Oxnard, part 1

When I was growing up, there wasn't any place I wanted to be less. Oxnard was the jail of my adolescence. Who's hometown isn't?

As I child, my street, my school, my neighborhood (known to those from without as South Oxnard) was my world. It was a safe place, for the most part, and my life revolved around my family and all of our extra parts. My mother cared for children in our home as a way of not having to work outside the home. So besides my four siblings of a wide range of ages, we always had two or three other very needy children running around our house.

My hometown is the stepchild of the county. We don't have a pretty name or a mission or anything of note, really, but as an adult, I can look back and see that we had the best beaches, really wonderful fresh fruit and vegetables and the kind of welcoming and friendly place you mostly only read about in books. Everyone in my community, as far as I could walk or bike in any direction, knew who I was. They were folks who had known my family for years or at least since we had moved into the neighborhood. Some of the them went to high school with my parents when there was only one high school in our town (by the time I was in high school there were four in town, now there are five with three alternative campuses). Even if they didn't know you, they behaved as though they did.

But as I grew older, that world felt like it was closing in on me. What had been comforting, like a cocoon, was now just suffocating. And all I could dream of was how to get away from what seemed like the smallest town in the world. It was, in fact, then and now the largest city in the county by population if not by geography. But, nothing seemed smaller than Oxnard when I was a teen-ager. Everything seemed more sophisticated, more exciting and better.

I couldn't get out of the 'Nard fast enough and have, really, never gone back to live for longer than 10 months. But, now, when I visit, I start to catch glimpses of what I gave up, how the place formed me, and to understand why, even though I haven't really lived there since I was 18, I still always claim it.

Where are you from?

Southern California, Oxnard...it's between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, on the coast.