In May and June of 2016, Dimitri and I drove the amazing state of California, visiting friends and colleagues and family, and experiencing an addictive mix of love and serendipity. To read this travel journal from the beginning, click here.
Days 4-9: Monday, May 23rd – Saturday, May 28th
Silverlake, Los Angeles
Staying in Lizzie’s home is the perfect inspiration for a week of finding my voice. The walls are covered with collages of family photos, joyful original art, shelves where LEGO mini-figs share space with Homer Simpson, more shelves covered floor-to-ceiling with movies.
And of course there are movie posters – some from films she has loved (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is my personal favorite), others from movies she has both loved and worked on. Her poster from The LEGO Movie is personally inscribed to my girl by everyone she worked with on the production team.
The other wonderful part of staying here is that it is familiar. I know where most everything is. I know that if I look out the kitchen window, I’ll be met by a happy elephant enjoying the sunshine. And importantly, I know she has one of the most comfortable couches I’ve ever slept on. When I visit, I choose the couch over her bed every time.
With Lizzie being in Japan, her home is all ours. The plan is simple: I will spend the week getting stuff done so I can relax over the weeks ahead, while Dimitri spends as much time as possible with his son, Derek. And because the week happens to include Derek’s birthday, we’ll get to have dinner with Lizzie’s best friends, Jessica and Nick!
Other than that dinner, I see no one but Dimitri all week, except of course the meetings I had already scheduled – a coaching session, an interview for an article I’m working on, a coordinating meeting for the conference I’m keynoting in June. The big work is an initial blog post on Scaling Organizational Culture, a prelude to the larger article I hope to write about that topic later this summer.
After long days of writing, I end each day as I learned to do long ago when a dear friend would lend me his beach condo to write: End the day walking. In Lizzie’s neighborhood, that meant walking the urban hillscapes of LA.
The Franklin Hills are vertical – so vertical that the streets are switchbacks. The magic of hiking the hills is that midway along the straight patches there are stairs, connecting the lower road to the next higher loop of the switchback. Which means the stairs connecting those steep loops are about as vertical as one could imagine.
According to SecretStairsLA.com, LA’s steps are one of the best kept secrets of Los Angeles.
The staircases lace the hillsides of certain L.A. neighborhoods, and are historical reminders of a time when this was not a city of cars. City planners and developers installed them as direct routes for pedestrians—housewives and children particularly—to get down the hills to school, the supermarket, and transit lines. The city at that time was well served by trolleys, streetcars, buses, and light-rail systems. The staircases were clustered around steep hillside communities near these transit lines, especially steep-streeted communities that developed in the 1920s.
No photo can do justice to these stairs. A ladder leaned against a roof is about the pitch of the sets of concrete steps that are tucked away in neighborhoods across the city.
So instead of joining a gym for the week, I walk the hills and steps in Lizzie’s Silverlake neighborhood. I traverse the whimsical architecture of the Shakespeare Bridge, a hidden gem built in 1926 to cross the ravine where the Arroyo de la Sacatela once flowed. Every day I hike to lunch. And at the end of the day, I hike to Vermont Avenue for a tequila and a browse through one of my favorite independent bookstores, Skylight Books. The hills turn the simplest of errands into a workout.
Skylight Books has two separate storefronts along the very hip Vermont Avenue. The “real” store is an awesome general-purpose indie book shop, where authors do readings to packed crowds. I am not sure if I’ve ever walked into that shop without buying something.
Down the street, though, is my favorite part, an entire annex dedicated to the arts. I find a copy of the Epileptic Bicycle as a gift for my friend Kathryn Bertine who is recovering from a near-death cycling accident. And I can’t resist several writing books in the arts annex, one of which will already be a scribbled-in-the-margins mess by the time I arrive home.
Eating is mostly a high point but also a low point that week. Great Italian food at Speranza, where the pasta is fresh and the seasoning is perfect. And an Italian meal so bad at Palermo’s that we make an excuse after only a few bites, pay the bill, and leave to find edible grub elsewhwere – which is why no, I’m not providing a link. (Why did we pay? Because it’s really hard to look an elderly server in the eye and say, “There is nothing redeeming about this meal. No part of this is edible. We are not paying for this.”) Fred 62 is a staple – breakfast all day! Blossom on Sunset for delectable Vietnamese. And a hole in the wall that is horribly named – Cugurt – but where a cup of lentil soup, two flafels and an order of tabbouleh sets us back just $7.
A week of work and walking – and eating. And for Dimitri, a week of just “being” with Derek (you can see all the different times they got to be together in the collage that opens this post!).
And before we know it, it’s time to pack up, do laundry, clean Lizzie’s apartment, and head up the road. By Sunday morning May 29th – Day 10 – we say goodbye to a week in one place. From this day till we arrive at home, no two days will be the same. And every day will be filled with what I’ve named the trip on Facebook and Instagram: The Beautiful Humans CA Road Trip.
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