Jobless Crickets Are They Illegal?
Eleven unemployed crickets were hanging at the door as I reached the sidewalk and turned right on Irving Place.
Briefcase in hand, not another human in sight in any direction, I might have been a target for an unemployed robber if this had been Inglewood or certain neighborhoods in Santa Monica.
But in Culver City, I felt as secure as a five-minute-old newborn.
Was It Like This?
This is what the 1950s must have been like. Any sound I caused would have echoed and volleyed north and south on Irving Place, due west on Braddock.
This is what Culver City must have been like when the founder Harry Culver was alive.
Turning into Braddock, four of the crickets followed me, chattering incessantly as we went.
Reynolds Wrap, Anyone
Only the tone-deaf could not love spring. The crisp night air felt like one of those 1950s films Debbie Reynolds starred in, a young girl in a squinchy small Southern hamlet.
In the summer between high school and college, I lived in a community where I worked until 3 in the morning.
Since no known burglars or robbers lived in this town, my landlords not only kept the porch light burning, the screen door leading to my room at the top of the stairs was always unlocked.
Lights of My Life
As I curved southward onto Lafayette, my path was quaintly illuminated by rows of old-fashioned street lights that were standard-issue in the 1940s.
Such a hush blanketed Lafayette that over the sound of the soles of my shoes, I could hear conversations between husbands and wives in their living rooms as I strode along.
Minutes earlier, dozens of speakers at the School Board meeting had sought to soften the allegedly hardened hearts of School District leaders.
Choosing Quality of Life
Plaintively they pleaded they had moved to Culver City to capitalize on the rich quality of public education at El Marino Language School.
Their patter sound like a my-kid-is-smarter-than-yours assertion. It is not.
Culver City has crime, but it is a deliciously safe hometown.
A Pedestrian Visionary
Along Irving Place, Braddock, Lafayette, I could see hundreds of yards away, as if it were daylight at night.
Lights, feeling unthreatened, twinkled.
On the east and west sides of Lafayette, 36 birds, sparrowish in size, conversed with each other about mundane subjects, not including El Marinos dispatched kindergarten class.
My Tiniest, Bewinged Friends
A landlocked armada of 21 insects served as my personal bodyguards from Lin Howe to my destination on Lafayette.
I wanted to exult.
But shouting would have shattered the precious pristinity of the moment.
This was a sudden synergistic intersection of time and space that was specially designed for arresting a poets mind.
Can a Moment Be Recaptured?
I thought back to the fluttering, the wing-flapping, the feather-preening the first time I saw my wife.
Bathing in the relaxing glow of occasional, unobtrusive street lighting on a late spring evening when the thermometer asked, How may I serve you? a guy had to know he only could be in Culver City.
If only Hank Mancini had not retired to the next world.
