paul burney dot com
doing the truffle shuffle since 1985
Representing the LBC
"The hot, dry wind blew across the desert plains of Fontana, California as a dark haired woman struggled and pushed in a delivery room…"
Well, at least I think that's how it started. I can't really remember too much about that night. My mother used to remind me each birthday about how long it took and how much it hurt. I miss her…
In my youth, I remember running, sweating through the hot, muggy, and interminable all-season Summer of San Bernardino. In that old white house on 7th and H street, I learned to ride without training wheels, build fantastic lands using Legos™, and burn ants and army men with a magnifying glass. Magical trips to the swap meet at the Orange Show fairgrounds led to pony rides and toy surprises.
My teenage years brought me briefly to the beautifully breezy idyllic town of Hermosa Beach, the birthplace of surfer stereotypes. I remember walking down to the Boardwalk for a Hawaiian snow, a bubble gum ice-cream, or a peck on the cheek from my first "girlfriend."
I wound up in Long Beach for high school, putting my nose into the books, publishing a literary magazine, running clubs, graduating valedictorian and being accepted to college. My fifteen seconds of fame took place on public access television in the form of the Challenge Bowl. It's all a blur now, "Slaughterhouse Five", "John Locke", and "Friday, I'm in Love." It was a good time overall, though suburban folk look at me in awe when they find out my school was right across the bridge from Compton, CA, home of the gangster rappers.
I cashed in the California sunshine and bought a ticket to the wonderfully snowy, home of American history, Boston, Massachusetts. There I attended Boston College, studying physics with a minor in secondary education, while working three jobs as a teacher, a lab instructor, and a head waiter at a trendy pizza place near Fenway Park. At some point along the way, I also learned what really goes into the dining hall food and how to make a Cinnabon™.
One cold winter, I met a kind, sweet, intelligent and very pretty girl. We danced the night away at an Alvaro Torres Valentine's Day concert at the Wonderland Ballroom. Like a storybook, we married and had a beautiful daughter. I got a real job as a teacher and we moved out to the suburbs in pursuit of the American dream.
The monotonous nights of mall shopping and days of trying to teach spoiled suburban kids material they didn't want to know pushed us to seek a change. Back to California, back to the barrio that I was raised in. I turned my old Performa 636 and teaching experience into freelance web work which ultimately lead me to running several web sites at the UCLA Graduate School of Education.
I immensely enjoyed creating dynamic web sites using PHP, SQL, HTML, CSS and other acronyms. And yet... every time I drove into that exhaust-fume cloud of haze that insulates LA and makes it special, I longed for the falling multi-hued leaves of autumn in New England, the feeling of snow flakes falling on my tongue, the smell of new flowers risen from melting snow, the sound of the Boston Pops playing "Stars and Stripes Forever" on the Charles with majestic fireworks rising into the sky.
It was thus that after three years of beautiful sunshine lighting up el barrio, we decided to go back to New England. Now we're nicely settled into our new house in Athol, Massachusetts, learning the joys of being a parent to two beautiful girls and wondering how we could've lived without small-town life. I finally feel home again.
