When our daughter first told us she wanted to go to college in California, a flash of a 1980s hair metal band video played in my head. A young woman leaves her hometown on the bus and alights on the Sunset Strip. Innocence and beauty trail behind her on the late night sidewalks, stardom alludes her, and suddenly she’s writhing on a pole or the hood of a car and sharing Aquanet hairspray with the lead singer of the band. As she continued to talk about the possibility of going so far away from home, I shook the MTV video image away and focused on her real reasoning for heading west. I realized quickly she was more akin to the settlers on the frontier looking for new lands than the ill-fated small town girl lured by glamorous possibilities.
Now, only weeks away from her UCLA graduation, she is building a life on the West Coast, and with each trip we take to see her, we unlock more of the bounty and beauty of Los Angeles making our way through the labyrinth of neighborhoods, surrounding areas, and iconic sites. A car is essential for maximum exploration of LA. What Missing Persons told us in the 80s is still true today: “Nobody walks in LA!” On our latest visit, we pick up a rental car from LAX and pull onto the 405 to find Emma’s apartment near the UCLA campus. We will spare you most of the common complaints about LA traffic. It is what it is, and it seems to us worth the suffering to enjoy the sunshine.
I am not surprised when Emma tells us upon our arrival that she has reserved tables at restaurants and booked special events including visits to natural wonders, theme parks, and at least one brilliant LA surprise: a visit to the Starcourt Mall. We will venture into the upside down from the show Stranger Things for a drive thru immersion experience sponsored by NETFLIX.
Emma has learned from her father how to build a vacation itinerary that includes a wide variety of activities to satisfy all age ranges and interests in our family. This is one of those proud parenting moments that comes with mixed emotions: joy for Emma’s independence and sadness to feel unneeded. Every year of her life has brought these moments to us. From holding her own bottle to tucking herself in at night, to driving a car and finding a new path out west, we have celebrated hundreds of moments when she relied on herself more than us. California accelerated that independence and gifted us a new city to explore in the process.
Our first stop is breakfast at a place called I Met Her At a Bar on South La Brea Avenue. We eat delicious Belgian waffles and sip from oversized cups of hot tea. Because of the inhumane early morning start time in our work lives, we relish the chance to indulge ourselves during normal breakfast hours and eat something besides a breakfast bar or doughnut on the run. As teachers, we are forced to live by the clock with breakfast and lunch narrowly squeezed into the minutes of the day in between bells; so, when we are able to travel, these meals become major events. At work we cannot live by Pavarotti’s quote of “one of the very nicest things about life is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating.” But on the road, Pavarotti is our spirit guide, and we devote ourselves to every meal.
Nourished and energized, we make our way to Griffiths Observatory passing through neighborhoods, parks, and hiking trails climbing up into the hills for a view of the sprawling city. The building is still closed due to COVID, but the grounds are bustling with people squinting in the neon California sun. We try to get our bearings from this vantage point for areas like Downtown, Century City, Beverly Hills, and Santa Monica. To my stranger’s eyes, it’s all nameless: a hazy mash-up of houses and roads I call LA with the aspirations of the ages threading through the streets. Hope fuels the electric buzz that crackles in the air and feeds the myth of La La Land. But alongside lofty hope comes real despair, and there is a lot of that growing in LA today, too.
When we visit the City of Angels, I always look forward to spotting a star or two and Chris looks forward to seeing a Lamborghini or a few Ferraris. The BMW in LA is like the old Ford Taurus. It is the ubiquitous ride of the common folk in Los Angeles. We did spot a Rolls Royce and a beautiful Aston Martin, but no recognizable stars in them. On this visit, it seems like I see more people that look like me in LA then famous people, more dreamers then descendants of Zeus himself.
I always expect when celebrities trace their ancestry, the lineage will climb all the way back to the gods and goddesses. If there were records on Mt. Olympus and proliferation and progeny could be traced, these people of LA would claim Zeus as their ancient grandfather on the family tree. Hollywood’s mythology makes me believe that some people pulse with gifts from the gods while others are damned and thrown asunder. Favor and curses doled out unequally and sometimes on a whim with justification for some and none for others, just as the Greeks foretold.
As we drive around, I see these descendents of Zeus safely protected behind tall fences and sophisticated gates that block all earth-bound, probing eyes from the hidden inner sanctums of the rich and blessed. I also see those other descendants of the gods, struggling souls suffering everyday on the streets of LA who are not hidden from sight. They are not tucked in under interstate overpasses on the peripheral edges of the city, but are desperately living on center stage, out in the open for all to witness.
Sometimes visits to new places and vacations can show you things you don’t expect to see and sometimes what you may not want to see. To ignore these sights, is to lose part of who we are as humans and to lose one of the important reasons to leave our own backyards. Traveling should force us to reflect and not just relax. It should make us ask tough questions and struggle to find meaningful answers.
What does it say to us when we see these gated houses gleaming and sparkling within a stone’s throw of the homeless tent encampments? What does it say about LA today to see the mansions of the stars so close to the makeshift structures of the dispossessed where the unlucky, and perhaps a few of the deliberately free, make their beds from discarded Amazon boxes and whatever else can be found on the streets and repurposed? What does it say about us to see the pandemic-fueled American dream and the American nightmare living so close together yet so far apart? How much of what we see do we simply blame on the fates of the gods or their descendents, and how much do we say WE are responsible for and must help to change?
These are the questions that Emma will have to wrestle with as she makes a new life in a post-COVID Los Angeles in the months and years to come and questions, we hope, she will never stop asking. Even when she is on vacation.