A Little Personal Business

The last time I wrote a column under the above headline it was to describe a move from Pasadena to Northern California. Four years later the time has come for another personal passage, another move. This is the last column I will be writing for the Los Angeles Times. Instead, I’ll be taking this circus of words about California up the road a bit, to another newspaper group.

The reasons are many and my own, and of no great significance, I am sure, in a time of unraveling presidencies. This stuff happens all the time. Change can be good or bad, but rarely avoided. Life, it seems to me, is a bit like trying to crack a safe--a process of forever working the tumblers, hoping for a click.

There are plenty of things I will miss about planting my 815 words in this spot twice a week. Columns are called columns because, beyond content and attitude, they also have a physical property to them, a sense of place. Over time, this side of this page on Sundays and Wednesdays has become for me a sort of residence, not unlike that bungalow in Pasadena we left behind.

It was tough moving out of that little house. Moving out of this column after six years is no different. Somewhere along the line something clicked, and it evolved into an enterprise that was less workaday journalism and more an ongoing correspondence with good friends. The friends are what I will miss the most. You--the folks on the other side of the page, an audience I can only imagine as I write, but at the same time a quite tangible presence--well, you are the friends.

*

That said, let me unburden myself of a few boxes of guilt. I always was amazed to receive letters from readers, fan mail, hate mail, any sort of mail. In an age of answering machines and e-mail, the task of sitting down with paper and pen--poisoned or otherwise--to compose a letter to a newspaper columnist seemed beyond the call of duty, quaint and, from a recipient’s viewpoint, quite wonderful.

I read them all--scanning and filing the hate mail, committing the pieces of more lavish flattery to memory. Under pressure of time and travel, however, I never managed to figure out a way to answer the mail. It was always next year’s resolution, and next year never came. For that I beg forgiveness, and also for the opportunity here to offer up this last column as a sort of blanket response to all.

So . . .

To the grammarians who gently corrected my misapplication of words like “anymore” . . .

To the California buffs who felt obliged to set straight my sometimes wobbly versions of such matters as the coinage of the word “freeways” (it apparently originated not with us, as I wrote, but in un-golden Tennessee) . . .

To the anonymous benefactor who presented me with a computer program guaranteed to make me rich (it didn’t, alas) . . .

To the Texans who rose, with alarming fury, to my satirical proposal in mid-recession that a good war with the Lone Star State would resolve most of California’s miseries . . .

To the inmate who sent a crayon self-portrait, titled “I Am the King of Nothing” . . .

To all the people over the years who wrote to share their fears and frustrations, their ideas and insights, their applause and scorn and, more recently, their opinions on why my face should or should not adorn this column (a mixed bag, there). . . .

To Harold Weber, Patricia Oppenheim, Pancho del Rancho, Paul Weeks, Margaret Romani, Gladys Martinez, Charles Pomeroy III, Walter Karabian, Anne Sharp, Arturo Luis Nieto, Bob Green, Jeffrey Hayden, Macy Baum, William Ree, Saul Halpert, Monica Lewinsky (just checking to see if anyone is still paying attention) and all the rest of those who contributed to the pile of unanswered letters.

Thank you.

Should have said it sooner.

But thank you.

*

It appears there is no good way to end this thing, so let me delegate the job to one of the letter writers, one Geraldine Forer Spagnoli of Calabasas, who took the time last June to write and send along a poem she titled “ESCAPE.” It seems fitting enough.

A friend who got bored with the Hollywood hoopla

Pulled up his roots and took off for Utah

He thought he’d escape from graffiti and grime

Then found that the Mormons also had crime.

He had no idea, not one iota

Of what would confront him in Minnesota

So he bought him some land,

And as would be his lot

They built the Mall of America

On the next plot.

He no longer could handle the noise and the stress

So he built him a home in the wilderness

News came from Alaska, (didn’t know he was there)

He was out chopping wood and ‘got et’ by a bear.

Hope that doesn’t happen to yours truly.

Goodbye.