Playa del Rey

Tonight I took a walk through a little neighborhood near Loyola. It was dusk – one of my two favorite times of day in Los Angeles, and the one period when everything here grows lovelier, as the sky blossoms from its typical blue into a blush of watermelon and lavender.

With the evening light came that special silence in which every sound takes its own place—the whir and click of a passing bike; the sparkling clatter of a Scottie’s chain as he dashes here and there on momentary adventures, while other tiny dogs in nearby houses vent an exasperation of yawrps and harroos, each one triggering the next, up and down the block.

Before me one lone palm trees rises. Like everything else, palms are so much different than they’re presented in the movies, messier, their leaves often askew, patchy or half-dead. They’re what you start to look like in middle age when you first wake up, that sagging you begin to notice beyond any ability to fully come back.

(And yet, the older I get the more I prefer the blemished to the bland and flabless perfection of youth.)

At the end of a block I’m suddenly surrounded by the hot, serrated cycling of the electric lines that hang overhead. It’s an unsettling hymn, calling to mind flourescent lights, mental institutions and radiation sickness. A sound that whispers, “The cancer’s come for you and you’re never getting away.”

And then miraculously, fifteen, twenty feet on, the comforting blanket of silence descends again, opening a space for the singing of crickets and the sigh of the wind.

Today is the fifteenth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center. It’s hard to believe so much time has passed; the moment continues to loom large.

But who knows, maybe some day soon we’ll take just one step further and find ourselves in the gentle arms of a setting sun.

Michael Leunig

-- pop culture spirit wow