novembre ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- their sparkling cities notes from my break 1. i first knew i was in hollywood proper when the 101 wound around a spotless, gargantuan church of scientology. tom cruise. tom cruise. 2. whenever i see palm trees in southern california i wonder whose bright idea it was to import them here in the first place. when i was little, i thought palm trees were the saddest of all trees, especially when their excess dead leaves had been trimmed, leaving them just tall drooping heads. bowing to the sun. close your eyes and picture this palm tree, all trunk and palm, no excess leaves, just trunk and puft of palm at the top. do you see it bobbing in the wind or sweating silently through a hot LA night? i imagine it almost on its side, palms shocked against its trunk like hair, as in a hurricane. 3. my grandmother's favorite nurse at the interim home where she will be receiving round-the-clock care until the end of march is a flamenco dancer who lets her feel his arm muscles. he paints her nails and gives her advice on which dinner jacket to wear over her sweat suit. 3.5. grandma is now diabetic and can't walk. vision failing. can still hear sharp as anything and give shifty sailors the evil eye from miles away, though. 4. grandma swept the interim home during bingo and poker last week. she won a frog/ladybug wind chime (i can't decide which animal it is; it has a frog's head and ladybug wings?) and specifically saved it for me. 5. my brother bought a chinese wedding cabinet. it is red and has its own key. it is one of the prettiest things i think anyone in our little immediate family has owned. we walked up and down valencia looking at similar furniture but the first was the best. and then burritos and then i hit the road. that was the beginning. 6. i am teaching my father to have better posture. at any given moment i blurt out, "ENGAGE!" at which point he sucks in his stomach and i mock punch him. and then he mock punches me. this is the most bonding we have done since the red sox last fall. 7. apparently there is a scabies scare among the hip LA/hollywood elite. xo was telling me about it and advising me to take hot showers. we'd shudder, wash our hands, drink our whiskey, and admire the cavernous bar and how distinctly los angeles the whole place felt: i remembered driving to melrose to shop when i was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen with groups of friends. i remembered going to no life and wasteland and all the other shops i now forget the names of. walls painted deep, dark colors. figures, cartoons painted directly on the walls. low ceilings. cavernous back rooms hinting at nicotine and cocaine in its corners. los angeles. "scabies," she said, looking at me and shuddering for emphasis. i laughed. the band began to play, swan island, friends of friends and so on. 8. my grandfather gets the results of his latest catscan on friday. i called him and asked him what he was doing wednesday, and after a pause i heard my beloved grandpa peek out from under years of family strife to make a joke: "wednesday? why... i'm hanging out with elka!" 9. the dog is now twice as big as i remember, and they've even inserted a little chip in her ear should she ever get lost. she wiggles and preens and it is no secret that my parents have filled their empty nest with labrador, now for the second time. the second coming. on the kitchen counter i found an old key chain that my dad scratched ruby's name and information into. it was right next to her collar, and i figured he was hoping to somehow fasten the key chain onto her collar as makeshift dog tags. i looked up and asked mom, 10. they close access to the cross (ventura's highest point, a city-owned park with a gigantic cross on the tip of a mountain) at night now. we drove up to see the city from afar, from under the great big beams, but it was closed at the foot of the steepest incline and there were sports cars lining the dusty road, lights turned off and heads together discernable over each dashboard. it was only about ten pm, but it was a tuesday night. 11. k has the most lines on her face of all our friends that are our age. she knitted her brow together and mulled over how it didn't make sense because her skin was the oiliest. 12. at my grandmother's interim home there is a cage that is twice the size of my brother's new chinese wedding cabinet and in this cage are five pairs of lovebirds. she scuttled down the hall in her wheelchair with me at her heels making sure the oxygen was still connected. we sat in front of the cage for a while, discussing whether there were six or five pairs (five, there are five) of birds and whether they all match (most of them do, but there is one pair of a blue bird and an orange bird. they don't seem to fit with any other birds, so i paired them together in my mind and viola. five couples. i didn't tell grandma this, just said i agreed that they all matched. she couldn't see them anyway). i leaned over and in a loud whisper thanked her for still having all of her marbles. this made her eyes relax and she let me run my fingers through her hair, softer than it has been in decades without all that aqua net, without her weekly hair appointment. rake the fingertips from the hairline to the skull's crown, and back again. soft as a bird's egg, shaking and hollow as a bird's wing. 13. i mapped out an idea for a children's novel. i watched blue crush on sam's couch. i slept in her bed, but restlessly, turning this way and that and dreaming about the wide expanse of los angeles surrounding us in little armenia, in her flat wide neighborhood with its defeated trees. 11:25 pm - 03.22.05 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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