There are days when I wish I lived almost anywhere else than Southern California, and then there are days when I fall in love with my home state all over again.

Whenever I have to drive around Los Angeles in the rain, or battle the ever-elongating rush hours, I'm ready to answer that ad and buy the $10,000 house for sale in central North Dakota up near the Canadian border. See enough cars and enough people and you'll convince yourself that hermits know something the rest of us don't.

[caption id="attachment_80" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="The never-ending story"]<img class="size-medium wp-image-80" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/california-wide-300x155.jpg" alt="The never-ending story" width="300" height="155" />[/caption]

I spent 14 years commuting in the opposite direction of rush hour, which was a mixed blessing. There wasn't as much traffic, but it meant that for 14 years I was driving into the rising sun in the morning and the setting sun in the evening. That got old long before I had the chance to stop doing it.

But nearly two years ago I stopped commuting, and now the only time I see the sun rise is on my monthly trips to the golf course. It's no fun to blast a drive directly into the rising sun and have no idea where it went, but I do it by choice -- and eventually the sun is high enough in the sky that it doesn't bother me.

One of the reasons I often forget how wonderful California can be is that I don't get to the coast enough. If that sounds ironic to people who think that everyone in California lives on the West Coast, well, I live about 30 miles from the ocean and I rarely see it.

I saw it last Saturday when I drove my wife down to San Clemente for an appointment, but that was the first time in a couple of months. The fact is, when you don't get to see the ocean or the mountains here, it might as well be Houston or Dallas. Just another big city with far-flung suburbs.

But when the air is right, when the sun is shining and I see the palm trees stretching out through the city toward the ocean, I remember why it mattered so much to me to be here and how I battled for so many years to work my way across the country.

During the years I was a newspaper columnist, I made a lot of speeches in the community. I told people I was a California native, a true Son of the Golden West, but that I hadn't been given the opportunity to grow up here. I told them my parents had moved away before I was a year old.

"I knew it was a mistake," I said. "I told them not to go, but they wouldn't listen."

Ah, the curse of being pre-verbal.

Before we leave sometime next year, there are a lot of places I want to see, some for the first time and some again just because they mean something to me.

I've been to Yosemite, but I want to go back. Ditto with the giant sequoias and San Francisco and Morro Bay. But I haven't been to Death Valley or Mendocino or a dozen other places that are still on my list.

I've seen surfers catching waves, but I still want to do it myself. And after seeing the Beach Boys perform three times in the D.C. area when I was younger, I finally got to see them here in California in September.

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It's still a wonderful place, and I will cherish the memories of living here long after I am gone.

It's ironic. I married a California girl in 1975, but I found real love with a Frenchwoman 17 years later and raised two California kids.

Ah, California.