DAH: Just Visiting

I wrote this in 2004, for a collaborative performance piece called "Of All Places." For whatever reason I started thinking about this monologue over the weekend (OK, I can conjure about the reason, it's not a mystery). I've added an update at the end.

We lived in Santa Monica, Mom and Dad and me, when we first came to California. I cried, says Mom, whenever we took a car trip away from town. I wasn’t happy away from people and their places.

I come from a place I’ve never lived. My parents immigrated to California when I was scarcely a year old. They never became U.S. citizens. I was an English citizen until I was nearly 40. So, I’ve spent most of my life in California, labeled with a specific legal status: “Resident Alien.” Being from somewhere else, somewhere not here, is a big part of what made me me … just visiting, a permanent alien.

Since I’m just visiting, time and place are magical concepts:

Time is the fire in which we all burn. That gives us all an essential commonality: We’re all just visiting, all just fuel for the fire of human time.

Place is a wondrous, complex interplay between nature and people, interacting with nature and each other, over time.

When I think of home it seems for me a journey … from a mythical England where I never lived – an England of kings and queens, of Robin Hood and Shakespeare and Sherlock Holmes, of rolling green hills and ancient, magical woods – to California’s North Coast.

I don’t have children of my own. My family’s visit here is soon ended. We burn away in the fire of time and leave behind only the residue of how we acted in this place, how we spent our brief flame of life, with nature here, and people here, all of us, all of you, just visiting.

UPDATE: And now we're in San Luis Obispo, California. Which was not even a glimmer in my imagining when I wrote my story for "Of All Places." And we're making new friends and new experiences, with shadows of the past flitting large and small through my mind. Like black and white photos, some of them beginning to fade, tucked away in an old favorite book, and found again, with surprise, once in a while. Remembering, who I once was, as the journey of this oh-so-brief visit continues.