The March for Truth, Los Angeles

 It doesn't get better that this. Behind the plaza where we were waiting to begin the march was a giant excavator digging up shovel after shovel of dirt. No, this was not the movie called March for Truth; this was the March for Truth.

Some of my favorite signs

Afterwards I went to see the play Archduke, a fictionalized exploration of the backstory in the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. While I did not find the play emotionally involving, I did find the questions it posed food for thought. Are terrorists/assassins all just crazy psychos? Are they fervently devoted to their mission or manipulated by a mentor? What part does prejudice, politics, and hopelessness play in their radicalization? In a totalitarian regime these are not idle discussion points over dinner.

My favorite chant in every march I've attended has been this call and response:
Tell me what democracy looks like.
This is what democracy looks like.

You'll Want to Have What I Had

I had two glasses of the above concoction with some ceviche and chips last night.

Dream:

Dan Paik came back from the dead, wearing a long red skirt over tight pants, a bolero, a kimono, and two hats perched at jaunty angles. He came bearing gifts for every birthday and holiday that he'd missed. In the dream, I didn't quite realize that he'd been dead, I thought he'd stayed away because  he'd broken up with me. What's all this? I asked of the dozens of colorful shoes, the chocolates shaped like animals, the watercolor paints. "It's all for you, baby," he said. The gift that beat all gifts was an immense curly-haired dog wearing an embroidered jacket that said flowers and candy in romantic curlicued script. "Is that his name?" I asked. Dan laughed and shrugged. All this while I'm thinking, uh-oh, what about Amado? 

Dan and I were sitting on the bed in my apartment and I could hear Amado whistling as he came up the stairs. I stood up to hug Amado, then turned toward Dan. "Guys, I've got some explaining to do," I said. They listened and there was some back and forth about what it meant to be dead. "It's time to go downstairs," Dan said. The three of us descended into the street and half of L.A. was standing there, necks craned upward. It was the night of the Bobbing Man, or maybe it was Ballooning Men. The sky was full of  primary colored life-size balloon men, some of them anatomically correct. When one of the endowed balloon men bobbed up and down in the evening breeze, a roar would rise from the crowd. 

Dan, Amado and I walked around in amazement. The sunset had lit  the sky on fire and torches lined the street. It wasn't long before we ran into my friend Paula and her sisters who had traveled from Arizona to witness the spectacle. I tried to explain about Dan and got confused, but Paula seemed to take it all in stride. We sat on a bench and talked, and my younger daughter who was still a young teenager came and lay across our laps and fell asleep. I thought about telling Paula that I might be leaving the Earth soon, that I felt like I was as tenuously tied to this life as one of the balloon men, but I didn't want to risk worrying my daughter, so I kept that thought to myself.

What the heck? But thanks for the visit, Dan Paik. It was lovely to see you. Coincidentally, it was my friend Paula, who appeared in the dream, that left the bottle of La Vida Bonita at my house.  What a pretty life, indeed.  But who is Amado?

HAKA with Standing Rock

It's been five days since the  NoDAPL march in Los Angeles, and I cannot get the young woman I saw out of my mind. Standing just behind me to the left at the end of the march, I heard her before I saw her. Her shrill cry got the attention of everyone in our immediate area. Two or three large TV news-style cameras came running as we backed away. "Maori," a man whispered. Another repeated him. "Maori, Maori," went the ripple of mumbles from one person to the next while the cameras churned, and I tried to decide if what I was seeing was simply too painful to behold.

Worthy of a spot in the pantheon of spell-binding, breath-stopping stage performances, this young woman, I have since figured out, was performing a haka. A solo haka no less. You might have seen a group one on You-Tube. There was one going around several months back with beefy gorgeous guys. This was not that. Wikepedia's definition doesn't really capture what I saw on the steps of the L.A. Federal building  either:

The haka (plural haka, as in Māori, so in English) is a traditional war cry, dance, or challenge from the Māori people of New Zealand. It is a posture dance performed by a group, with vigorous movements and stamping of the feet with rhythmically shouted accompaniment...

Various actions are employed in the course of a performance, including facial contortions such as showing the whites of the eyes and poking out the tongue, and a wide variety of vigorous body actions such as slapping the hands against the body and stomping of the feet. As well as chanted words, a variety of cries and grunts are used. Haka may be understood as a kind of symphony in which the different parts of the body represent many instruments. 

I don't know if  this solo female NoDAPL haka turned up on any TV news coverage. I searched the Internet and could not find it. But I can't forget it. She was young and beautiful, this woman. Her soul was visible. She was a symphony of pure being.

Here is a link to an article about Maori performing haka in solidarity with Standing Rock. The second  video in the piece is a solo woman (but not the woman in L.A.) From the article you can link to a FB page titled Haka With Standing Rock that also contains other pipeline updates.

Happy Mother's Day

Jacaranda Trees in Bloom at Grand Park, Los Angeles

I rode the train into downtown L.A. today.
Time travel.
There I was at the Oxnard train station, walking along the platform where two years ago, I would have met Dan as he stepped off the train, coming to see me for the weekend.  
Time travel.
There I was with a ticket marked "senior fare." As if I'd been asleep and awakened to find myself a senior citizen (by Amtrak standards anyway.)
Time travel.
I swear this park didn't exist the last time I was downtown, its wide swath of trees and fountains leading directly to the Music Center.
Time Travel.
It's Mother's Day. Last year I had a mother to celebrate with. This year I do not.
You go along and you go along, and then all of a sudden you are without the people you can't imagine being without. You yourself are old enough to get the senior discount, and a technicolor park emerges from the gray cityscape of the City of Angels.
There's nothing to be done but weep and celebrate, drink champagne, eat escargot and mussels with  the beautiful young woman who was once a baby in your arms and take the train back home.

Dispatch from Los Angeles--Part 2

The book salon feast and its creator, reflected in the mirror.

"Despite the shock of walking into an empty flat, the absence isn't immediate, more a fade from the present tense you shared, a melting into the past, not an erasure but a conversion in form, from presence to memory, from solid to liquid, and the person you once touched now runs over your skin, now in sheets down your back, and you may bathe, may sink, may drown in the memory, but your fingers cannot hold it."--from Anthony Marra's novel "A Constellation of Vital Phenomena."

A story set during the two recent Chechen wars, Marra's novel has a lot to say about loss, love, cultural identity, betrayal, survival, war, and the art and objects we humans use to connect, commemorate, and remember one another.

The meal was sublime. Yes, of course there was vodka. We poured it into white creme de menthe to make a cocktail called a stinger and we poured it into pomegranate lemonade. There was also dovga--yogurt soup with greens and herbs. There was beef manti and stuffed grape leaves and a dish with peppers that I wish I could be spooning into my mouth right now. And you might want to lie down in case you feel faint when I tell you that we had homemade halva ice cream with homemade chocolate sauce and salted peanuts for dessert.

Then I dove into my bed for the night where I looked out over the City of Angels. Really.

I went to LACMA again this morning, as has become my habit, where I visited the Art of the Americas Building. It lives up to that rather broad name. The heyday of American furniture and decorative arts, and all that, and in a sort of reverse chronology, on the top floor there's this:

The photo can't capture the experience at all.

I gasped when I rounded the corner and caught a glimpse of this gallery with its draperies of reds and greens floating above and its curving walls fashioned of wooded slats. There are one of a kind chandeliers and  lighting that cannot be captured in a photo, and in about 5 seconds you forget all of this because the ancient art is positively stupendous.

And there's this somewhat more modern piece, which was different from everything else, but quite fitting with the larger theme of this 24 hours.

And downstairs, before I walked up the steps to the long, long ago past, there was this:

It fits right in. There were several conjoined couples in the ancient Mexican/Central American clay pieces.

24 Hours

This is the So Cal talk of the town this evening. But not for me.

I slipped out the door yesterday morning, simply telling my mother that I was off to an evening of theatre with old friends. (M is here.)

It was a much bigger day than that. It was a drive through the past, recent and not-so-recent, in a grid-lock through L.A. way where you have time to inhabit years of your life, taking it all in, remembering this and wondering if you'll ever forget that.

I had lunch with my dear friend Elizabeth, a friend I know "in the memoir way." You want to get to know someone? Take a memoir writing class. Write down your story. Read it. Listen while they read some pages from their story. Repeat, repeat. Thereafter those words will always hover between you. They are the basis for how you know them. How you trusted them with your story. How they will always be able to trust you with theirs. Sprinkle some of that over your Greek salad.

She and I went to the memorial service for the husband of the beautiful and fabulous women who taught that first class we took something close to a decade ago. This must be hard for you, Elizabeth and other friends said, acknowledging my own recent loss of the man who loved me. A dark place I chose not to step into. One cannot go to the service for another's beloved and wail. T'ai Chi Chih has taught me to place my feet flat on the floor, to feel the earth beneath the floor, and connect with the energy there. To breathe. To recognize my t'an tien. Your friend's grief is not your grief. All grief is all grief, said the voices in my head. Both are true. So I let those voices just talk it out while my feet stayed flat.

There were prayers, and poems, and remembrances. One learns so much at a memorial. Memorial. Memoir. Both peel open the story. The music, performed by the church choir and a soloist from the Los Angeles Opera was probably the most stunning I have ever heard at a church service. The soloist, a beautiful young soprano, was from South Korea. Dan's face seemed to materialize from her face in the moments I felt most transported. There he was in front of me, my beloved.

Then came the driving. I drove through one old neighborhood after another on surface streets, crawling along in traffic that seemed just one car short of gridlock, contemplating the three decades of my life with a man who discarded me like I was nothing. How incredibly lucky that was in the bad luck good luck sort of way. I shuffled my plans around to this and that as if all the time travel was unhinging my brain and after, a stop at a favorite museum, ended up in the new incarnation of the very restaurant where, for years, I ate dinner nearly every Sunday night with The Someone, Finally, I went to the theatre with friends and saw a play that I performed in myself forty years ago. I slept at the house of those dear old friends who gave me oranges and almonds this morning that I ate in my car with a perfect latté I bought at an old-haunt coffee shop.

It was a lot to think about.

And 24 hours later, an empty cup in my cup-holder, I was back. Not singed from the re-entry, but warmed.

How I Met Dan

My date first messaged me on Match.com a couple of weeks earlier while I was visiting friends in Portland. My friend Robin and I sat on the couch, our heads together over my laptop and scrolled through the pictures and profiles of the men who were interested in me. “Date the bass player,” she said. “They don’t have to be the center of attention.” After decades with a man who remained at the dinner table or a party only when he commanded the room, I liked the idea of someone who didn’t need to be wailing the melody center stage. The bass player had a solid day job, too and was fit from years of practicing and teaching Tai Chi. He didn’t profess to have any “unusual needs” like the guy in the loafers and the sport coat who explained during our online correspondence that he insisted on being “included” when his girlfriends used the toilet. The bass player didn’t post dozens of pictures of himself poolside in a skimpy pair of Speedos or shots of his pet lizards posed on toy furniture. So I took Robin’s advice and answered his message. 

We agreed on a hike for our first date and climbed one of the trails near the Griffith Park Observatory on a December Southern California day when you could actually see into the distance. The ocean was shimmering in the sunlight; storm clouds piled up like a stack of pillows over the San Gabriel Mountains, and from our particular angle the Hollywood sign appeared to read, "Hollywoo." There wasn't really any serious wooing going on though. Both of us were cautious. But conversation was easy, sweet and deep. After two hours of talking and walking we hugged and agreed we’d get together again. Then we got into our separate cars and drove down the hill. At the bottom, as we sat side by side at a stop sign, he blew me a kiss before we turned in opposite directions.  

            But I wondered if I really would see him again. My experience with Internet dating did not include much forthrightness when it came time for the on-the-spot analysis of the first meeting. “It would be fun to get together again,” I told the stocky curly-haired guy I’d met for coffee after a couple of weeks of emailing back and forth about our favorite New Yorker stories. He had teeth the color of topaz and t-shirt so sweaty that I shook his hand with a fully extended arm and had no intention of seeing him again. 

            “You’re beautiful and sexy and you have a great sense of humor,” the screenwriter on the verge of his big break told me at the culmination of our expensive dinner. I tried to envision my silver hair glistening in the candlelight like some ad in an AARP magazine, but I saw the way his gaze shifted every time a pretty woman young enough to be my daughter walked by our table. “I’ll call you next week,” he said as he kissed my cheek. I knew he wouldn’t.

            Dating at the age of fifty-plus includes the inherent knowledge that we’ve all been broken, and there seems to be an ethic that says, “Do no further harm.” It makes it hard to be honest about the prospects of beginning a relationship. But with a little bit of luck a pleasant hour or two has been spent, and one returns home with a clearer idea of what characteristics might be included in that perfect match.  If you are someone that dates with your head and not your heart, that is.

            I have no idea what the bass player sees in me, is what my head says as I ride next to him. I ponder his profile while he watches the six lanes of traffic in front of us. We’re so different from one another, I think. Different ethnicities. An age gap of ten years. I’m taller. I know very little about music or eastern religion. But then he glances my direction and our eyes meet. There’s nothing I’d like better than to skate my palms over his shaved head and bring his mouth to mine. How exactly did an online dating site figure this out?  Or am I just swept away in the moment the way I was last summer before I got tired of the playwright who wanted to read me a play of his every evening before we turned out the lights?

            I’m striving for more candor this time around, and while I don’t think Internet dating requires a brutally accurate assessment of why people don’t especially want to go on that second date, I aspire to some degree of honesty. “I don’t ever plan on getting married again and if we continue to see each other, I’m going to take things very slowly,” I told my date before our good-bye hug in Griffith Park. “It might be months before I’m alone with you in the dark,” was my response after he invited me over to his place to watch a movie. “I’m really glad you came to the airport,” I tell him now, electing to keep my hands to myself in an effort to avoid a fifty-car pile up.

            When we get to my place, I invite him in for a glass of wine. I’ve already told him I’m not ready to sleep with him yet, but as we sit in my living room with the lights low, visions of the future stand quietly in the shadows. Through the French doors, I can see the ivy and jasmine vining around my patio, and it’s easy to imagine my roses in full bloom when summer comes. Something is unfurling inside my heart.

            In this era of Internet dating, love happens the way it always has. It’s not a laundry list of attributes or an inventory of likes and dislikes that propel us toward one another. It’s an earlobe, the taste of a kiss, or the way someone nods when they understand what is being said. Dating sites no doubt increase the traffic on the freeway to our hearts. The intersection of the data on our screens and the input of our senses is a good place to stop and smell the roses. But love, as it’s always been, is still a happy accident where the palpable world collides with the mysteriously intangible. 

            My date pats the sofa as I set two glasses of wine on the coffee table. I curl up next to him, pondering the wonders of Internet dating and the small miracle of how, in a city of almost four million people, I’ve been guided to someone I never would have found on my own.

Hospital: Day 3 or How I learned to love the L.A. freeways--and thank you

The infamous 405, (as seen from the Getty Museum) looking like a river of molten lava

I moved to Los Angeles from the midwest in 1975. I didn't have a car, so I took the bus to work, and my boyfriend drove me anyplace else I wanted to go. The freeway on-ramp in our neighborhood was also an off-ramp (I'm not going to explain this--if you don't get it, be glad.) When I finally started driving in L.A., I would cry--no matter if I was merging in or getting off. Thirty-some years later, I still loathed driving the freeways.

It was a big relief for a million reasons when I moved out of L.A. to my little paradise up the coast. These past few days with the man who loves me in a suburban L.A. hospital, the freeway speeds me to him. Five lanes going exactly where I want to go.

This marvel of modern urban engineering also delivered my friend Toni to my house this morning where she is hanging out with my mother, who after her tug of war with the neurologist yesterday, has fervently promised to be good, while admitting that she should not be left alone for hours and hours. (More about that in the next report from Pillville.) This evening the freeways will speed me to the nearby house of a couple more friends where I will enjoy their good company and the antics of their handsome cats before I'm given a bed for the night.

Then tomorrow, back to the hospital for day 4. The man who loves me is doing well--as well as anyone can do after such a traumatic surgery. The cancer is out. The road ahead of him will not be a fast and furious freeway. But on that slow and narrow lane that leads back to wellness, all I ask is that it be smooth.

Thank you all so much for your good wishes.

The water in the marina looks like a sheet of corrugated tin. Pathway and dock lights reflect off its ripples as I look down from my darkened bedroom. I want to sleep, but part of me is on the lookout for masked gunmen. My imagination culls my rollodex for sociopaths. How is it that a person can buy 6,000 rounds of ammo in two weeks and no alarm bells sound? I had to answer a hundred questions to get a home loan. I had to explain and prove how I'd gotten the money for the down payment. I just joined the local yacht club and was required to list four references complete with their addresses, and I had to be sponsored by two current members. I don't even own a boat. How much harm can I cause poolside or in the bar or dining room? Plenty, I suppose if I had an arsenal of guns and a free run at all the ammo I could want. And those things seem much easier to acquire that a mortgage or a membership card.
"You have the right person," the mother of the shooter said. How is it that a parent can so quickly recognize a child as a mass murderer, but not have gotten the intervention required to keep her child from hurting so many people? We ask these questions over and over again because we do nothing in our land of the free to stop these tragedies from unfolding.
We are afraid of planes and airports. Our high schools are fortresses patrolled by armed guards. Now we've lost the sweet escape of  the movies.

It's quiet here in Margaritaville. I'm not awakened by sirens, police helicopters, or gunshots. The throaty call of herons has been the only midnight disturbance. I raised my kids in the middle of L.A. for the first half of their childhoods. When I went out to walk C in her stroller her first New Year's morning, the sidewalk was littered with celebratory bullet casings. When she was just a few weeks old, I carried her across a puddle of dried blood to a theatre company meeting. M's friend, a boy we'd known since kindergarten, was shot and killed at a party when he was 17. At one point in the late 70s, most of my close friends had all been mugged at gunpoint. These are the things I know about guns. I don't know anyone personally who has warded off an attack with a gun. No one fired back in that dark theater. A well-meaning upstanding citizen with a gun would probably have only added to the carnage.

I first saw a world-wide comparison of deaths by firearms right after I move to L.A. I clipped it out and stuck it on my refrigerator. It might have still been stuck there the day the bank robber waved his gun at me while I was planting flowers with the neighbor's little boy. The robber was in a helluva hurry. We stood up to give him room to climb over the fence, but for a second, while I was on my knees in the dirt, the gun was at eye level.

Here are the RECENT STATISTICS.

I didn't notice the San Pedro Street trees at first. The jacarandas are blooming, and Little Tokyo is stealing the show, ringed by the jacarandas' purple curtain. The trees on San Pedro street are not in blossom. They do not tower over the people on the sidewalks or reach up to the windows, but these trees on San Pedro Street are giants of possibility. I learned about them from a student of mine at the DWC. A tree saved her life once. You can watch for her story on the Trees on San Pedro Street Project blog.

Why I Am Moving

"Why did you move?" This question from one of my readers appeared as a comment on my last post. I'd been asking myself the same thing all day. Standing alone on the empty beach under a gray sky with the man who loves me sixty-five miles away, how could I not ask that question?

I tallied up the reasons on the walk home and have been going over them for the last day and a half.

1) My eighty-eight-year-old mom is coming to live with me, and would have trouble managing the four-story "tower house" floor plan of my current place.

2) I've wanted to live by the water ever since I was 11 or 12 years old, goofing around outside my friend Kim's house with her skateboard and her transistor radio playing The Beach Boys "Little Surfer Girl." I'd already caught the wave that included Elvis's "Blue Hawaii," and the Gidget movies. By the time the Gidget TV show aired, California was mine--if only inside my head. When I finally moved to L.A. from the midwest a decade later, I couldn't imagine how I ended up so far from the ocean.

3) I have more than 35 years of memories in Los Angeles. Nearly everywhere I've been in L.A. is someplace I've gone with The Someone. The narrative runs through my head constantly. I'd need some sort of lobotomy to stop it.

4) Downsizing was okay. It was good in many ways, in fact. But despite the fact that buying a bigger place seems misguided at almost 60, I want to gather those people I love and enjoy to my heart and to my hearth. I think I have some talent for this. I have three children and three grandchildren. I hope to have more (grandchildren, that is.) I am serious when I say I want house guests. I hope my grandchildren will come for a long stretch of each summer because I think parents need a break whether they realize it or not.

5) It's cooler here. I'm wearing a wool sweater right now.

6) There are blue herons and pelicans, and other birds I haven't yet learned the names of.

7) I have a boat dock here. I lived in a house with a boat dock until I was five years old. We had a pontoon boat, and a row boat, and a motor boat. I like boats. I need to learn something new. Kayaking seems like a good thing to learn.

8) About half of my L.A. friends have moved away. Others are planning on it. The rest live across town, and I seldom see them anyway.

9) The traffic in L.A. keeps getting worse. The smog is still bad--even though every year, they say it's not as bad as it used to be.

10) I had to move somewhere. Really, I did. It's not that far from L.A. There are trains--Amtrak, Metrolink. You could even come here by boat. If you had one.

Leaving the City of Angels

It's stalking me, this feeling. This feeling that leaving L. A. is bigger and wider than I want to admit. The city where I've spent nearly two-thirds of my life is about to become a pinpoint of the map of my past.

It was sweltering the day I arrived, sweating in the passenger seat of a 1966 Dodge Coronet. No one would recognize either of us now--the lanky blond boy that became my husband a year later, or the round-cheeked girl with dark hair falling to her waist. They inhabit the past, too.

And they inhabit the present.

Last night I thought about the way things end. How, in my choking grief after he left me, I told everyone I was already over it and moving on. It wasn't a lie. It wasn't the truth. "I'm over it," I'd say, sometimes laughing. Sometimes weeping.

I'll drive out of the City of Angels alone. I know I'll look back. There's a lot to see. But I'll be looking forward, too.

Here's what I saw from my patio last night:

I went to another L.A. Literary Event last night. The daughter C. and I soaked up the neon atmosphere of Chinatown before we entered into the crimson cave that is The Mountain Bar. Hipster dive bar, I've heard it called. C. says all hipster bars are dive bars. But not all dive bars are hipster bars. In her line of work, there are always true dive bars in the neighborhood. Tall ship sailors hang out in ports, and ports are not the gentrified end of town. But in the sea of literary dive-y-ness that washed up in the Mountain Bar last night, there was literary gentry, and it was cool to think, hey, yeah, I'm in the the same lit mag those folks are in. It makes the beer taste better, anyway.

Sam Dunn was one of the readers last night. She said something about "the psychosis of place" as she prefaced her reading, and the phrase has been bumping around in my brain. Place effects me tremendously. In a new place I sometimes feel as if my old self could be taken over by a new me. As if something akin to the French concept of terroir might grow a new person.

Place is context. I couldn't help noticing that in the hundred or so people crammed into the reading, that I was the lone silver-haired woman. There were silver-haired men. They stood at the bar and ordered Cosmos for their wives or girlfriends and carried them back to women who were not gray. Ah, well--this is aging in the context of The City of Angels--even in a bar in Chinatown.

Old Haunts

I've been taking a class in the Writer's Program at UCLA Extension. Tonight I gave my driving jitters a break and came out early before the traffic got jammed and agressive. On campus for the first time while there was still some daylight, I noticed that the building where my class is held is very near the Law School. I went in and had a look around, used the restroom, and tried to figure out why it all looked so familiar. It was The Someone who went to law school there--not me. But I guess there were presentations or award ceremonies or something. Or maybe I gave him a ride a couple of times when his car was in the shop. And I think there was a cocktail party or two.

I'm always amazed how a place can roil the waters of memory and before I know it there are bodies floating on the surface. Last week after class, I decided to take city streets home instead of braving Freeway detours, Cal Trans' late night habit of road work, and the outtage of dozens of lights. Dark strange roads plummet me into a panicked despair. Driving through streets and neighborhoods that I haven't travelled since the 70s took me on a different sort of detour. I had conversations with The Someone. Sometimes these talks are replays of real conversations that we had in the past--or at least the gist of them. Sometimes I'm talking to him in the here and now. Inventing conversations that will never happen. But really, if I saw him in person, I wouldn't rush over and get chatty. So why do I talk to him in my head? And how do I stop?

As I begin to shape my weeks in a way that will include experiences other than staring at a blank word document and wishing I could or would write something, I have been doing a couple of different volunteer jobs. Today I sorted clothing donations at the DWC. A mountain of clothes. More clothes from Ann Taylor Loft than the inventory of an actual Ann Taylor Loft store. Things in such pristine condition that they may have actually been donated by the store. And if not, there's someone out there with a serious shopping addiction who just cleaned out her closet.

Los Angeles amazes me in this way. Such plenty. Such poverty. Three times a week, the women who patronize the DWC day center (these are the women who drop in for meals and showers and other care, but don't live there) get to "shop." The clothing, given the once over by volunteers like me in order to eliminate things too dirty or tattered, is sorted into piles of small, medium, large, and extra large before the women have at it. I haven't seen this in action yet, but today both residents and day center women chose Halloween costumes from the items we pulled from the giant pile and laid out on tables in the conference room. If you're downtown frequenting some of the meaner streets in the City of Angels, look for boas and flapper headdresses, for a genie, an airline stewardess, a church lady, a magician, a mannequin, a convict, and a doctor. Look for women who, once upon a time, probably had a place to call home just like you and me.

photo credit: dallas.about.com

Wilder than You Think

Wedged between some pots on my patio, I found this the other morning. 

It was tricky extricating it from its narrow berth, and I pulverized a three to four inch section of it as I lifted it out--so that means the snake that shed its silvery skin was about a foot long or a little more.

This is the sixth place I've lived since moving to L.A. in 1975. The wild thing about the duplex in Culver City was the neighbor's doberman--and the deranged roommates. On Manhattan Place in the Wilshire district a bank robber pushed me aside as he jumped over the back fence with a gun and a bag of money. In Silver Lake an expensive bike was stolen out of our garage as I walked back and forth between there and the house putting away Christmas decorations. In Los Feliz there were skunks and raccoons, avocado rustlers, and a housepainter who tried to infiltrate his way into the family. In Sierra Madre a scary drunk guy staggered into our driveway one night--and there were teenagers. Lots of teenagers. They're always wilder than you think, those teenagers. 

But I've never had a bear in my jacuzzi or a deer devour my garden or a coyote or a mountain lion stalk my children, as sometimes happens in certain neighborhoods in Los Angeles. And I've never seen a snake in L.A. except while hiking in the San Gabriel mountains.  I'm hoping this little guy is a baby boa constrictor and that it has an appetite for squirrel.

We All Fall Down

The first time I lived in New York City,  I arrived on a sweltering summer afternoon. Through the windows of the taxi I saw a rainbow stretching across the skyline while children shouted and splashed in the spray of open fire hydrants. My friends took me to a concert in Central Park that night, and as we walked home I was giddy with fact that New York would be my city for the next six weeks while I rehearsed a show that would tour middle schools in Wisconsin and Indiana. I lived in New York for another rehearsal period the next year, and then again for the summer of 1984 while I studied at HB Studios.

Counter to prevailing opinion, New Yorkers seemed to me to be friendly and talkative. I loved brushing shoulders with other people on my morning commute to rehearsal. The "bar car" on the Friday afternoon return to Grand Central was certainly far more congenial than being sealed in one's lonely automobile in L. A. I stumbled getting off a bus once in mid-town and and was scooped up and set on my feet by a man who was about to get on. He insisted on waiting for the next bus to be sure I was okay and to give me the name of a good shoe repair because the heel of my shoe had cracked in the mishap. Bus drivers gave me advice on how to get from here to there and how to vary that route if I was going to be coming home late at night by myself.

By February of 1986, I had a new baby. The acting career was finished, and I spent my days in a 450-square-foot apartment in the middle of Los Angeles. New York might have been a better environment  for my daughter and me back then. It would have easier to mix with other mothers and babies, to feel the hum of humans going about their days. Yes, there would have icy sidewalks and snow. But isolation is cold, too.

Five years after the birth of my first daughter, I considered that I might be suffering from some kind of late-onset postpartum insanity when I planned our first big family vacation that didn't revolve around a visit to see family in the Midwest. New York seemed like an off-kilter place to take a two-year-old, a five-year-old, and my mom and her twin sister who were then in their mid-sixties. If it turned to chaos, I'd be the one to blame. I bought theater tickets, made dinner reservations, planned which attractions we'd visit, and in a stroke of mothering genius, made our first stop FAO SWARZ where my daughters were each allowed to choose a new toy. Despite an emergency trip to Woolworth's on our second morning to buy a stroller (a two-year old in L.A. is quite capable of walking to the car), the vacation was a show-stopping hit. We returned nearly every spring for the next sixteen years.

The towers and the Pentagon had already been hit when my cell phone rang the morning of September 11th, 2001. My mother, who was living outside of Washington D.C., called to tell me the news. Instead of driving to the Burbank airport to board a plane to Arizona to see my son's new baby, I sat on my bed, alone, and watched on TV as the towers fell. My younger daughter and my husband were on a school camping trip and unreachable. My older daughter was in boarding school an hour away, and when I called the school office to see if I could speak to her, I was told that the administration was handling all communications to the student body.

I drove to a coffee shop not far from the school and watched another hour or so of coverage on their TV. Then I sat in my car in the coffee shop parking lot, checking the news on the radio every so often to see if L.A. had been hit. If the world was going to end, at least there was a chance of  getting to one of the people I loved.