To Live and Drive in LA

I read an article on “mindful eating” the other day in the New York Times.  It’s about applying the principles of mindfulness and meditation, being in the moment while eating.

I couldn’t figure out whether to laugh or cry, since I practice the exact opposite of mindful eating.  This practice of mine is not for any weird LA anorexic/dietetic reason; it hardly feels like a choice at all.  My children’s school is five miles away, through one of the densest parts of Los Angeles.  Between the school commute and after school activities, household errands, and traveling back and forth across one small swath of my area code for personal and work errands (the gym, a writing class), I drive hours each day.  I actually drove less when I worked 35 miles away from home, since my kids pretty much stayed in one place (home or preschool) during those years.

This was not how my life in Los Angeles began.  I moved here in 1994, several months after the Northridge earthquake.  Traffic was not the epic force of nature that I’d been led to expect, perhaps because there had been a significant exodus after the earthquake.  But the biggest reason my husband and I didn’t have any sense of traffic was because we lived about a mile from our jobs and graduate programs at UCLA.

Many days we’d drive anyway, laughing ruefully about how much we were becoming like the Steve Martin character in “LA Story,” who drives next door to his friend’s house.  Sometimes my husband would be home early, shop at Trader Joe’s, and whip up an overly complicated meal by the time I arrived home from work.  When acquaintances would tell us how horrible their commutes were, how hard it was to juggle work, school pickup, karate practice, and some sad semblance of a family life, we would try to muster some sympathy.  But we had no idea.  In one corner of our minds, we were often thinking that the poor whining jerk should just move somewhere more practical, or stop trying to have it all.

Oh, how the young and cocky have fallen.

My husband now drives 50 to 60 miles away to his two job sites (in different counties), and I zigzag around a tiny corner of Los Angeles doing the daily Rubic’s cube of our family life and my writing, such as it is.  There’s a ball of hair on the floor of my car, and I realize that I now have a nervous tic of pulling out my own hair as I sit in interminable traffic.  Yes, it’s come to that: I now exhibit caged animal behavior in my own car, as if this life isn’t a product of our own choices.  (I hope that by outing myself this way, I will redirect my nervous energy back into swearing-as-an-art-form instead of plucking myself.)

I know that if we went “full Unibomber” (i.e., lived “off the grid” — which is to say anywhere other than Los Angeles, New York, or a handful of other cities), as we sometimes threaten to do, that life would be simpler.  When I visit family members in quieter parts of America, I am in awe that in one afternoon, a person can do several errands, make dinner, and still read part of a book.

But after all these years in Los Angeles, and the friends we have here, and how accustomed we are to the relative diversity and the precarious beauty of it all, it would be very hard to leave.  I have come to view Los Angeles as a huge, beautiful but garish tattoo that I got when I was young.  I sometimes regret it, but I have it, and that’s that.

And as I rounded the corner too fast, one piece of four-day-old pizza hanging out of my mouth, the other piece between my legs on crumpled aluminum foil, the Don Henley song “Sunset Grill” came on the air, and I listened to the words as I inhaled the food:

Let’s go down to the Sunset Grill

Watch the working girls go by

Watch the basket people walk around and mumble

Gaze out at the auburn sky

Maybe we’ll leave come springtime

Meanwhile, have another beer

What would we do without all these jerks anyway?

And besides, all our friends are here.