Rediscovering my small town l.a.

“Do they have bats in California?” my 6-year-old daughter asked.

“Yes,” I guessed, “But not where we live.”

“Then what’s that?”

She pointed above us to the roof of the solarium addition that serves as a family room. Sure enough, there was a dead animal with wings splayed staring down through the glass. By attaching a coat hanger to a broom handle, I was able to drag the creature down. It was a dove. Moments before, leaving a play date at a friend’s house, we had discovered a dead rat in her backyard; skeleton, ants and everything.

These twin signs of death and desiccation perfectly reflected my state of mind. Just about everyone we knew had fled the doldrums of late summer for the rarefied pleasures of Just About Anywhere Else: sand dunes on Cape Cod. Parrotfish in Hawaii. Olives in Tuscany. White water in Colorado.

“You know, Santa Monica is a pretty nice place to be during the summer,” our friends assured us, on their way to the airport.

I was left feeling sulky and deprived, common symptoms of living on the Westside and not driving a sport utility vehicle the size of a small cruise ship. But after all, my husband and I had chosen to walk the artist’s path (you know, where it cuts through Brentwood), and now we were paying for the privilege. We still owed the IRS for the hide-and-seek financing of my first book, and now this second novel was turning into an epic--while my husband was engaged in the cuckoo undertaking of writing a musical based on the Japanese comic book classic “Galaxy Express 999,” set to open in Tokyo next month with his English lyrics performed in Japanese.

There might be no vacation this year, but I could still enjoy the heady pleasures of finishing a manuscript--what greater luxury for a writer than not writing? However, when I finally did submit the 425-page draft of the new thriller, my publisher responded, in his graceful and understated way: “I don’t want you to fret, but the manuscript needs a bit more work.” Wham. Euphoria evaporated and depression hit like a hailstorm in the Catskills in July.

Worst news of all: He and I wouldn’t be able to meet to discuss the book for at least another month.

I couldn’t write.

I couldn’t rewrite.

I couldn’t go anywhere.

I was dead in the water.

Relax, you say. Forget about it and go to the beach.

You say that because you don’t know the obsessive mind. It labors on, waking and sleeping, putting mismatched ideas together (“Sell a pilot!” “Move to Portland!”) worrying them and taking them apart--a handy attribute if you’re building Legos perhaps, or a novel; madness if you are not.

There were other reasons for my agitated ennui. It was the first anniversary of the death of my husband’s best friend and collaborator, film composer Miles Budd Goodman, who at 46 had collapsed suddenly in his home in Mandeville Canyon. The powerful memory of those awful days was with us as my husband prepared to go to Antioch College in Ohio--where he and Budd had met as undergraduates--to be keynote speaker at the dedication of the newly renovated college amphitheater renamed in Budd’s honor.

And this contradictory season had brought more untimely deaths. A woman I had admired, the mother of a good friend. My brother-in-law. Alone, I sank into a generalized feeling of loss. With nothing to distract the obsessive mind, every aspect of my life seemed fraught with wrong choices. There was nothing in Santa Monica I hadn’t done a million times, nothing I wanted to do. I had already cleaned out all the drawers and cabinets. For the first time in memory, I was even too depressed to eat.

It took a sharp kick in the butt to bring me to my senses.

It happened at an afternoon party given by our warm and generous neighbors. I was foolishly carrying my daughter (all 40 pounds of her) while attempting to balance a plate of grilled chicken at the same time, and took a fall down some brick steps, still clutching her in my arms. We landed with a few scrapes, but the fact that we both didn’t end up on crutches struck me, as I sat there in numb shock, as a reprise, a bit of a miracle.

The next morning, my body felt as if it had been in a car crash, so I did something radical: I snuck off to a spa for a massage. This was a treat I might allow myself twice a year with great fanfare, but I guess the obsessive mind was out to lunch because there was no chatter, no guilt. A healing touch soothed sore muscles and a long soak in the whirlpool cleansed the soul.

It’s hard to feel peaceful in this laid-back town, hard enough to navigate the sprawl, let alone the inner obstacle course that keeps us from finding happiness in what we have. I go at my writing/mothering life 90 miles an hour and often it’s a blur. Did you know 3 million people visit Santa Monica each year? Forced to slow down, I was beginning to see what those travelers see.

On Wednesday I went to the Farmers’ Market in downtown Santa Monica--not with head down and shopping list in hand, but lingeringly, taking in the sweetness of all that plenty, the calmness that seems to come over people when they’re able to connect to the earth in such a simple way as holding beautiful sun-ripened vegetables in their hands.

Thursday I fulfilled a fantasy I’d had from the time she was born and took my daughter and her friend to Neiman Marcus. We weren’t there to shop. We were there to be “fancy ladies.” (I had analyzed the feminist implications of this and decided, screw it.) We wore pretty dresses and were spritzed with perfume and had blush put on our cheeks and nibbled popovers. The girls were excited and adorable and I caught myself smiling with pleasure. We weren’t bucking traffic to get to a meeting--we were trying on hats. My fancy ladies pronounced our day in Beverly Hills “the most fun.”

To welcome Dad home we baked a chocolate cake and then, unexpectedly, my daughter was invited for another play date with the same friend who’d had the dead rat in the backyard--which left my husband and me suddenly free to have dinner alone for the first time in weeks.

Spontaneously we ducked into a pizza joint, where we talked about our long, separate week (Budd’s memorial in Ohio turned out to be joyful and positive)--and then something happened. Hot, desperate, pulsating, flushed, we drove to the nearest place we could think of--Palisades High School--where, just out of sight of parents and kids at football practice, we climbed into the back seat and made out like teenagers.

After 18 years of marriage, who can explain it? Except to say that something had fundamentally changed during my vacation in my own hometown. I wasn’t longing to be somewhere else. Pleasure had begun to come more easily, in small things, here and now. The noise had quieted. I had become interested in cooking again so we invited those old friends we’d been meaning to invite for about six months over for dinner.

Time became an ally; we were learning to enjoy our share. Instead of imposing the rigorous dinner hour, at 6 p.m. we’d go swimming at the Sunset Canyon Recreation Center up at UCLA because the light was soft and the pool quiet. We rode our bikes, walked on the beach. Tasks took on a luxurious quality. I brought the knives in to be sharpened. After four tries (don’t ask), I was able to download AOL 3.0 and finally get on the Internet. The weather, I noticed, was glorious.

Ultimately I took a whole day off and spent it in the delightfulbut-too-rare company of a dear girlfriend, free-flowing the way we used to be before husbands and kids. First, of course, we hit the sales, then we ate chicken salad sandwiches at the counter of the Beverly Hills Hotel coffee shop, which, as she says, is “a scream,” and then, because we felt like a movie, we actually dialed 777-FILM from the car phone, located the nearest showing of “Air Force One” and spent the rest of the afternoon with Harrison Ford.

It wasn’t Nantucket. It was Westwood Boulevard, 4 p.m. on a Friday.

“I haven’t been this happy and relaxed in months,” she said.

Me, too.