Show and Tell
Since the new year began, Julie and I have already hosted two visitors in our new home and are about to host two more. My mom came first and the three weeks she spent with us gave me a fascinating new view into my city. You see, my family has a surprisingly long history of stories here.
Shortly after my mom left her hometown of Chicago for Boston in 1960, her parents moved out here to Los Angeles. At first they lived in the then relatively new Park La Brea apartment complex that is literally next to our current apartment building. My mom visited them here and as we walked around our new neighborhood with her she told us what used to be here. The LACMA west building was a department store, the Whole Foods used to be something else, the Farmers Market is largely the same as before, and so on.
The weeks with her were filled with this combination of exploration of contemporary LA and my mother's memories. Her parents eventually moved to a house in the valley and then, because my Zedeh was out of work, they moved back to Chicago. I knew the shell of this story. I had seen pictures of their house in the valley when I went through stacks of old photographs. But now, exploring these places with my mom, it all felt more real to me.
After my parents got married in 1968, they moved from Boston where they both got BAs at Boston University and my mom earned her MSW to Los Angeles so my dad could get his PhD in Economics. We drove to Westwood and found their old apartment building in Beverly Hills.
The highlight of her visit was our day trip to Zuma where she used to body surf. She told me about how she took a summer class out here in LA and every day would come to the ocean. Watching her run ahead of me on the beach filled me with such joy. This was a part of my parents life, before they moved to Washington, DC, and had me and then moved to Peoria, IL, and had Aaron, that I didn't know much about. We'd never come west as a family, always east or to Europe.
But now I live here and get to play host to them in their old city.
This past week we hosted Julia Appel who came from Jerusalem to see the rabbinic program at the University of Judaism first hand. Tonight I am picking up Rob Levy at LAX and showing off my new city to him for a few days. Next weekend Jeremy Coers is flying out from Chicago for a fun weekend.
It's funny to show a place so new to us but it is a place we are falling in love with. Los Angeles is so different from any place either of us have ever lived before. It is incredibly huge but also very rich with opportunities to explore ourselves and to find new communities. We already have restaurants and shops to take our friends to see. We have beaches and parks we like to visit, grocery stores to buy food to transform into delicious feasts, museums and galleries, and all the stuff jammed into a city this big.
Who is this guy?
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