It was unseasonably warm last night as we took our evening walk. The sliver of a crescent moon hung low in the western sky, glowing orange in the bad air. The stars were unusually bright, both of them. As we walked our little Bako neighborhood, my thoughts turned to... Dallas.
Not the city, the TV show.
Specifically, Season 8.
During Season 7, actor Patrick Duffy had grown bored playing "good guy" Bobby Ewing. He was a big TV star now and there were surely bigger and better things ahead for him, so he asked the producers to let him out of his contract. They obliged and promptly killed off his character.
Season 8 proceeded sans Bobby Ewing, but the bigger and better things didn't materialize for Mr. Duffy. So he asked to come back to the show. Once again, the producers were happy to oblige, but there was a problem... he was dead. Or rather, his character was. You have pretty limited options for bringing a character back from the dead, especially if you rule out the "evil twin" scenario. So the producers came up with a novel solution.
Season 9 began with Bobby's grieving widow awaking to the sound of running water in the bathroom. She goes to investigate and discovers her dead husband in the shower. "But how can this be?!" she exclaims. "You're dead!".
"Oh honey", he replies. "You were just having a bad dream."
And that was that.
Season 8 didn't happen.
It was all just a bad dream.
And never spoken of again.
I've decided this will be the approach we take in regard to our two and half year stay in Bakersfield... it never happened.
We'll do a little nip and a tuck on our personal history and surgically remove 2010 and 2011. We'll fudge the dates to hide the scars and from now on our official story is that we lost our house in LA and then moved to Orange County for new job opportunities. Nothing to see here, move along.
Sure, if anyone were to examine it closely, the puzzle pieces wouldn't quite fit and the dates wouldn't jibe, but why would anyone do that? And soon enough, it will all grow blurry in the mists of time and become irrelevant. Bakersfield will be as it should be... forgotten.
