Traveling East

Sunday was a day for celebration. Finally, the Gold Line extension into East L.A. opened to what the LA Times claims was 50,000 free riders. Man, it was more like 500,000! I've never seen so many people crammed onto a light rail car. Huge lines formed in Union Station and snaked their way back through the terminals and out the parking lot. Proud parents brought the kids along like they were going to a historic political rally, and in a way they were. Angelenos rarely travel east to East LA, but East Angelenos travel in droves to downtown Los Angeles, and neighborhoods beyond, for work. Up until now commuters had to deal with crappy public transportation—slow buses, inconsistent schedules (to be kind), over crowding, and on some days, no transportation at all. But the Gold Line has brought change to East LA, plus the hope of the City Fathers that the rest of us will travel east to help in that part of the city's economic revival.

After eating at King Taco (Maravilla stop), we walked to the East LA Civic Center and lined up to come home. We decided to skip Union Sation altogether and walk to Chinatown through Olvera Street, where they were having a festival of their own.

All in all, a great day!

Freak Show

I've never gotten used to L.A.'s weather, never, especially come fall and winter when exotics are in bloom. This isn't natural— this is a freak show!




Not that Louisville got that cold in the winter but, G-d-damnit, we had seasons— four of them!

A lizard sunning itself in a cool 69 degrees:

Dodger's Dicey Divorce

To some people divorce has a big appeal.

The rich and famous for one. They get divorced a lot. The "it" divorce couple of the moment are Jamie and Frank McCourt who own the Dodgers. Although Jamie McCourt was denied her CEO title by a judge last Thursday, if her lawyers have their way, the Dodgers will be lumped in with other community property and split in half.


This idea, that you could split the Dodgers in half, intrigues me. Not that I give a rat's ass (Sorry, Luna and Malka!) about baseball, but how would you split a baseball franchise in half? I decided to go to Dodger Stadium, a mere ten-minute drive away, to imagine it.

Care Package

I miss my daughter.


They are just so far away, as Jeanne writes in an email about our girls who are both at college.



I'd emailed Jeanne earlier that I wanted to send a care package to Maya and she sent me a good way to wrap cookies, back to back, using her recipe for chocolate chip cookies from her scrumptious cookbook, Blue Eggs and Yellow Tomatoes.

So on Thursday I went shopping in the a.m. and made the cookies in the afternoon, which took a lot longer than I thought. Maybe I'm just out of practice (confession: who am I kidding? I've never sent a care package in my life), but I ended up making only two things after four hours, with every pot dirty and every cabinet open and everything everywhere. I rushed around like crazy to get the box to the post office before I had to go to work, and then realized, too late, that the care package probably wouldn't get there until Monday. The cookies will be fine in their cling wrap, but I don't think the matzo balls are going to make it.

A Look at A Serious Man

A group of us mothers have been walking around the reservoir on Sat. morns. After our walk last week, Julie S. and I began discussing "A Serious Man," the new Coen Brothers' film, based loosely on their lives growing up in Minneapolis during the sixties.  We found we'd both been unnerved by seeing our Jewish childhood up on the screen: the paranoia, the goyim neighbors, that whole world-unto-itself mentality, the sexy temptress lurking next door. J's husband thought that scene was over the top—the temptress seducing the protagonist with marijuana—but J remembers her mother had a friend just like that. Which got me thinking about Gloria Cole, a friend of my parents' back in Louisville, the sexiest woman in their circle. Gloria had teased-to-perfection peroxide blonde hair, gargantuan tits, tight 60's cocktail dresses, stiletto heels... and a husband named Leonard.

One night, a few years ago, Gloria showed up in my dream, still young still shapely, attending a party for my father. Everyone was socializing, Gloria knocking the men out cold with her figure, except for my father who sat up on stage covered in a wool blanket, with one bulging furious eye peeking out at the crowd. That one eye bulging out so reminds me of this film: how Jews of a certain age look out through the metaphoric kitchen window —Larry Gopnik is always peeking out at the goys next door— and feel the weight of their accursed history upon them, fearing the worst.

Postscript: Immediately after seeing the film (which was torturous to watch, but, given the Coen brothers' ability to capture angst, quite enjoyable), my right eye imploded with a flashing white light, and the next day I had floaters. I looked online and found that floaters are caused by degeneration of the vitreus gel or head trauma. I'm thinking head trauma. Your thoughts?

Halloween at SRF

It's interesting (well, at least to me) that I chose to do my first interview in two years with Tigger the Tiger. I don't know how it happened; I was all geared up to do it with someone of note, but then I saw this friendly tiger walking down the street, and since my journalism chops were rusty, I thought, what the heck, I'll give her a try. Tigger didn't have a lot to tell me, but she didn't bite. And she invited me back that evening to the Self-Realization Fellowship Center's Halloween celebration, a yearly event on top of Mt. Washington. I used to bring my kids up here when they were small, until SRF closed down the party. Tigger didn't come clean on that point, but it's a fact that the monks and nuns were somewhat pissed at those in the community who fought against bringing the remains of their beloved guru, Paramahansa Yogananda, (Autobiography of a Yogi) up to the Mt. Washington headquarters. I distinctly remember a few years without Halloween.

But this year's celebration was terrific and brought back so many happy memories. The SRF works hard all year long to put on a really good show. Kids as well as adults run around excited to see the Queen, hear the talking pumpkin, watch fairies blow bubbles and be awed by the magician with his slight of hand. I kept looking around for someone I might know but it's a whole new crowd.

Worrying-from-a-distance stage

This morning I was talking to my good friend Mary, whose son Ben was my son's best friend in school— now studying to be a neurosurgeon. We were talking about how much we still worry about our children. She told me that when she read about the suicides in Silicone Valley, of the four teenagers who walked onto the RR tracks, she wondered what her son would do. Would he follow his friends if he were feeling pressure from his medical studies? I reminded her that she worried like that in sixth grade when he was 12-yrs-old; he's almost 23 now, no longer a follower. That calmed her somewhat.

Then I told her how I worried, how the worry moved around from one thing to another, like a pain that starts in your knee, moves down to your ankle, then to the bottom of your foot. If it isn't one thing, it's another. Sometimes I think I'm a curse, like the time I took my son to get his driver's license; he failed three times, but when my husband took him on the fourth try, he passed. She said that was merely a case of redundancy, that once the test clicked in, he got it—no curse. She told me I worried like that when he was in kindergarten, afraid he couldn't make it on the playground. That made me feel a little better. I think if I worry I can control things so nothing bad will happen, but, of course, that bad thing is called "life" and no matter how much I worry, I can't protect my children from getting hurt. Mary and I call this the "worrying-from-a-distance stage," the stage we find ourselves in now.