LA JOURNAL 

ACCENTUATION 

 As I travel about the country I keep an ear out for how pronunciations change, one regional accent sliding into the next. There is, I’ve observed, a sorta continuum that flows down from Maine across New England then spreads west and south. But I’ve never been able to detect a California accent. At first I thought it might well be because everyone there is from someplace else. That was before Erik, George and Heather came into my life. All are native Californians and all speak that unaffected mid-continent anchor desk media English (essentially a Nebraska accent). Turns out I was listening in the wrong place.  

              Bill, down at the corner on Sunset, spotted two guys washing the windows on the Pharmacia building. Likely motivated by my kvetching about our very dirty, very difficult to reach apartment windows, he asked them to stop by and give us an estimate. It proved to be so reasonable that we and some tenant neighbors hired them on the spot.  

              They did a great job.

Before

After

 

             

 

 

 

 

 

 

The window washers were very congenial guys. When conversing with us they spoke English; between themselves they kept up a lively banter in Spanish. They were equally facile in both languages. But their English was spoken with a light Latin lilt. 

                “That’s it!” I realized. That’s the California accent. Well, at least the Southern California accent. It’s where that slowly changing flow of spoken English blends into its near neighbor which just happens to be a different language. There’s that flow again. It disregards borders. Anglosphere meets Hispanosphere.  

              While I was drafting this post, Alvaro stopped by. Together we recalled a conversation that took place during his last visit to Buffalo. He engaged two fisherman on Unity Island in Spanish. Later he noted how much their Puerto Rican accented Spanish differed from his Mexican accented Spanish. That prompted me to further inquire about the many different Hispanophones here in LA: Mexican, Guatemalan, Honduran, Salvadoran, etal. Of course he can, he told me, distinguish one from another by their accent. For instance he told me those window washers were speaking Quechua, a dialect from the highlands of Guatemala.

                LA JOURNAL

 

 

                                                 GET AROUND, GET AROUND, I GET AROUND. 

“Do you know where you are?” Bill asks. We’re on our way back from a club when Bill suddenly hangs a left and we’re headed uphill through the narrow streets that wind past the homes that cling precariously to the hillsides.

It’s always a lesson going places in LA with Bill. He’s a veritable Rand McNally, a living breathing road atlas. Indeed, on our way out this evening we’d a “watch this” moment during which he taught me a short cut only a real Angelino would know.

“We’re on top of the hill between Griffith Park Boulevard and the actual Silver Lake. We're on Micheltorena Street. If we continue downhill we’ll come out by the school on Sunset,” says I, the proud ardent student.

 

Silver Lake

 

But really, it’s getting harder for me to get lost here. I pretty much know my way around Silver Lake (our neighborhood as opposed to the former reservoir now repurposed as a decorative water feature after which our neighborhood is named) and Los Feliz, the next neighborhood over. I can get downtown; I can cruise Hollywood. I can meet a high school friend for a beer way out in the San Fernando Valley. I know which freeways to take and even better I know which “surface” streets to take to avoid the freeways.

Let me not get too ahead of myself. There’s lots of this five hundred square mile city (by comparison, Buffalo is forty square miles) and its huge attendant sprawl that remain a complete mystery to me. Then again, strictly by accident, or so it seems, I left Garminella at home in a box on a shelf in a closet. I imagine her muttering to herself, “recalculating, recalculating.” That was an error but nowhere near as egregious as it would have been in previous times here. Sooner or later, the training wheels must come off.

 DRIVING

 

 It’s just not possible to write about Los Angeles and avoid writing about driving here. As I’ve noted in previous posts, LA traffic has only gotten worse in the years since we’ve been wintering here. Its by now pretty extensive public transit system doesn’t really help much. In fact, faced with a 13% decline in ridership, the authorities commissioned a study to account for it. Their conclusion: the problem stems from low interest rates. No really! Low rates have allowed more folks who might otherwise rides the buses or the Metro to buy cars and join the stop and go, mostly stop, jams on the freeways. Making matter worse, I suspect, is prosperity. Southern California is now experiencing the lowest unemployment rate ever in the history of keeping track. More folks are on their way to work in the morning and irascibly heading home again in the evening. It’s almost enough to make one wish for the return of hard times.