Los Angeles No. 1

May 3 - May 28, by Tom

Retrospection and innovation are born of boredom.

Los Angeles has been a flurry of activity.

Since we began planning this journey nearly three years ago, I’ve been most curious about how it would feel to live in Los Angeles. Not whether I’d like it, or if it would match my memory, but how I would emotionally interact with returning to and—for the first time—living on my own in the city that raised me for my first 18 years. I’d played out scenarios in my head – cinematic montages of sitting in the sun among LA’s hills and canyons, running through sand along the Pacific Ocean, yelling for the Dodgers under an orange sky, laughing, smiling, relaxing into a life made for me. Feeling Los Angeles within me as I return to her golden embrace.

For the most part, my imagined scenarios have been quite accurate - these first three and a half weeks have played out nearly identically to those picturesque montages envisioned years ago. And after months of traveling just with each other, Kat and I have seen our lives take a true 180; from the calm and quiet embracing of a life on the road to a cacophony of activity. As if attempting to catch up for missed time.

A comedy show at the Greek, movies in Glendale and at the Academy, a frosty tallboy sipped and spilled as Max Muncy powered the Dodgers to victory under a setting sun, three straight nights of birthday parties, each getting progressively more intimate (and for such an inconsequential birthday), LACMA jazz, darts at Sonny’s, Gas Lite karaoke, hikes in the hills, and countless new restaurants and cocktail bars. As Kat left town for Lauryn’s bridal shower, I only accelerated my ferocious planning, filling my hours with activities and the people I love.

Perhaps it is because of all this joy, this activity, this immersive love, that I do not yet feel like I live in Los Angeles. Without the requisite downtime to reflect, download, consolidate, and interpret all these inputs of activity, I have found myself more unsettled than the reality of my life would indicate. I still feel like a traveler, interrupting reality.

This is a role this city has seen me play before. Since moving away, I’ve returned for two week stays almost every year (and sometimes more often, for longer stints). Each of these stays had been similar to my experience since the start of May: a sardine-like calendar, packed into and overflowing from its minimal space. At this point, three and a half weeks in, I have not yet mentally emerged from that commonly held role of visitor.

I thought I may have when I left last week. For 40 hours, I flew to Nashville for a board meeting. As previously experienced, leaving a city is often that catalyst to transform it into home. But without Kat there waiting for my return, this travel did not have the same transformative power. Which brings me to a third understanding. Travel can create a home because it enables and accelerates reflection. The act of missing someone or something requires the act of reflecting upon that person and place. The strongest example of this—when I returned to San Juan from Boca Raton—occurred as my plane banked over the coast of San Juan and touched down under the island’s tropical sun. I was overwhelmed with excitement and joy to return to an apartment that had two weeks prior been foreign and underwhelming but was now inhabited by Kat and the life we had begun to develop. This place had become home because of the overwhelming power, beauty, and pure excitement of coming home to a person. A year of life on the road has made it clear. Home is not found, but created. And as our roots lift and float and flutter about, we create home in tandem.

So I sit with the irony of struggling to find home in a place that has been home for much of my life. With the hypocrisy of an unsettled spirit while surrounded by family and friends; with an existence immersed in love and life and joy.

I am about to leave LA. Tonight, I fly to North Carolina for a week for Marybeth’s wedding and return with Kat. McCabe asked me if I was nervous that leaving would break up the experience and cut into time during which I may more fully settle in. I expect the opposite. That coming back, together, will accelerate and solidify the feeling of being settled in Los Angeles. And from there, we can find home.

Kat making the birthday cake and a lovely joint 27th birthday celebration at Mark's house

Go Dodgers (and thank you McCabe for the last four pictures (but no thank you to the woman who cut Cam out of the frame))

First night in our apartment with mom bringing over Erewhon prior to a show at the Greek, working from the patio, Kat guiding a squirrel to snacks, and Kat around the house

with friends

Selfies in order of excitement

Birthday golf with McCabe

Memorial Day barbecue at mom and dad's (we missed you mom and kat) and a quick round of karaoke at the gas lite