[I’m flying to Los Angeles this afternoon…. Tomorrow my friend James will drive me up to Kennedy Meadows, on the Pacific Crest Trail, and I’ll start walking.
I don’t know when I’ll get a chance to post an entry again,
or how much I’ll be able to write when I do get to a computer…. It’s going to
be an adjustment, giving up this writing…. But I’m sure I’ll return to it as
often as I can. ]
[Later: I came off the trail unexpectedly, earlier than
planned, and so I went ahead and posted a full entry for this day, and for
subsequent days….]
On the flight to Phoenix, a stopover on the way to LA, I was
sitting next to a teenaged girl who was part of a group traveling to Australia.
A big strawberry blonde, she wanted to keep to herself, but the guy on the
aisle quizzed her mercilessly about the trip and the group, ignoring the hint
of her terse answers, rambling off on an anecdote about some school trip he had
taken to DC as a 8th grader…. Finally, the girl got out her book and
began to read. It was Fifty Shades of
Gray, which seemed an odd choice but maybe not. In the Boise and Phoenix
and LA airports, stacks of the books and its sequels were prominently displayed
up front at bookstores and newsstands.
The temperature in Phoenix was 103, the sky hazy, and from
above the brown mountains looked baked, the sprawling city scalded and
untenable. The airport terminal was packed; long lines snaked from restaurants
and bars and restrooms, all the seats at each gate were filled, and the people
spilled out into the wide corridor, bodies and luggage taking up almost all the
space. I shouldered my heavy pack and looked for room, weighed down by the
emotional brutality of air travel….
I reached LA a half hour late, but James was even later. But
I wasn’t sure if he was late or we had got our times mixed up….. I had the
wrong cellphone number for him (though I didn’t know that), and I’d deleted a
message he had left earlier, so I had no way to contact him. I waited outside
the baggage claim, a roofed-in space where the air was concussed with the
ear-damaging noise of automobiles and buses, and thick with the poisons of
exhaust. I tried his home number, tried the cellphone numerous times, walked up
and down the verge of the pick-up lane as the last of the daylight faded away,
looking and looking for a little red Fiat, wondering what I should do….
Finally, after an hour and a half, James appeared and
suddenly all was well. He had been driving up from a meeting in San Diego, and
the traffic had been much worse than expected…. But it didn’t matter; I was in
the car…. James’ meeting was with the president of Lamborghini (I think; someone
high up in the company anyway). He, James, recently took a job as general
manager at Symbolic Motors in La Jolla (before he was managing an Astin-Martin
dealer in Newport Beach). They sell Bentleys, Rolls Royces, Ferraris,
Lamborghinis, and other high end cars. They recently sold a Lamborghini to Kim
Kardashian.
We drove to Long Beach and ate dinner at a restaurant while
the end of second game of the NBA finals played on a tv over the bar. After, we
went to his house and stood in the kitchen talking, with his wife Trish too,
leaping associationally all over the place as people who haven’t seen each
other for some time do….
Their younger son, Jordan, had graduated from 8th
grade earlier in the day, and following the ceremony, the kids had had a dance
or party at the Petroleum Club, a posh meeting place built by and for Long
Beach’s oil barons a half century or more ago. I spent my first four years in
Long Beach, and one of my earliest memories is of a black oil derrick, the big
arm plunging down and popping up, like a huge mechanical bird.
Knots of girls in prom dresses and boys in suits gathered in
the lobby, sweaty and disarrayed by dancing and hormones and parental attention.
They hugged and performed their emotions and posed for photographs, while
parents chatted about the upcoming weekend and 10K races. A group of girls
clustered around Trish, and she matched them in tone and excitement and
laughter, and they promised each other get- togethers in the weeks ahead. James
said, “They all love Trish.” After a while Jordan awkwardly embraced one last
friend and then joined James; the two stood waiting patiently for Trish, who
talked on, took pictures, found more girls and mothers to hug and gush over. I
examined the oil paintings of decades of club officers, bald men in suits, each
with the expression of a person who expects to be obeyed….
Trish finally finished, said her goodbyes, and the four of
us went out to the Range Rover. On the way to the club, Trish had said
something about Jordan having a new girlfriend. In the lobby, James had wanted
Jordan to point her out, but Jordan had acted like he didn’t hear.
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