Lost Angeles

Los Angeles is home for me, and has been so for many years. Yet I'm aware that many people not only consider L.A. a bazaar, but simply as bizarre. It's a odd place in which the vast majority of its inhabitants are, for the most part, simply transplanted midwesterners (or its equivalent from other parts of the country and world). I still tend to see my city through non-native eyes, as I grew up in small towns in the West, but came to California for college and stayed. After four years in the San Francisco Bay area, I moved to Los Angeles, where I married and raised a family. But I've never been able to shake an Alice-in-Wonderland feeling for my adopted city, Los(t) Angeles.

When I was 18, moving to California sounded rather exciting and romantic. Well, it can be both, but on a daily basis most of Los Angeles is about as exciting as Mayberry, USA. The only real difference most residents usually note is the weather. Hollywood is nearly as remote to the average Southern Californian as it is to the resident of Kansas. Occasionally, however, unreality intrudes. Some years ago I was driving into the underground parking facility below my place of work. My office building is on Bunker Hill, a landmark of old Los Angeles, into which a subterranean street (called Lower Grand Avenue) was cut directly underneath Grand Avenue and from which you may enter the parking lots of the numerous Bunker Hill highrises. As I swept down into Lower Grand Avenue (very dark in the middle of the brightest day), I suddenly found myself in Gotham City, awaiting the arrival of the Batmobile. All of Lower Grand Avenue, including the entrace into my building, had been converted into one of Gotham's main drags. It was quite eerie. Street scenes for the movie were filmed a little more than 100 feet below my desk.

Over time I've grown used to seeing film crews around my office several times a year. I hardly notice them any longer. But as Dorothy might say, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore!

Yet for the most part I don't think my childrens' upbringings have been dramatically different from my own. More interesting--yes. But too many people probably find the area itself to be a convenient excuse for failures in childrearing. No one should regard small, rural towns as free from any of the problems that plague large cities, even unreal cities such as Los Angeles. In fact, parents may be more lackadaisical in smaller towns, thinking that the worst influences are confined to the hellholes that are the major metropolises. But evil finds its true home in the human heart, not in the sunswept palmways of cities like L.A.