Circling Around
I recently took a motorcycle ride to to Mount Palomar with a friend in the neighborhood, Brian. Brian is 48 years old and has five kids that range from eighteen down to three. You don’t run into a lot of families with five kid anymore, but Brian seems blasé about that number of dependents, which is good because as I say to my kids all the time, “don’t worry, it’ll all be over in fifty or sixty years.” Brian is a big off-road guy who rides dirt bikes and he and all his kids ride BMX-style off-road bicycles. In fact, his oldest daughter is a world-ranked rider who might well choose to turn pro. He very calmly says about that it would be a great experience but he has told her to get her nursing degree first so she has something to fall back on. I like the way Brian thinks. It shouldn’t be about raising automatons who go down a track towards making as much money as they can. It should be about nurturing your kids’ passions and helping them self-actualize. There is nothing wrong with injecting a bit of reality as well by telling them that after they self-actualize they should expect to self-support as well. The world isn’t getting any easier even if it does seem to be moving faster and the current labor market shortages would imply that that long-ago predicted shortage of qualified employees may finally be coming home to roost for good.
Brian followed me up Mt. Palomar on S6 with its many switchbacks. He was riding my BMW R-Nine-T and seemed to have no trouble keeping up. In fact, Brian seemed to like riding large in my rear view mirror either because he wanted to prove he could keep up with the old man or he was just used to those tight BMX riding packs. When we got to the top of the mountain, I told him to take the lead as we headed down S7. I thought that was an important move since I might have been holding him back and I never want to do that to a fellow rider. I won’t lie, it also occurred to me that if he saw me keeping a respectful distance behind him it might subtly remind him that tailgating is not necessary on a mid-week ride. We stopped at Lake Henshaw for an early lunch and used the time to do something we had never really done in the years we have been neighbors, learn a bit more about one another.
Brian owns a very successful corporate event business, judging by the number of recreational vehicles and general toys he keeps around the house. He started adult life as a DJ (a.k.a. Party boy) and turned it into what sounds like a serious corporate marketing services business supported by strong digital technology for planning events and client interaction. It all sounded very impressive to me and showed me that he bootstrapped himself into business in a very compelling way. I did not get the sense that there was any family money involved in making that all happen. If I had any doubts about that, he then told me that he had grown up right here in Hidden Meadows. That really surprised me. He and his wife, April, met at Escondido High School and have been together every since. If he had just told me he was born and bread in Escondido I would not have been so surprised as I was when I heard that he grew up IHT here in our little enclave. I didn’t even know the area was old enough for that, but he told me that his parents moved in during the 60’s when the development first sprang up on the land of the old Daley Ranch that ran from San Marcos all the way inland to Valley Center. There are certain names that one hears in the area a lot and Daley is one of them. I even know a Sam and Chris Daley, but I think that is just a coincidence (I should remember to ask anyway).
When I visit back east and go to Ithaca or almost any town in the Northeast, it seems perfectly normal to be living in the town where you grew up. But out here in LaLaLand it seems strange to think of people coming from a place where almost everyone else moved to quite consciously for some combination of the weather or the landscape, and which didn’t exist all that long ago. When I see communities like Hidden Meadows, even though the homes are not cookie cutter replicas of one another, they do seem to be developments. I always think of the community in Poltergeist where the family is living on top of what used to be a large graveyard and is set on the rolling hills that someone in the distant past thought was good place for souls to rest for eternity. That is quite a different feeling than the one I get in communities like where my niece Stephanie lives in Carlsbad, close to the beach. That gated community always reminds me of the town where Truman lived (technically, Seaside, Florida) and led the perfect American Dream life. Hidden Meadows is a bit more down to earth, but not so far away from it on the idyllic spectrum.
But Brian has taken this whole issue one step further. When he built his house in our little enclave, which I would argue is the nicest area of Hidden Meadows, he bought 7 acres with the full intention of selling this first house that he built and then building his dream house a bit to the North near the ravine that looks out to the Northwest. In other words, Brian is so happy with his life in Hidden Meadows that he feels that growing up here, raising a family here and then presumably retiring here is exactly what suits him. It probably says more about me than it does about him that I find that so unusual and hard to grasp. There is absolutely nothing wrong with it at all, but it just seems all a bit closer than I am used to in living my life. You can argue that he is lucky to have found himself in such an idyllic place that people like me gravitate towards. But somehow that seems to understate my discomfort with it. I should be happy to see someone find peace in familiarity in a way that I never have. I am prepared to say that this hilltop is now where we will be for the foreseeable future, so i have found myself in exactly the same shoes Brian is in even though our paths to this place were quite different.
My older two children have more of Brian has in him than I do. They like that sense of permanence and while I would not presume to say they have found it in Delaware and Brooklyn respectively, I do know they are more happy to stay put than my youngest son, Thomas. Thomas has jumping beans in his pants, He ws raised in lower Manhattan and summered in the Finger Lakes. He has grown up as the quintessential city kid and yet while he lives in Brooklyn, he has little interest in staying there for much longer. He is in the process of trying to get his EU citizenship through my paternal lineage (I am helping him out with that). He wants to move to Europe (Italy or Holland) in another year or so if he can get the work permits. Today he sent me an article about a town in southern Italy (on the bottom of the heel of the boot in the Province of Puglia) where they are paying people $30,000 to move there. I don’t think he wants to be that far off the grid, but he, like me is happy to circle around trying out different ideas about where he might like to land. I get it and I will help him accomplish that if I can. I suspect he will be circling around for a while yet while he sorts it all out.