At home, we are a normal family: my parents, my brother, and me. We don’t live in Los Angeles, actually, but in Norwalk, next to the freeway. We live in one of those houses you see as you speed by or sit still in traffic, suffocating. A cracked cement patio, baby clothes stuck to dry in a chain link fence, a lemon tree black from the exhaust of a million trucks. You think, Who lives there? Who can have that life?
We don’t dry our laundry in the fence. We have a clothes line from the lemon tree to the house and a sprinkler that waves its arms like a sea anemone.
But the trucks roar by all night, my lullaby. At first they looked like devils hurrying north in their peaked, demonic wind foils. But they are so lost, so repetitious and unaware. I feel sorry for them.
You grow up thinking this is the world—heat, exhaust, a trickle of dirty water in the concrete riverbed. But how different the rest of the world must be: pebbled roads and wet sky, women in funny shoes, and the moist faces of angels looking down on you from every building and fountain.
