Refugee from the City of Angels

I haven't moved a million miles from Los Angeles. I'm 70 miles away. I can drive there for lunch and be home in time for dinner. I can take the train, as I did on Thursday, for my regular gig on Skid Row at the DWC. In fact, there's an Amtrak train as well as a commuter train called Metrolink. I could even sail to L.A.--- if I had a boat.
But it's a different world here in Ventura County.
On Thursday I skittered along the narrow ribbons of shade through L.A.'s Little Tokyo. The village walkways and plazas are brick, and I felt like I'd been cooked in one of those clay casserole dishes by the time I got where I was going. Back at home in Oxnard that evening, when I stepped off the train I wished I had worn a polar fleece scarf instead of a cotton one.
L.A.'s smog is legendary. Any native Angeleno will tell you how much worse it was when they were kids. When I moved to Los Angeles from Minnesota in 1975 the contact lenses I wore in those days revolted, and I had laryngitis off and on for six months. The sky here in Ventura County is blue and clear and prone to the sort of white puffy clouds I used to draw into landscapes when I was a kid.
But it's not the lack of  heat and smog or even the absence of gridlock that blows my mind. It's the parking.
I went to the WESTSIDE ARTWALK in Ventura today. It's a big event. People have been talking about it all week. I planned to get an early start on the fun. Nab a prime parking spot and forego the frustration of circling through traffic or the hike from some distant outlying lot. But errands slowed me down, and by the time I left, it was just past noon. Oh well, I thought, if the parking is too far away, there'll be a shuttle bus.
Nope.
Despite the crowds, there was so much parking, I didn't stay parked in the first spot I chose on a side street just across from one of the galleries on the route. I was paranoid. There must be a "No Parking/Tow Away Zone" sign somewhere where I couldn't see it. So I moved. I found a city lot even closer to the heart of the action. "Free Parking All Day," it said. That can't be, I thought as I hunted for a posted notice that might proclaim, "NO ArtWalk Parking." But I left my car there, looking nervously over my shoulder for a parking enforcement officer as I walked away. After a couple of hours I began to worry. Maybe the sign said "fee" not "free." So I went back and moved my car to a different free parking lot. At the end of the day, I couldn't find my car. Towed, after all, I thought. But no, there were two free city lots so close together that I had confused them.
I have a new syndrome: PLAPA. Post Los Angeles Parking Anxiety. Maybe if I get a little boat, learning to park it without crashing into an expensive yacht will take my mind off the incredible surfeit of automobile parking spaces. Free parking spaces. Seriously, the gods must be playing with me. Or it's some kind of Ventura County initiation ritual, right? There really can't be all that free parking--can there?

Bird of the Day

Maybe not this exact bird, but some kind of cormorant. On my neighbor's boat dock. 7:35 a.m.

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.