Just Leave Me In Bakersfield

We all have childhood dreams. Adolescence and adulthood often cause us to jettison these dreams, dismissing them as silly, or worse, as forgotten relics. I never forgot my dream; never abandoned it either, no matter the odds. Wants and desires are a tricky business - sometimes exactly what you want falls right into your lap, and sometimes the wishes of an 8 year old boy are left to wither and eventually rot on the vine. I would like to travel back in time and meet Ponch and Jon from CHiPs.

I don't necessarily even need to meet them, it's the California of 1978 that I want to see. Clean and new, it had everything that New York was missing - kids with perfect white teeth playing sandlot baseball in December. Innocence with a seamy (but not too seamy) underbelly. All the music started off with bass and a wah-wah pedal scratch guitar, paving the way for brass and thudding drums. It never rained. As I got older, I realized I could have seen Van Halen on the "Women and Children First" Tour also.

I've since been to California and it was really nice. I saw LA and Santa Monica and Torrance and Long Beach and even South Central. It wasn't the same. Not even close.