Joe and Arline Halper loved his house, his neighborhood and his lifestyle in Pacific Palisades, and the plan was to stay there indefinitely.
Even when Joe reached 95 and Arline approached 89, neither was considered old, and Arline had no appetite for moving to what he called a specific age environment.
As a retirement community.
Steve López
Steve López is a native of California who has been columnist of Los Angeles Times since 2001. He has won more than a dozen national journalism awards and is four times Pulitzer.
Then came the fire, which destroyed his house and much of the palisades.
So where do they live now?
In a retirement community of 175 units.
Arline said his children were familiar with Avocet in Playa Vista, which offers an independent and careful life in place for those who need it, and many comforts, including a pool on the roof and a gym, a bar, a movie theater and daily foods for those who prefer not to turn on the stove.
Firefighters fight against a house in Bollinger Drive in Pacific Palisades, on January 7.
(Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times)
The halpers reviewed it five months ago.
They moved.
They are adapting.
“Now that I am here, I feel different,” said Arline, a former teacher. “We have a lovely apartment … and people are very warm and friendly.”
A great advantage: there is no danger that insulation is epidemic among older adults.
But community life gets used to it, Joe said while we had lunch in the common dining room a few days ago with three other evacuated from Palisades who moved to Avocet.
“You could be having dinner or breakfast, whatever, and people will come to stop and talk to you,” he said. “It is a total sociability here. And be careful too. But it is simply exhausting.”
And yet.
Joe, who worked in the parks administration and served until recently as a recreation commissioner and Los Angeles parks, goes to the gym on the last floor of the building, where he works with weights one day and nothing to the next.
Restaurants and purchases are at a short distance.
Arline has taken pickleball in nearby park.
And the conclusion is this:
Transitions can be difficult at any age, and especially as it ages. But there is life after the Palisades, and it is a quite good treatment if you can pay it.
“This place is not cheap,” said Bill Klein, 94, a former UCLA Law professor.
Bill Klein, on the left, his wife Renee and Joe Halper finish lunch at Avocet Playa Vista, an independent retirement community in Playa Vista.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
Bill and his wife, Renee, 85, were friends with the halpers in Las Palisades (where Renee and Arline were volunteers for a long time for the Library Association). Everyone said that having the nearby company of good friends in a moment of loss and rebirth has been of great help, even when Joe and Bill Nurse persist the bitterness about chaotic evacuation and the rapid propagation of fire that overturned their lives.
Renee, a former social worker, said she had already begun to think that her 54 -year -old Palisades house of View Ocean had become too much to take care of. Unlike Halpers, his house survived the January fire, but the neighborhood was incinerated and will not return.
“This was at the bottom of my mind, but it was nothing that we were planning right now,” he said.
“We had a disagreement about it,” Bill said. “I wasn't willing to get to a place like this.”
Bill looked through the dining room and spoke clearly.
“Look around,” he said. “There are many older people here with their walkers and it is not an animated place, except forced, in my sense.
That is not an Avocet trial, or people. It is more a comment on the commitment imposed by aging. Bill said he and Renee once visited his mother's retirement house, and that he could not hide what he was thinking.
“Don't let them grab me and keep me here,” he told Renee.
But Bill knows he is fighting against the inevitable.
“I had to admit that I belonged here,” he said. “But I didn't like it.”
However, it comes. What he likes, said Bill, is “push weight” in the gym and swim in the pool.
“I have made a good life for me,” he admitted, saying that he is devouring a pile of books, mostly non -fiction, including one that has just read about Jesse James and another about artificial intelligence.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
When he runs out of his own books, there is a library outside the lobby. And daily videos with conferences of experts on various topics.
And although Avocet is specific to age, Bill and Arline said, the neighborhood is not. It comes out and are surrounded by ethnic and generational diversity, with neighbors walking to stores, restaurants and parks.
“You can cross Lincoln and you are in the wetlands,” said Arline.
He joined us for lunch Janet H., 85, another evacuity of Palisades. The retired teacher, who asked me not to use her last name for privacy reasons, said that her husband was up in her department, recovering from a disease that took him to the hospital for a month.
“This place saved our lives,” said Janet, who had lived in his home in Palisades for 53 years.
The care in the place offers tranquility, and in Las Palisadas, his home was somewhat isolated. In Avocet, said Janet, neighbors and affectionate staff have been a daily comfort.
And that is not even the best part of the package.
“What I am very happy is that I never have to cook again,” Janet said.
While we talked, a 98 -year -old woman was exchanged. A few minutes later, her husband followed her with a walker.
He had just turned 100.
“And keep going,” said Arline.
“Well, the alternative is a bit more gloomy,” replied the gentleman.
For me, as a visitor for the first time, Avocet had the feeling of a great resort or a luxury cruise.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
But does it feel at home? I asked.
“You're right,” said Arline. “We are on a cruise and we are not landing.”
“But maybe that's where we belong at this time,” Janet said.
They belong where they have chosen to be, taking advantage of the best in a year of unfathomable loss and non -programmed reinvention.
A trip full of potholes, sure, but Joe made an observation about where they ended.
“It's a soft landing,” he said.
