We're clearly not in California anymore. . .

D and I have never before felt like Californians. I have always thought of us as displaced Coloradoans--although a turning point in my self-identity came a while back when I realized that we have given birth to three of our four children in CA. No matter where my spirit feels most at home, my children are growing up Californians! I remember being surprised to find that D and I seem to fit really well into the culture of the Monterey Bay area when we first moved here, although good friends who knew us before CA said they were not surprised. Even though we are politically and ideologically fairly conservative, which is not common in our area, we are. . . well. . . weird. Which is very common in our area. So things like the big family in the tiny house with the huge price tag really flip out people who live elsewhere--but locally we have been told by three different families that we inspired them to chose to be content living in smaller spaces even with growing families. Somehow it makes sense in our cultural climate.

But even if we fit into our area of CA, I never thought of myself as a Californian until this trip. Let's see, it happened in Missouri, when we made our first morning pit stop. Doug and I decided enough was enough--we had been without good coffee (gas stations and free continental breakfasts do NOT provide) since leaving CA, having been driving mostly on backroads. So when we stopped in a university town for gas, we thought we would see about getting some drinks. D asked the women working behind the counter at the convenience store/gas station if they knew where he could get espresso, and they looked at him blankly. Until he clarified, "You know, like a Starbucks," and they brightened and said "Oh, we have one of those!" and gave him directions. Then they commented to D about our California liscence plate, saying they had never been there.

That was when we started to feel like strangers in a strange land.

I was, I have to admit, a little giddy walking into Starbucks. After all, it had been almost two weeks since any chai! And as I chatted with the very professionally friendly men working the Starbucks counter, I thought it was funny to learn that both of them were originally from California. The chai and the espresso, by the way, were quite satisfactory.

Then at our late lunch stop, we chose a McDonalds with Playplace, having promised the girls that at some point they could experience one. So as we sat and watched the girls running and playing, that feeling of. . . displacement came back. The girls have never been to a MickyD's playplace, although the other families there gave me the impression that this was a routine stop for the locals. The oddest thing was seeing a huge display up on a platform over the doorway, that had red white and blue "In God we Trust" draped on a large wooden cross, with lots of little American flags planted at its feet. Uh, I have a feeling that kind of thing is not technically allowed by the McD corporate franchise, but here in the Midwest no one is complaining. You know they could never get away with that in CA, unless it was a Budda or Ganesha.

And then another sign that we are really Californians in our thinking is the recycling I see people throwing away everywhere. I am just so used to recycling almost everything (Ok, it is true that putting something into the green bin is not the same as it actually being recycled into something new, and there are good arguments that recycling uses so much energy that it is not the most environmentally green solution--reducing waste is!--so our county may not actually be helping make the world a better place as much as we would like to think, but it still seems right to make the effort) that watching my parents throwing away glossy paper and plastic bags is a shock, and seeing all the water bottles and aluminum cans in the trash at gas stations seems like sacrilege.

Then the final moment of self-realization came when I was talking the other day with one of my suitemates from college who has lived in Indiana almost all of her life. I eagerly suggested I could make dinner for her and my other suitemates when they come to visit here today. She very nicely and humorously suggested that my cooking would be way too foreign to her decidedly Midwestern taste buds. She is one of my faithful readers (thanks, Dawn!) and said the recipes I occassionally post here in my blog make her laugh because they are so out there to her, and she knows I think they are simple, basic stuff. The conversation still makes me chuckle, and it is one more example of how a certain way of living has become normal for us, and we forget that other people don't see it as normal at all! I was cooking that way before we moved to CA--I learned to cook when I got married from an International vegetarian cookbook given to us as a wedding present from D's sister--but our cooking style fits so well in our area that most of the people we know eat the same way! Doesn't everyone eat Kalamata olives and marinated artichoke hearts and feta and organic baby spinach salad? Even at the same time! (I'm getting hungry just thinking about it. . . )

Other signs we are not in California anymore:

We hit Missouri and started to see black people. When we lived in Seaside, we were in an almost all-black neighborhood, which was a very different experience for us--as it would be for most white Americans!--but overall a good one. But moving up the bay to the Santa Cruz area and suddenly there are lots of Mexicans but no black people! So on this trip, driving through Nevada and Utah I wonder if I had not seen a single brown-skinned person, because when a black man waited on me and Susan at the WalMart in Colorado Springs, I noticed him for the color of his skin. And when that happens, it makes you start to wonder what you weren't seeing previously! And then once in Missouri and now Illinois, there are dark brown faces everywhere, esp. here in Champaign. How strange to my eyes! How refreshing! I was so fortunate to grow up in a fairly diverse community (our high school prom queen and king were black students my senior year, my church was at least a quarter Asian, since the U of I has the third largest engineering school in the country) and now realize that may not be the growing up experience of my children.

In a similar vein, one of the most strange experiences on this trip happened when we stopped in a Mexican restaurant in Utah and the people working in the kitchen were white. In CA, even the Chinese restaurants have Mexicans in the kitchen, so eating Mexican food prepared by white people (good Mormons, from the size of their family) was a little unsettling. The food was still good, though.

I love our country! I love its diversity of people and places and foods (gotta love that Snickers Salad in Amishland). I am so glad my girls are getting to experience some of it!

*when i have queried my black friends at different times, they all said they use and are comfortable with the term "black" instead of the more pc "African American." Recently I have even read different opinions that really the term should be "American of African descent." But that is a mouthful, and so since my friends referred to themselves as black, I will too. in our home we use "brown-skinned" and "peach-skinned" to make those distinctions.