Tag: road trip

Week 21: Cancelled

August 18, 2020

I cannot get used to this time we are living through. I’m trying to refocus and recalibrate and reconfigure — my life, my expectations, all of it. But 2020 keeps throwing me off balance, no matter how flexible I attempt to be.

Tomorrow, we are supposed to take Liam, our 21-year-old, back to his fraternity house in Berkeley (I would say back to college, but the campus is closed). That plan is intact. I can’t imagine what would cause that to change, short of a literal earthquake. The guy is determined to return to his friends and whatever semblance of a collegiate existence he can muster.

The following week, Eli was supposed to return to Michigan State, which had opened the dorms and was planning on a hybrid learning experience. Then, at around 3 p.m. today, the university’s president sent an email that announced:

It has become evident to me that, despite our best efforts and strong planning, it is unlikely we can prevent widespread transmission of COVID-19 between students if our undergraduates return to campus. So, effective immediately, we are asking undergraduate students who planned to live in our residence halls this fall to stay home and continue their education with MSU remotely.

He ran into my bedroom, where I was about to take a nap, yelling that it was all off, he would be home, school was over. Kind of with a wild look in his eyes, hair ruffled, glasses askew. I sat there for a few minutes, absorbing that news, wondering if my fall was about to get emotional in ways I hadn’t managed to predict despite all my attempts to predict every possible fall scenario. I mean, I’d figured he’d at least get a few weeks in the dorms before they kicked them all out, you know? I guess the news about UNC yesterday did it.

Anyway, I sat there for a few minutes, thinking all this, then I went down the hall to find him. He shooed me away, on the phone with his friends. I went back to my room, locked the door and tried to fall asleep, because I was really very tired. It’s been a long week around here, helping my mother process her grief and planning a Zoom memorial service for her longtime partner, Richard, who died of cancer a week ago. We still don’t have a funeral date, because he was a veteran and will be buried at the National Cemetery, on Wilshire Boulevard, and they appear to be backed up. But everything connected with the funeral business seems backed up these days. The mortuary can’t even cremate the body for ten days. There’s much that’s unsettled, and it has a wearing effect. Plus, Richard’s gone, and we all miss him.

So despite the drama, I fell asleep. When I woke up a half hour later, Eli was buzzing about a new plan. He and three other friends would head out to Michigan anyway, and rent a place off-campus. There’s Emma, the bass player from Sacramento, and Andrew, the pianist from South Dakota, and Juan, the sax player from Florida, and Eli, who plays trombone. They are all finding it increasingly challenging to focus on their music after months of being disconnected from each other and their music program. At least, they thought, if they were together in Michigan, they could feed off of and encourage each other.

Students are vacating East Lansing apartments right and left today, opting to stay home rather than take their chances with a pandemic. But a household of four musicians would not make great apartment neighbors. They wouldn’t even make great townhome, or duplex neighbors. To ensure they don’t get banned from practicing at all hours, they need a house.

There are exactly two houses left that fit their need. One has 23 other applicants on it. The other one … well, they’re crossing their fingers.

I thought I had mastered this pandemic thing. But that’s an absurd idea. It’s the nature of this time to throw us curve ball after curve ball.

Meanwhile, I’m nervous about this road trip tomorrow. I also went to college at Cal, and the campus and its surroundings are one of my favorite places on Earth. One of the things I’ve always loved about Berkeley is the people — so many people. A crush of people. A cascade of characters. Berkeley is fun, exciting, invigorating, always fascinating. But I’m scared that tomorrow, I’ll just find it depressing.

Eli was supposed to come up with us, mostly so I didn’t have to drive home on I-5 alone on Thursday. Now he’s too busy trying to figure out housing 2,500 miles away. But it’ll be okay. I have an audiobook downloaded to my phone, plus an endless supply of podcasts. I figure as long as I don’t stop in the Central Valley, a Trump zone where the residents apparently don’t believe in masks and the virus is running rampant, I should be fine.

I just wish I could make this year okay for Eli. I wish I could make a house appear out of the ether. I wish I could do something as simple as providing him the tools he needed — at this point, money for tuition and rent — and let him use them to build a bridge from childhood to adulthood. But thanks to the coronavirus, I may not be able to do that.

Twenty-four hours ago, I had two sons going away to school this month. Now I have one son going and the other in limbo. Oh, and my daughter started 11th grade today, online. Then promptly got a migraine and lost hours of the afternoon to it. We’re all kind of reeling around here. At least we’re not alone. It feels the rest of the nation is spinning right along with us.

Day 47: The Bowl

May 13, 2020

Of course the Hollywood Bowl will be closed this summer.

Think about it: you sit in traffic on Highland Boulevard, glancing from the car’s dashboard clock to your phone’s screen to your watch if you’re wearing one, just in case one of them affords you an extra minute or two, because it’s always more jammed and moving more slowly than you expected.

If you’re like me, a very occasional Bowl attendee, you don’t have a designated parking spot, nor any particular allegiance to a lot. You just want to get as close as you can for as reasonable a price as you can. You always end up spending a little more than you want, but eventually, there’s a lot you pick, and you pull in and the cars are too close and you swear you’ll never get out until the last guy leaves, but whatever, you’re stuck, plus you’ve already handed over the cash.

So you gather the food you brought, and the blankets and sweatshirts you hopefully remembered (because there’s already a bite to the air, and it’s just getting chillier as the sun wraps up its daily arc), and you scurry out into the crowd, which swallows you up.

You’re swallowed up, like Jonah in the whale, only this whale is the swarm of people, walking and shuffling and skedaddling up the sidewalk. You walk one block, two, three, four (the Bowl is always further away than you anticipate), and with each block, the whale grows. By the time you pass through the Bowl’s front gate, if you don’t keep your companions in sight, you’ll lose them in the surge of bodies.

Finally, you land at the escalators, and now you’re going up, all of you, a throng elbow to elbow, practically toe to toe, with one common purpose — to get there. Because even though you’re on the Bowl property, you haven’t arrived. Not quite yet.

Here’s when you arrive: when you get to the entry that corresponds to your seat, and the whale of people spits you out into the amphitheater — the wide, open amphitheater, where there’s a seat for everyone, where your ceiling is the sky, and where the crowd is no longer a swarm or a throng or a whale. It’s no longer any kind of impediment at all. It’s necessary. It’s the hum of the evening, the thrumming energy powering the stage. And you melt into it, becoming both you, and not you, listening, maybe cheering, maybe singing, maybe turning to the person next to you, who you’ve never met before in your life and you’ll never see again, and saying, “Isn’t this amazing?”

You may have tears in your eyes. They may have tears in theirs. And they’ll nod, because you’re all in the thing together for some more minutes, maybe a few more, hopefully a lot.

And behind the stage there’s the mountains. Above it, eventually, there are stars and a moon. And you think, this is the best of L.A.

See, there’s just no way. This isn’t a time of shuffling whales or melting consciousnesses or turning sideways to chat with strangers.

Talk about a super-spreader event.

I’m embarrassed to admit that many summers I haven’t made it to the Bowl at all. I have my excuses, none of them good enough. Not when you can buy nosebleed seats to some performances for less than $20 a ticket. But I always knew it was there. I always sat with the purple brochure that landed in my mailbox each spring and thought, “How about this one? And this one? And this one? Definitely, at the very least, the Sound of Music sing-along.”

Now, I can’t even do that.

It’s been a startling spring. An alarming, head-spinning, heart-palpitating spring. But I fear it will be a dull summer. The sun will be out and the colors will pop, but our lives may feel muted. So much that makes summer thrilling, from venues like the Bowl to sunbathing on the beach to road trips and jet planes and staying somewhere that isn’t our homes, simply won’t happen.

Shoot.

The Bowl is furloughing a quarter of its staff and all of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra. It’s also laying off all seasonal employees. If you love the Bowl, please consider donating what you can.