Four minutes to read.
The trouble with dinner parties is that they aren’t parties at all. People who hardly know each other are assembled to consume good-to-mediocre food while searching for something to talk about. It’s beyond my acting ability to feign interest.
Too often a braggart—usually a male--will serve up a travel story about “making a connection with the locals” who were just so, so welcoming that he made new, life-long friends. People as trophies.
Collecting humans like I collect photos of archaeological ruins, much less bragging about them, turns me off so I blot out his monologue. Instead, I rearrange the food on my plate into geometric tile patterns. Or I take an interest the host’s art.
At my last dinner party, I only survived by mentally plotting out a road trip up and down the length of California. Hollywood. The Redwoods. Big Sur. Disneyland. Stanford. San Francisco. I could almost hear California Dreamin’ blasting from my car radio.
I even contemplated talking with the locals. Why not give it a try? I thought. It can’t be that hard to approach a total stranger, strike up a conversation and give shape to a new friendship. Like the lyrics say, I was California dreamin.
Beyond its iconic tourist destinations, California is agricultural. 77,000 farms and ranches grow 400 commodity crops. There are pastures, fruit trees, vegetable gardens, farmhouses, barns, silos, cows, horses, goats, tractors, combines, harvesters, corn rows, almonds, walnuts, chickens, sheep, irrigation ditches, orchards, rice fields, pigs, avocados, grapes, lemons, melons, peaches, plums and strawberries. All of it sprinkled like confetti over 25% of the state’s acreage.
And farmworkers and farmers. And farm towns like Winters, California.
The Winters vibe is innocence hardened by lifetimes of honest, earthy labor. Saturday night dinner at a steakhouse. Battered pick-up trucks. A Victorian gazebo and bandstand, painted white. The storefronts are antique ornaments.
The men wear blue jeans, boots, flannel shirts and ruddy complexions the color of dried soil. The bars have jukeboxes and dartboards. On calm, clear, blue-sky days, hot air balloons ferrying tourists cast bulbous shadows over yellowy fields of sunflowers.
The downtown has one, and only one, metered parking space. Originally put there by a prankster, the lone meter generates approximately $100 a year to help finance the town’s July Fourth fireworks.
Arriving on a ghostly, frosty early morning, walking down Main Street, I bend my shoulder against the January cold. A few leaves cling to the trees, keeping guard like the last of the Spartans. I pull my scarf tight around my neck.
Inside the Putah Creek Café, a waitress smiles an honest smile before calling me “dear” and “honey.” She pours a warming cup of coffee. I order farm fresh eggs with golden yolks—scrambled. Hash browns, sourdough toast soaked in butter. Sizzling, peppery sausages.
My first difficulty in getting to know the locals is deciding which locals to get to know. Should I ask to meet the editor of the Winters Express? Talk to a shopper in the electrical aisle at the hardware store? Ask my waitress when her shift ends?
Silently, I pay at the register. Silently, I exit the café.
The temperature is a cold silence.