Clouds
Just yesterday, I lounged in Claire’s backyard on Corning Avenue, staring at the blue sky and watching clouds. The fluffy white clouds looked like dogs, lions, dragons, or large bearded men. What fascinated me most was the movement of the sky as the earth turned. I had heard about the earth’s rotation in school, but witnessing this movement showed me the reality that we are an orb spinning in space.
Claire’s rental house is long gone, destroyed in service of creating the Santa Monica Freeway. The destruction of that wonderful street filled with individual unique homes hailed the change of our neighborhood and our lives. We couldn’t have known at the time what it would mean.
Ugly large brown apartment buildings behind the houses across the street from me appeared, blocking the once clear view. With them, our quiet neighborhood was diminished by ugly buildings and sounds. We never again walked down Corning Avenue.
Claire and her husband, Mel, moved to Sherman Oaks, located in the San Fernando Valley. They’d been close by my whole life, and now they seemed far away. They used to come over multiple times a week for cocktails and poker with my parents and other friends, and laughter filled our home. Once they moved, we didn’t see them often. Driving to the valley in 1960 and 1961 was an adventure through Coldwater Canyon. Adventure because my dad loved to speed around the curves, and I was a bit of a coward.
Showing Dad any fear was something I learned not to do. Inside, my imagination ran wild as I saw his large Ford Sunliner convertible careening off the edge and plunging down the canyon. Even when we weren’t in the car, I’d dream of riding in a car as it failed to follow the curve and plunged head first off the cliff. In the dream, I knew the terror, but never the outcome. No crash, just downward flight.
We couldn't know that life as we knew it would also irreparably change not too long after Claire and Mel moved. This time it was death, not the City of Los Angeles, that altered our lives. My dad’s sudden death changed everything. Added to the end of Claire and Mel’s daily visits, Mom’s friends never came for drinks, games, and laughs. There were no longer laughs to be found in our home.
The death of my father, Claire and Mel moving away, and large apartment houses appearing to replace beautiful sky with ugly buildings were my first lessons in how quickly life can change. What I had taken for granted as life that would stay the same, populated by people I loved, could no longer be counted on as a given.
You’d think I would have learned this back in 1961, and the lesson would stick. But you would be wrong. I’ve had to learn it again and again and again. I even chose a career in death, dying, and bereavement, where I studied death, read about deaths, and accompanied people in the last moments of their life. But that was still insufficient to shake me out of any complacency about life.
I believe the lesson has stuck now that I’m older. My husband’s sudden medical emergencies the past few years, 911 calls for ambulances, and escaping death by minutes and hours, has awakened me in ways nothing else ever had.
Instead of scaring me, living at a time of life when death hovers around us every moment continues to teach me the importance of gratitude. Every day I say thank you for what I have because I know—know deep inside my being—that all that I love could be taken away in an instant. And that includes my own life.
None of us is getting out of here alive, and as Don Juan in The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda said, Death is next to us and can tap us on the shoulder at any time. We don’t know when our time will arrive, so let’s celebrate our lives and be grateful for every day, every moment, and for all the people and animals we are fortunate to love.
You write so beautifully. Your descriptions are so vivid. I love this little slice of childhood remembered and childhood altered. I believe this is a universal experience but not everyone has a talent for putting it into words that create pictures.
YES, let’s celebrate our lives! Thanks as always for sharing your writing and reminding us of how precious life is, Tori