Love (and not in a cheesy way!)

My landlord and landlady came visiting this morning to say good bye before I move. They are the sweetest old couple. Apparently he went to USC and she to UCLA and come the annual big game, they do not talk to each other for the day. She grew up in the house that occupied the plot where the 9 apartment building I live in is located. He grew up seven blocks over and they met at the public library when he was doing some graduate work at USC. They have been married 64 years. And he claims that he still can't read her handwriting. Awww!

Why?

"Why do we journey, muttering
like rumors among the stars?
Is a dimension lost?
Is it love?"

© Maya Angelou 1990

The Getty

I finally got to visit the Getty Museum. It was beautiful. The perfect place to go to with a packed lunch and sit and write or read or work surrounded by a garden designed by an abstract artist.


Or I could go see Van Gogh's Irises or one of the thousands of other pieces of art that the museum has. It is no MoMA or the Met or even the Art Institute in Chicago but it is so well designed that it is as great a pleasure to potter around as the other better known museums.


As you can see I had a great time. How stupid was I to not have gone these last 13 months? (That is a rhetorical question, please don't leave comments to answer that!!)

A Move is a Move is a Move...

People in this country move at the drop of a hat. They put things in storage (a bigger business than Hollywood apparently) and go off to China or Upper Volta (no, I don't know if its now called something else and I am too lazy to look it up) or Arizona. With e-bills and online banking, you could be anywhere really.
I have never actually moved before, not an honest to goodness move. When I first moved out of my parents' home, fresh out of college, I went to b-school. It was probably less than 15 Kms from home, a bus ride away. I would even bring dirty clothes home over the weekends. It was just the best of both worlds where one could wear shorts and rubber chappals to class and eat koraier dal and posto chochchori for Sunday lunches at home. It definitely does not count as a move!
Then I made a move that seemed pretty big at the time - a whole different city, maybe even THE city - Bombay. The thing though is that one moved with a suitcase of clothes and lived in a pretty well-furnished apartment that the company provided. There was no question of owning furniture or god forbid, cooking utensils! When I moved out of there I had accumulated books and shoes but not much else.
The next move was across continents. This time I carried pressure cooker and tawa and khunti and Cotton World t-shirts. Over the next few years I moved just once more, locally in a rented u-haul. When I finally moved out of that little Midwestern town it was the people I missed and still do. The place is an afterthought. The apartments I left behind were familiar but not personal.
And now I make a move that is sudden and unexpected. I am no longer that footloose, I have a couch and a bed and a dining table to take with me. And enough books to surprise the movers. I have to talk to movers and get estimates. It all feels strange and very adult.
Stranger still is the fact that the apartment I will leave behind is one that feels like my own, my very own place and I will miss it. It was where I expected to be for a few years at least. I was planning to get a deck chair for the little balcony, so I could read there on the weekends. I should be relieved that I did not do so as that is one less thing to worry about, but I guess I hate that I never did get to sit and read on my balcony.

Craziness

A seven day hiatus. But so many changes.
Apparently I am moving 275 miles north in less than a month. Craigslist and Metrorent are my friends now.
More importantly, a close friend usually takes a train from one of the London metro stations that got bombed. He decided to go in late today. Such are the little things that determine fate. He and his wife are both fine. Much love to them and all of you out there.
In other news I wrote my first short story ever for a class that I am taking in the evenings and it felt so good. No, you don't get to read it. Not that you want to - believe me! Its all about death and pestilence and plague and stuff, no good at all. Just to give you an idea of the style, someone in it paints an Asian Mona Lisa for a sushi place in Hollywood. Yes, forced laughter followed by utter despair. Ugh. But nevertheless the process was so cool! Yay for making things up.