The Bell Curve:

When I checked my backyard this morning, as I do every morning, I thought I could detect some new green grassy spots in the mud. It may have been pure imagination. I’ve been fantasizing about that picture for so long that I can no longer separate high hopes from reality.

Dealing with unfulfilled expectations that I might awake one day to a carpet of green surrounding my house has been a blight on my life — and my bank account — for several years. There’s a kind of certainty of failure in each new attempt to achieve it.

It has been 50 years since I moved from a suburb of Chicago to Southern California, where a good many natives have never awakened to a vista of shimmering green grass. Instead, they plant rocks and crab-grass on sand, while I try and fail to create an island of green.

Deprived of the real thing, I dream of a funky mom ’n’ pop motel I once frequented in Columbia City, Ind. It nestles atop a hill commanding a bright green carpet of grass as far, it seems, as the eye can see. Sitting there with a drink at dusk is the ultimate peace.

Empty stadiums surrounding a brilliant spot of green playing field have a similar effect. My two grandsons and I had a secret entrance to the Colorado University stadium, and we would go there in the offseason to play imaginary football before 50,000 empty seats.

Driving through the Midwest, I would always look for college campuses and stadiums as rest spots, because they offer that same sense of peace I seek in my backyard. That sentiment made up a large part of the reason I settled my family in what was then called Santa Ana Heights — and is now part of Newport Beach.

Only the richest resident could afford enough real estate to surround his home with green grass.

But where they sought an ocean view, I was seeking a yard large enough to make it my spot of Indiana.

And it worked for many years, until watering became a difficult chore and the ash tree in my backyard grew such a high density of foliage that it cut off the sun so totally that even the crab grass filling in for the real thing began to turn brown and die. That started me on a journey with the people who make a living nurturing and generally cheer leading our green grass hopes.