Driving up the 101 from a weekend spent in Irvine California for Far West, following the Presidential debate and the Giants game on my Twitter Feed, I reflected anew on how incredibly grateful I grew up and still live in California.
As we made our way north from the beaches to agricultural fields and rolling hills of the Central Coast, the Giants were winning and the debate… was giving me pause.
My renewed gratitude for growing up in California wasn’t completely about the game. It was about appreciating how fortunate I was to be living amid diversity and lifestyles and freedom of speech and choice and general encouragement for finding and expressing one’s voice I experience on a daily basis.
Living in the Bay Area most of my life, I’ve been privy not only to beaches and mountains, but exposed to seemingly every color, denomination and mode of creative expression there is…and — mistakenly — thought it was that way everywhere.
“This is the best place there is,” my dad, a WWII vet and native of San Francisco, used to tell me. Of course, I didn’t believe him for many years, until I’d traversed much of the globe, and lived in a different state, double-checking for myself.
So, California has always found me circling back. Its varied physical beauty, is of course a major draw, but the varied terrain reflects an equally diverse population I’ve come to expect.
And I realize I so often take this for granted when the precariousness of our rights is highlighted by the gravity of what’s at stake during an election.
Especially, it seems, this one.
Deborah Crooks (www.DeborahCrooks.com) is a writer, performing songwriter and recording artist based in San Francisco whose lyric driven and soul-wise music has drawn comparison to Lucinda Williams, Chrissie Hynde and Natalie Merchant.
Singing about faith, love and loss, her lyrics are honed by a lifetime of writing and world travel while her music draws on folk, rock, Americana and the blues. She released her first EP “5 Acres” in 2003 produced by Roberta Donnay, which caught the attention of Rocker Girl Magazine, selecting it for the RockerGirl Discoveries Cd. In 2007, she teamed up with local producer Ben Bernstein to complete “Turn It All Red” Ep, followed by 2008’s “Adding Water to the Ashes” CD, and a second full-length CD “2010. She’s currently working on a third CD to be released in 2013.
Deborah’s many performance credits include an appearance at the 2006 Millennium Music Conference, the RockerGirl Magazine Music Convention, IndieGrrl, at several of the Annual Invasion of the GoGirls at SXSW in Austin, TX, the Harmony Festival and 2009’s California Music Fest, MacWorld 2010, Far West Fest and many other venues and events. She toured the Northwest as part “Indie Abundance Music, Money & Mindfulness” (2009) with two other Bay Area artists, and followed up with “The Great Idea Tour of the Southwest in March 2010 with Jean Mazzei.
