Nostalgia tastes like a chocolate-tahini croissant

It's raining in LA and the place is lousy with ghosts

One thing I’ve noticed about getting older is that the world is increasingly full of ghosts. Ghosts of relocated friends, vanished lovers, dead relatives, and, most of all, ghosts of my younger self. Those phantoms pop up in the damnedest places, which is a good reason to keep moving on. The old neighborhood is just too crowded with absence.

I got up before daybreak to drive a friend to the airport today. Big orange sunrise over downtown, Joni Mitchell and America on the radio, giving me lots of feels as we sailed southbound on the Harbor Freeway. She’s been staying with me for the better part of the past week and it’s been nice.

I live in Hollywood now, about ten miles from the beach, which might as well be ten thousand miles for all I get out there. An early morning drop-off at LAX always puts me in the mood for a little jaunt up the coast to Santa Monica, where I lived in the early 90s. I’ve packed my hiking gear into the back of the car, thinking I might do my favorite old loop trail at Temescal Canyon, but heavy drizzle drives me into a very overpriced bakery in Venice instead, where I sit on a stool chewing a white chocolate-tahini croissant and ruminating on the past. It’s delicious. Bittersweet and flaky.

I’m not really an Angeleno. I’ve lived here for two spells, from age nineteen to twenty-four, and again now for about the past six years. I’m not sure I have a right to feel so intensely nostalgic about this city, but I do. There’s something about LA that has nostalgia baked into the asphalt. Maybe it’s all the sun-bleached signage, or the Joan Didion-ness of the Pacific Coast Highway. This place makes me think of sobbing bottle blondes on quaaludes, bundling their kids into the back of a convertible, sucking on a menthol and mainlining that sweet rush of freedom that only a freeway on-ramp can deliver. (To hell with that son-of-a-bitch!) That’s my Los Angeles—and I didn’t even live here in the 70s. It’s weird to feel nostalgic about a time and place you never experienced, but I guess that’s how it works. Our collective memories hang in the air like smog and we can’t help breathing them all in.

Middle age is nothing like what I thought it would be when I first moved here in 1990. My god, I was full of dreams and fears. So many fixed notions of what a good life must and must not have in it. So many plans (become a famous actor and win an Oscar!) that simply had to happen and then didn’t. And others (get married and have a baby!) that did happen, but turned out so wildly different from my original vision as to be unrecognizable.

Thinking of that starry-eyed and terrified version of myself at nineteen, and twenty, and twenty-one, and twenty-two, and twenty-three, I feel a pang of tenderness. I know exactly how much sorrow and hardship she’s in for, and also the joy and freedom she’ll eventually find. I want to buy her a six-dollar pastry and give her a little shoulder rub, and reassure her that although literally none of her dreams will go according to plan, things will actually turn out better then she can currently imagine, so it really is ok for her to relax a little bit.

I’ll tell her that she doesn’t need to fret so anxiously about securing love because she is swimming in it.

I’ll explain about traumatic growth, and why the demons that she’s working hard to pretend she can’t hear must keep howling at the door until she welcomes them inside and tends to their cuts and bruises. That when she does, they will not ravage her but instead will become the guardians that make safe her open heart.

I’ll advise her not to be so quick to insist that she’s already over everything. That letting herself be exactly as broken as she is now might allow her to actually become whole and healed a little sooner, maybe with less collateral damage.

She’ll gaze at me, nodding earnestly to show that she understands.

She doesn’t.

That’s ok.

I leave her there in Santa Monica with her hand-me-down map of the world, her soft-soled shoes, and her lucky dice. She will be fine and I know it, because I now know that her compass was never, in fact, broken and that she eventually figures out how to use it.

As I merge onto the onramp of the eastbound 10 freeway, I flick off my windshield wipers, now squeaking on dry glass. California is bright and sunny again and I have the whole day ahead of me.