East v West: the highlights

When I was a child I subscribed to Highlights magazine, and waited with excitement for each month's delivery. It billed itself as 'fun with a purpose', which has an ominously earnest, almost Soviet tenor, but back then I didn't mind earnestness. The stories and even more so the jokes, letters, and drawings sent in by readers seemed like license to spy on the lives of other children (maybe kickstarting my career as an anthropologist). From Highlights, I learned that growing up in Los Angeles was different from growing up in Iowa, or Pennsylvania, or New Hampshire, places that to me constituted the 'real' America. For one thing, in Los Angeles, we didn't have snow. Highlights stories were full of children building snowmen and sledding and spotting the first red-breasted robin against a pure white drift. Outside my house, meanwhile, the leaves might turn urine-yellow and fall off the poplar trees in November, but in December the oranges and lemons ripened, and the palms and the pines and the eucalyptus stayed green all year round, so the scenery did not notably change. In the pages of Highlights, children picked apples and made their own cider. We had no apple trees.

"You poor things don't know about the changing seasons!" my Brooklyn-born mother lamented to her three daughters.How silly. I argued that of course we knew about seasons. In summer we wore shorts and sandals; in winter, long-sleeved blouses and sometimes a sweater or even a coat.  Occasionally in winter, on one of those chilly days in the 60s, rain came along with fanfare suited to an apocalypse: we would be driven to and from school rather than having to walk the half-mile and get wet, and any extra-curricular activities might well be cancelled.  The next day's newspaper likely featured on the front page a picture of a VW Bug up to its windows in water. In Highlights, I saw drawings of children wearing rainboots, carrying cheerful umbrellas, and splashing in puddles, and wondered what was wrong with their parents' cars. We kept a few umbrellas in our house but used them to run down the hill while trying to fly like Mary Poppins. My mother would tell us stories of her childhood, in which fell summer rains warm enough to play outside wearing only a bathing suit. Rain in summer! This seemed as miraculous and unlikely as a Martian landing.

Highlights never featured tales of children putting their treasured objects in boxes by the front door, ready to evacuate in case a brush fire came too close, nor of children cowering in doorways during an earthquake.

I moved to Northern California for university, just as a drought ended in the state. In early November of my freshman year I awoke to see water beating on the dorm window. "Oh well," I said to my room-mate, Linda, "I guess we'll have to miss today's classes." Luckily, I had only one lecture scheduled.

"Why?" Linda asked, puzzled.

I gestured. "It's raining. Who would give us a ride?"

She  laughed and of course shared my idiocy with the other girls on the floor. I was pretty wet when I got to my lecture, but learned quickly about raincoats and hats and umbrellas. And I sure have put that knowledge to good use over the subsequent, California diaspora years.

Recently, during my children's March Break, we made a family trip to the US Northwest (Washington), then northward to the Canadian West (British Columbia). (I am advised that Canada is unidimensional and has only 'east' and 'west'; without the attenuation of a northern or southern trope. The North is a category of its own.)

I loved re-visiting Vancouver, loved Victoria. It's Canada, Jim, but not as we know it. The Pacific Ocean! Mountains! Greenery and flowers  in winter. Just like California (except for the rain, of course).

Wreck Beach, Vancouver, at sunset. A naked man stands behind me.

Why do we not all live there? I asked my Toronto friends when I got home to temperatures hovering at 0C, and melting dirty piles of slush at the curb, and bare trees. Several of these women had lived in Vancouver for a number of years. They looked at me in horror. "I wouldn't go back. It was like exile," said one.

"If you're not involved in sports, you're no one. You have no friends and nothing to do," said another.

"All they want to talk about is their latest hike and where to find the best local organic mushrooms," scoffed the third. "And it rains five months of the year!" Someone else said that Vancouver is a great city for being outdoors, while Toronto is a great city to be in.

"In my book group in Vancouver," said one woman in my current book group, "none of the other members actually came from Vancouver." Implication: those durn Westerners don't read.  It reminded me of hearing, many decades ago, that serious thought couldn't occur in California, that real American intellectualism happened strictly east of the Rockies, where Best Foods mayonnaise was called Hellmann's. I didn't believe it then, as I earned my degree in Berkeley, but perhaps that contention, coupled with my memories of  the 'true America' as delineated in Highlights,  contributed to my desire to get out of California and experience the Great Elsewhere. (As they say, be careful what you wish for.)

And I don't believe it now. Folks in B.C. spoke warmly of Toronto. "Oh, it's a wonderful city! I love visiting." They had no desire actually to live here, though. "Couldn't do it. Too cold." I call that thinking.

A few years ago I got my own children a subscription to Highlights, but they never expressed much interest in reading it. Perhaps because they have the internet, or because they have already travelled so much, or because they are not growing up in America. To them the magazine opened no doors on wonders of life in the great elsewhere. We let the subscription lapse. I do wonder if these days, Highlights depicts children playing at the beach as well as on snowy hills in January.