Joan Didion's essay Notes From a Native Daughter describes what it must have been like to have grown up in Sacramento in the 1950's and 60's and while I can recognize some of Joan's Sacramento, it is not the Sacramento I grew up in.

We lived in a yellow house on Pershing Avenue in Orangevale, which is right next to Folsom. By the 70's and 80's, the city was so sprawled out that all of the little suburbs and small towns might have names like Fair Oaks and Del Paso Heights, but the people who lived in them thought they were a part of Sacramento. We were connected by the traffic and the heat that made its way along the concrete and past all of the new malls and buildings.