Hi, loves. 🌿

Notes from LA's outer ring

1.

I drove right by my street today. Yesterday, I said to myself, “I really need to get gas,” and then looked at the gas odometer and saw that it was full. I suddenly remembered, in a vague way, that I’d gone to the gas station just a few hours earlier. Last night I completely forgot to teach my 7:30pm class. At 7:45pm, when the emails started pouring in — are we having class? — I lost it.

I should say: I can drive by my home and fill my car because I still have both. Along with every other Angelino who is as geographically lucky as we are, this is a thought I have 4,000 times a day. Also, I doubt I’d have the capacity to write anything if I had lost everything, so know that this missive comes from the outer rings of this horror.

2.

I cannot stop thinking about the circles of grief. I woke up one morning last week (last week? I have no idea, time means nothing) to find that a friend across the country had randomly Venmo’d me $50 (drinks or pizza or baking supplies on me, she wrote). I was so moved by this — the generosity, the balls to just send it, the not-asking, the desperate attempt to help from 3,000 miles away. She did the thing everyone tells you to do in a crisis: something, anything, without asking. I told her we didn’t need it but that I’d use it to help buy dinner for friends whose parents had lost their home and who were now all bunking indefinitely together.

We didn’t need the help because we already had it: at 11:30pm some night last week, we packed our clothes and birth certificates and one photo album and plugs and computers and the kid’s oldest blanky and woke Noa up and drove down the 405 to my sister’s house. Her family took us in and fed us and offered us rooms and beds and towels and fresh sourdough and made us laugh and gave us a key to the community pool in their neighborhood and allowed us to calm our nervous systems and do more than stare at the Watch Duty App.

I have two friends outside LA on speed dial right now; they keep checking in on us so that I can turn to people closer and closer to the center. They ask me, How are you today? How is Noa holding up? What’s happening with school? They add: It’s okay if you’re completely dis-regulated. They buoy me so that I can turn to others and say, Can I give you food? Shoes? Money? A bed?

Dominos, dominos.

3.

The kid’s school was about to reopen last Monday when the head of school emailed us from her car as she was evacuating her own home, which is on the grounds of the school. She knew nothing but that she had to get out, right then and there.

The week — this week — was thrown into further chaos. Other than the schools in the vicinity of the fires, most schools did reopen (we did learn something during Covid), but our daughter, like so many other kids, spent it asynchronously with her classmates, meeting occasionally on Google Meet or on Roblox, but mostly on her own or with me as her sole entertainment and playmate, all too reminiscent of Covid, of course. I have so many unkind words for Jonathan Haidt right now.

Noa handled all the craziness so beautifully, then, finally, a week in, she sobbed, “I just want to go back to schooooooool!” And I cried, too, while trying to man the car down a narrow LA street, reassuring her that she had every right to be upset and angry — this is such a hard and sad and scary situation! — knowing, too, that she will go back to school eventually. The school is still standing, though still without power. And as I said all these words, I could not stop thinking about all those other kids who are crying about just wanting to go back home, or to a school that has now burned to the ground.

4.

We came back to LA this week because while school and UCLA were evacuated, dance class was on and she (we all) needed some sense of normalcy. When she came home from a few hours of dancing — the studio had only just regained power — she said, “It was so nice to be under the control of a teacher.”

How much we are asking of them. And this is — again — a kid who still has her own roof over her head and her own clothes in her closet. I’m not sure how many times I’m going to say that in the next few years.

5.

It is remarkable and horrible to watch a preteen make some sense of what’s happening all around her. “Laura lost her home,” she told us after the first 6th grade Zoom meeting, “but she was about to move anyway, and her new room is supposed to be bigger, so I guess that’s okay?” And: “Sarah’s Mom lost her home but her parents are divorced so I guess she still has one home at least?” (Not the kids’ real names.) My therapist told me that we are constantly trying to find containers for things, trying to make things make sense. I am amazed listening to how her mind is coping with all of this.

We won’t know until she returns to school how many families at the school have lost homes, but there are far, far too many.

6.

One last story: I got into a small car accident this week. (We are all fine.) I stupidly tried to squeeze my car through two other cars when I shouldn’t have, even though one of the cars was parked illegally and jamming up the corner, leaving the ass of my car protruding into the middle of a busy intersection. The other driver and I started off by screaming at each other out our windows. Then we pulled over.

I’d been going as slowly as humanly possibly through the too-small space so the damage to both our (not new) cars was minimal, but not nothing. I felt so stupid and so angry at myself and at her and suddenly so aware of how not in my body I was, how reckless and idiotic I’d been to even try such a maneuver. The other woman and I stood next to each other, looking the vehicles over, clutching our wallets, ready to share whatever information one needs to in these situations.

“You know what?” she finally said. “Forget it.”

“It’s been a week,” I said.

“Tell me about it.”

We smiled at each other from behind our sunglasses. I apologized profusely and thanked her and we wished each other well, and I drove off and cried quite hysterically over the steering wheel.

7.

I am not going to attach links because they are everywhere; so, so many people and places need so many things. And I also know that links don’t tell the whole story. Every single person I know here is doing something — or many, many things — for someone here, whether it’s dropping off clothing, or feeding firefighters, or making dinner after dinner for bereft families, or sorting through the endless legal documents, or taking care of a kid who doesn’t have a permanent bed to sleep in or a school to go to.

If you aren’t here and can spare it, send money to any of the many people or places that could use it. Check in on your people. Don’t expect a reply, but know we appreciate you reaching out to us directly. We are all still here, just trying to slowly put this city, and ourselves, back together.

Sending love,

Abs xo