O grain of the earth and fruit of the strawberry bush! O pancake of joy and syrup of thanksgiving! To You we lift our hearts, and our mouths are full of Your goodness. To You we raise our shining forks and sticky faces, for today heaven and earth are dripping with Your glory. Light of our light, festivity of our feasting, joy of our breakfast picnic: the night’s long fast is over, and we give You thanks and praise.
California
The future
“As one went to Europe to see the living past, so one must visit Southern California to observe the future” (Alison Lurie, The Nowhere City).
The slide
“In Los Angeles, all the loose objects in the country were collected as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn’t tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California” (Saul Bellow, Seize the Day).
Pasadena
The night before the Rose Parade, the Oklahoma preacher makes his way down Colorado Boulevard, holding above the crowded sidewalk a big yellow sign about the Bible, the wages of sin, the dreaded afterlife. Ten paces ahead of him, his eleven-year-old daughter keeps the same funereal march, pointing the megaphone straight ahead like a pistol and proclaiming the King James gospel at 120 decibels. I thought: One day she will write a book about all this.
The idea of home
We stayed in a big house on the hill above the sea. Everything was new, clean, polished, straight off the pages of a magazine, migrainously bright. It was not so much a home as the idea of a home, just as Starbucks is the idea of coffee and The Smurfs 3D is the idea of a children’s movie.
Disneyland
I am a cynic, a hater, a vehement critic of the Disneyfication of childhood. Anyone who will listen, I tell them what’s wrong with Disney. I tell them: “You should not always follow your heart.” I tell them: “The Real You is, at times, an abomination.” I tell them: “Your little girl is not a princess.” I tell the little girls: “Your aim in life is not to marry a prince.” When we agreed to take our children to Disneyland I made ironic remarks from the corner of my mouth, I spoke of compromises and the sacrifices we make for our children, I prepared myself for the grueling spiritual trials of an entire day at Disneyland, though secretly I wondered whether we might persuade our children to leave a little early. Then the day came. We drove all morning. We walked through the gates and we were in Disneyland. The colored shops and houses were bathed in a soft nostalgic glow, the streets curled away lazily into the distance, a horse-drawn streetcar pulled up beside us, the music of half-forgotten childhood movies played from somewhere beyond the sky. Everything was Sunday and Pollyanna and homemade lemonade and America. I peered carefully at a drifting cloud to check if the sky was real. We stayed for fourteen hours, until my children had to beg me to take them home.
Prison
We were eating breakfast and I was telling him about the evils of the penitentiary system. “You know, the percentage of incarcerated citizens in the United States is seven times higher than in Australia. And a seventh of all those American prisoners—mostly African Americans—are right here in California. It’s because the prison systems here operate just like any other corporate enterprise. Did you know that the prison guards union is one of the wealthiest and most powerful political lobbies in California? The Three Strikes legislation, for example—one of the most unjust pieces of legislation in American history—was backed by the prison guards union. For them, it’s all about keeping the cells full, expanding the number of prisons, increasing the number of people who work in prisons. A few years back, over 10 percent of the entire state budget was spent on prisons. Just compare that to schools and universities. Compare that to rehabilitation programs. I mean, once you’ve been incarcerated in California you’ve got a 90 percent chance of returning to prison—90 percent! My God, do you know how much money is at stake in all this? Do you know how many new prisons have been built in California in the last twenty years? The real dream of these purveyors of human misery is to have half of California behind bars, and the other half gainfully employed as guards in correctional facilities.” He chewed his food thoughtfully and said, “Man, I hear you. It ain’t easy. Wherever I go, them police move me on. I try to sleep behind the dumpster, they move me on. I stand in front of the store with a cup, they tell me they’ll send me back to jail. Man, it hard keeping out of jail in California, you got that right.”
Los Angeles
He took me hiking in the mountains and in hushed tones told me the names of all the birds. When we had reached the edge of a steep ravine and all we could see were the mountains, the sky, the cool stream and the canyon, he stopped and said, “There it is. My favorite view of Los Angeles.”
Whales
The day I went whale watching at Newport, we found ourselves in the middle of a huge pod of killer whales. They swam alongside us and swam in front of us and glided under the boat, their white patches shimmering like immense green lights beneath the water. They were so close, so good and gleaming, so startlingly alive, that it took the greatest effort not to throw myself into the sea in a mad gesture of love and gratitude.
Celebrities
It was a deflating experience. I had gone into Target on the way home because I needed toothpaste, and I stood at the checkout contemplating the infinite melancholy of big department stores. Then in one of the lines I saw a celebrity. Some of the Target staff left their checkouts to go over and shake his hand and tell him that they loved him. I looked down at my tube of toothpaste, averting my eyes, and to tell you the truth I felt very sorry for the poor bastard.
Languages
“I’m going to cycle around Europe,” he told me as we started on our second beer. “I dunno, maybe stay and work a while. Maybe learn a language. I’ve always wanted to learn a language.” He had lived all his life in Los Angeles, so I asked him what about Spanish, did he know that Los Angeles has more Spanish-speaking people than any other place in the world, after Mexico City? He said, “Ah, I don’t like Spanish, never liked it. It’s such a—an ugly language.” I asked him which languages he liked. “You know, maybe French, Italian, maybe Polish or something like that—hell, I dunno, maybe even German.”
Cracks
My son and I were walking down the street and as usual he was carefully stepping over the cracks in the sidewalk. When an old hobo shuffled past in his broken shoes, my son told him matter-of-factly, “If you step on the cracks you’ll die.” Without stopping the man nodded his grizzled head profoundly and said, “Yeah brother, they hard rules. One false step and it’s all over. They hard rules right there, brother.”
The mysticism of the freeway
“The freeway experience . . . is the only secular communion Los Angeles has. Mere driving on the freeway is in no way the same as participating in it. Anyone can ‘drive’ on the freeway, and many people with no vocation for it do, hesitating here and resisting there, losing the rhythm of the lane change, thinking about where they came from and where they are going. Actual participants think only about where they are. Actual participation requires a total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway. The mind goes clean. The rhythm takes over” (Joan Didion, The White Album).
Venice Beach
Along the brokenhearted strip of break dancers, jugglers, graffitied trees, sinister musicians and fortune tellers, amid the slouched storefronts peddling pipes and hotdogs and T-shirts and tattoos, the medical marijuana clinics are newly painted, clean, seedy, legitimate. A guy in dark shades and a bright green lab coat takes a drag on his reefer and sings out, “Step inside, ladies and gentlemen, right this way, the doctor is in. Headache, back pain, insomnia, sadness—it’s good for whatever ails you.”
Australia
I told him I was from Australia.