000 - Introduction

The Last Apricot Tree Under the Mountain

This collection of stories, fables and meditations is autobiographical but not an autobiography. It is historical but not a history, at least not one that could withstand fact checkers. It might be chronological, but I wouldn’t always count on it. Perhaps it is a love letter to the time, place and people I grew up with? What I want to record is how it felt to come of age in my small town of Brentwood, California, perched on the edge of, well, everything.

The left edge of the continental United States where it meets the fathomless Pacific Ocean.

The left edge of the Central Valley of California where the farmers and laborers grow millions of acres of food, limited only by contentious water politics.

The right edge of the coastal mountains where rolling foothills sift and melt into the old floodplain of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

The edge of urban and rural.

The edge of the 70s and everything since. Can you really go back after you have met a computer or video game? Some boundary has been crossed after your town gets its first stop light. Our first was installed at Sand Creek and Highway 4. I used to run that stop light late at night just to show whoever is in charge that I wasn’t always going to be told what to do. Now it is a huge intersection, and I try to avoid it at all costs.

And perhaps it was the very edge of optimism. Certainly there were terrible things in the world, even in Brentwood, but I was largely protected from them, so the romantic Pollyanna sheen of my version is authentic, if not also naïve. That it was not the same for everyone living there is sometimes painful to me.

Watching over it all is our unusual double-peaked guardian, Mount Diablo. It isn’t that big, as mountains go. But because it lives alone at the edge of one of the great valleys on the planet and rises seemingly unbidden and rangeless, on a clear day, you can see more land from the top than almost anywhere else in the world.

Including a little boy, his stories and the last apricot tree.