-- a trolley line connecting Los Angeles with the Orange County communities of Santa Ana and Newport Beach, is completed, July 1904.

Yesterday afternoon B and I drove down to the OC in the rain, which I admit may seem like a curious way to celebrate Martin Luther King Day, because we ended up at a certain shopping mall down there and really it is more than a mall with a couple big box stores surrounded by parking lots as those of you in the Midwest may be imagining; it is in fact more of a whole vast area of shopping, if you want to know the truth, a tastefully landscaped grid of wide streets with plenty of turn lanes and streetlights directing you in an orderly fashion to massive structures connected by overhead walk ways and hanging gardens, upscale stores and palm trees and valet parking, also quintessentially OC for being so orderly and oppulent and yet conservative and Republican and ... well, white.  And although I may feel a little embarrassed or apologetic saying so, I doubt that the teen-aged girls shopping in small unchaperoned harems, scantily attired in the latest fashions, would have felt apologetic along with me.  "Like, duh," as they say.



But here's the weird part.  As is my wont, I sought to capture at least part of the day -- the rain, the traffic, the road back to L.A. from behind the Orange Curtain, as they say -- "Leavin' County Orange," as I said in what to my ear sounded like a passable Irish brogue, which merited a raised eyebrow and sideways glance from B who was driving.  "You sigh alot," he observed, "did you know that?"

I was caught off guard.

"I sigh?"

"Twice already, since we got in the car."

"I was just thinking," I explained, somewhat defensively.

The truth was I'd been thinking of the California-ness of it all.  Or so I would have said in the moment.  And yet --look at this picture, which incorporates what is possibly the only active train trestle over the Five or in Southern Califfornia [that trolley line is long gone].  The truth is, this could be a picture of rush hour traffic pretty much anywhere in America, adjusting for weather and billboards.  This could be highways I've driven in Chicago and Charlevoix, Pittsburgh and Platsburgh, Cleveland and Clarksville.  This could be anywhere. 

And I thought, but that's what we do.  We go somewhere and we make it look familiar.  We make it look like wherever we've come from.  We see with our own eyes and hang with our own kind and we call it home.  The differences -- what differences? -- are superficial. 

And I suppose that's why I sighed.