Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
A kaleidoscope of years
What I always forget about the LA basin is its scale. If I drive 20 minutes in Bakersfield, I get from one side of town to the other. If I drive 20 minutes in LA, I get from one suburb to another. On the map, they’re next door neighbors.
We knew our neighbors when we were kids. We knew everyone on the street. We knew their occupations, the names of all their kids; they had nicknames; each dad had a characteristic whistle to call his kids home for dinner. We even knew whose dad was pissed (the whistle changed pitch). The adults weren’t friends with one another but we knew them. And the kids hung out together, of course. Nowadays, I don’t know my neighbors. Yes, I’m as much to blame as they are. It was a little better in Crescent City and Harbor, but not much.
In Texas, we knew our next door neighbors. We met the wife when Sydney, my tortoise, dug under the fence to see if there were any female tortoises in their backyard. The wife liked to feed the deer; huge scads of deer came by for the free food, the parasites. The husband was an emeritus prof at the med school, in the Family Practice Department. Nice people. But we didn’t know anyone else there.
So I had in mind eating at Cafe Santorini tonight, since I have fond memories of their smelt appetizer — my “pile of little fishies,” as in, “Karen, I want a pile of little fishies tonight!” I was so eager to get there that I took the Colorado exit from the 210. Big mistake. I should have stayed on the 134. Not only did the 210 exit put me in the wrong place, it pointed me in the wrong direction. It has been so long since I lived in LA that everything looks unfamiliar now. The fact that I passed first the Eagle Rock Plaza and then the Glendale Galleria should have told me I was going the wrong way, but finally I had to come to a dead-end to figure it out. Fortunately, I found the 134 East, got myself turned around, and soon found myself in Old Town Pasadena. Huzzah!
Old Town Pasadena is a product of end stage gentrification. In my childhood, Colorado Blvd. was a string of seedy bars and pawn shops. You wouldn’t stop there, you would drive through. Fast. In the 90s, it went through a lovely in-between phase where pawn shops and adult bookstores intermingled with Il Fornaio and Gordon Biersch. Now Gordon Biersch lies vacant, and what was once a stodgy and ancient cigar-and-top hat restaurant on the corner of Fair Oaks and Colorado is now a Cheesecake Factory. Abercrombie and Fitch, Barnes and Noble, T-Mobile, an Apple store, Victoria’s Secret . . . I want to know who gutted a mall! I might as well be back in Walnut Creek.
But Cafe Santorini is still open, and my little fishies are still on the menu.
“I can’t tell you how happy I am that you’re still open,” I told the hostess.
“Oh, we stay open until 10 on weekdays!” she bubbled back. I suspect she was 10 the last time we ate here.
Overheard at Cafe Santorini: one twenty-something woman telling another, “I feel settled now.” I didn’t catch the details, but she proceeded to tell her friend how everything in her life had fallen into place. And maybe she is settled. Maybe she’ll still be in the same place, doing the same thing sixty years from now. But it struck me that it’s far more likely that she’s settled only because she has not yet become unsettled.
I was settled once, too. I had free food and rent, a girlfriend, a job that paid me enough for gas and date money, a certain amount of homework to keep my mind busy. Then I left home for college, and since then nothing has been the same.
It seems to me we live many lives, each in blocks of ten or five years, sometimes less. Certainly my first ten years felt like an eternity, and the next ten weren’t much better. Berkeley was only four years, yet it was and is a huge part of my life. Texas? Little more than two, but it made a big impression on me.
What fascinates me is the selectivity of memory. I’ve spent something like 40% of my life living in the San Gabriel Valley, yet I got lost trying to get to Old Town Pasadena. But once there, I walked straight to Cafe Santorini (which is a bit out of the way), and the place looked and felt like I had been there only a few months ago.
And my little fishies were just as tasty as I had remembered.
D.
I just read a post on Facebook from a guy I knew in my last year of grad school, who said:
must have been absent on the day they passed out total personality changes to all his friends in their mid-20s, because (modulo greater self-awareness) he feels like exactly the same person he was in college, with the same interests, dreams, and outlook. Hope the rest of you are enjoying adulthood!
I’m with you on living one’s life in blocks. I still think about things based on where I was at the time. The remark above caught my attention, since it was so alien to my experience. I am certainly not the same as I was at Cal and can barely remember that person. Fascinating to know someone who feels that he’s still the same.
My favorite LA freeway story was when a friend of mine and I were on 10 different freeways in the space of an afternoon. Still find that impressive.
Glad you found your restaurant. I feel betrayed when a favorite place disappears – sort of like one’s past is eroding away…
I enjoyed this blog…because I remember the neighbors…sometimes we knew too much about them, but even with the negative stuff we knew about them, it was still comforting to know who lived around you.
I’ll have to give Santorini another try.
I think we live life in blocks, too. I’d list mine, but I think this too long for a comment on your blog. But you have given me a blog post.
I grew up in a small town where I was a newcomer because I came in Grade 3. I graduated in a class of about 80, probably 50 of whom had started kindergarten together. We weren’t very social people, but I knew everyone’s names, and the names of their siblings, and the names of their parents, uncles, and cousins.
And yet when I drive through now I can’t remember many of those family names any more. I can remember that I used to know who lived in THIS house, or THAT house, but I can’t remember the name any more. If someone says, oh, Berchtolds lived there, I’ll remember that yes that’s right or no that’s wrong.
Funny thing, memory.