Ramona, I Love You (Novel by Helen Hunt Jackson ‪)‬

Love for a landscape, what we might call topophilia, derives not so much from how a place looks, but rather from our interactions with the place, and the stories and songs we create to record our recollections and emotions associated with the place. It is the stories that bring a landscape to life for me and make it beautiful. Beauty is never simple: for a landscape to be alive, its stories must be alive, and things that are alive are always growing and changing. Sometimes the stories change in ways that nourish our emotional longings and fears. Sometimes the stories make for a fantasy heritage that dishonestly obscures what people actually did in history, and sometimes the stories hide ugly things about what happened in the place. We all have our stories. I will tell you now my tale of love and landscape. When I was seventeen, a senior in high school in Los Angeles, I got the family Volkswagen as a combination Christmas and birthday present. It was a '64 with those little tail lights and a 44 horsepower engine, but, more important, in it I learned my first lessons about love. Furtive sex in the back seat, you might be thinking, but no--it was just kissing and listening to small tastes of Joe Tex, Percy Sledge, Solomon Burke, and Eddie Floyd, and large quantities of the Temptations, the Rolling Stones, and their idol, Otis Redding, on the AM radio. Yes, readers, I'm referring here to Wolfman Jack's broadcasts from south of the border on station XERB. Those of you who never knew the Wolfman and XERB, skip it; you had to have been there. I can't convey in words this scene driving around Hollywood late at night listening to the Wolfman, coming to know that one's little world is neither what it seems, nor all there is in life.