Saying goodbye to the City of Angels


Two of my very best friends moved away from Los Angeles this year. I myself said goodbye to the City of Angels in 1989, and while it's easy to be glib about it, it's still tough to say goodbye to where you've lived for a long time.

I've long gotten used to people making fun of California, and Los Angeles, and I understand. It's a goofy place in so many ways. It's a place of wacky celebrities, and botoxed movie stars, and people who will grab you by the lapel insisting that the only way to health and happiness is to eat 100% organic gluten-free avocados. I get it.

But Los Angeles is home to a lot of people, and has been for much longer than most people realize. When I lived there I got interested in the history, which I found to go way back even before the Sherman Oaks Galleria was built. Generations have lived there, many generations.

Speaking for myself, LA was the Big City. After I got my degree at Arizona State, I wanted to see what life was like in the Big City. To me, that means either New York or Los Angeles (sorry, Chicago). And my hatred of the cold put New York out of the question, and LA didn't seem to be all that different from Phoenix. You know, palm trees.

I spent so little time there, from age 25 to 31, that it amazes me how much Los Angeles, and California, molded me. Maybe it was the right time for me to be receptive to understanding, maybe in my journey to find myself I was willing to learn about other people, other cultures, other points of view. I don't know, I just know that it happened to me, and became a part of me.

And maybe it's the cliché of "Tinsel Town" that makes thinking about ordinary family life so fascinating to me in Los Angeles. People are born there, they grow up there, they go to school there, they raise families there, just like anywhere else. And sometimes it's time to go, and even if it's the right thing to do, it's gotta hurt a little bit.
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