Happy Valentine's Day, Mom and Dad

Strangers in the Night

My parents met each other on St. Valentine's day, 1962. They met at a bar in the San Fernando Valley. My mom was there to meet a date. She was then a 34-year-old divorced mother of four who lived with her kids at her parents' house.

Parents don't like to talk to their kids about the people they dated before they met their final mate. It's as though they would rather not show their work in solving an algebra problem. My mom was a little more forthcoming about her pre-marriage experiences than my father was. I know she dated Johnny Grant, the recently deceased "mayor of Hollywood," who she described as "all hands." Hearing that ended my line of questioning for the day.

Still, I was the kind of kid who wanted to get to the very root of my origins, the point at which chance comes into play: that night, a bar, the San Fernando valley.

My dad was 26 at the time -- eight years younger than she. He was working for the L.A. school district as a custodian (janitor) and going to night school to get a degree in geography. He was living with his parents at the time -- he had moved to the area eight years previously from North Dakota -- and he was soon to buy a house on the same street, just a few houses down.

I picture them both, in this bar, in a semi-rural suburb of Los Angeles, orange trees and tract houses, chatting with each other while she waits for her date to arrive. My father, probably post-break-up and my mother, post-divorce. They're drinking martinis or scotch-and-sodas. The guy my mother is waiting for, whoever he is, calls and asks for her. He's running late, he says. He wants to meet somewhere else.

No, she says. No. She's not going somewhere else. She's waited for him this long, and she's talking to another guy at the bar anyway and, well, he can just take a long walk off a short pier.

And that's it. The future starts. My father gets her phone number, one that strangely starts with a word, like TOrrington 7-5309. That night starts a chain reaction of step-children, marriage, my sister, myself, looking after ailing and dying parents, a move, retirement, another move to a new state, and death -- all of it over 40 years.

A flat tire, a newspaper article, even a head cold could have made it all happen differently. They're both gone now, which is the trouble of being born to older parents. The advantage of being born to older parents, though, is that they're wiser and less likely to fly off the handle. My life has been made easy by older siblings who smoothed out the rough edges new parents always start with.

I miss them both very much. Whether they're together in the afterlife or together in oblivion, I know they are together.

photo credit: Cocktails 4 Two by gwENvision

Geography of My Childhood

Geography of My Childhood (Detail)

This is where I grew up in Panorama City, CA. My neighborhood was bordered by Osborne St. on the north, Woodman Ave. on the east, Chase St. on the south, and Van Nuys Blvd. on the west.

The houses were built by Kaiser Steel shortly after WWII. The company also built a hospital, where I was born, just out of the lower-right corner of the picture. It was a working class neighborhood, with many families working either for the GM plant down Van Nuys or the Anheiser Busch brewery out on Roscoe Blvd.

It was a good place to grow up. It was safe, aside from the Night Stalker summer, where everyone felt they had to sleep with their windows closed for fear of being raped, robbed, and stabbed by a crazy satanist.

One Saturday night when I was 10-years-old, I was listening to KIQQ-FM. The DJ dedicated the song "Funky Town" to Panorama City, he said, "Los Angeles' funky town." For some reason, this elated me. I thought we would all wake up famous the next morning.

Put Your Foot in this Metal Clamp

Wendy and I were talking last night about that weird metal clamp used in shoe stores to measure kids feet. It's been probably 25 years since I saw one up close, but I remember them as vaguely scary and very cold.

I remembered it this morning and looked it up on Google. It's called a Brannock Device. According to the company's web site, it was designed in 1927 and it's a must for all shoe retail stores since it leads to greater customer satisfaction and ultimately more sales.

There were some items that my mom took me to buy when I was a kid (school clothes, school supplies) and other things that my dad took charge of, among them church clothes and shoes. There was a practical reason for this. Mom generally knew more about clothes and what looked good, but she just wasn't qualified to fit me for a neck tie or a sport coat, having never worn either herself.

Dad picked out my shoes because he used to sell them (and other items) at J.C. Penny, first in North Dakota and later in San Fernando. He would stand over me and the poor shoe salesman, watching for errors. After measuring both of my growing feet in that cold Brannock Device, the salesman would run into the back room for the right size and then pull up that stool with a slanted porch. He would lace me up and have me walk around on one new shoe where I could get an ant's-eye-view of myself in the shoe mirrors.

"Yes," I would think to myself if I liked the shoes, "I just might be able to jump higher in these."

But before the final nod, Dad had to show off his footwear knowledge with his own test. He would kneel down and press down on the tip of my shoe, searching for little piggies. "Do you feel that? Where's your toe? Feel that?"

I was probably 15 before I bought a pair of shoes on my own. Even now, I have to thumb the toe of the shoe to find my own toes. It wouldn't be right otherwise.

Java Junction (formerly Mitches Java & Jazz)

When Mike and Jenn moved up to Newhall from the valley, we used to come up here a lot. It was started by a former NBA player, but since then has changed hands a couple of times. I'm just glad that, after all I've seen displaced, that it's still here.

I drove by where Record Trader used to be, just north of Sherman Way on Reseda, but that's gone now too. After that I drove back to Panorama City and took some pictures of the old house and of Kaiser, too. I also went by Sepulveda, my Junior High, and Monroe, my High School, before driving up here.

Why did I do this? What did I gain?

I hope I put some of the nostalgia to rest. I'm trying to learn to live more in the moment, and doing this let me live, for a day, in the past. I did it until I got bored. My hope is that no man lives more in the present than one who just left his past behind. That's what I'm trying to do: write it down, box it up, make it clear. Will I ever need to see these places again? The area around the Americana, for example, has gone through so many different iterations that I don't really even remember which iteration I am nostalgic for. Almost everything about my boyhood home has been altered--some of it for the better. All the schools I went to, and all the places I worked, are so drastically changed that I can hardly recognize them. Most of my favorite places are gone. The Winetka drive in, where I lost my virginity, is now a parking lot for a walk-in movie theater. I even drove down an old girlfriend's street and couldn't remember which house she used to live in. The whole experience was almost like trying to recognize a family member by the shape of their skull.

So what am I left with? The realization that there's more of my past inside me than there is here, that I am the primary source of my memories. Also, that life is for living.

Pacific Northridge Theatres

After the Americana, this was my favorite place to see movies as a kid. It was within walking distance of where my grandmother (and later my parents, sister, and I) lived, and the place usually had the best, first-run movies. I can't recall the first movie I saw there, but I think it may have been Ghostbusters.

I was there with Jason, Chris, and Mike one night to see Blue Velvet (we had heard there was a lot of nudity in the film, and we were just 16). I remember that we were too young for the film, that we were confused and bored by it, and that we laughed and joked all the way through it to the annoyance of the 3 or 4 adults who were in the theater. Afterward, I picked up an application and was hired. It was a great job: I got to see a lot of films, made a lot of friends my age, and the work was never too serious. Mostly, the job consisted of preparing food in the snackbar and then cleaning up the food from the theater floor between shows. Later, as I gained seniority in the place, I tore tickets at the door, kept kids from sneaking in the back exit doors, managed lines of people waiting to see the next show, and sold tickets in the box office. Toward the end of my time there, I would resupply the stock room (upstairs above one of the theaters) and set up scaffolding to change out the letters on the big marquee out front.

The big marquee is gone now, in its place is a ridiculously ugly pink and purple nameplate--something that had been done in the mid-nineties. I always looked forward to seeing the names of six films in 2-foot high red letters.

When I went in, the woman working behind the snackbar eyed me suspiciously when I said I just wanted to come in and look around. I let her hold onto my drivers license.

What were they thinking when they redesigned this place? I understand that you have to have a certain amount of theaters to keep up with the times, but the place is ugly apart from it being unkempt. Want to know what I mean? Two words: faux columns. I took pictures of what used to be called theaters four, one, and five. Theater six, which had formerly been the biggest, had long been carved into microcinemas.

Something I had forgotten about the place, because it had been completed after I stopped being an employee there, was that Giovanni Dulay had painted four murals in the main exit hall. Only two of them are dated, 1992 for one and 1993 for the other.

Gio was one of the kids who worked at the theater with me, who was into heavy metal music, weight lifting, and the Marines. He so wanted to be a Marine, that he jumped into the reserves out of High School and was sent, a few years later to Quwait during Gulf War I. He was a really nice guy, always laughing, and aside from the heavy metal and muscles, didn't seem the type to me to be a jarhead. In fact, I remember hanging out with him one night before he shipped off--and we didn't usually hang out together just the two of us. We went to a in a North Valley neighborhood late on a weeknight and sat on the swings and talked for a while. I couldn't comprehend why he would go, but I tried to keep that to myself. I think we were both considering the possibility that he would get killed over there, but to me it was much more of an abstraction. He didn't--but he did confide in me that he had to kill one Iraqi soldier who refused to lay down his rifle. When he came back from the war, he was very serious and unsmiling.

But I remember now that Gio was also a very talented illustrator. He was a big fan of Arnold Schwarzenegger, so he used to draw the actor in Conan poses and Terminator glasses. Standing there, looking at the murals, I saw that Gio painted himself into the Star Wars mural as Boba Fett, the masked mercenary from episodes 5 and 6. What turned out surprisingly foretelling, the image of fett with his helmet in his hand and Gio's face looked surprisingly like the actor that Lucas later casted in the Episode II prequel.

When I came out here searching for something from my past to connect to, I didn't know what I was looking for. I still don't, but seeing Gio painted into his mural made me feel like I was getting close. The past weighs heavily on me, and this theater was a major part of my life during a very formative time. I wonder if it was for him, too, and that by painting himself into the mural--no, into the movie--was his way of crossing time into the future.

I asked to speak to the manager at the box office. The manager was there, and could hear me (the outside is amplified inside the box, but the only sound that gets out comes through the microphone). The girl at the window acted as an intermediary. I asked if they knew who had painted the murals or if they had any contact information, and they said, no, they didn't know, and that they were painted "a long time ago." They didn't at all seem interested in why I was asking...

Atmospheric Memory

It's been a pretty tough week at work. My boss has left my department for another, and she's basically been replaced by two people--both of whom don't really know anything about video games. Plus I've just been feeling emotionally exhausted by all of the family turmoil of the year. Wendy says we really need a vacation--our last one was a four-day weekend about a year and a half ago. Unfortunately, there's so many other commitments on our time that we won't really be able to take a non-family-visit vacation until early 2003.

We did spend a lot of evening time this week in the city. On Tuesday night, we went to see a retrospective of Evan Mather's work, which was pretty good. On Thursday night, we went to Olympic Hills Elementary for the premiere of Wendy's Animated Authors project. That was really nice. Wendy spent two months working with each class in the school to write and animate a fable. Some of the stories were really cute, with titles like "The Stealing Aliens" and "The Evil, Stupid Joker". The kids and the teachers were all very happy to see Wendy and they thanked her for all of her great work. I like that I was really able to see her specific sensibilities in the animation (she did some animating of the project between groups of students in the class). Last night we went to ResFest, which was actually very good. We went to the Altered States program and saw one very funny, well-produced short called It's A Shame About Ray about a guy who is forced to review his life after he prematurely dies, and another called Copy Shop, a dialog-free German film about a guy who runs a copy shop who is himself being duplicated by one haunted machine.

But the main thing I want to remember is yesterday morning. I am fortunate to get to walk through part of the city on my way to and from work. Yesterday I had what I would call an "atmospheric memory". It was overcast but rather warm, and that combination, plus the fact that it was morning and spring, reminded me of the June gloom we used to get when I was growing up in the San Fernando valley. Because that always happened at the end of a school year, I've often felt a sort of bittersweet exhilaration during those conditions. As I walked, I listened to an NPR story about how volunteers had planted one million bulbs right after the September 11th attack, and the city was now awash in yellow flowers. I felt happy and thankful to be alive. I could recall specific scenes from my youth and feel no anger or bitterness that they were long gone--they felt just as much a part of me as when they happened. Then I thought of my dad and I started to cry a bit, but he felt a part of me too.