Mom is moving to Bakersfield from Mammoth. Usually that happens the other way around.
More than 35 years ago, it did. Mom moved to Mammoth to an old condo that my parents used during ski season.
“I’m moving to Mammoth,” she told Dad. “I hope you’ll come with me.”
It wasn’t so much a declaration of independence as a declaration of love. She loved him but she loved the mountains too and the mountains were calling. The mountains were calling and she felt the tug in her mountain-loving soul for something cooler, more beautiful and with air blessed by the desert sage and Jeffrey pines.
I’m not sure Dad blinked. He knew who he had married. He understood the restlessness that had her thirsting for the highest mountain she could climb, the steepest hill she could ski down and all the other things that make Mammoth one of the most alluring places in California.
He fussed around, finished what he’d been doing, played a few last doubles matches with his younger friends in town and then he said goodbye and headed toward the mountains via the desert and little towns that are like jewels on a desert necklace: Little Lake, Olancha, Lone Pine, Independence, Big Pine and Bishop.
This is not to say they didn’t miss their friends, he more than her because Mom likes the outdoors more than she likes most people, but gradually they made new friends. Mostly younger ones who were the type who thought or said, “I want to be like them when I get older.” The kind of people who don’t make a big deal about getting older and if they thought about it at all, try not to make a public spectacle of their discomfort.
They skied, they hiked, they worked in political and saving-the-earth groups like the Eastern Sierra Land Trust and they supported the music, especially Chamber Music Unbound, which brought classical music to Mammoth and helped young people in the surrounding schools discover it.
Dad died four years ago on a cold, clear, windy Mammoth day. He’d lived a long, good full life, but we were sad anyway.
We were, she was. Mom not only lost her husband of 60 years but someone with whom to eat, laugh, and have a glass of wine when the sun went down early in the winter.
Her Bakersfield family is not much, we’ve never been much and we’re probably not going to amount to much, but Mom has a son, a daughter-in-law, two grandchildren, their mates, plus two great-grandchildren here. She prefers babies when they get older, when she can teach them the names of wildflowers, peaks and Sierra lakes.
No one is doing a hard sell on Bakersfield; she knows what she's getting into, except when you haven’t lived here for a while, it’s easy to forget about the heat.
Bakersfield has grown up, probably both a good and bad thing, but that aside, at least there is company here.
Nothing and no place is perfect, but the valley isn’t bad especially if you cherry-pick the seasons. Welcome sort of home. The wine will be cold or appropriately cellar- temperature and there will be a place at the table.
December 21, 2020 at 09:50PM
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HERB BENHAM: Welcome home, Mom — we have family, wine - The Bakersfield Californian
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Herb
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