California Dreams Fade In, Fade Out

Once and for all, today’s column should silence critics who have been lamenting for years, “Why can’t we get more news about Lebanon, Tenn., in the Los Angeles Times?”

Last Sunday, I wrote about Dave and Adrienne Kirkey, a couple in their early 50s -- Californians their entire adult lives -- who packed up in May for Tennessee, settling in Lebanon, a growing town of 25,000 near Nashville. They embody some of the reasons people leave California, in their case Coto de Caza, for places a bit off the radar screen.

To my surprise the column prompted a response from Kim Cantwell, who lives in nearby Lake Forest but who until a month ago lived in -- are you kidding me? -- Lebanon, Tenn.

In a way, it figures, even if the symmetry is weird. As the Golden State dream fades for one, it beckons another.

Or to be more accurate in describing Cantwell’s westward move, sometimes life just works out that way.

So, if only to square the cosmic circle, I wondered how Cantwell, a longtime, small-town Tennessean who traded places with the Kirkeys, is faring.

And just as the Kirkeys told me last week that life is just different in Tennessee, so does Cantwell say that life is just different in Southern California.

For Cantwell, like everyone in Southern California, the story starts with housing. Her Lebanon home, which her college-age daughter still lives in, has 2,000 square feet, four bedrooms, 2 1/2 baths and sits on a half-acre. In Lake Forest, she’s living with her husband of six months in a 740-square-foot studio apartment.

“I kept saying to my husband before I moved here, ‘Can’t we buy something? We don’t have to buy a house, let’s just buy a townhouse.’ He kept saying, ‘Kim, you don’t understand.’ ”

The couple met late in 2002 when Cantwell was in Orange County at a training session for employees of Toshiba America. They married last January and lived separately until last month, when Cantwell moved to Orange County after taking a buyout.

Cantwell, 42, lived in Lebanon as a child and then again for 20 years until leaving last month. “The whole time we were dating and engaged, we had planned to [live in] Lebanon” as soon as her husband -- also a Toshiba employee -- could move out from Orange County, she says. “The entire time I kept telling everyone, ‘I will not leave, I will not leave, I’m not living out there.’ ”

Like many Americans, she just couldn’t picture living in California. And in her first month, she’s still grappling with directions and freeways and the unfamiliarity of not having longtime friends in her daily orbit. “I’m used to driving on the interstate, but it’s just so much different here,” she says. Not to mention the occasional times when locals don’t exhibit the kind of Tennessee gentility to which she’s accustomed.

When she tells her husband about them, she shorthands it to: “I had a California experience today.”

But Cantwell is hardly miserable. “The weather is fabulous,” she says. “I think California is beautiful. I wasn’t expecting mountains next to the beach ... Where we live is very nice. And the variety of people, just the variety of shopping, restaurants -- you’re not going to get that in Nashville, let alone Lebanon.”

She laughs when confiding that Lake Forest seems like a big city; San Clemente is more her style, she says. And while she says her husband has promised that they’ll eventually return to Tennessee, Cantwell also is committed to getting the hang of California.

“Actually, I’m thinking I’d like to have this experience under my belt,” she says. “Right now, people [from home] are saying, ‘You’re living in California?’ My brother said, ‘I can’t believe I have a sister living in California.’ ”

Pausing a moment, Cantwell says, “I think that’s kind of cool.”

Dana Parsons can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at

dana.parsons@ latimes.com.