City Kid Daughter.

I’m going to sound like a sexist here, but I’ve probably been guilty of worse sins of indiscretion. Women like the city and men like the country. I realize that is not true in all cases, but it works as a generality.

My daughter couldn’t wait to move to Los Angeles. When I called her, often at first, I would ask her how she was doing, hoping that she would say that she needed me to help her move back “home”. Her answer was unwaveringly that she was happy and positive, and she thought that she made a good move. After a while I stopped worrying that she would not fit in, being a country girl born in the Garberville Hospital, and SIXTH generation native of the South Fork of the Eel River. I couldn’t understand how she could just set all that glory aside to move to a place that nobody knew who she was. To me she was like a princess in exile. I couldn’t understand how she could live in a place that nobody knew her heritage and linage.

Then I started being curious about how a person could live in all that smog and heat and mechanical turmoil. When I asked, she replied; “Dad, you go don’t go outside, you drive everywhere that you go, and all the shopping malls are air-conditioned.” She told me that a person could get their nails done in one shop and get a pedicure in another. She could buy a blouse in a separate shop from the place that she bought her skirts. There were thousands of shoe stores. They even had foundation shops. Being a country boy, I had to ask her what a foundation was. I thought that maybe that’s where you went to by a bottom part for a house. She said no, that was were she went to buy underwear to cover her bottom part. Of course a father doesn’t like to discuss underwear with his daughter, so I used it as an opportunity to give her a fatherly lecture about proper manners, being that she was living in a town that has a bad reputation for bad manners. It made me feel like I was needed again for a few seconds. After all what’s a father for?

To make a shorter story, I will fast forward like they do in Hollywood. She went to work in a “Builders Showcase”, fell in love with the manager, got married and wanted to have four kids because she likes kids. At least she inherited something from me! And lucky, lucky for you, you didn’t have to hear about all the total reject boyfriends that she had leading up to the great guy that she married. Why do daughters do that? Looking back, I think that some of the guys that she went out with… she did it just to watch me turn all those funny colors that I turn when I absolutely can’t stand someone and I’m trying to hide it while trying to be “nice”.

So anyway, this great guy that she married and my daughter had a girl and a boy. Children are the best methods of birth control. After two, my daughter and son-in-law decided two were enough.

She has done very well and probably enjoys more of “The country life” than I do. They live in the hills behind Loma Linda. They could buy or sell me many times, which is good, Because I thought that I would probably have to support her for her whole life, a father always has plans for such things.