Just Visiting

We lived in Santa Monica, Mum and Dad and me, when we first came to California. I cried, said Mum, 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. 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, an alien.

Since I'm just visiting, time and place are urgent and 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, inextricably entangled with each other, simmering over time's fire.

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 Coast, on the edge of the Pacific, where peace should reign eternal but seldom does, at the ring of fire's rim.