What was lost

 

   I recently realized that I’m feeling overwhelmed by the last six months or so, with my dad dying, the election, the holidays, the L.A-area fires and now Trump 2.0. (No, I’m not watching the inauguration – and what an obscenity to have it on the MLK holiday!)

   The fires have really taken a lot out of me, although they are “over there,” as I discuss in a column published on Friday in the Claremont Courier and below.  Not only do I have friends and cousins and one attendant who have been evaluated, the fires have stirred up a lot in me, like embers and ashes.  Many places that I love are gone, but, what’s more, they’ve been gone quite a while, since my spinal surgery seven years ago, when the drive and the traffic became just too hard.  In short, now that L.A, as many are saying, will never be the same, even with rebuilding, the fires are like the surgery, in how it radically changed my life. 

   I’ve been thinking about all the things I’ve been missing: going to dinner in Santa Monica after spending hours on the beach on PCH, passing the lines outside clubs after getting out of plays in Hollywood on Saturday night, taking the train and subway and bus on my own to see the latest exhibit at the county museum (when it cost $6, not $20, to get in), to meet a friend in Beverly Hills, even to go to the pier in Santa Monica and maybe cruise down to boardwalk to Venice.    

   There were the restaurants, the favorites and the discoveries that became favorites, especially the vegan ones.  I loved Doomies, when it was good, really good – the bomb – with incredible vegan chicken fried steak, pot roast scallops, shrimp served up to tattooed, pierced punks in black high-tops and jeans jackets.  (I felt right at home shirtless in my cut-off bibs and Docs.) The last time I was there, about five years ago, it was just a vegan burger joint.  Talk about missing something!     

           SAYING GOODBYE TO THE L.A, THE LIFE, I KNEW

   I was going to write a nice little column about how Claremont has changed over the years, about how things were there and suddenly not there, about how Claremont is suddenly the way it is and we barely remember the way it was, even a few months ago.  This occurred to me recently as I would go north on College Avenue from Arrow Highway and see the traffic lights at Green Street and think it has always been there, even as they were installed late in the Fall.  There was another traffic light and that weird permanent cone in the middle of the street a block south, replaced by the new lights, right?  Right? 

   I was going to write about other examples of this. Not far from the new traffic lights was a lovely field of wild flowers and grasses before it was used as a movie set across the street from where the Courier office was, just south of the railroad tracks, where I used to go in my wheelchair to hand deliver a hard copy (before it was called a “hard copy”) of my column.  There was the old Courier office on Harvard Avenue where I began working as a summer intern and the train-car restaurant instead of the large office building that now seems to have always loomed over the Village along First Street.  There was the vet office where the Village West plaza now is, and there wasn’t always a traffic light just north of Memorial Park on Indian Hill Boulevard, right?  Right? 

   There are hundreds, thousands of these small, not so small changes that have happened. I even had a nice, clever title: “In the blink of an eye, another Claremont.”

   Then there were the fires. And, suddenly, in the blink of an eye, my column wasn’t so nice, wasn’t so little.

   Sure, the catastrophic wildfires, at least as I write this, are “over there.” They aren’t a Claremont story, as my old editor Martin Weinburger would say. 

   But, for many of us, they are our story.  The fires, which so far have wiped out tens of thousands of acres and thousands of structures and caused at least 13 deaths and may well go on to do who knows how much more destruction, are my story. 

   I have friends and cousins who have been evaluated from Pacific Pallisades and Topanga Canyon.  One of my caregivers has been evaluated from Pasadena. 

   What’s more, much more, though, is that I’m familiar, so familiar, with many of the places now gone or now in danger.  That’s really what makes these fires, which some say will end up being the worst natural disaster in U.S history, so real and, as more than one person has been quoted in the L.A Times, so “surreal.”

     When I graduated from college, I told myself I would live in Claremont, because I could easily get to L.A and other area communities – and that’s exactly what I did.  A lot.  I loved living in Claremont, but I also loved spending days on the beaches on P.C.H and hanging out in Santa Monica and on Melrose Avenue.  I attended plays outdoors in Topanga Canyon as well as dozens of tiny theaters in Hollywood and everywhere else.  I enjoyed drives along Sunset Boulevard, past Will Roger’s house, UCLA where I attended briefly and through Beverly Hills and West Hollywood, and I enjoyed getting as far as I could in my wheelchair in Eaton Canyon and going to movies and free outdoor concerts with well-known artists in Pasadena. 

   Now, some of those places, like Will Roger’s house and the Eaton Canyon park, are gone, unrecognizable like the P.C.H beaches or endangered. Even with rebuilding, already talked about with hope and desperation, Los Angeles, my Los Angeles, will never be the same.

   Actually, the L.A that I know and love hasn’t been the same for some time. In a painfully real way, L.A, for me, has already been  gone. 

   Since my spinal surgery now seven years ago that left me more disabled, going into L.A, especially with all the traffic, has gotten too difficult.  If I go, it’s only once or twice a year, usually to see friends.  (I have enjoyed some time in Eaton Canyon, but, sadly, it looks like that’s gone.)

   While we are safe here in Claremont from the fires “over there,” I know already what it’s like to lose L.A, the L.A that I knew, the L.A we all knew.