“I just don’t know if I can do this.”
Cheryl was sitting on the dining room floor of her parents’ home, surrounded by stacks of boxes and other random collections of old letters, photographs, and assorted family memorabilia. For years, she has been telling me, “I’m not going to plan anything major until after my father dies. I’m going to have to go through that house and clean everything up.”
Well, now she was doing it.
Her father, a devout Republican, had lingered until early 2010, the year when all the Bush tax cuts reached their glorious conclusion, and, for one year only, rich Americans would be able to pass on their estates unimpeded by a rapacious government, seeking to destroy family fortunes and inhibit the free flow of commerce from one generation to the next. He never mentioned this – he never said much of anything, probably why he was such a good neruosurgeon, where one has to focus silently forever, hours at a time, on the tiniest of blood vessels and neural axons to save a personality while killing a cancer.
Duke and his wife Jane had bought this Brentwood canyon residence in 1961. Built in 1949 (the year Cheryl and I were both born), it now seems quaint, almost timid, amongst the more recent remodeled mansions along Tigertail Road. One story, shake roofed, angling along the ridge above wooded canyon housing coyote and deer, this house now contains the flotsam of 5 decades spent traveling, corresponding, and collecting. Cheryl and her sister, both parents gone and the house still mortgaged to half its value, need to empty the place, sell it, and thus abandon their life-long connection to this magic corner of LA.
The basin, of course, is now defined by its freeways; but before the people all came, there were still the ocean, beach, flat basin lands, and mountains providing contours and demarcations to the land. Look at the map of LA; the Santa Monica (10) and San Diego (405) Freeways meet just west of UCLA. The tiny wedge of land, north of the 10, west of the 405, east of the Pacific, and south of the Santa Monica Mountains, contains Santa Monica, Brentwood, Pacific Palisades, and Malibu. Also the homes of many kings and queens of finance, politics, show business and sport. People who can live anywhere in the world, or even just anywhere in LA, choose to live here. Why? Because the weather is perfect, the people are beautiful, the scenery is unbeatable, and the money is all around you.
Duke and Jane, thus, got very lucky, moving in just before the “go-go” years of the 60’s bull market, and the real estate booms of the 70s, 80s, 90s, and, oh yes, the 00s. Before the houses were built, people like Will Rogers, Bob Hope and J. Paul Getty and other oil tycoons and show business mega stars owned all the land. When the Getty Foundation wanted to build its Louvre of the 21st century, a monstrous marble palace went up across the canyon just east of Tigertail. When Conan O’Brien wanted a place to call home at the start of his ill-fated sojourn heading the Tonight show, he moved in four houses up the street. We’re talking SERIOUS mojo all around.
Cheryl’s middle school, Paul Revere, and high schools, Westlake and Palisades, are the places one sees in TV shows when they want to show kids in idyllic settings. The Palisades park, just down San Vicente on the bluffs overlooking Pacific Coast Highway, is where one goes to gaze on the Pier with its LED festooned Ferris wheel and19th century restored carousel. Her entire life has been a series of growing up and coming back to this fantasy land of perfection. Impossible to leave; impossible to stay.
And cutting over all those emotions of place and power is the nostalgic value of home, the primal clan, and all the memories which lock that deep inside us. Memories anchored by fading letters with 3 cent stamps, sent from college, or further back, with rounded perfect script no one uses any more, from grandmother to great-grandmother, and grainy photographs showing God knows whom smiling stiffly outside in God knows where, but important enough for someone to save 100 years or more.
One of Cheryl’s favorite memories, by now a traditional family story, took place on Halloween. She was canvasing the nearby houses, about 28 years ago, with our toddler Cody (now a strapping 6’2” 29 y/o). Knocking on one house, who appears, but Indiana Jones himself, Harrison Ford.
There’s an extended iconic scene in the final Indiana Jones movie (The Last Crusade). Harrison Ford is teamed up with Sean Connery, inspired casting for a father/son archeology duo. The climax of the movie takes place inside Khaznat al-Faroun, a tomb carved over 2 millennia ago in the sheer sandstone walls of Petra, the ancient rock city of Jordan. The Nazis have mortally wounded Indy’s dad, and the only way to save him is to retrieve the Holy Grail, Christ’s goblet, the water from which can heal wounds and provide eternal life.
After surviving three tests – a nasty decapitating buzz saw, a game of hopscotch where the penalty for failure is a blizzard of arrows, and a disappearing rock bridge – with the help of his father’s trusty notebook, Indy arrives at the chamber housing the Grail. It’s protected, however, by a 700 year Knight Templar, left behind the make sure only the most devout can claim the prize. After quickly defeating him in battle (after all, the Knight IS 700 years old, has been out of the sun a while, and is sorely in need of practice), Indy then must choose.
Walking over to the raft of goblets laid out like pirate’s treasure along a ledge in the cave wall, Indy asks, “How will I know which one is His?”
“You must choose … wisely,” the Knight replies.
Indy gulps as he passes a skeleton, still hold the jewel encrusted cup he tried drinking from. The Knight notes, “He chose … Poorly!”
Indy ponders the problem a while, then picks up a simple, unadorned wooden cup, “This would be the cup of a carpenter.” He makes a big show of filling it with water dripping from the ceiling into a rather homely stone bird bath type thing, and takes a drink. Still alive, the walls start to shake, and it’s time to get out. He races across the swinging invisible bridge, ignores the hopscotch pattern while dodging arrows, and dives under the neck high blades whirring out from the walls.
He gives his dad a drink, and pours water from the Grail onto his wound. MIRACLE! Sean Connery lives!
But great commotion ensues, while all the bad guys (and gal) make a play for the cup (after all, they ARE Nazis, and do so want to win the war, rule the world, and live forever.)
Apparently, though, the cup cannot be taken across the final chasm of the cave, and, once it is, the usual earth shake and rock fall takes over. Great gaps open up below the combatants, and the cup rolls down into the void, landing tantalizingly just out of reach on a shelf about six feet below.
A Nazi baddie plunges to his death while making his play for immortality. Indy, dreaming of his life stretching on forever, to say nothing of the temporal glory accorded the the finder of the Grail, slips down the cliff.
His dad grasps his hand at the last moment. Indy looks down, reaching for the Grail, just inches past his grasp.
“Dad, I can reach it!”
“No, son, give me your hand,” his father says with calm intensity.
Indy gives a look of determination down the pit, and insists, “I can get it, just let me down!”
“No, Indy. Just let it go, son. Let it go.”
How, indeed, does one let go of, and save forever, the life and lives so dear, so formative, so revealing of ourselves?