All the gold in California

is in a bank in the middle of Beverly Hills
in somebody else's name
so if you're dreaming of California
it don't matter at all where you've played before
California's a brand new game.

Troy and Sherry got me thinking about California. I tell you, I really can understand the whole changing cultures thing they both discussed recently. I've become, after nine (!) years in the northwest, somewhat of a grafted-in local - something altogether different, cut from a totally different tree, but growing and prospering on this new plant called my home.

I'm doing a quasi-Bible study with a good friend of mine right now - we meet weekly at the local Brewed Awakenings coffee shop, and discuss C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity. He asked me tonight if I miss California.

I have to admit, I miss a few things - but they are getting fewer and further between, as the days go my. My father told me, many years ago, that no matter where I live, I'll never know a place as well as I know Long Beach, and I think he was right. I know that if I were to board a plane at PDX tonight and fly down to the Long Beach Airport and rent a car, I could get still maneuver my way around Long Beach very easily - it's still hard-wired in - like, for example, slingshotting across from one end of the city by taking PCH to the Traffic Circle, then taking the Diagonal all the way up to where it just about meets Los Alamitos and Hawaiian Gardens. (If I recall correctly, it actually peters out somewhere up past Carson Street, then you have to actually travel east, then a small jog south on Norwalk Blvd/Los Alamitos Blvd. to head into the upper end of Orange County that Los Al represents).
I was sharing with my friend about some of the urban legends of Long Beach - some of the hangouts, some of the weird stories. Troy, do you remember Krista, from the apartments, taking us to something she called "Witches Alley" (or something like that) over by Santiago Ave. by the University, where there's an alley you can just tear down, and if you do it at night, all the security lights on the back of the houses light up in succession? That was pretty cool. As was Igor's Alley (all the legendary places in the LBC have to do with alleys, I suppose), over in Bixby Knolls. There, if you drove down a certain alley (don't ask me which one), you can see a house that, oddly, has a doorframe, up on the second floor, with no stairwell or porch for it. There's just a door there. The story goes, Igor (or maybe the name was Otto) killed someone, and hanged them from some sort of dealie from that door. The true story, I'm sure, is much less prosaic (if you can call the Igor/Otto story that): the house either a) dates from a time when the structure was actually a barn, and the doorway was for hauling up hay bales, or, more likely, b) there one was a porch or stairway there, and the owners just got rid of it.
My personal favorite Long Beach myth/legend has to do with "Midget Town." A good friend I worked with at the Grace Brethren summer day camp told me there is, in the Bixby Knolls area, a gated community for 'little people,' complete with proportionally-sized houses, doors mailboxes, etc. The reason he knew about it was, as he claimed, he hit a baseball over the fence into "Midget Town," and he climbed over to reclaim it. Inside, he was confronted with a whole neighborhood of small-sized everything. Then, in his own words, a "raspy-lookin' little midget dude chased me out."

Raspy-looking.

That phrase has stayed with me for, oh, fifteen years, at least.


What, exactly, does make one "raspy-looking"?

Is it particular to little people?



Could I become "raspy-looking"?



What if I were shorter?



Is raspiness proportional to one's height, or, more accurately, the lack thereof?