Gone But Never Forgotten
Those of us who have made Los Angeles home can’t wrap our heads around what has happened to a place so deeply engrained in our daily lives.
In the novel “The Member of the Wedding”— by my favorite Southern writer, Carson McCullers — Berenice, the Black maid and surrogate mother to a white family, hears that the local vegetable peddler has suddenly died.
“She can’t be gone,” Berenice exclaims. “I’ve still got her peas in my stomach.”
That’s just how I felt last week when I learned that my favorite L.A. grocery store, Gelson’s in Pacific Palisades, had burned. I had shopped there just two days earlier, and my fridge was filled with their food. As long as I had their strawberries, Greek yogurt, turkey meatballs, raisin bread, split pea soup, and chocolate chip cookies, how could they no longer be there? The thought made no sense.
There was something eerie about eating what they provided when they had ceased to exist. Part of me felt like a traitor for enjoying what came from there, but the rest of me wanted to savor every bite and make my last stash last.
I don’t think the human mind and heart are wired to comprehend what happened to Los Angeles last week. The devastation is simply more than we can grasp, especially those of us who make our home here and have grown to love this seductive, quirky city.
Close friends have lost everything. Their kids have lost their schools. Entire city streets are reduced to ash, homes and businesses on both sides flattened. Favorite restaurants, stores, parks, and cultural landmarks — the scaffolding of our daily lives — have vanished, replaced by ugly gray warlike scenes as though we’ve been bombed. Our psyches won’t let us absorb the enormity of the loss.
Parts of L.A.— some of the most beautiful parts — will never be the same again. Certain scenes will live only in our minds’ eyes. Those of us who are older may not live to see complete reconstruction.
Yet we don’t flee. This is our home and we want to be here to grieve with everyone else, to do what we can to lighten the load of those most affected. We take one step at a time and lean on one another. You don’t turn your back on what you love, even when the going gets unthinkably hard.
In the midst of this unimaginable alteration of our city, I’m drawing strength from what another great Southern writer, Tennessee Williams, famously said: “All you can do is go on.”
