Joan Didion - Where I Was From

I have on my desk a copy of the 1895 California Blue Book, or State Roster , family detritus, salvaged from a Good Will box during a move of my mother’s. I assumed at the time I retrieved it that the roster had been my grandfather’s but I see now that the bookplate reads “Property of Chas. F. Johnson, Bakersfield, Calif., No. 230,” in other words the detritus of someone else’s family. The book is illustrated with etchings and photographs, a startling number of which feature what were in 1895 the state’s five asylums for the insane, huge Victorian structures that appear to have risen from the deserts and fields of California’s rural counties in a solitude more punitive than therapeutic. Among the illustrations are the facts, in neat columns: there were at the Napa State Asylum for the Insane thirty-five “Attendants,” each of whom received an annual salary of $540. All were identified by name. There were, listed under the “Attendants” and also identified by name, sixty “Assistant Attendants,” thirteen of whom received $480 a year and the rest $420. There were on the staff at the State Insane Asylum at Agnews, in Santa Clara County, more “Cooks” and “Assistant Cooks” and “Bakers” and “Assistant Bakers” than there appear to have been doctors (the only doctors listed are the “Medical Director,” at $3,500, and two “Assistant Physicians,” at $2,500 and $2,100 respectively), but the staff roster also includes — a note that chills by the dolorous entertainments it suggests — one “Musician, and Assistant Attendant,” budgeted at $60 a year more than the other, presumably unmusical, Assistant Attendants.

These places survived through my childhood and adolescence into my adult life, sources of a fear more potent even than that of drowning in the rivers (drowning meant you had misread the river, drowning made sense, drowning you could negotiate), the fear of being sent away — no, worse—“put away.” There was near Sacramento an asylum where I was periodically taken with my Girl Scout troop to exhibit for the inmates our determined cheerfulness while singing rounds, nine-year-olds with merit badges on our sleeves pressed into service as Musicians and Assistant Attendants. White coral bells upon a slender stalk , we sang in the sunroom, trying not to make eye contact, lilies of the valley line your garden walk. I could not have known at nine that my grandmother’s sister, who arrived lost in melancholia to live with us after her husband died, would herself die in the asylum at Napa, but the possibility that such a fate could strike at random was the air we breathed.

Oh don’t you wish that you could hear them ring , we sang, one by one faltering, only the strongest or most oblivious among us able to keep the round going in the presence of the put away, the now intractably lost, the abandoned, that will happen only when the angels sing. If it was going to be us or them, which of us in that sunroom would not have regressed in Royce’s view to that “novel degree of carelessness,” that “previously unknown blindness to social duties”? Which of us in that sunroom could not have abandoned the orphaned Miss Gilmore and her brother on the Little Sandy? Which of us in that sunroom did not at some level share in the shameful but entrenched conviction that to be weak or bothersome was to warrant abandonment? Which of us in that sunroom would not see the rattlesnake and fail to kill it? Which of us in that sunroom would not sell the cemetery? Were not such abandonments the very heart and soul of the crossing story? Jettison weight? Keep moving? Bury the dead in the trail and run the wagons over it? Never dwell on what got left behind, never look back at all? Remember , Virginia Reed had warned attentive California children, we who had been trained since virtual infancy in the horrors she had survived, never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can. Once on a drive to Lake Tahoe I found myself impelled to instruct my brother’s small children in the dread lesson of the Donner Party, just in case he had thought to spare them. “Don’t worry about it,” another attentive California child, Patricia Hearst, recalled having told herself during the time she was locked in a closet by her kidnappers. “Don’t examine your feelings. Never examine your feelings — they’re no help at all.”

To me as a child, the State was the world as I knew it, and I pictured other States and countries as pretty much

MY MOTHER died on May 15, 2001, in Monterey, two weeks short of her ninety-first birthday. The preceding afternoon I had talked to her on the telephone from New York and she had hung up midsentence, a way of saying goodbye so characteristic of her — especially by way of allowing her callers to economize on what she still called “long distance”—that it did not occur to me until morning, when my brother called, that in this one last instance she had been just too frail to keep the connection.

Maybe not just too frail.

Maybe too aware of what could be the import of this particular goodbye.

Flying to Monterey I had a sharp apprehension of the many times before when I had, like Lincoln Steffens, “come back,” flown west, followed the sun, each time experiencing a lightening of spirit as the land below opened up, the checkerboards of the midwestern plains giving way to the vast empty reach between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada; then home, there, where I was from, me , California. It would be a while before I realized that “me” is what we think when our parents die, even at my age, who will look out for me now, who will remember me as I was, who will know what happens to me now, where will I be from.

In the aftermath of my mother’s death I found myself thinking a good deal about the confusions and contradictions in California life, many of which she had herself embodied. She despised, for example, the federal government and its “giveaways,” but saw no contradiction between this view and her reliance on my father’s military reserve status to make free use of Air Force doctors and pharmacies, or to shop at the commissaries and exchanges of whatever military installation she happened to be near. She thought of the true California spirit as one of unfettered individualism, but carried the idea of individual rights to dizzying and often punitive lengths. She definitely aimed for an appearance of being “stern,” a word she seemed to think synonymous with what was not then called “parenting.” As a child herself in the upper Sacramento Valley she had watched men hung in front of the courthouse. When John Kennedy was assassinated she insisted that Lee Harvey Oswald had “every right” to assassinate him, that Jack Ruby in turn had “every right” to kill Lee Harvey Oswald, and that any breakdown of natural order in the event had been on the part of the Dallas police, who had failed to exercise their own right, which was “to shoot Ruby on the spot.” When I introduced her to my future husband, she advised him immediately that he would find her political beliefs so far to the right that he would think her “the original little old lady in tennis shoes.” At Christmas that year he gave her the entire John Birch library, dozens of call-to-action pamphlets, boxed. She was delighted, amused, displaying the pamphlets to everyone who came by the house that season, but to the best of my knowledge she never opened one.