Month: September 2012

Our nephew hatched a plan to borrow his mom’s Lexus and drive us up the coast, “Something purely California.” But first we had to read the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. By the time we finished those and a few pots of coffee the whole family was on board, or what’s left of it. We packed a lunch of leftovers from the post memorial service gathering and a bag of plumcots, the plum apricot hybrid.

We travelled out Sunset Boulevard through Malibu while Peggi’s sister studied a map of hiking trails and we gawked out the window at the surfers and campers and funky bungalows along the coast. We stopped at Mugu in the Santa Monica mountains and left the air conditioned car for a three hour looped trail that was supposed to follow a creek with a small waterfalls. The creek bed was dry as bone. I borrowed a hat, shorts and a long sleeve t-shirt from my brother-in-laws closet and we lathered up with #60 sunscreen. No one in the family is anywhere near size twelve so I did the three hour hike in my street shoes.

We carefully rationed our water and by the time we returned to the car were primed for a Bud Light toast to our brother-in-law but we forgot the cooler.

As we drove by these trees today there was a guy in the middle of the road taking a picture of his girlfriend while she stood under them. They are quintessentially LA and could not exist in Rochester, New York. The traffic on this road is mostly workers – gardeners, pool maintenance people, maids, nannies, construction workers and taco trucks. They filmed the Beverly Hillbillies here. Quincy Jones lives nearby and Zsa Zsa Gabor but the biggest stars in my book are are our two nephews. One is law student and anti-fracking advocate the other is a chef who is currently working at 11 Madison Park and NoMad, two of the top restaurants in the world. They are featured in this week’s New Yorker.

The sky is impossibly blue in LA and the sun is so intense it is oppressive. You can’t walk for long without protection and protection is hot and uncomfortable. Walking up Bel Air Road the difference you see, in color and type, between the planted and tended vegetation and the native landscape tells that whole story.

But the stainless steel houses with the flat roofs and big picture windows are seriously dreamy and imagining the lives of the people who live behind the gated entries can occupy some mind space. Because the climate is so different the art is different. “Made In LA,” the first Los Angeles biennial, organized by the Hammer Museum was being disassembled when we arrived. Admission was free and all but four installations were gone. A minimal music piece with musicians scattered about the courtyard was underway when we got there and still going when left about two hours later. It was beautiful and spacious and perfectly LA, like something that had been out in the sun just long enough.

One of the strangest things about death is the finality. The things you take for granted are just gone. Its unsettling as it should be.

When we arrived here for my brother-in-laws’ funeral I pulled my laptop out to check email. I couldn’t get online so I asked my nephews for the password. Neither one of them could remember it because it had been so long since they first entered it on their machines. My brother-in-law had taken his password to the grave. My nephew retrieved it from his keychain.

We were renewing the downstairs bedroom, the room that Ken spent his last days in. My east coast internal clock woke me before anyone and I sat in his home office, surrounded by his pictures and books, while the sun came up. Was this whole section of Bel Air Road wiped out in an earthquake in the thirties or was it a brush fire? And where did these antique wooden floors come from again? He was full of life, inquisitive, sharp as tack, so much fun to talk to and joke around with and now he’s gone.

We’ve been digging a small footer in the back yard for the last week. Any day laborer worth his salt would have it dug in a day but we’ve been struggling and the whole street knows it. The earth in this part of our yard has not been disturbed since the ice age so the sand is on its way toward becoming sandstone rock.

One of our neighbors brought us some unsweetened Honest Tea green tea today and our next door neighbor who has been snoopervising all week suggested we rent an electric jack hammer at Home Depot. We took his suggestion and Peggi came back with a 70 pound jack hammer. It worked great, it cut so well it went straight down and I could barely get it out. Peggi took it back and traded it in for a 35 pounder. It cuts almost as well and was much easier to lift over and over. We have to have back by noon tomorrow so we might have to set the alarm.