LA Pt. 1: Lights

Of course the sun is shining.

Of course flowers bloom everywhere.

We’re in LA.

We’re invited to Molly and Heather’s house to view the sunset from their patio. The house is about half way up the side of a hill above Silver Lake, the actual lake (Soon to be drained we’re told. Wouldn’t that be awful.) not the neighborhood although it’s in the neighborhood which extends to include our apartment which isn’t near the lake at all. Got that?

It’s a lovely home built in the California cottage style in 1927. The first homeowners here worked at the Disney studios. They could take the stairs that climb the hillside down to the trolley line that delivered them to the studio doors.

Bill and Alvaro are with us. Mark Weinstein stops by. Glasses are filled and refiled. Molly proposes a toast, “To Kenmore.” Indeed five seventh of us are from there, none regretting not being anywhere near there now.

Reaching the patio involves climbing a coupla short flights of stairs up from the backyard. The patio is built into the hillside above the house. No, really, the patio is higher than the roof of the house. The view is fabulous, down the valley, west over Hollywood, down and out over the LA basin.

The sun does its firey ball dropping below the horizon thing. Colors emerge in the southwestern sunset style. It’s all so beautiful. As the colors fade away, Venus emerges, brighter than the lights of the helicopters, two or three of which seem always to be airborne over Los Angeles.

Lights go on all around us. I’m in mind of those iconic pictures of LA at night, the foothills all around the basin set alight by houselights from the homes that cling, often precariously, to the hillsides. We are, it occurs to me, one of those lights.