The effect, of course, lasts for only a few days.

This is not me, I say to myself. This is Ward Cleaver and Jim Anderson and all the other fathers of the ‘50s. I should be using these hours to spend quality time with my 2-year-old son. Or perhaps to play golf. But certainly not to mow a lawn.

In the end, the California experience has suggested a solution. We don’t exactly have gardeners in Maryland, not the kind familiar to everyone in the Southland. We don’t even seem to have neighborhood kids looking for pin money. But we do have fellows who will cut your grass for about $30 a week. A small price to pay for sanity, I say.

I hired one, just the other day.

Robert W. Stewart is in Washington, reporting for The Times Orange County Edition.