I dreamed about his death over and over, and then it came. This was also the year that my father’s health started to fail, months of strange physical symptoms and medical tests that showed nothing. “Soon enough,” my father said, “it’ll be one town from here to L.A.”Īlthough he was 57 and I was 16, we shared the same nostalgia. I remember a conversation in a restaurant near Truckee on a day trip to see the snow. This grieved my father, and it grieved me too. The suburbs bulldozed their way past our house, felling the oak trees, cluttering the foothills with strip malls, car dealerships and lookalike housing developments. Summer afternoons, I dressed in an ankle-long skirt, slung a fake rifle over my shoulder, and headed into the backyard to hunt for dinner or navigate a raft over the treacherous waters of the swimming pool.Īs I grew, so did Sacramento. Like him, probably because of him, my imagination favored the past. He took us on excursions to Gold Rush towns, bribed us with doughnuts to watch World War II newsreels at the local airbase, and pulled the car over whenever we passed a historic plaque. When he wasn’t in his office in the state Capitol, he was with my brother and me. The antithesis of California cool, he wore suit pants with tropical shirts and tennis shoes. He was decades older than the other dads, an Irish-Catholic civil servant, and a devoted Democrat. A history aficionado, he rose every morning at 5 a.m. My family saved its money for trips to the remote islands of Vanuatu in the Pacific, France and Ireland, voyages organized by my father. He taught me that a father’s life isn’t measured by achievements but by the lives he inspires by being a dad. Opinion Op-Ed: There were some things even my dad, the fixer, couldn’t fix Families in our neighborhood, built on the remnants of orange orchards, had second houses on Lake Tahoe. Until I was 18, I lived on the edge of the city, near the foothills of the Sierra, in a suburb that at the time slanted politically right while my parents slanted left, where most mothers stayed home while my mother worked.
Seeing Sacramento anew made me see my memories of this place through fresh eyes, and, unexpectedly, I felt connected again to my father. As I drove in my mother’s car along I-80, an unfamiliar feeling stirred in me - affection for a landscape that I’d long found bleak, especially after I’d lost my father here years ago. I knew climate change caused this verdant hallelujah, and yet, I was enraptured. The native grasses, usually torched stiff by the unrelenting sun, were a lush emerald. In the fields around the airport, buttercups and poppies bloomed. The city had turned green after a period of torrential rain and storms. In March, my family reunited for a weekend in Sacramento, where I grew up, to celebrate my mother’s 80th birthday.
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