When It’s Springtime in the City

I spent Sunday ambling in the golden sunshine of January.

I wandered along the beach for awhile and then I took a short walk through Topanga State Park.

The sky was as blue as a starlet’s eyes and the warmth of the sun on my face was like a baby’s kiss.

As I lay on my back among the sweet smells of winter’s spring, relaxed in the embrace of a day that inspires poetry, a smile crossed my lips.

I was thinking about New York.

The reason I was thinking about New York on so sweet a day as this is not because there is misery in their weather, but because there is glory in ours.

Finally, I was thinking, something to call East about.

Specifically I had in mind a friend who used to telephone from the Big Apple every time it appeared that our town was going to hell.

He never actually gloated when disasters shook us, but there never seemed to be any other reason for his calls.

“How’s it going?” he would ask cheerfully when Northridge disappeared under a cloud of earthquake-generated dust.

“You doing OK?” he would wonder as flames as high as heaven roared through the Santa Monica Mountains.

He telephoned during the riots, during the chaos that accompanied the verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial and even when he heard that killer bees were heading our way.

“You guy got bees yet?” he asked with the kind of smug geniality that drives good men to bad deeds. “We’re doing just fine back here.”

Well, I can say to him now, the worm has turned . . . and there’s an expression of evil satisfaction on its funny little face.

*

However, I do not intend to call the poor frozen fool to gloat over the fact that while it is in the mid-80s here, it is 20 degrees there and snowing. I am more charitable than that.

Well, yes, we do have a slight breeze and there is a threat that it will drop to the high 70s in the next few days, but I think we can weather that OK. I may have to slip a sweater over my T-shirt if it gets too bad.

Meanwhile, I lie on a hillside overlooking Topanga Canyon and meditate, like an old dog in utter repose, flat on its back with four feet in the air, letting the sun warm its aging stomach.

It feels good.

Part of the satisfaction comes in knowing that attention is focused our way this time not due to a situation that involves either natural disasters or unnatural acts, but one that involves only sunshine.

There is a kind of sweetness to that, an innocence that recalls gentler times, when weather, not calamity, lured the attention of the world toward Southern California.

We dozed in those days and were content to be mellow when all others seemed to be plunging toward a chaotic new society that offered nothing but violence and despair.

But then something happened, I don’t know what, and we were suddenly thrust upon the world stage, as rowdy and violent as anyplace on Earth, killing babies and old ladies and feeling lousy about ourselves.

Back East, they called us a city of fallen angels.

*

But maybe at least today they’re thinking in New York and Milwaukee and Chicago and Philly how nice it would be to be lying on their backs on a sunny hillside in L.A., getting their tummies warmed.

That is not to say I am in favor of a spring that will last forever. I can only lie on my back for so long before it begins to hurt and before boredom becomes a palpable entity among the weeds on the hillside.

I will begin to long for the rush of high winds against my face and the splash of rain on my head. I will want to see an earth nourished by moisture. I will want to see new grass sprouting and leaves gleaming with the wetness of a winter doing what it’s supposed to do.

But meanwhile I am content to daydream and to take this one moment for what it is ultimately worth, a chance to recover, an opportunity to be at peace with a city that has known so little of it for so long.

I won’t call my friend in New York where blizzards kill and chaos reigns in almost every area of their daily lives. I will not take pleasure in their pain and discomfort.

But should he telephone me, I will say to him with a contentment rooted in relief that nothing but sunshine happened in L.A. today. And then I will return to the hillside and smile.