It's Not Tundra

I never thought it would be EASY to sell my home. I’d never sold one that I owned, but my parents were serial monodomusites and we moved 5 times in my first thirteen years [1] . But I’d never been involved in the sale beyond having to toss some of my stuff in boxes or once going to the lawyer’s office to make the down payment and being all googly-eyed at the wad of bills my bank-distrusting father carried. But while I never thought it would be easy, I didn’t think it would be the razor wire mobius strip it became. It’s not like we hadn’t thought of it. We’d been on our way out of L.A. and I was going back to grad school when I got a temporary job at Warner Bros. Animation as a P.A. [2] That became a permanent job with promotions and the next thing I know I have an office, a secretary and a career. [3] Every year or so we’d reach the requisite number of episodes for an animated series and I’d start thinking of life after cartoons and every years we’d get picked up for another se...

When I moved to Los Angeles after college, I swore that I would never complain about the weather. After growing up with WINTER, what was there to complain about? To be sure, Buffalo, NY and its environs have a reputation for tundra-like conditions that it doesn’t deserve. We’re not Inuits. We don’t dog sled to work and school and I never once saw anyone use a snowshoe. We had several pair in the basement, along with ice-fishing equipment and an ancient violin and none of these saw the light of day. It snows, sure. It snows in a lot of the world. Buffalo is not only not the snowiest place in America, it’s not even the snowiest place in the State of New York. It’s not even the snowiest place in the county. But you’d never know that to watch the national news. Once, after I’d been in California for about five years, I read in the paper about a big snowstorm hitting Buffalo. The city was shut down. Animals were escaping the zoo. It was chaos. I called my college buddy, a public schoo...

When we bought the house, I was a not-so-lowly-but-still-pretty-small-potatoes Senior Production Coordinator [1] , making about fifty percent more. In the next couple of years I was bumped up a couple of times and making about two hundred percent more. And still, my salary was JUST KEEPING PACE with the L.A. housing market. Patricia was getting raises, but hers was pretty much constant. Because I had started at such a low point, I could get bumped up five hundred percent, as I did at the Warner mines, and still just be making a decent living. Patricia started at a livable wage and because of her pluck [2] and intelligence. Many people I know were cashing in on their equity and trading up. Patricia and I, hemmed in though we were, and disliking what was happening in the neighborhood, kept thinking about moving, but any rational person, having just been through the Nineties, MUST have know what was going to happen – but so few did. The reason we were able to but the house we were ...

What the hell, right? She was in a crosswalk at a school. She backed into a crosswalk, saw people in it and then drove by close enough that putting my arms out, I hit her car. Let her take her lumps and maybe learn a lesson. And to use the word “Car” or “Van”. She wouldn’t let it go, she thinks she’s in her rights. Let the guys with the badge handle it. So we sit down to wait. It’s midafternoon and it’s getting hotter, probably in the nineties. I buy the kids water. I’m hungry and I’d like to get home and do some work. I call the guy I’m working for to see if there’s anything pressing. I know there are some animation models waiting for me but being a freelance producer, I could work my own hours most of the time. He’s aghast when I tell him the story and wants me to call him back and tell him what the police do. I call Patricia and tell her what went on. She’s not aghast, just tired of the sum of the shitty parts of living there. I see the Odyssey. It drives back and forth a ...

Understand: When I first moved to California, I was told that there was only one thing holy and that was the crosswalk under California law. You have to stop when there are people in the crosswalk. Even if there’s no light, if there are two parallel white lines on the pavement and they aren’t cocaine, you gotta stop. I’ve seen old ladies dragging shopping carts across Ventura Boulevard at 8:45 in the morning and cars, even cars carrying very important movie executives, stop to let her hobble across. Admittedly, this rule had become a little less firm in the popular consciousness than it was when I was first there. Pedestrians once beset me when I tried to make a legal-in-New York right on red and the people in the cross walk attacked like villagers in a Frankenstein movie. Now cars creep into the cross walk, they wait until the pedestrian is out of their lane and gun it. But a SCHOOL? Crosswalks in a school SHOULD be sacrosanct. They’re not, but if you’re going to run your over...

FIFTEEN MONTHS EARLIER: The Honda Odyssey that was the FINAL indignity. Let me explain what a typical L.A. afternoon was for me and how it led to my personal physical contact with an American-Made Japanese vehicle. My son and daughter were in the highly gifted magnet program in the L.A. school system. This got them a smaller class size and a more demanding curriculum and, at least in elementary school, a school that we liked better. [1] But it also meant that after second grade they were no longer in the school that was two blocks down the street. They were bused to the magnet school. When you apply to the magnet program, you’re assigned to the first school that has an opening no matter where it is. My son’s elementary school was about eight miles away. My daughter’s middle school was about nine miles away. Every morning my son would have to be taken two blocks to the school down the street to get his elementary school bus. My daughter would have to be taken about four miles...

“ 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...