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A small piece of the Palisades remembered

Heading North on Pacific Coast Highway, you make the right up Sunset. The world blurs, the years divide—reforming and recombining.

You pass the gym where you used to watch your mother’s shapely Angela Bassett-esque arms pump to and fro on the elliptical machine beside you while you both gazed out at the ocean. She always snuck you in, and no one ever really objected.

You pass the gas station and Taco Bell, where your friend once painted the bathroom walls with projectile vomit while the boys you were partying with waited outside. You pass the Vons, where you sometimes stopped for ripe raspberries and blueberries and eggs—forgotten provisions, scavenged hastily on Sunday mornings.

You strain to recall the following expanse of roadway. It’s difficult to remember many things, but that’s why you’re making this drive in your mind now: to remember what you can while you can.

You see the Westside Waldorf school. When you went there, the campus was still in Santa Monica. Your mother often grumbled that things would’ve been a lot easier if it had always been located here at the base of the Highlands rather than all the way over there on 4th Street. You always nodded and agreed. It was thirty minutes to everywhere and everyone outside of the Palisades. You had no concept of distance, no concept of time.

The Self Realization Fellowship appears, encircled in verdant brush like a secret. You fed koi there with your mother and father under the bright sunlight as a little girl, shrieking gleefully as the colorful fish swam into view, their whiskered, gaping mouths eagerly breaching the surface. You visited the portion of Gandhi’s ashes kept there often with your mother and prayed to the spirit of Yogi Paramahansa Yogananda for guidance when you were depressed at sixteen. You felt connected to his picture—the one that makes him look something like the Mona Lisa.

You turn left onto Palisades Drive. The strip mall is next—a mixed bag of memories you try to sort and preserve. The video store, captained by a wise cinephile named David, who recommended all the fantasy films, anime, and psychological thrillers that became your favorites (one time your mother went rogue when David wasn’t there and brought home Grave of the Fireflies, which briefly traumatized you). The Italian restaurant that changed and changed and changed, but at its best, was manned by a fleet of handsome waiters who all treated you like you were their niece. The cafe at the end with its many identities, most notably Cafe Cabana (though Mogan’s gets an honorable mention). You’ll never forget the former because you and your father turned it into a chant, and he always said it in a funny voice that made you giggle. “Ca-fe Ca-baaa-na, Ca-fe Ca-baaa-na.” The wall outside, peppered with those climbing purple flowers—you used to watch it move and swell with life, teaming with a billion busy bees.

The canyon yawns before you, parted by a wedge of blue sky. You wind through its belly past bushy pampas grasses, fennel clumps, twisted trees, and craggy rock faces adorned with weeds. You recall every drive all at once, up and down, in and out. Laughing, belting, crying, screaming. You find the stone and the bench. You say a prayer for everyone who was lost somewhere along this road.

You break into the open, flanked by wild brush on one side and a manicured hillside on the other. You see the concrete drainage swales. You used to climb through them barefoot on one imagined adventure or another, ducking behind trees to avoid detection and hoping for the rumored presence of a wolf girl prowling the surrounding developments. You wanted to be feared and respected. You wanted to be hunted. You wanted to prove yourself a worthy disciple of the books and fables you loved so much.

The hillside is peppered with those same purple flowers. “Look, Alana…it’s finally Springtime,” you hear your mother muse. You see her hair piled up high atop her head and her long fingers gripping the wheel, and you feel her relief to be home, and you are relieved to be home, too, for the duration of a millisecond.

Up and up, higher and higher, you reach the Highlands Center and its ageless charm. Casa Nostra, where you ate lunch alone on weekends whenever you had seventeen dollars to spare for the gamberoni al burro—an appetizer you finished off by sopping up the sauce with enough bread to fill you the rest of the way, always paired with an iced tea. The chiropractor you saw with your mother who treated people in group sessions (someone was always crying). The Coldwell Banker, like a sentinel presiding over everything since the dawn of time. The scenic parking lot overlook you often visited at dusk to gaze out at the hills and cry about the small pain made large in your little body. So much small pain made large in such a little body—cast out over the wind when the salt dried on your cold cheeks.

You know they built some new structure on the corner of Vereda De La Montura, but you sweep it away for now and remember the empty lot—the golden field with its broken fence you snuck through often to photograph your friends half-naked Tumblr style with an old film camera. Another place you ran away to often. Not quite as far as the Santa Ynez Canyon trail where you sat up on a high rock and held your pet gopher snake as it died in your hands (this was its final wish—it told you so, and you obliged). But something wide and empty and waiting for you just the same.

Across the way, you find yourself on foot, Frye boots clipping like horseshoes over the faded red brick driveway. You pass the mailboxes and the tree that caught your ball in its branches one day as you played outside with your father. “Give me back my ball!” he shouted as the two of you stared up into the tree’s canopy. He pounded his fists against its mottled bark, and your tears turned to laughter as you joined in. Demanding this of the tree became a practice for years to come. Even after your father moved out, your mother took up the mantel, but the tree never gave in.

You wonder if the tree survived and if maybe it caught and held more than just toys over the years. If it holds the memories and milestones and birthdays and holidays and parties and friendships and heartbreaks and first love and family homes and businesses and purple flowers and everything in between, too. If it still stands, you hope for the honor of beating your fists against it someday soon, demanding what was lost for anyone and everyone who ever called this place “home.”

Home - Taken with my dad’s film camera (year unknown)