WEEK 13 - I Love LA!

I originated in the Windy City - Chi Town - the city of Upton Sinclair's legendary novel about the meat "hacking" industry. When I was three, I was relocated to the South - Atlanta, Georgia - where I subsisted mainly on cornbread and red beans and rice. I saw blue gum people and heard Geechee spoken and by the time I was six, I could tell you the color of the people who lived on the "other side of the tracks" and knew what the KKK meant when they burned a cross on some body's front lawn. Gratefully, my daddy moved us "compass north" to Ohio. (What's round on the ends and high in the middle? OhiO!) We moved to an orderly community of conservative homes filled with White, Anglo-Saxon Protestants who never did anything interesting or daring.

When I was 10 my father announced, "We're moving to California!" My mind raced in anticipation like a Sooner at the reigns of a Conestoga wagon. "Yippee! We're goin' to California!" I thought of the gold rushin' 49'ers, the dust bowl Oakies, and the Donner party who resorted to cannibalism to realize their dream of standing side-by-side in the golden land of milk and honey. I devoured every book in the Wickliffe Elementary School library that had anything to do with California, and can still remember writing "California or bust!" in crayon on our shipping boxes before they were stowed in the Allied Van Lines trailer.

It snowed that early December day we left Columbus, but the sun was shinin' bright in LA when our plane skidded to a stop on the tarmac at LAX. I remember riding up the 405 freeway, seeing the giant donut sign on Manchester Boulevard, Christmas wreaths on palm trees, and my father gesturing toward the Valley with an outstretched hand saying, "this is home" as we drove through the Sepulveda Pass. Coming from mid-western, cornfield flat-land, the San Fernando Valley and surrounding San Gabriel Mountains were like paradise found.

Since that day in 1971 I have loved Los Angeles. Everything I want and everything I don't is right here in this 469.1 square miles, infested with nearly 4 million people. Despite all its problems, I'll take this city over any other place you can plot on Google Earth. I'll even take LA's traffic 'cause I know where there's lots of people there's traffic. And, where there's people, there's stuff. Lots and lots of it. As for LA's people - they're certainly diverse - from the street corner mariachis of Boyle Heights to the young, crowned beauties smiling and waving from the Rose Parade Queen's float, to the brothers selling bean pies on MLK, the entertainment industry's royalty partying in their hillside homes, to the scab-faced, anorexic tweakers of Hollywood. LA is rude and gritty and rough, but at the same time it's also refined - full of history, culture, entertainment, world-class hospitals and universities, gardens, libraries, five-star restaurants and scenic vistas. Like I said, there's lots of stuff in LA. I know many people don't agree with how I feel about the City of Angels and would love nothin' more than to pack up and get the hell outta' Dodge, but for me, LA's the place!

View from the London Eye

WEEK 12 - I am Not an Armchair Traveler

Travel has been, and always will be my unwavering passion, for this world is meant to be experienced in the first person. It's to be tasted and felt and smelled and heard, not experienced vicariously through books, magazines and travel documentaries.

Since childhood, I had always heard how green Ireland is. But, until I stood among Celtic crosses and monastic towers, looking across the Boin Valley, could I truly appreciate just how green the Emerald Isle really is.

And, when learning of the holocaust in school, I thought I could grasp the extent of its inhumanity, but not really. Not until I opened and walked through the iron gate at the work camp at Dachau, Germany, the gate that bears the words, "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work Will Make You Free), could I understand the holocaust's horror. As the latch of that gate clicked shut behind me, I could feel the weight of the despair that must have been felt by the many people who were imprisoned and died in this camp.

In Amsterdam, Holland, I experienced the narrowness of the stairway that led to the not-so-secret hiding place of Ann Frank and her family. In Normandie, France I wondered, "just how long did it take those brave, American soldiers to crawl on their bellies across that wide expanse of sand known as Omaha Beach, as they attempted an escape from slaughter by German snipers on D-day?" On the bluff above Omaha Beach, there are 10,000 Americans buried in the Colville-sur-Mer cemetary. I have stood there solemnly and contemplated the lives of the young men in repose. France cradles these heroes in her fertile soil, entombed beneath their cold, white marble markers. She must care well for them because she owes them everything. They paid for her freedom with their guts and their blood.

In this country, you cannot appreciate the handiwork of the magnificent tool that is the Colorado River unless you stand, gripping the railing at an overlook and with your own eyes, take in the grandeur, the depth, the width and the color palette of the Grand Canyon.

The range and depth of emotion that one can experience by physically being at a place cannot be elicited by a glossy photo. An armchair traveler, I am not!