Friday, June 02, 2006
Homecomings and Homegoings
In honor of it being time to go home for the weekend:
I thought I had come home again. Of course, I didn’t live there anymore, but I’d spent my nominally formative years there and I still thought of it as my city in some way. Or perhaps I thought of myself as part of it. In any case, I felt that we were linked - me and NoHo. Well, it was NoHo when I’d left for a trip with my family in 1970; I got back six months later and it was calling itself Studio City. Now I think it’s “Valley Village” or some damn thing. But it was always Wortser Avenue, Coldwater Canyon and Moorpark Drive, and the house and the ‘hood I’d incorporated into the fiber of my being as I grew up. So when a friend from my earliest days invited me to his southland wedding, I seized the opportunity. For the cost of a cut-rate PriceLine rent-a-car I could renew my acquaintance with a land that was intrinsically part of myself. Anyway, that’s what I thought I’d be doing.
I started, actually, in my second ‘hood, the one where I lived for two short but very dense years during law school. At that time it was a mixed transitional zone between the Miracle Mile and the Westside, between the Fairfax District and Northern South-Central. As I cruised the broad boulevards and tidy side streets, it all looked familiar, except for most every store and shop. The area had been badly damaged in the King riots and all my favorite old haunts were gone. In their place were a bizarre profusion of Ethiopian groceries and boutiques, and Jewish delis, yeshivas and tchkochketoria. It felt different, even though all the houses seemed exactly the same. Banners hung from streetlights denominating it the “SoFax District;” next to these were official civic community markers that read “Little Ethiopia.” I didn’t know which one to believe, but it was pretty clear that this was no longer my old ‘hood. It had moved on, so I did likewise and kept driving.
The wedding was that night and by the next morning I was already on my way back out of town. I’d stayed overnight with some old friends – the groom’s parents, actually - on a block adjacent to what had once been my elementary school. As I drove out, the houses where I’d spent time as a kid called back to me – Randy W’s house, Danny F’s house, and of course good old Tommy L’s house…. Each one was like a page of sheet music to a song I’d forgotten that I’d forgotten, a displaced memory preserved in the morning air like a fish in latex. The houses and streets were all immediately recognizable but the whole thing wasn’t right anymore. It was alive, but not with my life.
I headed on out to Riverside Drive and down Fulton on a sneaky surface street route to the airport that led me very near the house where I’d actually grown up. It felt like fate. I felt compelled to take a brief side trip to see how the old homestead looked.
The street names were as familiar as the lyrics of that once-forgotten song, irretrievable from my memory till I was reminded of them, each in inevitable turn after the last. Soon I found myself at the corner of my old block, but truly I didn’t recognize it – the street signs told me to turn but without them I’d have cruised right on past. Instead, I pulled a right, slowed down, and tried to reassemble history. That – was Nana B’s old house, but they’d added a second story and taken out the avocado tree from the front yard. That was the Frankels’ place, the Nivens’, the Galupo house. Many homes had been significantly built out. Landscaping was robust but most of my favorite trees were gone. The Hunt place had been razed, and entirely replaced with a much larger, fancier house. And that meant that my old home should be across on the other side of the street – and, indeed, it was still there.
The gnarled elephant of an acacia tree in front was long gone – I knew that already. The lawn looked fabulous and the driveway still shot clean back to the big garage. The porch was still long and narrow; there was still an octagonal window off the front door and a bay window off the master bedroom. It was neatly painted in subdued shades of putty and dark blue. The houses to either side were faintly recognizable, but my old place was definitely still my old place, my home for 15 mostly uneventful years. But the strangerchild’s tricycle on the porch mutely underscored what was growing ever more obvious to me: I had no place at my old place anymore. It was just another house on another Valley Village street. Others had made it their own, and no trace of me or what was mine remained there. My home, I realized, was 400 miles away, and it was time for me to catch a plane and go back to it. I could go home again. However, I could only have one home at a time, and mine, these days, was elsewhere.
That’s it for now. Have a good one. See ya next week.
