Four Days in LA

My week in LA that went as well as I could have hoped. My new subject and I forged a warm connection in person and made a good strong start on the book. Little by little the narrative arc is coming into view. I think I have decided on a first chapter, centered on an event that chronologically occurs in the middle of her story, but it brings together all the threads of the book, so perhaps I can start there and hopefully engage the reader, then return to the beginning, working my way back to that climactic moment, then moving beyond it. I do worry about stealing a narrative high point that could help pace the middle section of the story, but there's a lot that happens in my subject's life after this event that will be equally as compelling, if told right. I just have to figure out how to tell it right. I started this post on my phone while at the airport in LA. I'm back home now, listening to tapes to get my subject's voice in my head and reflecting on the work we've begun. I have many more interviews to do, but now my subject and I have identified the people I need to talk to, who can help to widen her story's lens.

The first morning, she was very apologetically running late from an early meeting. While waiting for her on a bench outside her office building, I snapped the selfie above at the same moment that my daughter texted me. 

My subject arrived soon after, and we went inside and set up for our morning session. Later, when we were heading out to have lunch, I laughingly shared what I'd told my daughter and confessed my abject avoidance of stairs. "The irony of you and me together," I said lightly while climbing gracelessly into her car. "What do you mean?" she said, looking at me sincerely. "I'm an athlete. I definitely understand injury." By then, I had already seen that she was as kind and considerate a human as she'd appeared to be back in July when we first met on Zoom. And how lucky am I, because now I am working with yet another subject whose energy I will enjoy channeling in the coming year.

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A big part of why I wasn't nervous on the morning I was to meet my new book subject was because the night before, I had been enfolded in the most generous and non-judgmental atmosphere. I'd arrived in LA on Monday afternoon, and faced with a free evening, I texted my friend Elizabeth Aquino, mother of beautiful Sophie and her princely brothers, Henry and Oliver. Elizabeth and I first connected in this virtual community in 2009, when she was blogging at “A Moon, Worn As If It Had Been A Shell.” These days you can find Elizabeth's exquisite writing about life’s vicissitudes here. She and I met in person a few years ago when she was in New York with her youngest Oliver, and the three of us went to breakfast at Sarabeth's on Amsterdam Avenue. Our connection was immediately easy. We bare our souls here in ways we don't often speak, and so when we meet in the non-virtual world, we discover that we already know each other in a deep way. The moment I hugged Elizabeth and Oliver back then, I realized I already loved them.

Still, I wasn't sure Elizabeth would be able to meet up given the last minute nature of my text, and the fact that I didn't know how far away from her my hotel was. She's in LA proper and I was in Valencia, and I had no mental map of the distance between us. But Elizabeth texted me back right away, eager to meet up, which made me eager too. I quickly assessed that getting to her would be akin to getting from Harlem to Brooklyn to see my daughter, so I jumped into an Uber and was on my way to her home. I was thrilled that I would get to meet Sophie, and I would also see Oliver, as we’d made a plan to have dinner at the restaurant where he works. "Oliver was excited to hear you were in town," Elizabeth said, and she can have no idea how much that touched my heart. I also met Carl, Elizabeth's partner, who is just the gentlest and kindest of men. Elizabeth, Carl, and I sat and talked around her green mosaic table that I've seen in pictures on her blog. Elizabeth also gave me a tour of her home, an artistically nurturing space, filled with visual and literary treasures. 

When Sophie got home from her evening stroll around the neighborhood with her lovely caregivers, I was able to hug her gently, moved by her great presence, her dark eyes taking me in, allowing me. Soon after, Elizabeth, Carl and I went to dinner, where the servers treated us as if we were special guests, and Oliver kept checking on us, and the chef and everyone else came by to talk to us and tell us how much they love Oliver. How could anyone not love Oliver! 

Oliver and Elizabeth drove me back to my hotel after he got off shift. I loved hearing him talk about the dreams he holds, and I would bet on that kid every day of the week. All these people are the reason I woke up the next morning feeling as if the world is a munificent place, where the only harsh judgment of me is my own. As an unwitting antidote, Elizabeth and her beloveds gave me a gift heading into my first interview with a new subject. I felt grounded. Filled up with love.