Going Home Again--to LA

Just about to jump on a plane from Seattle, my home for the last 15 years, back to Los Angeles, where I was born and raised.  Peculiar that much as we feel the same as ever, everyone and everything else is so different.

Los Angeles was a great place to grow up, and of course I took it for granted.  When the daughter of an army buddy of my dad's met me for the first time, she was awed that I came from the land of movie stars.  She was from Goshen, Indiana, a tiny town known for manufacturing motor homes (at that time, "trailers"), not far from Elkhart, Indiana, known for its violins.  When I visited her one time, I was the celebrity; California was the golden land where everyone was perpetually tan and beautiful, as seen in the news stories about Muscle Beach.  I was even asked to write a feature story for her high school newspaper about my fabled home.

In those days, a yellow-gray scum of smog hung over Los Angeles like a heavy blanket.  Gasoline was 19 cents per gallon, which, given the incomes then, wasn't so very cheap but fueled the car culture.  One of my best school chums moved away because the 5 freeway "took" her home.

We had guavas growing in our back yard, and avocados and lemons, and pink hydrangeas that bloomed all year long.  We had bird-of-paradise in our front yard, and a jacaranda tree that dropped lavender bells onto the grass every June.

The flora are probably still there, though the last time I drove by my childhood home, the owners had brought out its fake English styling by digging a mini-moat in the front yard with a bridge as part of the walkway.  The smog has lifted, one of the beneficial effects of environmentalism.  But the car culture has now become oppressive.

This is the LA I know now:  traffic.  What used to take me half an hour to drive now takes two.  When I worked downtown, in the early 80s, I used to play a game on my way westward on the Santa Monica freeway.  Even then, it moved sluggishly at 6 pm, a stop-and-go trudge.  But if I carefully managed my use of the accelerator on my manual-transmission Honda Civic, I could sometimes make the drive without having to press the brake.  Now, such a mind-occupier wouldn't be necessary.  The freeway stays at a stand-still for minutes at a time.  Merging onto it is a wrenching push against drivers who would sooner risk a ding than let you in.

Pico Boulevard was a magnificent thoroughfare that carried cars effortlessly from my west-side neighborhood all the way downtown.  I could walk to Pico Drug, not far from my home, and sit at the old-fashioned soda counter, looking at myself in the mirrored wall behind.  A cherry Coke, served in the classic inverted-pear-shaped glass, was 5 cents.  That's Coca-cola with maraschino cherry juice in it. A nickle.  I like to talk about it now, but I think I got two of them in my life.  Even then, I was taught that carbonated drinks were unhealthy.

Over the years, I watched the town change.  It became a magnet.  In the same way New York was the Big Apple, some started calling LA "The Big Orange."  Now, anyone who wants to enter show business has to go there.  And that superficiality, the emphasis on competing to "make it" in a field based as much on connections and appearance as talent, lends what was a family-centric place a different emphasis.  Both my parents were born in LA, and my dad recalled driving as a kid with his folks across open bean fields between downtown and the beach.  The Valley was orange groves, and in fact an uncle of mine became quite wealthy subdividing a swath of it.  There was room to play, room to expand.  But now, with the hopeful throngs, that competitive mentality has carried over, and the traffic symbolizes it all.

I'll be back there tomorrow, staying with my brother-in-law and his family. They never left the region, but bought a home just over the Ventura County border.  His commute to work is an hour each way, on a good day; two if it's rush hour.  When we moved from Santa Monica 15 years ago, we had to pay more for the house we bought here in the Northwest. Since then, our old home has quadrupled in value; the "more expensive" one we still live in has increased by maybe one-fourth.  This reflects the new urgency of LA; gotta be there, gotta get there, gotta elbow the competition out of the way.

I still have good friends and wonderful memories in LA.  The beaches are still deep and white, the palm trees line the Venice Boardwalk where Harry Perry still roller skates playing his electric guitar (now only allowing a photo if you buy his self-promoting t-shirt).  The weather still lures me, and Jewish life there is vibrant and abundant.

In fact, I look forward to dancing at the joyous Jewish wedding of a girl whose birth announcement I remember well.  Her dad, our rabbi, stood at the front of our beach-front synagogue and explained the name of his sixth daughter.  He'd named her something forever identified with the city where she will now, as a married woman, make her home:  Tamara, Hebrew for the palm tree, and I do hope she keeps her wonderful young head above her surroundings, like the palms' lofty view of the confusing scene below.

Summer in the City

I accompanied my husband to a screening last night--a rare occurrence since few films meet my criteria of no violence, no suspense and no slapstick.

But "(500) Days of Summer" was a romantic comedy, and had good buzz. Turns out the flick was charming and inventive, and both of us enjoyed it.

But there was one character in the movie touted as beautiful and charismatic that I knew really wasn't: Downtown Los Angeles.

The filmmakers even offer on the "(500) Days" website a video extolling their incorporation of the setting into the plot, as an underappreciated but praiseworthy locale.

Los Angeles is my hometown--in fact I'm the fifth generation born and raised there--and I love it for many things, almost all made by God and not man. When I worked downtown (as a writer at the Los Angeles Times) many years ago, I'd stroll during my lunch hour to Grand Central Market, where the produce was cheap, but the proprietors put the bruised pieces from behind the counter into your brown paper bag. I'd walk to the Bradbury Building and eat lunch in its lovely central plaza. Then I'd fast-walk back to the office, past little clothes stores where everyone spoke Spanish and seemed to have a ruffley and poufy sense of style. Downtown LA is colorful in the mornings, shut tight by 6 pm, and just not all that nice for browsing.

I also worked for a bit writing editorials at the Herald Examiner, RIP, and its historic building, as I've blogged before, had a distinctive Spanish style, a sweeping entry staircase, a grand cupola...and rats. Not much was nearby, though about six or eight blocks away, some clothes factories and stores clustered in dark, scary older buildings, where you could hear the churn of sewing machines and sometimes get a great deal; other times get ripped off.

In "(500) Days," aside from one hillisde location where the lovers perch overlooking a panorama where two of the prominent buildings are identified as parking lots, and one nice scene in the Bradbury Building, LA is just a blink. Even being in love--or not--can't color the brown that dominates the entire region, but that's irrelevant since there's not much of the region in this movie.

LA's attraction is its weather, its beaches, and the creativity and vitality of its people. Only tourists walk around Hollywood; many attempts to revitalize its skuzziness have failed. In fact, I just took a virtual look-see down Hollywood Blvd. on googlemaps' "street view," and no, it hasn't changed since I moved to the Northwest a dozen years ago. Too bad.

I'm still attached to my beloved hometown, and when the sky up here is socked-in gray, the ground saturated and moldy, and the short, cold days of winter yield to mostly night, I yearn for Santa Monica beach, for palm trees and sidewalk cafes, for the ever-blooming hydrangea and bouganvilla in our yard.

But don't tell me downtown LA has special magic. This time of year especially, I'll take the vibrance of downtown Seattle, where locals and tourists walk the sidewalks carrying white-wrapped armfuls of dahlias and peonies from Pike Place Market; where sparkling Eliott Bay moves with ferries and sailboats, where the golden light glints off panes in the Olympic Sculpture Garden. And where there's no better view than cerulean Lake Washington and snow-topped Mt. Rainier from right where I live. I only wish that summer in Seattle could last 500 days...

Visiting My Home in Los Angeles

Just got back from a visit to LA, my hometown. I get down there a couple times a year, but this time, I had a few hours to take a good look. Just like when you see someone you've known well after a span of a decade, I noticed how my dear city has aged.

Judging by its face, not so gracefully.

Ironically, Hollywoodland could use a shot of Botox. It was built up, but not cleaned up. Streets in neighborhoods where a modest three bedroom, two bath house built fifty years ago cost $2 million were lined with squashed fast-food cups and wrappers, and collected brown palmtree dirt like dust bunnies.

An area that had been a wetland now holds dozens of high-rise condos and the businesses to profit from them. But instead of the strip malls of the past, the stores were merely the lower levels of "multi-use buildings" that held more condos on top. The neighborhood where I'd lived--where we'd worked hard to build up a Jewish outpost on the beach--had never become upscale. The housing was the same, except that beat-up plywood-topped "RVs" now lined the thoroughfare we once walked every Shabbat, and the houses on my street all seemed to need paint.

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of new Los Angeles is the traffic. Everyone we saw discussed it--or how they averted it. Some scotched a move, preferring cramped quarters to two hours daily on the road. Others described the circuitous routes they devised to avoid crowds. Some merely groused about it, employing distractions like lectures or books on tape, or using the time to make cell phone calls.

Jewish Los Angeles, however, is thriving. We were treated to dinner at Prime Grill--yes, the Rodeo Drive incarnation of the famous Manhattan restaurant. Loved it. Loved it even more because we didn't pay for it. Pico Boulevard felt much like Israel with falaffel and thickly Hebrew-accented English and in-your-face signage and stores wedged together.

The number of synagogues is growing; the Persian community burgeoning. New schools are opening; Touro College welcomed its first students to its west coast campus. Communities are blooming in far reaches of the San Fernando Valley, and the stretch between Century City and Hancock Park is becoming solidly observant. When I was a kid, the Orthodox had left Boyle Heights and clustered around Fairfax, huddled against Reform domination of the region. Now, the streets of Pico-Robertson are alive on Shabbat with families walking; you hear z'mirot (songs) through windows, and passersby greet each other, "Gut Shabbos!"

I believe God smiles on all this, as more and more Jews take His commandments seriously. However, I also see zealousness, division, and sometimes disdain toward those deemed "modern."

The best surprise for me was the winter weather. After two days of rain, and then wind, when my plane descended into LAX, I could see the entire region. The Hollywood sign to the snow-dripped San Gabriel Mountains; the tall buildings along Wilshire to Loyola-Marymount University in Westchester. I saw downtown with its clustered high-rises, and even the outline of the old City Hall. There's nothing more beautiful than a clear, sunny day, crisp and invigorating (while 65 degrees) in my home town. After enduring weeks of northwestern wet, sitting in the sunshine renewed and reinvigorated me.

And I did see many old friends. After ten years, some had indeed aged, but others seemed much the same. My dear friend from high school, our neighbors, our street, all felt embracing and homey. The house where I lived, once with a mezuza on its doorframe, now boasted a wreath on the portal and a twinkly Christmas tree in our dining room window. Still, it was the same house where I brought home my newborn babies, and where I welcomed hundreds--probably thousands--of Shabbat guests. It was the same gray-blue color, with its expanse of green grass in front, and the low brick wall where my preschoolers balanced, holding my hand.

Yes, I'm sad so much treasured time has passed; I miss those little kids who needed me so much. But like my town, there's too much new to face, too much to accomplish...and precious few clear days in which to savor the entire view.