GOOD MORNING LA

 

What constitutes an LA sorta day? Friday was definitely one.

Starting with Mr. Squeaky Clean.

These wonderful windows in the room we’ve dubbed porch west came with a problem. They were dirty, dirty, dirty:

 I made it my mission to get them washed. Not something I could not do myself; they’re way higher up than any ladder we have. I went to Google and entered “window washers near me.” That produced thousands of results. Trying again I entered “window washers in Silver Lake”. Among the results up popped Squeaky Clean with an address in the neighborhood. I called on Monday and left a message on voice mail. The how things get done in SoCal process was launched. That evening I received a text from Fred, Mr. Squeaky Clean his very self. It was the first of several texts and calls from Fred most of which postponed his arrival to look over the gig until eternal tomorrow. He showed up on Thursday morning. I accepted his offer and he said he’d be back that afternoon to do the job. Of course, because this is LA where one day is pretty much like the last, he showed up on Friday. And, hooray, hooray, he and his partner did a super-duper job. Wow, what a difference, day and night.

That afternoon I left Shelley off at Bang Bang on Hollywood Boulevard. I rolled on to Rite Aid with a list of items I could nab for her while she was getting her hair cut. And that’s where I met Deliciosa. Upon entering, I was approached by an imposingly large woman outfitted as security. “Can I help you find anything?” she asked. Not a question I’d expect from security. I declined her offer. But soon, I realized that I could use some help, found her and took her up on her offer. Deliciosa and I had fun shopping together as she led me through the vagaries of a LA Rite Aid.  Like toothpaste. All the toothpaste was locked up but fortunately Deliciosa had the key. She took the tube I chose from me. 

“I’ll put it at the register for you. You can get it when you check-out.”

I crossed the street to the bank of user-friendly ATMs. I’ve used ATMs all over the world and they’re pretty much the same everywhere. Except, of course, here. It started out as you’d expect: insert card, enter pass code, request a withdrawal. Then, well if this were a movie the ATM would be played by Owen Wilson and it would go like this:

“Hey, I’ve got bills in all kinds of denominations. Want me to choose for you?”

“No. let me choose.”

“Hey, no problem.”

“I’d like all twenties.”

“Oh, bummer dude. I’m all outta twenties. Here comes your withdrawal “

I got a big pile of tens.

 

         Los Angeles in the Time of Covid

 

Right off the bat the title is pretentious. Los Angeles is a sprawling five hundred square mile megalopolis. (By comparison, Buffalo is fifty square miles.) To say I know this city is at best an exaggeration. It’s not possible. There are huge sections that are a mystery to me. Then again there is a whole lot I know very well. I can get around, get around. But this visit, constrained by the pandemic, I haven’t been outta Silver Lake, our neighborhood. Even so, we’ve noticed real differences between this visit and those halcyon before times.

TRAFFIC

Writing about LA and not about the traffic is akin to writing about the forest and leaving out the trees. For years I’ve defended LA traffic. Yes, it’s fearsome I’d say but it rolls along. But in recent visits it was clearly worsening.

This was particularly noticeable at our corner. We’re on a semi-major street that connects one block away to Sunset Boulevard, a maxi-major street. During our last stay on this corner, we were concerned that it was becoming untenable. The traffic never stopped. Day, night, it didn’t make any difference. It was loud, it was constant.

But not now. Day time traffic at our corner is back to ignorable. Night comes with long stretches of quiet.

                                                          THE NEIGHTBORHOOD

We’re in Silver Lake where the city begins to climb up the hills. It’s funky and flashy, a typical LA mix of classic SoCal cottages and contemporary wide glass windowed boxes. Flowers bloom everywhere. Palms sway in the breeze and all size and shapes of cactus abound. Parking can be tricky although during the day a new space opens up about every twenty minutes. Get a good spot and you’re loathe to leave it. Since just about everything we need is in walking distance my car hasn’t moved in days.

Nighttime used to attract crowds to the restaurants and shops on Sunset. Now two of the trendy restaurants have closed and the remaining places have, as best they can, moved outdoors. The crowds have thinned out. Saturday night around ten all was quiet.

 

                                                          MASK AWARENESS

 

Everybody here is much more mask conscious. Everybody is masked all the time. Basically you put one on when you walk out the door and don’t take it off until you’re home again.

 

                                                         DEVELOPMENT

The breakneck pace of development has ground to a halt. In before times those quaint California cottages were being ripped away from the hillside to be replaced with big undistinguished multi-tenant apartments. Over on Sunset the old Army Navy surplus store where once you could find anything if you could maneuver the narrow aisles between the big piles of stuff is gone. Construction of something new and way bigger was started but is now stopped. This all means our views west over downtown Hollywood has been, for now, saved. It also means that the abandoned Church across the street is now a total eyesore surrounded by plywood fences topped with concertina wire. Well, it was slated to be resurrected as a boutique hotel which would have added lots of coming and going. We can put up with it.

 

GOOD MORNING LA       Thursday Morning 

My body, still on EST and thinking 8:30, was up and running while it was still dark, very dark, outside. Time for few hours of hypnopompic liminal dreaming.

Now up and about powered by a coupla cups of coffee. Finding stuff. Organizing, well one of us is organizing,

Bill has offered to drive me downtown to pick up the rental. I’ve accepted.

Feelin’ good so far

 

GOOD MORNING LA    Thursday 

Our first full day was inhabited by a sense of the familiar.

After coffee we set about organizing the apartment, searching through drawers and cabinets inventorying what we had and what we needed to get. And then, as we always do when we’ve arrived somewhere recently, we went shopping. This time we tossed Erewhon, a brand new upscale grocery just a short walk away. As we walked the neighborhood, I was struck how it hasn’t changed all that much. Oh, there have been changes; some shops are gone, replaced by the next ones. But it’s still Silver Lake, flashy and funky. Flowers bloom everywhere.

We have a noticeable effect on the average age here. Bill says that all the hip, young and beautiful head here while they’re still hip, young, and beautiful. Nothing we see here refutes his theory.

Bill gave me ride downtown to pick up our rental car. Quite confidently, I drove back to Silver Lake over streets I know well.

Evening came and Bill and Alvaro invited us to put on coats (cold is a very relative term.) and spend some time in their garden. They’ve created an urban oasis just outside their door, lush and at night, softly lit.

Then back upstairs. Shelley had baked bread and made chicken and veggie soup. The cliché is “all the comforts of home.” But in a certain sense, this is home.

 

GOOD MORNING LA    Friday 

There came a time late afternoon when I thought to myself how mundane this all has been. It had been a day of household chores, straightening up, window washing, hanging a spice rack, trying, pretty much unsuccessfully, to keep the imitation Ikea dresser from collapse. Nothing here to write about. Move along.

And then, as night descended, with beer, bubbly, and some California grass, we settled into the comfy chairs in the windowed room that looks west out over Hollywood lights. Mellow tunes from Pandora played.  Bliss came rolling in. Shelley noted this is remarkably like how we would spend a summer evening on the second-floor porch on Columbia Blvd. “Porch West,” she says

 

GOOD MORNING LA       Saturday

Saturday morning off to the farmer’s market. We buy tomatoes, avocados (oh, the piles of just right ripe avocados) strawberries and flowers. I’m just so impressed with the piles of fresh produce. Here in mid-January fresh veggies abound.

We take a walk over to Sunset to shop for a birthday present for Bill. Jennifer recommended Yolk, a shop that mostly sells kid’s suff. Good tip. We find just the thing.

Early eve we’re off to Betsy’s to celebrate Bill’s birthday. When we arrive the Bills’ playoff game is already in the first quarter. Was there ever any doubt that Betsy would have the game on? She is wearing her Bills gear, snackies on the table include chicken wing dip, there’s Bills napkins and her little bity dog is wearing a Bills doggy jersey.

Buffalo dominates the hated Patriots. Game ends; birthday party rolls on. Alvaro has brough tamales. So good. They should be traditional birthday fare.

It’s our first visit to Betsy’s charming LA 20’s home. I struggle to describe it. Exquisitely enchanting, so very SoCal, something delightful meets the eye everywhere you look. And oh my, the tiled bathroom…shoulda took pictures.

 

GOOD MORNING LA       Sunday

We went shopping for a long list of mostly staples at Vons. Vons is a B-list supermarket which reminds me a lot of Tops before that chain changed owners and the new owners lightened, tightened and brightened the stores. But we knew from past experience Vons is the only place that carries our favorite probiotic. We rolled our piled fulla stuff shopping cart to the yogurt section and sadly discovered Vons no longer stocks it. This more than mundane story has a kinda happy ended. I’ll get to that.

This visit is unlike any of our previous visits which as you so well know were filled with music, art, culture and plenty of fine dining. None of that this time. Instead, it’s been pretty much dealing with our lives as we typically do when we’re home. (I shan’t mention shoveling snow.)

But it’s also been catching up with friends. So far Bill and Alvaro, then Betsy. And then I stepped outside to go to the car and a heard a hearty hello from the porch. It was Badwater Bob. We chatted. Well, mostly I listened ‘cause he’s always entertaining.

Later I went downstairs and there was Mark Levinthal. Earlier he’d taken Bill out for birthday wings. I asked about the kids He told us he hopes to bring them to Buffalo this summer and show them his heritage. Naomi (gasp) is eighteen!

Dinner was humus veggies, Shelley’s scallions, cucumber, cherry tomato and avocado salad piled on my own home-made humus in pita topped with guacamole. And even those veggies from the B list supermarket tasted so great because they were, here in mid-January, so fresh. A happy California ending.

GOOD MORNING LA       Monday

 

Kinda more of the same.

Not too long after we arrived the sink in the bathroom would not drain. Gallons of Liquid Plumber had absolutely no effect. By Saturday we concluded that professional help was required. But we didn’t want to pay weekend rates, so we decided to put up with it until the long weekend was over.

Then yesterday morning Bill spots a plumber’s truck parked across the street. “I know this guy. He used to live in the neighborhood.” The boys track him down and ere too long he’s here. And ere not much after that all’s well. Apparently, plumbers don’t celebrate MLK Day so we get away for far less that what we’d expected to pay.

We walked to the hardware store on Hyperion. I bought some clothes hooks which I’ll install in the closet today. Shelley bought paint and brushes. She plans to repaint the floor in porch west.

Buffalo and the Columbia Blvd fb pages are fulla pics of huge piles of snow. I resist posting that we had some light rain and the temperature never got out of the mid-sixties. That would be way too smug.

 

GOOD MORNNG LA     Tuesday

 

Is this getting boring? Is this already boring? What if I wrote today I went to Dash’s, bought milk and bread, came home and made toast. Would you wish i hadn’t bothered? Bur really, that’s what it's like here pretty much just normal life in a warmer place.

So I put up a new towel ring and some clothes hooks. Shelley painted a shelf in the window room. We walked over to the Tuesday afternoon farmers market where we bought broccoli and strawberries. We chilled on porch west. Then dinner and bed.

Oh, and yet another acquaintance showed up. Spiro stopped by to visit the boys and was on the porch when I came down to empty the trash. We chatted. He said he had to depart. Good-byes all around.  Later I went downstairs to return a drill I’d borrowed. Spiro was still there, just now inside. “Take my chair. I’m leaving,” he said. I did just that. He went and sat on the coach. More chat. Then I left for upstairs. Spiro was still there.

This is a pattern I’ve observed, not just here. Visitors state their intention to leave but then don’t. Am I supposed to say, “Oh no, please stick around.”? I tend to take people at their word. If they’re ready to leave, fine. If not that’s OK too. I donno.

 

GOOD MORNNG LA     Wednesday

 

I actually drove the car somewhere. Not exactly an excursion, I drove to the user-friendly ATM at Hollywood and Vermont, then to the gas station where $60 (yikes!) filled the tank.

I figured my iPhone 6s needed a new battery because it would not keep a charge for very long. Keeping a charge for when I had to depend on the phone, like when making a cross county flight, was a constant challenge. So a week or two before we left, I took it to the Apple store. I was told the battery was fine. The problem was with the phone. Seems so much has been loaded onto it since I acquired it seven years ago that it rapidly ate its way through a battery charge just trying to keep up. And, they told me, Apple would soon cease support. I knew then that its days were numbered. 

So Shelley and I took a long walk down Sunset to the Verizon store. I needed her support to overcome the raging anxiety I experience whenever I’m facing a major purchase. Net result: my new iPhone 13mini will arrive next week. It’s weird to be sentimental about a device. But my little 6s has been my constant companion for so much of my life for so long. I’m gonna miss it if but briefly.

On the way back we stopped at CCA Silver Lake where I became the newest member which admitted me to the retail room. What an intimidating selection. Shelley, who was not admitted as the driver’s license, she carries for ID had expired, once again saved me from purchase anxiety by specifying ordering Blue Dream. We left with a quarter which should last us for quite a while.

Rather than cook dinner as we’d done every night we ordered take out from Pine and Crane. Boy, was it good.

 

GOOD MORNING LA    Thursday

 

Gelsons, on the other hand, is a class A1 supermarket, bright, clean, wide aisles and sufficiently stocked with stuff I want to buy. For instance, unlike the other stores we shopped, there’s a craft beer cooler. I walked there, two and a half miles there and back. Combine that with our three mile walk to the Verizon store on Wednesday.

Shelley’s painting project continues. Expect pictures when she’s finished. Meanwhile, I’m running out of home improvement projects.

 

GOOD MORNING LA       Friday  

Shelley finishes her repainting. The furniture goes back. It’s hard to get a good photo:

(Not to scale)

Back to Gelsons, this time we both so we can carry more stuff. We score artichokes bigger than softballs and fresh sea bass. Shelley breaded the fish with seasoned crumbs made from the last of a loaf of bread she’d baked. Dinner: Baked breaded Sea Bass, Artichokes with Hollandaise, Oven baked French Fries. We agree this was a meal as good as served in any fine restaurant.