It's strange how homes can change into houses, and houses into homes.
I'd never think that LA would become my home, but now after 6 years of living here, I've put down roots. My house here in Culver welcomes me home with newspapers gathered in my driveway, my Christmas tree wilted, and junk mail reaching out to me from the mailbox.
I think it missed me.
As I pulled up to my house, now my home, my neighbor Fernando, the Cuban plumber, rumages for unkown trinkets in the backseat of of his late eighties Astrovan. I did the same as I unpacked the spoils of christmas with my family.
Driving across the Arizona desert has become something of a cathartic experience. I leave behind my history in Phoenix--the place i grew up, the neighborhoods that I hung out in, the people that have watched me change (or stay the same)-- and return to LA my home and city that has nurtured me for these last 6 years.
But in between these two cities is a vast (yet ever-disappearing) desert speckled with nearly empty towns: Blythe, Quartzsite, and Desert Center. I've made this drive about a hundred times but I never stopped in these lonely places.
Except now.
Desert Center is a town with more junked cars than people. The man at the gas station, the one with the alcoholics face and the famer's hands, said there were 900 people there. "Or that's just what the sign says," he told me as he started up the archaic pump.
The town's groves of broken palm trees are visible from the highway, casualties of some family dispute years ago. At least that's what the highway patrol officer said, when he pulled me over a few years ago. Some rich land owner got in a fight with his greedy sons, and he wrote them out of his will, instead leaving all his money to build this stretch of palm trees, which were impossible to maintain. They mostly died a few years after he did.
Near these memorials to arrogance is the abandoned Desert Center School. Its back faces the I-10, while the broken windows of its three class rooms face a field of auto wreckage. I went into a class room, with its insulation hanging, glass strewn across the floor, and in the center were two upright pianos.
Their wood warped by water, their keys missing ivory, and their strings, hammers and guts obscenely exposed, I felt a little embarrased for them. They had no choice in this matter, but there they stood, back to back never again able to play songs for the now invisble kids of Desert Center.
I'd never think that LA would become my home, but now after 6 years of living here, I've put down roots. My house here in Culver welcomes me home with newspapers gathered in my driveway, my Christmas tree wilted, and junk mail reaching out to me from the mailbox.
I think it missed me.
As I pulled up to my house, now my home, my neighbor Fernando, the Cuban plumber, rumages for unkown trinkets in the backseat of of his late eighties Astrovan. I did the same as I unpacked the spoils of christmas with my family.
Driving across the Arizona desert has become something of a cathartic experience. I leave behind my history in Phoenix--the place i grew up, the neighborhoods that I hung out in, the people that have watched me change (or stay the same)-- and return to LA my home and city that has nurtured me for these last 6 years.
But in between these two cities is a vast (yet ever-disappearing) desert speckled with nearly empty towns: Blythe, Quartzsite, and Desert Center. I've made this drive about a hundred times but I never stopped in these lonely places.
Except now.
Desert Center is a town with more junked cars than people. The man at the gas station, the one with the alcoholics face and the famer's hands, said there were 900 people there. "Or that's just what the sign says," he told me as he started up the archaic pump.
The town's groves of broken palm trees are visible from the highway, casualties of some family dispute years ago. At least that's what the highway patrol officer said, when he pulled me over a few years ago. Some rich land owner got in a fight with his greedy sons, and he wrote them out of his will, instead leaving all his money to build this stretch of palm trees, which were impossible to maintain. They mostly died a few years after he did.
Near these memorials to arrogance is the abandoned Desert Center School. Its back faces the I-10, while the broken windows of its three class rooms face a field of auto wreckage. I went into a class room, with its insulation hanging, glass strewn across the floor, and in the center were two upright pianos.
Their wood warped by water, their keys missing ivory, and their strings, hammers and guts obscenely exposed, I felt a little embarrased for them. They had no choice in this matter, but there they stood, back to back never again able to play songs for the now invisble kids of Desert Center.