THE LAST DAY IN PARADISE

“Isn’t it cold there?” She asked me.

“Colder than it is here,” I said.

I was standing outside my son’s Third Grade classroom in Woodland Hills, CA[1], waiting for him to let out so I could put him in the car and drive twenty minutes to wait outside a motel for my daughter’s middle school bus. I was talking to one of the other mothers. I say “other mothers” because many people think I’m a real mother – but perhaps the context is a bit different.

“Does it go below freezing there?” She asked.

We were talking about the fact that my house was on the market and I was moving my family out of Los Angeles, likely close to my hometown of Buffalo, NY.

“Well, sure. I mean, it snows. It has to go below freezing.”

She looked at me for a long time, obviously cogitating over the my weather report.

“Don’t you die?”

“Sorry?”

“If you go outside and it’s below freezing --- don’t you die?”

I like to tell the story of when I was working in Montreal. The first day I was there the high – the HIGH – for the day was zero degrees Fahrenheit. The best is was going to get that day was the absence of any temperature at all. I had a duffel coat I’d bought a few years before for a winter trip to Korea and it was woefully inadequate. I put it on and braved the ten-minute walk to the studio. When I go there the first person I saw said:

“I bet you’re used to this weather growing up in Buffalo, huh?”

“Fuck you,” I said. “It never gets this cold in Buffalo and if it does, it’s three AM and I’m asleep anyway.”

This day, the last day in L.A. was clear skies and around seventy-two degrees on the day that was FINALLY our last day in the California house. It was the kind of day that you wished for all the time, but got only rarely, especially in the San Fernando Valley just over the hill from L.A. proper[2]. It was the end of the year, and the weather had conspired to make you think perhaps you were crazy for leaving a place like this.

Yeah. Nice try. Didn’t work.

I was relieved, my wife was happy and, much to my surprise, my kids were happy and excited to leave the only house they had ever known. The house was empty, our furniture, most of our clothing, our cars and our pet were already on their way. It was a day that was both nine months and fifteen years in coming.

We’d been a night without furniture, camping out on the floor with blankets. We’d sold the appliances with the house, so we still had a washer/dryer and that gave me something to do. Something to keep my hands busy as I was all a-flutter with anticipation. Well, maybe not a-flutter. Maybe something more manly. But I was ready to go.

I’d downloaded some movies onto my laptop and the spare laptop[3] was traveling with my daughter[4]. Sadly the cable modem had been returned and the wireless router had been packed, so the computer had been rendered a fancy-ass typewriter that you could play backgammon on.

BUT! A friend of my wife’s (the Sainted Patricia) had gifted the kids with a portable DVD player and they had immediately conned Mom into taking them to the used DVD store where they had purchased “The Devil Wears Prada” and “X-Men: The Last Stand”[5].

The house no longer seemed like ours. We’d been there 12 ½ years, originally as a rental. We bought it after a year for a deal that still makes all our friends green with envy, but that was the great L.A. market dump of 1997, not the great L.A. market dump of 2008. But that dump was a worse dump and now the market was taking a historic dump and we were still getting out with a profit. Not the F-U profit we had hoped for, but still a profit and that’s better than most everyone else we knew.

We’d been in our little Beaver Cleaver house for the longest I’d EVER lived in one spot. Well, not one spot. I did move about the house, thought I did have a favorite couch location. But it was the longest-held address of one lifetime. So long that I had forgotten the intricacies of turning utilities on and off – something that had become automatic in my years in L.A. where through the nineties and into the Twenty-First century, the population moved on an average of every eighteen months.

Now the blue/gray stucco house with the white shutters and awnings that drooped a bit didn’t seem like home anymore. All one-thousand and thirty-seven square feet that we’d brought our daughter and son home to from the hospital right around the corner was about to change hands. We were living there for a few more hours.

The walls were the same colors they’d been. I’d patched and painted every wall and ceiling in that place with the exception of the living room/dining room. The carpet was the same blue – maybe a little faded in spots and surely more worn in others. Right by the kitchen if the nap was a certain way and you caught it in the right light you could see the spot where, when my daughter was about two years old, she’d tried to carry her mother’s coffee in to the kitchen and had spilled it, becoming fascinated with the patter the coffee was making on the floor until it was all gone. By the window that looked into the back yard you could see the extra-worn spot where the couch had been when we’d first owned the house and the nearly pristine spot across from it where the entertainment center from Ikea that had taken me six hours and a pack of cigarettes to built[6]. The floors we’d put down in the kitchen were the same. The Spanish tile kitchen still had the crack in it where I’d hit it with a chef’s knife. The front screen door was still wobbly from my son trying to get through it too fast and the bathroom vanity and linen shelf (can’t really be called a closet when it’s perched above the toilet) were still the Seventies dark wood/fake mahogany and not the white with blue trim I’d always thought of painting it but had never gotten around to.

If you looked out the window into the back yard you could see the aviary the neighbors behind us had built, for some reason hidden from their own home, but in a perfect spot so we could hear the racket their unknown number[7] of birds set up, especially when the sun came up and, I think it was a cockatoo, let rip with a something that sounded like a bandsaw mating with a howler monkey. If you looked to your left a little, you could see one of the many spots where the neighbor’s cat crapped almost daily. To your right was the neighbor’s house that had been home to some good friends and also some rather odd people, including a man who, in an argument with his wife, could be heard to yell:

“Do you want me to go back to jail? DO YOU WANT ME TO GO BACK TO JAIL!!!!”

Ah, misty water-colored memories…

The house was full of tiny regrets of things not done, things I’d never gotten around to, but it wasn’t full of much of anything else.

The kids were in the living room, dead center, hunched over the DVD player, close to the tiny screen where the morning’s negotiations[8] had resulted in a second showing of “The Devil Wears Prada” before a second showing of “X-Men: The Last Stand[9]”. My wife was a few feet away – near where the glider was where she’d nursed both the kids, and we were all eating Carl’s Junior, the last Carl’s Junior we were likely to have for a long time as it’s a chain that doesn’t extend to the Eastern States. Not around where we were going, anyway.

The neighborhood, for a change, was quiet, giving me a brief moment where I thought that perhaps we’d been too hasty in leaving. The field across the street, a Department of Water & Power property; a long patch of green with a couple of power towers on it, was empty. One of the reasons we had liked the house was that field. It gave a country-like feeling to this part of a megalopolis and when we’d looked at the house, it had always been empty with “No Tresspassing” signs. DWP called it a “passive use” site. That meant they knew they couldn’t keep people off it, but it was not a public park. Here’s a little nugget of info: “No Tresspassing” signs are largely so people can say: “See? I put a sign up?” It did nothing to stop the kids soccer practices, the adult soccer games, the defacto dog park[10], mobs[11] of football players, a gathering of a local church youth group, screaming parents “coaching” soccer toddlers or the thing that first made me think the house had been a bad decision: Someone checking out their four-wheeled drive in the middle of suburbia.

It was quiet behind us. The Roarer family were not performing whatever arcane ceremony they performed in their backyard pool that required conversation to be held no lower than 125 decibels. And their dog and the dog next to them did not seem to be seeing, perhaps, the squirrel that would terrify them into such a state that they would have to bark for 2-3 hours to warn everyone of the impending danger. Neither was the neighbors 3-legged poodle out an about. It seemed a nice dog. Nicer than the cats that belonged to the same people that mistook my backyard for a sandbox. And nicer than the people who owned the three cats, three dogs in a three bedroom house that was home to at least six people and God knows what else[12].

To top it off, the sky was clear, a perfect California blue, that seemed to go on forever.

I checked the weather on the magic iPhone again. It was going to be cold when we got there. Really cold. Not step outside and immediately turn into a people-cicle cold, but colder than either of my kids had known. Ever.

It seemed that everything was conspiring to let me know that things were changing. It was going to be a better life if I stayed in Tarzana. The promise of the area when it had been the estate of author Edgar Rice Burroughs would come true. It would be paradise. Lovely weather. Nice people. If only we would stay…

Not on your frikkin[13]’ life.

We finished our Carl’s Junior and tried to relax. Nerves were frayed about the move. Dragging kids out of their only home will do that, no matter how sure they are that their parents love them and would only do what was best for them.

Negotiations opened once again and, in Kissenger-like fashion, my daughter once again convinced her brother that yet a THIRD viewing of “Prada” is in order and he, after a bit of pouting, settles in, crouching like Squanto in front of a fire. She’s laid out on her stomach, head resting on her palms.

Patricia finds something to do. She can always find SOMETHING to do, even if it’s nap (and she’s really, really good at that). I settle in, head against a suitcase, and try to read. That doesn’t work. I open the computer and try to write. That doesn’t work. I try to get a signal to steal a little wireless from a neighbor for a short period of time, just to have something else to do. It doesn’t work. It seems all those strong wireless signals that would fight each other on a daily basis --- a sort of cable modem cage match occasionally forcing me to reboot the modem because my own signal had been put in a submission hold by someone else’s --- only work at table level. Here on the carpet: Bupkus. No internet. No Hulu. No nothing.

It’s New Year’s Eve – or the afternoon of it, anyway. And it’s looking to be a grand evening. A New Years to remember.

About three in the afternoon, the lovely and talented Belinda Nunez Arnold pulls up in her SUV. She lives in Redondo Beach, which is closer to the airport and has offered to take us to the airport. She and her husband Brian are wonderful people and Belinda is one of my wife’s closest friends, yet we hardly spent any time with them. The thirty mile drive could take upwards of two hours – quite often more – and as we had two kids and they had two kids, the investment of time was not cost effective. Two hour drive, 2-3 hours playing before the kids get worn out and then 2 hour drive again. There’s your day. It’s like going to a football game without beer.

We get her SUV loaded with our baggage; all the stuff we would need to last us the week or so until the truck carrying the majority of our belongings turned up. Three suitcases: an overnighter, a week-longer and something that I think was originally designed for ocean voyages and that you could comfortably fit a linebacker in. A “bag”[14], two purses, a backpack and two laptop cases. It’s a pile such that if there’s a sudden stop there’s a good chance someone will get decapitated.

Even on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve – a time when a lot, if not most, companies are shut down and people are getting ready to go out and get roaring drink – the freeway is damn busy. It take’s a half an hour longer to get to Belinda’s than we had planned.

But Belinda will the the Last Supper in California and she’s cooking some Texican recepie that involves soup, chicken and tortilla chips. The kids seem okay playing with the Arnold kids. Lots of running around and Guitar Hero blasting eighties tunes.[15]

Friends come over and at dinner we talk about moving while the kids eat at the kids’ table in the kitchen. And then, just before desert, it’s time to go.

Back into the SUV and now onto the almost-deserted streets and freeway (which you think should be filled with people on their way to get drunk after having been home getting ready the last time and to the airport.

It was quiet at LAX. Well, quiet for LAX. For most airports, this level of traffic would mean the Thanksgiving rush and the predictable TV crews telling you how awful it would be if you were at the airport right then.

There’s an Austrailian family sleeping on the floor, which might be a step up for them, some kinds splayed out watching a DVD on a portable player[16]. I settle back and do what I always do in a crowded place – or at least what I do whenever I can: I put on my semi-noise canceling earphones and fire up the magic iPhone iPod feature and settle back. And since I have the magic iPhone out, I use it’s mystical properties to check on the weather.

It was zero degrees in Buffalo.

And the high they’re prediciting for the next day is four degrees. Farenheit.

Oh, crap.

I wonder if you die if you go outside in that?

---

[1] It’s, like a suburb of Los Angeles, right? In the Valley, but a REALLY NICE part of the Valley, okay? And, like, people don’t TALK like that anymore, y’know? Except most of them.

[2] But still a part of Los Angeles.

[3] We’re not rich. Honest. The spare was an old one that my daughter had adopted. That’s what the world’s like now. When I was a kid you tried to get dogs to follow you home so you could adopt them. Now kids search out used Macintoshes.

[4] Who thought of computers and computer communication the way I thought of air.

[5] I did not yet know how tired I could become of a movie.

[6] The cigarettes were for anger management only.

[7] But it was A LOT!

[8] Carried on with the fervor and intensity of the Paris Peace Talks.

[9] And it’s important that I identify it as that particular X-Men movie because it’s astonishing to me that out of the thousands of movies available, my son choose a really bad one.

[10] With the inherent ignoring of leash laws and pooper scooper laws that gave the neighborhood in summer the ambiance of a French sewer without the attendant benefits.

[11] I have an MFA. When I say “mob”, I mean “mob”. It’s not just colorful language.

[12] Fleas, very likely.

[13] I really wanted the write “fucking life”, but I have been advised that profanity so early in a book might be off-putting to the casual reader. So I have substituted “frikkin’”. Oh. Wait. I already said it.

[14] This is how my wife refers to a huge black leather thing that would make a nice golf bag.

[15] Is ANYONE as sick of the eighties as I am? Honestly, it’s the sound of my youth, but I started to go into overload when Grand Theft Auto: Vice City came out. And that was HOW long ago?

[16] “Save it for the plane,” I tell mine before they even waste the calories moving their lips.