Where the Living Is Easy

La Jolla is typical of the area's sunny disposition: The average daily high is 70.5 degrees. Photo: Mary Knox Merrill/the Christian Science Monitor/Getty Images

Blame it on the weather. It’s tough to keep your head in the game in a town where leisure is mandated by a mild climate regarded as the finest in the country. Could this explain why the Chargers have never won a Super Bowl, why the Padres have never won a World Series? The Chargers are 0 for 42, the Padres 0 for 39—collective incompetence that even Chicago sports fans have to admire.

The weather, joking aside, conceivably is a factor, according to one authority, Dr. Alan Stewart, a University of Georgia professor who is researching climate’s effect on behavior. “I lived in Florida for five years,” he says, “and for the first year or so every day was like a spring or summer holiday. It was Christmastime and it was sunny and 75 degrees and people were cooking out and boating. After awhile I felt I was kind of out of synch. There was a mismatch between what my inner clock was saying and the weather conditions. A similar thing might play itself out for a baseball player.”

This is only conjecture, Stewart cautioned, but let it be known that once again the weather of late has been as good as the Padres have been bad. Hold the tickertape.

And the sympathy cards. Let other cities enjoy their day in the sun. In San Diego every day is a sun day; the average annual rainfall is less than 12 inches. Rain is such an anomaly that when it inconceivably rained one summer day in 1982, the Padres’ grounds crew did not know how to unroll the tarp, resulting in a rainout, one of only 16 in 39-plus seasons in San Diego.

Usually there is no more need for an infield tarp than there is for a weatherman. Is there an easier job in San Diego? The weatherman’s greatest challenge is finding a new way to say sunny and warm, a pattern interrupted only in May and June (so it would seem), when a marine layer often blankets the coastal towns in the mornings. The marine layer, a phenomenon known as May gray and June gloom, typically burns off by noon, leaving sunny and warm in its wake.

Even San Diego’s cold months are warm; the average high in the dead of winter is 66 degrees. Its average for the warmest months, meanwhile, tops out at 78.

“When Adam and Eve were evicted and sent to dwell somewhere east of Eden,” New York columnist James Brady wrote of San Diego during the Republican National Convention there in the summer of ’96, “God whipped up a second garden that fell just short of the original, but not by much.”

If San Diegans are in fact devoted to sun worship, that would suggest that serious work is not being done. The cynic would note that although San Diego is the eighth-largest city in the U.S., it is home to only three Fortune 500 companies (Qualcomm, Sempra Energy and Science Applications International Corp.).

“Whatever,” its bronzed denizens might say in response. San Diego is unapologetically laid back; even its police have been known to patrol the beach in short pants.

Sophisticates also would no doubt find it objectionable that San Diego considers itself a cosmopolitan city when its international airport has only a single runway. San Diego’s rejoinder: Why would anyone want to leave?

Dr. Seuss, incidentally, was not San Diego’s only literary association. The crime novelist Raymond Chandler spent the latter part of his life in La Jolla, which he described as “a nice place … for old people and their parents.”

His flippancy notwithstanding, there is an element of logic there. San Diego has a timeless quality that lies at the root of its appeal across a spectrum of ages, something of an endless summer.

Its perfect climate may or may not discourage weightier pursuits, but in the event it does, that doesn’t warrant an indictment against an entire city. San Diegans are no more or less learned than anyone else, though they have one advantage in the subject of science.

Inherently they understand that the sun is a star.