After Lana almost burned
down the building, I was about the only friend she had in the senior complex. From the time the tenants gathered outside
watching them fight the blaze, the ladies were whispering that Lana (not her real name) was at
fault because she had been drunk at the time of the fire, drunk the entire week before, in fact.
I wasn’t critical of
Lana's drinking, I just wished I could keep up with her. Now she sat on top of an unpacked box in
my living room office admitting that because of the fire,
she'd probably have to move. She was
worried about where she'd go, rents being so high in Los Angeles, even as far into
the desert as we lived.
Taking on the persona
of friend, I said that even after her apartment was refurbished, if she continued to live there, the gossip would make her so uncomfortable she'd still want to
move. I had barely been able to go to the mail room myself since word got out among the mainly
fundamentalist Christian aparment dwellers that I'm a pedophile priest victim
who wrote as a journalist on the topic. Now almost no one in the building spoke to me anymore
except Lana.
I suggested: "You
should move to a place where people won't mind that you like to drink," being
my usual blunt self.
She shook a bit and
said, Yes, I do like to drink.
I said, there must be a
town in California where drinking and partying are part of the culture, someplace like Lake Tahoe.
I was sitting at my
desk at the time, as I always am, the laptop having become an extension of my
hands that I'm attached to nearly twenty four hours a day, disconnecting only when
I pry myself out into town.
So I said to her, you should
move to Tahoe, and we turned to my laptop and went to Craigslist, where I discovered that apartments in
Tahoe were about the same price as in Lancaster where we were living.
I had said to her, You should move
to Lake Tahoe. But after reading the Craigslist ads, I said, "Better yet,
I should move to Tahoe."
And that was that- Lana started
the fire in January, I was moved out in March. She still lives there, drinking enough to not notice the gossiping neighbors
I've lived in South
Lake Tahoe a little over a year now and lucky for me it's the kind of town where
you can live in a state of serendipity, like the one I've been in all my life. I finish work in this living room at the same desk as in Lancaster, walk out the door, catch the bus, and from there on it's Serendipity what I'll do with my day.
I've lived my whole
life in a state of Serendipity. For
example when I found out in 1994 that there are others who were raped by
priests as children, and somewhere in the Bay Area was a support group that does
activism about the topic, what did I do? I packed up Lizzie and me from a wonderful
two bedroom apartment in Eureka where we were almost putting down roots, and
shipped us to San Francisco in search of SNAP.
Chaos and anarchy
replaced serenity from then on in my daughter's life and I am forever sorry for
that.
However, I go to Lost
Coast Outpost now and then to read the headlines, though, and do not miss
living in Eureka at all.
South Lake Tahoe is a
great place to live if you are, like me, a little old lady who wants to be in a
metropolis, but does not like the way cities have developed in America.
I go out every day-
except when I'm too wiped out and exhausted which happens about twice a week-
and because of my job, I never know what time of day I'm going to be able to
get out the door.
Chaos and instability
are written into my life. When I wake up around midnight every night, I go to
my email. Often it is not until then that I know what my schedule is going to
be the next day.
Now I've arranged it so
I live less than a block from a bus stop near the boulevard. I'm surrounded by trees and recreational
vibes here in an apartment in South Lake Tahoe, but I can catch a city
bus that goes up and down the boulevard a block from home and get anywhere in town.
Of course the bus does
end up in the traffic and boy is there a lot of traffic on Lake Tahoe
Boulevard. I may get a bike soon so I can
even avoid the bus, take the back roads, even venture onto the trails.
Yes, a bike, I need to
get a bike next.
Serendipity ---
-ke