Location Matters!

On a September morning several years ago, I knocked at the door of a new tract home in Rancho Cucamonga, California, having arranged to interview its owners. They were recent transplants from Illinois who bought their house, sight unseen, on a broker’s advice.

“Care for some coffee?” the wife asked once I’d come inside.

The husband poured himself a cup too.

“Let’s talk out in the backyard,” he said. “Or do you think it’s too windy?”  

In fact, it was as beautiful a morning as I’ve seen. The previous evening, gusty desert winds swept away the smog that choked San Bernardino County for weeks on end. Thus we headed outside onto a small patio, where the husband, stopping short just past the threshold, stared agape at the mountains.

“Honey, look at that,” he said.

“My God,” she replied. “It’s beautiful.”

As it turned out, husband and wife were unaware that their home boasted a mountain view—in fact, they never knew that an 8,599 foot peak rose just several miles from their back door, for prior to that morning the hazy Southern California air obscured the horizon.

Strange as it may seem to move to the foothills without knowing it, I cannot fault the couple for their myopia. Transplanted to an unfamiliar region, I’d doubtless be ignorant of something that looms as large for locals, or so I expect after living in three regions and visiting several others.

Every election year we’re reminded that we are “one nation, under God, indivisible.” It’s true enough that the principles of the founders unite us, as does the national defense, the Olympic games and network television. There is, however, a limit to our unity, one wrapped up in a lot of disparate concepts, including controversial ones like federalism and multiculturalism, but also uncontroversial ones: the pride of Texans, the Midwesterner who wants his child to attend nearby college, the inevitable return of most Californians to the Golden State, the Alaskan or Hawaiian vividly aware of her locale’s singularity.

I’ve always gotten along well enough with my fellow Americans, or at least the ones I’ve met. I haven’t stumbled upon or sought out snake-handling churches, NASCAR hotbeds, or hippie farms where everyone prances around naked, but I trust I’d like most of their denizens too—not that I’d want to live in their subcultures, though they’re welcome to do so.

Perhaps my attitude is uncontroversial—most Americans are, upon reflection, live and let live. But I worry that too often, the over-culture we share blinds us to the importance of local circumstances, the significance of regional differences and the need to accommodate them.

Is this all too vague?

So that I might be clearer, I offer a few vignettes that converge around what I’m trying to describe—a polity whose diversity ought to inform how its people interact.

It is enough to begin by saying that location matters.

2.

The city of my birth, Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the place I grew up, greater Los Angeles, California, are each known, among other things, for their delicious Mexican food. My maternal grandparents are from Louisiana. My mother is part French Cajun, part something else European.

Nevertheless, the recipes she’s passed on to me include exceptional homemade guacamole, Prime Rib enchiladas made from Christmas Day leftovers, a particularly tasty taco salad that tops every variety I’ve sampled, and other Mexican dishes so much a part of my childhood that when my father’s Indiana relatives visited my parents for the first time, they assumed, based upon my mom’s cooking, that she must be partly Hispanic.

Imagine my surprise, at age 14, when on a road trip with my grandparents I sampled Albuquerque Mexican food. Served alongside the fare I’d long known were pillows of flatbread called sopapillas.  The waitress instructed me to bite off a corner, pour in honey and enjoy. At the time, and perhaps even today, one couldn’t find sopapillas in California, at least in any of the dozens of Mexican restaurants I have frequented.

3.
Though California is a place more cosmopolitan than most, a magnet for Americans from all over the nation and immigrants the world over, it is comical to look back on my own narrow perspective on the world after growing up there.

The anecdote that makes me look most foolish concerns the Golden State’s famously sunny climate.