We share our first kiss while we study poetry in the foothills of the rocky mountains. “I will move anywhere with you,” I declared a year later. “Any place except” after an childhood at the suburban edges of a west medium, wanted Big Sky and Montains almost as much as Domi wanted. But he won and ended here in his hometown.
I had courted me well. Now I wanted the angels to seduce me. He bathed me with scarves and necklaces while we examined the modern Melrose Avenue stores. We take cocktails at the Dresde while we are balanced to Marty and Elyne. To show that he had not lost the mountains moving here, he led his Jeep Wrangler along the Pacific coast road and went up to the Topanga canyon for dinner under the fairies of the fairies in the inn of the seventh lightning.
I began to acclimatize at the charm of Los Angeles, but my celebrity meetings gave me as a foreigner. In Du-Par's in the original farmers market, I implored my boyfriend raised in the city not to look at the movie star eating pancakes only at the counter. I thought he had whispered discreetly, but both Domi and the movie star laughed so strong that the whole restaurant turned to look at me. While we throw margaritas in Mexico City, I decided not to be ashamed again looking at the leadership in my favorite television program sitting two cabins. However, at the end of his food, he had slipped so low that his head was almost level at the table.
One day we climbed to the Griffith Observatory to the top of Mount Hollywood. I sat nested, drinking in the view of Big Sky that extended to the ocean. The only other group of hikers grouped, looking east. When they left, he said they had been members of a famous rock band. “But that's not the point,” I said. “The point is that I did not scare them. I finally belong here!
Domi agreed. On a weekend trip down, we stopped for the lobster in Puerto Nuevo. We buy cheap rings in Ensenada and exchange them under the full moon. Back in Los Angeles, we made our wedding votes, a poem that we wrote together, for friends and family between pepper and roses in the center of the Los Angeles River and the gardens in the Cypress Park.
As educators in schools in southern Los Angeles, we work long hours. Apart from the occasional game of thekers (Domi's mother had seasonal tickets), the nights grew more and more in the middle. “Everything we really do on weekends is to grab Burritos in low fresh and blockbuster movies,” I said one day. “I could also have a baby.”
We bought a fixer-upper at Eagle Rock. Thanks to my high school students, I had fallen in love with the murals and graffiti of Los Angeles as I had been with their celebrities. Then Domi covered the baby's walls with elaborate paintings of dragons, pirates, astronauts and a purple parrot (Magic Johnson) that hunted into a green parrot (Larry Bird).
Through our son's eyes, I found myself even deeper in love with Los Angeles. Domi and I pushed his stroller on the promenade of Venice Beach, stopping to listen to Harry Perry and see a man on skates juggling while using a speedometer. We dug the fingers of the feet in the sand while we waited for our names to be called to a seat in gladstones in Malibu. We celebrate the quinceañeras of my students in adorned halls throughout the south of Los Angeles
Closer to home we walk during a mile under the bright Christmas lights hanging along the road in Griffith Park. We were tricks or treating in Eagle Rock's Hill Drive and stopped to see a Flash MOB interpret “Thriller”. We spent on Saturday morning seeing the coaches proudly walk the horses and slowly around the track in Santa Anita Park.
As our son grew up, I found myself transforming into a football mother (literal) and discovering completely new pockets in southern California. Some of the football fields were close, located in the foothills of the Crescent Valley. Little by little, we find that our perimeter is extended. We turned the 210 highway to the 605 highway for night practices in a sports park in front of the place where our child had spent weekends dressed as gentlemen, riding the wooden ship that swing from one place to another at the pleasure fair Renaissance. We push more to the east to spend countless weekends aside in the vast extension of Norco soccer fields and south to the fields under the giant globe of Orange in the Grand Park of Orange County.
Throughout all the years of football, practices in Pasadena High School remained constant. In the days when it was my turn to drive the shared trip, I left the children, then led a mile along the way to Eaton Canyon. Under the last daylight, I walked from the parking lot, beyond the natural center and throughout the current. I passed the diversion to the waterfall, I went up to the steep paved hill and touched the Pinecrest door that leads to the streets of Altadena. Then I returned to the orange pink twilight. Sometimes the deer passed, sometimes another hiker. But above all, the path felt everything of mine. On those nights, above all, I knew that I had finally made my home here. Here in a city delimited by mountains and full of magical moments.
This is a love letter to Domi, who helped me learn to love Los Angeles. This is a love letter to Los Angeles, the backdrop of our love story as a family. And this is a love letter to all who have walked only by Eaton Canyon at dusk. Someday we will spend there on the road again. Some day.
The author is an Los Angeles educator who lives in Eagle Rock.
Los Angeles Affairs Chronices The search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the Los Angeles area, and we want to listen to their real history. We pay $ 400 for a published essay. Email [email protected]. You can find presentation guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
