THE ENDLESS BUMMER : A Reluctant Peter Pan Waits for Southern California to Freeze Over

What? Winter again?

Surely, you turned on the TV a couple of days ago and saw all those people from Michigan on cheap lawn chairs along the Rose Parade route, nattering on: “Boy, it’s snowing like crazy back home right now, and here we are in T-shirts!”

And maybe you noticed that the LAPD has switched from short-sleeve wool uniforms to long-sleeve wool uniforms, that the ocean lately too defiled by coliform bacteria for summer swimming is now too cool for winter swimming, that the live palm tree/dead Christmas tree ratio has dropped markedly.

Well, then, that’s how you know it’s winter.

Winter in Southern California is getting pretty subtle. In fact, this is becoming a virtually seasonless place; we have paved it over and built it up so much that, unlike the real sub-desert, the little changes that mark the seasons are vanishing. The generous winter rains have been dwindling, the spring wildflowers struggle to show themselves on condo-crowded hillsides, and some grass lawns, which ought to be a decent brown, are force-fed into greenness, irrigated by water that shouldn’t be here in the first place. We have had to make comedians of weathercasters just so people will pay attention to the drearily pleasant weather news--and its sponsors.

I left the Midwest at an age when winter was still fun and not a chore. I do not pine for snow and sleet or the other attendant miseries of hardscrabble winters. But this aggravatingly mild climate does something to us, and I am not sure I like it.

Some uncharitable Easterners believe it makes us stupid. Where do they do their best reading? Indoors. Why do they stay indoors? Crummy weather. Case closed. All those months of ice storms and freezing rain, when our chilblained brethren are cooped up inside, improving their minds, we’re out playing volleyball. So we have tans and no conversation; Bill Clinton has legs like mushroom stems and has read everything between endpapers. Hah! They’re secretly watching “I Love Lucy” reruns from November to March, and we all know it.

But the January-poolside-barbecue/convertibles-along-PCH climate has shaped us into Peter Pans, implausibly youthful citizens of a place that does not age, where it is always summer, where there is always time for another chance, another spouse, another break.

A friend who moved out from the East has found himself, to his astonishment, doing things here that he never would have done there--applying moisturizer to his eyelids, dyeing the gray in his beard. And once he became accustomed to seeing the thin and the young-looking, it startled him in his travels to come across people who were fat or old or gray.

In most places, you cannot overlook time’s passing--the harvest, the fallowness, the quickening of the earth. As things in the soil mature and age and die, so too do the people on it.

But aging and death are an affront here, as unthinkable as having your sitcom canceled. You half-expect that those hired cops at the Beverly Center are there to hand out ugly tickets. Like Shangri-La, like Dorian Gray’s portrait, we must look great until we die--and even afterward, thanks to the posthumous ministrations of the likes of Mr. Joyboy in Evelyn Waugh’s L.A. mortuary, Whispering Glades. In the movie houses, the dead still dance and swashbuckle and make love.

Christopher Isherwood saw it decades ago: “. . . the beautiful girls and superb boys in perpetual bloom still ride the foaming breakers. They are not always the same boys, girls, flowers, trees; but that you scarcely notice. Age and death are very discreet here.” And the land, like a vast greenhouse, seems always, fatiguingly, in bloom. Am I alone in finding something unnatural, even vulgar, about cornucopias of grapes and avocados year-round? At the market, there is no waxing and waning of the earth, no anticipation of the sweet corn season or the first strawberries of summer.

So we too go on in the relentless sunshine, confident that we are no older than we want to be--25 or 35 or 45--and that we stand never on the far side of possibility but always on its brink--a screenplay, a stock deal, a casting call away.

So, happy new year. And here’s looking at you, kid.