what is you?

this morning i awoke to the sound of the surf right outside a lovely foggy morning at our annual beach house holiday in cayucos, ca, the beach town time forgot

tonight i tap out a few words in casa de lopez/bronson it is still very hot outside the range of temperature today my body went thru is off the charts [not really but i was wearing a jacket as we looked at young elephant seals at their annual molt near hearst castle because it was damn chilly to a several hour drive thru my beloved state back to my city where a heatwave just broke and everything looks parched]

i recall in morro bay [a larger city a couple miles down the road famous for a giant rock sitting in the bay and three smoke stacks from the long shuttered power plant also on the bay] buying a couple things for anna at a garden store when i handed my credit card to the lady she looked at my name and blurted you don't look like a lopez

her face then turned red and she apologized for her rudeness i told her it's okay i've heard that all my life

turns out last year i did a dna analysis thru national geographic where they trace both your genes from both your mother and your father staring 60k years ago in africa

no surprises since i knew already my mother's family is from bergen, norway and my father's family is from spain but what caught my attention is that i am 14% native american and i am more or less a son of the laplanders in northern scandinavia [my mother-in-law who is born and bred swedish guessed on that last one because of the structure of my eyes]

i am a california hybrid a 21st century boy

but like many of us we are the sons and daughters of many peoples i make no special claim i grew up in a house where my norwegian mother grilled tortillas for dinner as we ate norwegian pancakes on a sunday morning i put my on zapatos one at a time and had to pick up my dirty chonies off the floor of my bedroom all the while digging grandma's spooky norwegian trolls she had hanging all over her house

life is always a mixture of many things

i take great delight in being a mix of cultures living is complex even if i try to attain simplicity i am always failing

like the micro-climates [hot in one area foggy and cold in another part of the state] of my beloved republic of california identity is un-fixed because we are always changing as we move thru the limits of our days the lady who blurted i don't look like a lopez is fixed on an image of what the owner of the name lopez looks like but really a name by any other is just as sweet because we all come in many forms