Travelogue — Virginia, Boulder, Los Angeles
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Notes on the return home to help mom pass from this world, and reflections on home and the search for home.
January 7, Arlington, Virginia
Huddled at a table near a window at Two Worlds Café, I stare out at the misty rain sweeping down the sidewalk, a welcome sight that carries on it a hint of spring on the way. So even with the damp sting, one flirts with optimism. And to think, two weeks ago I was smashing tennis balls shirtless in the warm sun of the San Fernando Valley. Half the time I don’t even know where I am.
Two Hopkins girls are camped out at the next table. A crumbling, half-eaten muffin sits on a plate between them like a Roman ruin. And two sleek, neglected mimosas. I’m impressed how casually treat those.
Fingertips dance on Chiclet keys, the laptop screens jiggle, and the blond— who’s tugging nervously at the string of her hoodie — glances disdainfully at a textbook heavy enough to anchor a dingy in the Bay’s chop. But quickly she looks away. She’s interested in what’s onscreen: the Facebook scroll. Blech.
The illness is only getting worse. Endlessly we spin our inane stories for all the world to ignore. The force with which we push out our insipid morsels is inversely proportional to their worth. We communicate about living instead of living. The image of drunks at a still comes to mind. The thirst, of course, is for connection — for touch and meaning.
I’m here to help Mom pass from this world. Which is why I’m teetering. A hugely important door is about to close forever. The one of safety. After this there will be no comfort and unconditional love.
So I find myself distracting myself with stupid things like noticing my clothes, mostly threads I picked up at thrift stores in Los Angeles. Virtually verything I own has traveled to meet me — crammed in suitcases, shipped in postal boxes, wedged into cavities in my car (e.g., T-shirts jammed into the gaps around the spare tire). They persist. But they do have meaning. They catalog my life and travels. But to be honest, I don’t want to see them. The jeans and jackets and sneakers trail me like a lover who does not understand that the relationship is over.
At the bar, the bullet-headed guy in jackboots who had been reading the sports pages has metamorphosed into a wiry dude in a bomber jacket staring at nothing at all. His eyes shimmer with the alcoholic’s glaze. I look out the window. Time has passed. The afternoon glow is gone. It’s dark now. No surprise. I linger in places.
A month ago, people were slender and bronzed and believed the makes and models of their automobiles defined them in important ways. Here, people are earthy, compleckted in shades of anemic white and bonemeal gray, and wear flannel shirts and page through textbooks as cold as cinder block.
I hated it when Dad moved us here (with me kicking and screaming, wrenched from the warm embrace of Forty-Second Street). Virginia is one of those states where history wafts in never-ending heat waves from the stones and brick of its buildings in far different ways than it had in the flimsy wood and stucco West, where it dissipated like smoke.
There it hardly mattered what had come before. Not here. Not by a long shot. Here the 19th and 20th centuries — and even the 18th and 17th — surge up from the ground to take hold of you and demand that you acknowledge them and keep what happened here alive. It occurs through the people who were born here, too, most of whom have no idea of their role in this drama.
You do your best to deal with it. I mean, you have to be here. So you try to make space for all that old crap, because then its hold may ease up. Maybe something new will come in. But very little ever does. It is always there, glowering possessively beneath everything, rising up, gripping and grasping at you until you give in and let it take hold of you, or else you just have to leave, the way I always do.
February 23, Boulder
Here you get the feeling that the well-to-do alpine folk of this squeaky clean town are content with their lives exactly the way they are. They don’t want them changed, nor do they want to meet you, thank you very much. So, you never have the feeling of being pulled into anything, the way you do in Los Angeles. The REI-clad folk who stroll Boulder’s Pearl Street Mall width their chins held high aren’t sending out invisible tendrils of need or probing at you in the way some Angelenos do (unbeknownst to them, I will give them that).
In L.A., in public places you sometimes feel a pull from a certain portion of the population — mostly, the down-and-outs, the discouraged, the disinfranchised, the angry, the defeated, many of whom are movie industry wanna-be’s who had met with rude awakenings upon landing here, who smashed headfirst into the closed doors of Hollywood . Those are the ones you can feel reaching out to you, wanting something from you. Gil was the opposite of that, and damned refreshing to be around, even if he did live in an alley.
I wonder if those who are newly landed in LaLa Land — those people like me, though I was always temporary— possess that certain something that the jaded, jangled locals hunger for. What is it? Optimism? Hope? Unjadedness? Are we are irresistible to them simply because we haven’t been here long, haven’t yet lost it, and the time hasn’t arrived when we will hunger for it and start to seek it in others, too. The thought chills me, enough to get me to think of home. Yeah. For about three seconds.
February 18, Studio City, Calif.
It’s morning at Peet’s Coffee & Tea, “morning” being 11 AM, a civilized time for first java. The weather is perfect, as always. All about me are the usual irresistible L.A. sights, which include: 1) Two pregnant bf’s in short-short T-shirts showing tanned and bulging midriffs, stunning in that fit L.A. way, 2) the 70-something Irma in a charcoal-colored bathrobe staring unabashedly, possibly adoringly, at those gals, 3) a well-to-do poseur couple featuring their expensive motorcycle leathers, and 4) all the other attention-getting faces and bodies, the golden-haired sunglass-wearing hotties and the ripped, square-jawed hunks from the Midwest, all posing and preening, hoping for that fortuitous meeting with a movie producer.
Haircuts, lattes, teeth. Oh yeah, one more: 5) The ancient guy, Bill, snoring like a big elk, folded in a deep leather chair, the Times on his flannel shirt gently rising and falling with each of his breaths. Oh, gosh, there is yet another one: 6) the sour-faced fiftyish guy paging angrily through the classified ads. You don’t want to look at too long at him simply to avoid the bad vibes.
Despite the diversity of exteriors, the radically differing situations and origins, the incredible mix of glamour, wealth, hunger, and despair, you sense an underlying cooperation going on here. It’s surprising. It’s as if these people instinctively understand that there are just too friggin’ many of them to coexist on this flat, dry plain without an impressive degree of cooperation and accommodation to make it work.
You have to get along, or it would be Mad Max come to life. The massive over-crowdedness creates a necessity of concession and an ever-forming community that makes people who wouldn’t otherwise feel part of a larger whole be just that. It’s really something to behold. You probably wouldn’t even notice it if you were just passing through. Nice to feel it on my last day here.
