Oh, California, My California by Marie Cartier

This is my home—California…I moved here from New Hampshire, Boston, upstate New York, Ohio, Colorado…why did I move here? I kept moving West…I used to say I came as far as I could without falling into the ocean.

California. My wife is a native Californian. She says people come here for “the California promise.” And we’ll say it often –what is that? Oh yes, the California promise. The sunset drops into the ocean. A true orange ball of spreading colors into pinks, reds…and then it slips into the ocean.

I take my dog Zuma, named after a California beach…to Huntington Dog Beach where she can run two miles before she even has to turn around. A life “other dogs just dream about” says travel mags. I make a wish on every sunset I see that slides into the Pacific. Past the edge of my world into the deep ocean…A moon will rise. A waxing gibbous, a full, a waning gibbous, a new, a dark, a crescent…and I will walk under those, too, and make wishes, too.

Why do we live here, those of us who do? In Los Angeles where Hollywood spells itself out in its iconic land grab against the hills, where one of the best meals you can get is the one where you know a magician to let you in. Where there are stars laid out on the sidewalk, round trip that’s two miles, too. Hollywood. The movies. The wonder of the silver screen hush—all of us watching …watching together as we adventure into the darkened room, eating popcorn.

California. Where you drive up the Coast and the cliffs fall off the Pacific Coast Highway and you open the windows and the moon roof or the whole top of your convertible and the sea air rushes over you and you make a promise, you made a promise…I’ll live here. I do live here.

I’m gonna make it here.

A city of dreamers. Years ago, I did a painting La Cite R’eve D’Arte. The City Dreams of Art. A city scape of multi colors and skewed perspective with paintings flying out of the windows. It represents all of the artists in LA dreaming of art…the paintings taking flight all over the city.

And now…we who live here are drawing on the California promise. The Magic Castle has magicians performing free in its parking lot while evacuees from the raging insane inferno of the January 2025 fires raged…And people got water and food in the parking lot.

Acupuncture at the Rose Bowl. Donations poured into the Octavia’s Bookshelf, named after the prescient science fiction writer Octavia Butler who lived here and wrote about a city on fire.

This city.

Yes, we’re burning. Still burning. I lived in the Pacific Palisades in a tiny studio and I was prepared twice to evacuate because of fire in the hills. But nothing, nothing like this. When I moved out of that apartment where I lived for 12 years, I left a “welcome home” card on the counter for the next tenant.

Now no one will ever live there because that building and …well, most of the town…is gone. The theater, the mall, the grocery store where I practiced Spanish with the woman, I bought a coffee from after I ran on the cliffs and looked for dolphins…

I moved to Long Beach. And…oh, California. I love you so much.

The whole world is watching as these trees, these cliffs, that highway…those houses.

The burn is as big as if all of Paris, plus all of Manhattan, and San Francisco were burning…and I love all of those cities.

But they are not L.A.

L.A. is the best city in the world and I have always said that since I moved here. Because you go from the beach to the mountains to the city of stars on the sidewalk to the surfers to communities And it is all magic—the taco seller or the big restaurants…it doesn’t matter. Disneyland. The iconic mouse …this city of wild dreams where I found myself, where I married a woman in 2008 on the Queen Mary before most of the rest of the country caught on…where I got tattooed, lived on the beach, got my fortune told, became a witch, dyed my hair pink and blue…I’ve done all I can whenever I can…

When I first moved here the Christmas gifts I sent back East were red and green tie-dyed T-shirts that we hung up outside our converted rental garage apartment on a clothesline between two palm trees.

I wanted California to give me—what?

Freedom. It represented that and it gave me that. I wanted California’s golden sunset and pink Maxfield Parrish skies to give me adventure—which it gave me in spades. Howling under a full moon. Falling in love over and over and over and having wild sex, quiet sex, crazy lesbian make- ups and break-ups and gay bars and Hollywood dykes and me stomping through my 30s in combat boots with flowers on them, and black mini skirts and doing slam poetry and all of it …and being an artist, and a writer. And doing performance. And teaching…Oh California…was such a huge bounty of promise.

I love her.

My old apartment in the Palisades is burning as I write this. While I lived there, I became a black belt in karate, a screenwriter, a performance artist, I started a Ph.D. in Religion with an emphasis on women and while I was doing it, I went up to Topanga to cast spells with witches

The California promise.

The smoke filters the air where I live now…An hour south the air is brown with ash of fires… fires… fires.

Everyone has a story who lives here. I have so many stories but today this is the story I’m telling.

Everyone has a dream here. And a story.

I eat tacos from the guy on the corner by my house where there is always a line, I drive an electric blue pick-up truck to the dog beach and walk under the moon. I build a studio in my back yard where I paint. I teach.

I love.

LA. The California promise.

California: Promise. Me. Promise me, California.

We will rebuild.