Living in a small town in the 1980s, Los Angeles California

I watched an excellent TikTok video yesterday that showed just how huge the city of Los Angeles is, and it got me to thinking about how I coped with LA in the '80s. Trust me, LA is huge, and has been for a very long time. I even remember the joke about Bugs Bunny burrowing to New Mexico and seeing a "Los Angeles City Limits" sign - and those cartoons were old when I was a kid!

What I did was to limit how much of the city I would live in, and take in. That is, I knew my neighborhood very well, but beyond a certain limit, and for me it was the 405 freeway, I it might as well be in a completely different city.

Don't get me wrong, I would still venture beyond the 405, but I would take a map, and I wouldn't feel right until I got back to my 'hood. If you've lived in Los Angeles, you understand, and if you haven't, it's difficult to explain, but today I'm gonna try. I've lived in Phoenix for a long time, and if people ever ask me where I lived before that I will simply say LA, but that's the short answer.

If you live in Los Angeles, just saying that you live in LA is essentially meaningless. Technically, since I lived in Canoga Park, it was City of LA, but I either said Canoga Park, or in the Valley. Of course there are separate municipalities (I think that's the word) in the Valley, such as Burbank, which isn't City of LA, and that means that they have their own cops, their own mayor, that sort of thing. And while places like Canoga Park are under the jurisdiction of the City of Los Angeles (the LAPD would come for you if you broke the law!), for practical day-to-day purposes, Canoga Park is considered its own city. And that's where I lived, in a small town.

I lived on the western edge of Canoga Park, and worked in Warner Center in Woodland Hills, which was about two miles away. My girlfriend used to say that I lived in a triangle that wasn't much bigger than that, my apartment, work, and the gym. Sometimes my world would stretch to a square, but even then she didn't live all that far away.

When I moved back to Phoenix after being away for ten years, it took awhile for me to realize how small it was, and still is. In Los Angeles I would use a Thomas Guide, which was a book with binder pages, but in Phoenix all I needed was a regular folding map. And because of that I figured that it would be even easier to make Phoenix into a small town, but it really wasn't - in Phoenix you were expected to know all of it, from Peoria to Mesa. No one I know ever said that they never been beyond a certain area. People in Phoenix go all over the place - they may complain a bit about traffic, but the traffic has never gotten bad enough to make people stay in one place, like in LA.

But I settled into a small town attitude in Glendale, Arizona, where I bought the house that I'm still in. My world remains wonderfully small - I go to the same places all of the time, for my coffee, that sort of thing. I've never gone to watch a football game, but if I wanted to, it's just a few miles away. I like it here.

Well, I was born in a small town
And I can breathe in a small town!

John Mellencamp

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