From My Front Door

Remembering a Time When Things Were Not So Sweet

There was a time - not toooo long ago - probably about 4 winters past - around this same Holiday and Christmas season, when I was still morbidly stuck in the LA desert. I was perhaps 73 years old, had already retired from USC (the over-priced University of Southern California) as a theater professor after 31 years, had gotten married for the first time to an Indonesian woman, also 31 years younger than myself at 55 years old, adopted our 8-year-old Indonesian son at age 68, and was still renting at “Lucretia Gardens” in Echo Park, having been in Los Angeles almost 40 years, over half my life. There must be some magical alchemy in the math, but I must say, it eludes me.

And that was exactly the problem.

I was on my way nowhere. Just holding on “‘til the end”. Hoping I could stay at Lucretia Gardens “forever” where I had scattered my parents’ and dog’s ashes in the gardens below, but I had already read the writing on the walls, loud and clear, from my dying landlady and her inheriting daughter, that,

It was time to go.

And there was the rub.

I had no place to go.

After paying $75/month for my first one-bedroom, petunia-gardened apartment in Chicago when I was a fledgling artist at 22, $125/month for the next one, $55/week for a room at the Hotel Woodward on 55th & Broadway in New Yawk, then $350/month for a beautiful 1100 square foot “clown loft” on 23rd Street and Park Avenue South in my 30s, then $235/month for a rent-controlled one-bedroom apartment in Santa Monica for 10 years when I first moved to LA in my 40s, then $1100/month for the 3-bedroom Lucretia Gardens hilltop “palace” for 25 years+, I’d say that I had more than used up my “good rental karma”.

Because now in the 2020s? LA rent was exorbitant and far out of reach. To say nothing of the sky-rocketed real estate. And Echo Park in particular? It was one of the most gentrified, hip, and desirable neighborhoods in LA. We had already gotten our eviction notice in the middle of covid and were engaged in a full-out landlord-tenant battle (previously written about). Not that we could afford to buy, or rent, anywhere else in LA. We couldn’t. We were priced out!

It was time to go.

But as I said, I “was stuck”.

So… one sad lonely night, while my wife was out working hard for one Wolfgang Puck or another, and my son was innocently sleeping over at a friend’s house, old “Pak Trules” (that’s what Surya, my wife, and Exsel , my son, call me, “Pak”, with a silent “k”, being an Indonesian word of affection and respect for an elder) drove himself to the toney neighborhood of La Canada-Flintridge. Right near Glenoaks Park, not far from the beautiful Self Realization Fellowship Center.

I often drove into this canyon for both July 4th and New Year’s Eve with both Clay, the Dog, and now his current canine in crime, Cassius, to lose most of the noise and bombast of the fireworks of which they both were and continue to be - terrified.

Tonight, it’s as quiet as a graveyard. All the lovely candy cane houses are laid out in softly-winding, perfectly-designed candy cane lanes… like “they should be” in the perfectly imagined La Canada-Flintridge suburbia. Each modest little house has multi-colored Christmas lights trimming their well-lit windows and their perfectly-manicured outdoor landscaped gardens, and their beautifully-trimmed Christmas trees laugh at me malevolently from their seemingly happy, warm, and oh-so-content living rooms within.

Tough luck, Pak Trules. Too bad you don’t have one of these. A nice little home to call your own.

Yeah, thanks a lot, La Canada. You remind me of my house in Westbury, New York, where I grew up when I was 5 years old. Of the house my GI Joe parents bought after WW2 for $18,000 which is now probably worth more than a million. About your price, right? Or are you preposterously worth double? Do you think I can afford to buy myself a nice little quiet candy cane house like you? Fuck off!

The houses maliciously mock me in unison.

Go take your dawg and crawl back to Echo Park, Trules. You’re never going to own a home of your own. You had your chance, you hippie-non-conformist suckah! You just friggin’ blew it!

Owwww……..

And now it’s almost Christmas, 2023. Somehow, and miraculously, I now live in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I flew the coup. I escaped the LA desert and somehow, miraculously, my family and I bought a house here. The first house I ever owned!

Last night, while both my wife, and my son, were working at the Hotel Santa Fe, she as a server, he as a pink-sweatered, Barbie/Ken host, I had some new friends, Nava and Jennifer, come over for some wine, gin and tonics, a roaring fire, and Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain.

It snowed.

Cassius the Dawg, was rambunctious. He wasn’t satisfied with the delicious Thanksgiving leftovers, so… we took him for a walk.

It was colllllld. And snow-fallingly, New Mexican, blizzardly beautiful.

It was a quick walk. Cassius romped in the virgin snow. Nava trembled in his thin “I’m invincible” sweatshirt, Jennifer was “wine-warm”, and I was grateful in my new four-layer, fleece-lined, minus 20-degree, hooded Klondike jacket.

We got back and sat around the fire of crackling pinon logs.

And I sent Nava home with “Mintz’ jacket”, a 40-year-old, trendy army green Eddie Bauer down jacket that my childhood friend, “Mintz”, gave me one winter in Brooklyn, that I had since worn around the globe in frigid places like St. Gallens, Switzerland, Amsterdam, and Moscow, but now Mike Nava would be schussing down the New Mexican slopes in forever more….

I walked my two new friends out the front door of TwinYuccas Lane, and I dusted off two inches of powdery snow from their front and back windshields. Then I walked inside.

Just before I closed the front door, I noticed the house across the street in our cul de sac. It was all lit up in Christmas lights. It looked like a picture postcard, and it looked… very familiar.

It looked like… each of those picture postcard houses near Glenoaks Park in La Canada-Flintridge.

Except I now lived in one myself, across the street.

In one of those modest, perfectly Christmas-lit houses that had laughed mockingly at me - only a few winters ago.

Now I owned one myself. Me and my wife, Surya.

I was shocked. And grateful.

You can see my view of my neighbor’s house - across the expanse of virgin snow - at the top of this post.

Sometimes…. things DO CHANGE…

The Trules house on Twin Yuccas Lane in virgin snow the next day

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