Another Post

Los Angeles is a place of people, a city in population, a pantheon. It isn't a love-at-first-sight, concrete city. It's easy to understand why human beings from Poitiers, France, Des Moines, Iowa and Clinton, Ct are smitten from afar and upon arrival, agape at the bar graph city skyline, the uniform grid of streets, the up and up architecture, the bustling sidewalks of mismatched people, the smells of dirty water hot dogs, candied nuts, sewer, bum, and bus exhaust tingling the nostrils, the large-windowed shops of Midtown, the boutiques of the leafy, windy, ivy West Village, the height and breadth and vividity of New York City. I love New York. I love New York. I grew up two hours away from the city. If you were artistic or smart of weird or into art and books and clothes you believed you ought to be there and when strangers or teachers told you - you should go there, you thought, when you heard that, "You. Are. So. Right." That is where I belong. Where I will finally be understood. Or lost in the crowd. Or able to make my mark. Where I will feel a kinship to history and humanity and Patty Smith and the beating pulse of America. So I moved there. And it was hard. It was intoxicating, and I ran down the subway stairs after a dance class with a hundred girls as good as I was. I went to museums I had only read about in books, saw in movies, and visited on too brief field trips from school, and wandered lonely and mysterious and felt like I was breathing true air for the first time. I worked and lived in apartments and tried as hard as I knew how to make it there. It isn't easy to stay, but it's impossible not to fall and feel in wonder and in awe upon arrival. It is the jumping off point of the American dream. Almost all the people I still know there are in finance or are consultants.

Unlike compact New York LA is sprawling. Disconnected. It is not iconic. There are mansions and the beach, big, deep beaches that are very beautiful, and palm trees so tall and magnificent your head swims, the Hollywood sign, which, like the Mona Lisa, is much smaller in real life. There are things one must see. But it's hard to think of what they are. There are places to be discovered. But I don't know about them yet. Everyone is very happy that we are here. All the people I meet genuinely like living here and thinks it's an inspiring coup that I've escaped the brutal cold vortex of "back East". It's in the past, they seem to say. Welcome to your future. Cult members, all of them, from those who were born here to the newly indoctrinated. They last ones arrived are the first to want to leave their hazing mark on your poor skin, so unused to all this singeing sunshine. One of us, one of us. They're all eating lotus fruit I haven't found at Pavillions. I don't hate it, but it doesn't feel like home. I don't love it, but I hate saying I don't love it because it makes me seem, by comparison, awfully pessimistic. Maybe you shouldn't move anywhere so alien when you're over the age of thirty. My sense of adventure has succumbed to my desire for a house near the ocean with two bathrooms and a kitchen garden. But this is still my time to uncover. I'm here doing this and not anything else. I am compelled to figure out what is good about this city even if I'm not in the movies or hungry with desire to succeed in the spotlight. We all want success. And to feel integrated into the world as we imagine it. Some achieve this by never leaving their birthplace, others wander aimlessly forever.  My aim is true, if not, at this late hour, defined. I guess we'll just have to wait to find out how it ends. In the meantime, when life gives you avocados, make guacamole.

The First Days of California

The section of Magnolia Boulevard, from Buena Vista to Vineland, is a wide sidewalk-lined two way street between media-driven downtown Burbank and the North Hollywood Wasteland. We now live in this quiet neighborhood of vintage shops full of ladies clothing from the twentieth century, beauty parlors, and small, well-tended houses. I buy a loaf of airy, tough-crust bread from the familiar Pinocchio deli, where the old man smiles at us and gives Violet a slice of salami and a bread stick while we wait. We go to the playground, where Mexican nannies, twenty-something nannies, and the token dad and I all watch toddlers act like antisocial lunatics. They climb up slides and steal each others sand toys. Violet loves to hold hands and slide side by side. We visit our library branch. There's a tree in the children's room. And also outside trees are living, roses in bloom, austere, steep conifers, and of course iconic palms. It feels good to stand in the breeze. Between five and five-thirty parrots arrive, from where I don't know. I think it's mating season. They are noisy and beautiful as one would expect. Every day I've wished I had a dollar in cash to buy a rocket pop from the ice cream man. Perhaps tomorrow. Mostly I feel nothing.