LA en vie

The Californian Republic?

As you won't read in the papers or hear in the broadcast media here-- both of which normally cover only two foreign countries, Israel and Iraq-- bilingual, civilized Belgium is close to splitting apart over the language issue.

Because it's never just a language issue, is it? Languages have different cultures and usually different ethnic groups. The populations tend to grow at different speeds. All the differences create tensions in every multilingual country.

Even if everyone goes on speaking English, as I expect, I've often wondered how long it will be before the U.S. breaks apart. Its regions are so different from each other.

California is "diverse" out the wazoo, multiracial couples are common, no group is a majority; but once I drove slowly across the U.S. through the midwest and Rockies, and for six weeks didn't see anyone who wasn't white.  I have a sister-in-law in Oregon to whom recycling is a fervent religious belief; she thinks everyone south of the Mason-Dixon line is forcément a redneck. In the South, it's taken for granted that much of the East and West coast are inhabited by people who are Not Like Us. In large swathes of the U.S., it matters more that the President is a churchgoer and good old boy than it does if he knows anything about the foreign country he wants to invade. ("Our army kin whup their army!") In a lot of other places, to act dumb, you just put on a Southern accent. Sometimes I think all our country has in common is American Idol.

I think it's just a matter of time.

Working in the National Parks

When I was in college I spent three wonderful summers working in a national park as a waitress. My co-workers were college students from all over the U.S..  I worked mostly breakfasts and dinners, so during the day, I was free to go hiking, climbing, biking and swimming. At work you'd be with your friends, looking out at beautiful scenery, and meeting mostly customers in a good mood because they were on holiday.

Once a middle-aged woman came in with her family and started smiling through tears as she ordered. Her kids explained that she had worked at the park during college herself back in the 1950s, and had always talked about it as some sort of lost paradise. So the family decided to surprise her with a visit, and they found it was even more beautiful than she had said.

I'm still friends with some of my co-workers from then, so I thought it might be a wonderful experience for my college-age children as well. A few years ago I drove them back up to the national park where I worked and we spent several days in my old haunts. The park was a lot more crowded than I remembered. There was even air pollution some mornings. But the kids who worked in the jobs still seemed happy and eager to share their love of the parks.

But they were all Ukrainians.

Mother's Day in L.A.

Last night we went out to a nice restaurant for Mother's Day. It was run by real Italians and was the best meal I have had since moving to L.A. Also, the portions were small and we had four courses without too much food. It was wonderful.

But we arrived at eight and shortly afterwards, everyone around us got up and left! Such an early town.

L told us about seeing Christina Aguilera at another nice Italian restaurant.

"I had my back to the door, and it's the first time I've seen something like that. The door opened, there was the noise of all these flash bulbs going off-- pop! pop! pop!-- then the restaurant just fell silent. Everyone turned around to see who it was; then once they figured it out, they just turned back around and things got back to normal."

Here is my favorite Mother's Day card.

The critters

This year the coyotes are hungry because of the fires of last fall. They are coming down into the neighborhoods and eating pet dogs and cats. They seem to especially like little white dogs. They have lost their fear of humans.

The exterminator came by. He's a jovial guy from the South of indeterminate ethnicity (reminds me of an "uncle" of mine who is Lebanese-American). He is one of those people who becomes an expert because he loves learning, not just for the money.

I had called him because I thought I saw a rat on the roof. Having lived in apartments in big cities most of my adult life, I don't know much about how to deal with critters.

"Of course you have rats out here," he said. "You're practically in the mountains. In fact, you have two kinds of rats. Norway rats, and roof rats. We can exterminate them, but with a tile roof like yours, they can still come back. They only need a hole a half-inch high. We don't guarantee houses with tile roofs."

He took a turn around the house and pointed to a spiderweb I hadn't noticed. "Most people think those are harmless, like Daddy-long-legs. But they're extremely poisonous."

"Oh no!" I said.

"But their mouth parts are too small for them to bite humans. It's Black Widows that can kill you. I wouldn't worry, though. They're timid."

He went around the house and saw rat droppings on the garage floor, near a hole leading outdoors; termites in the attic; and said we had silverfish and mites. I could have sworn the house was clean as a whistle.

"You can't avoid nature," he said. "You have coyotes, raccoons, deer, maybe even mountain lions coming down here at night."

He went out in the yard and bounced a bit on the spongy green lawn, so comfortable to the feet. "Moles, too," he said.

Plastic surgery

Almost the first time I went out in Los Angeles, the morning after I moved here, I saw my first example of bad plastic surgery. Waiting for the car at the pretty Shutters on the Beach  in Santa Monica, where we'd gone for breakfast, I saw a woman my age who was impossibly thin and blond. Her face was weirdly shaped, her lips bloated and her cheekbones golfball-sized. She was wearing pink designer sweatpants that showed off a pert little behind. She was also sporting enormous breast implants that stuck out bizarrely in front of her hipless body.

A huge percentage of older women in this part of Los Angeles have had "something done." Once when I was visiting the dermatologist (I had bronchitis and had coughed so hard that little red spots appeared all over my eyelids), a well-dressed woman came in looking frantic. The dermatologist rushed her into a private room and the nurse apologized to me for making me wait. Something had gone wrong with the lady's botox!

Once in a while I look in the mirror and practice pulling my face in the exact right way for every small wrinkle to vanish. Suddenly I look ten years younger. It's so tempting, if you could do it exactly right. But this website is a good dissuasive.

You're not really fooling anyone. You're still old.

Diversity vs diversity

The other night I went to a choir concert at A's school. One of the ways I pass the time at things like this (I'm not that musical) is to scan the faces of the children and try to guess their ethnic background. This is a fun pastime in Los Angeles because the city is astonishingly diverse.

At my children's French schools, in spite of the occasional pale, Asian, North African or blond kid, there was still visibly a "typical French" face-- which over the years I came to define as sallow or olive skin, long faces with slim noses, and gray-blue or brown eyes. (By "typical French" I don't mean that most French people look like that, only that if you saw that face, you would think the person looked French.)

It made me feel patriotic to see all the different groups that made up the multi-ethnic mix in A's choir. There were scarcely two kids who looked as if they came from the same background.

But even though diversity is the path of the future for the United States, I have mixed feelings about it. That's because I think that it has its costs, as well as its benefits. If every country became multicultural like ours, diversity would be lost, not gained.

For example, I am sad that the Irish language , which my grandparents spoke and which has the oldest vernacular literature in Europe, is dying out. Every language is a universe. Think how different the vocabulary is in different languages. There have been studies showing that bilingual people behave and think differently, depending on which language they are using. That means something big is lost when a language disappears.

Small ethnic groups are the original source of diversity. I don't like to see any group be melted completely and disappear from the earth. And that means that somewhere, that group needs to have a core where people stay together and belong. Sometimes, when my Czech au pair or my Finnish friend spoke of their nation, which is pretty much one with their ethnic group and their language (and let's not forget that DNA analyses are showing that many small ethnic groups are basically very large families)-- I would feel envious of the sense of belonging that they must have. No American can know what that feels like. So I want some places to remain.... un-diverse.

Is that racist?

You know, I don't think it is.

Junk the mail

Junk mail is one of those things I don't understand.

Every day I get so many catalogs that I can scarcely pull them out of the mailbox. Most of them  are for things I would never buy, and the few that I have actually used in the past send three or four catalogs a month. Such a waste of trees. I wonder if the U.S. has different, more favorable regulations for junk mail. In France I rarely got any, and then it was usually for charities or at least something I'd already used.

The worst are all the credit card invitations. I've been warned that the West Side of Los Angeles is one of the top places for identity theft in the nation. Each credit card invitation is potentially a thief's credit card in your name. So I shred all the Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Diners Club invitations that arrive. There are usually several a day.

Here's one way to fight back:

Send them back!

The movie star's assistant

One of my kids has just gotten a summer job with a movie star.

Delivery men

Most of the buildings in my neighborhood in Paris still have a concierge. This means never having to worry about deliveries... if you're not home, the concierge will take  delivery, and you pick up your package when you get back.

Now that I live in a real house-- delightful as that is most of the time--I have to wait around for delivery men. I'm waiting for one right now. I paid extra for something to be delivered early, and the delivery man came on Friday-- during my half-hour absence. He left a Post-It instead of my package. I stayed home all day Monday so I would be there when he came. This morning I found his Post-It on my door again, saying that I wasn't home on Monday. I called the 800 number and got a recording. But I got through to a human being with this wonderful site:

Get Human

The exchange student

Universities in France are a sad sight compared to American campuses. This building is the single location of Paris Dauphine, one of the more sought-after ordinary universities in France (i.e. it's not a grande école).

A girl I know from Paris, Laetitia, has been visiting a friend who is an exchange student here. They came for lunch and we ate outside on the terrace, amid the bougainvillea. It was hot, but they refused to let me open the sun umbrella. "On aime bien le soleil!"

They were both blown away by the American campuses. "They're so big and so beautiful!"

I had heard that HEC was a French school that had a pretty, American-style campus, but the girls poured scorn on this idea. "C'est tout petit! You can't compare it to USC, to UCLA... All the American campuses are nicer, even the small universities'."

"What do you think of the other students?" I asked.

"So diverse! They come from all over the world!" said Laetitia's friend. "But I am the youngest one. Most of them have had several years of work experience, but in France we go straight from university to business school."

I recalled the words of an American I met who had been teaching English at HEC. "The kids are all such babies compared to American students," he had said. "They go home to Mommy every weekend."

"I wish I could study here for a year or so," said Laetitia. "Or I could work here."

"You wouldn't get much vacation to enjoy it," I said. "Americans get one or two weeks a year."

"I wouldn't like that," said Laetitia. "I live for my summers in the South of France! But for a year it would be wonderful."