Stories

The weeks of soaking rain we had recently in LA were wonderful for people’s gardens, with the depressing drawback of the continued, surreal-seeming announcements, on radio and in the newspapers, that the rain was having no effect whatsoever on the drought.

In those circumstances, there was nothing more cheering to gaze upon indoors than parrot tulips. Even after they’ve been cut and put in an arrangement, these flowers continue to stretch and grow and open, with their vivid, striated colorations continuing to develop and intensify. Here, “Salmon Parrot,” “Orange Favorite” and “Libretto” tulips share space with “Climbing Joseph’s Coat”, a rose that has more than enough wattage to stand up to them, along with another rose, “Climbing Herbert Hoover,” which, although not widely grown (it dates from 1937), has the appearance and the scent of a peach, and a single specimen of the rose “Oklahoma”, which picks up the very darkest tones in all the other flowers.

Sorry for the bad-pun headline, but I do love fresh thyme. Right about now I’m getting to use a lot of it, for two reasons. First, I’ve got several plants flourishing, both right outside the kitchen door and also along the edge of the vegetable garden. Secondly, I keep cutting bunches to sell at the farm stand, and no one buys it. So it goes.

Herbs are not a huge seller, even in the high months, but I stubbornly put them out there, just in case. Secretly, I just like to look at the pretty little bunches arranged in cute cups. Thyme and all the rest of the herbs cut fresh from the garden last a remarkably long time compared to store-bought herbs. (And despite how pretty they look at room temperature in a little container, they will keep even longer in the fridge in a sealed zip-top bag. Dry them well before storing.)

Los Angeles is a contradiction: a paradox of urbanites that crave the outdoors and yuppies that eat vegan. Fancy jeans, successful lunatics, poor rich people, and other oxymorons splattered across Sunset Boulevard, a street with beaches on one end and mini skyscrapers rising up on the other end. I love LA. It satisfies my needs for culture and nature simultaneously.

So when I got an email blast from the Architecture and Design Museum about an Urban Hike through downtown LA, it seemed right up my alley.

It started with a rap. Mike Sonksen, aka Mike the PoeT, begins and ends each tour prosthelytizing about Los Angeles. Along with being a 3rd generation LA native, he is a historian and museum tour guide and has recently teamed with the A + D Museum to lead these tours every other Sunday.

I don’t know another food that seems to inspire stronger emotion—passion, even
—than that most humble of desserts, pie. — Joyce Maynard, "Labor Day"

I’ve been thinking about pie a lot lately. It’s only now, as I’m preparing to leave the college where I’ve taught for the last 15 years, that it occurs to me how many works I’ve taught that have included pie. In the early years of my women’s film class, I used a clip in which Snow White sings about her prince while crafting the perfect pie for the seven little men that she lives with. Pie can be a metaphor for comfort, for domesticity, for nurturing and for accomplishment.

Those very suggestions are what also make pie such a successful weapon in the arsenal of slapstick: to be attacked with a pie, otherwise a symbol of warm inclusiveness, is to be shamed, reduced (just ask the British Prime Minister’s pie thrower his intention).