Eight minutes and a world away from Venice, in deepest suburbia

The day we move to Mar Vista, I stand chatting with Randy, our across-the-street neighbor, to whom I’ve just introduced myself. Randy is my age, hovering around 50, although he seems more like someone of my parents’ generation. He and his Danish-born wife, Hanne, have three kids, the youngest in high school, all of them living at home. He’s always lived in Mar Vista, grew up in the house next door. Early in his marriage, he even lived in our house, long before its late-’80s transformation into the New Mexican fantasy of a rock music promoter on an upswing.

“We don’t get too friendly anymore with people who live across the street,” he tells me. I tense at what seems a note of warning.

“Nope,” he says. “They never seem to stay long enough.”

We watch as a table on the back of a mover appears to walk into our house on its own legs. “Trust me, Randy,” I say, “that’s about to change.”

For my partner, Marlene, and myself, Mar Vista is the Land of Settling Down. We joke about our first “grown-up house.” No way do we have another move up our sleeves, financially or otherwise. We have a daughter starting kindergarten in public school, and every intention of staying in Mar Vista for a long time. It’s the first time I’ve made a decision about housing with much thought to the future. I lived in one house in the Oakwood neighborhood of Venice for 16 years, but had no long-term plan. This new aura of permanence makes me feel quite middle-aged. And though a mere eight minutes east of my Venice home -- I’ve counted -- Mar Vista seems at first like deepest suburbia.

Wedged between Santa Monica and Culver City, Mar Vista ranges up and down its rolling terrain in waves of architectural miscellany. Clapboard, turn-of-the-last-century farmhouses and Craftsman mansions built in the ‘20s by studio executives dot Mar Vista’s palm-fringed boulevards, interspersed with tract houses transported from the path of the 118 Freeway when it sliced through the North Valley in the early ‘60s. The pre-World War II Japanese farms are gone, but carefully manicured bonsai or plumeria grown from cuttings remain fixtures in many a Mar Vista landscape.

I lie awake at night after we move, restive with the unaccustomed quiet. My daughter, Jennie, starts school; she makes play dates with kids who live mere blocks away. I become a card-carrying member of the PTA.

We live on a cross-town street, busy by Mar Vista standards, with vehicle and foot traffic. On weekends, I tend the herb and succulent garden in front of our house and shoot the breeze with whomever walks by. Sometimes, we talk politics: My next-door neighbor Rodney has been on the picket line since October, locked out of his job at Ralphs.

A woman with a toddler son in hand and a stroller filled with groceries stops as she walks past the house. I’ve just planted a stand of Grosso lavender, babies in 4-inch pots.

“¿Que es esta planta?” she asks, pointing. I don’t know the Spanish word for lavender, so I mention as many other details as I can -- herb, purple, sweet smell, heals burns. Nothing clicks, so I tell her I’ll get some from inside the house to show her. When I arrive back at the sidewalk with a bunch of dried lavender, she’s gone. Disappointed, I review what I said to her in Spanish, which still seems right. But she comes back with an enormous jalapeno pepper plant in the stroller, its root ball wrapped in a plastic shopping bag.

“This has gotten too big for its pot,” she says in Spanish. “Maybe you can put it in the ground here.”

Every day, I find a reason to walk the two long blocks of Venice Boulevard between Centinela Avenue and Inglewood Boulevard: Dick’s True Value Hardware, the post office, the gleaming new library. But I usually discover needs I don’t realize I have until I spot Trash & Treasures, Dollar Mart or the fine used-book shop Sam: Johnson’s. There are cheap fares to Oaxaca, the perfect plastic containers for making frozen-juice pops, pinatas, fresh baklava beaded with honey at the Luxor Market, Egyptian videos at Hany Golden’s.

Longtime businesses have succumbed to rising rents in the last few years. The day I finally decide to visit the Mar Vista Psychic and Tarot Reader, a florist has taken her place, seemingly overnight. Mar Vista Lanes, the bowling alley where, according to Randy, the West L.A. branch of the Hells Angels met in the ‘60s, survives, as does Robinson’s Beautilities, an African American family-owned store for more than 30 years.

I stop at Robinson’s to browse the racks of nail polishes, vivid chunks of costume jewelry, wigs, masks and a practical joker’s inventory that ranges from pepper gum to fake vomit. The week before Halloween, the line to rent costumes snakes its way out the door and down the block, and the owners serve popcorn.

But perhaps no place anchors me to Mar Vista -- and links me with the wider world -- as much as the corner of Palms Boulevard and McLaughlin Avenue. My daughter plays T-ball there at Mar Vista Park; there are soccer games and quinceanera picnics every weekend of the year.

Last March, a group of Mar Vista neighbors, along with hundreds of other groups from throughout Southern California, responded to Anglican Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu’s call for global candlelight vigils in hopes that U.N. inspectors would be permitted to continue their work in Iraq, perhaps averting war.

Now, almost a year of Friday evening peace vigils later, several hundred Mar Vistans have made their way to the corner. In a disparate band of regulars that includes teachers, civil servants, artists and high-school students, we stand together in our neighborhood.

Randy and his family don’t join our vigils. The Stars and Stripes billow from the flagpole in their frontyard, except in inclement weather.

One day, when no one’s home at our house, the antiwar banner hanging above our garage blows back over the roof in a gust of wind. Not seeing it, Hanne sends one of her sons across the street to make sure it hasn’t been vandalized.

Most people honk in support of our vigil or flash the peace sign out their car windows in the evening rush past the corner. Some call us names and yell, “The war is over!” Someone shouts, “Go home!”

“We are home!” I answer, knowing in my bones that it’s true.

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Sarah Jacobus is an L.A. writer who teaches creative writing workshops for at-risk youth. She is at work on a memoir about learning Chinese.