Life can be strange sometimes, and for me at least, oftentimes. Case in point: I grew up in a blue-collar household and may have a tiny issue with being around great wealth (that I’ve been working on for several decades now), so of course I have now lived in Malibu not once but twice. This time, just for pure comedy it seems, Jody and I had the opportunity for the past five months to rent a studio apartment on Broad Beach Road, a mile-long road with homes that realtors describe as “some of the most exclusive and expensive in all of Malibu.” Our Mazda vehicles blended in perfectly.
I confess a little online stalking where I learned that our neighbors included celebrities like Valerie Bertinelli, Dustin Hoffman, Ray Romano, Pierce Brosnan, and Mindy Kaling (and from days gone by, De Niro; Spielberg; Ol’ Blue Eyes; Matthau; McQueen; Goldie & Kurt; Devito & Perlman; and Archie Bunker, just to name a few). And then there are the rich people. So, you get it: for the past few months Broad Beach residents included the uber-wealthy, the celebrities, and the Sturgeons. As Sesame Street taught us, one of these things is not like the other. We tried to organize a neighborhood quilting group but had trouble tracking down good email addresses.
What a cool adventure it has been. That’s what I kept telling myself, and it was true. I am so grateful to have had this opportunity, but not in the wow-we-finally-hit-the-jackpot sort of way; instead, it has been a remarkable opportunity to have an actual mailing address in a neighborhood that few have the opportunity to experience. That distinction may not make sense to you, but it does to me.
We are moving into our new campus condominium at Pepperdine today, which was the plan all along, and we are happy to get settled. We are especially happy to have an actual kitchen, not to mention rooms with bona fide doors just in case we need a little privacy from one another from time to time. (Yes, the studio apartment on Broad Beach was a teensy-bit small.) But we are grateful for our life experience down on the beach.
Will we miss it? It’s a good question. One would think we would miss the sound of the waves crashing all night the most, or possibly the breathtaking views, and maybe one of those will turn out to be true, but on one hand I have chalked the entire adventure up as just that, an adventure, so I intend to be thankful for the adventure and not waste time looking in the rearview mirror; but on the other hand, if I was to miss something, I think I know what it would be instead.
One morning, on the beach at sunrise, I took possibly the best picture I will ever take in my life (pictured above, thanks iPhone). Both sunrise and sunset can be spectacular in these parts, especially during what SoCal tries to call winter, but what is more remarkable than the view and the picture it produced is that often, at sunrise, I would walk down to the beach and look to my left and then to my right before coming to the stunning conclusion that I was the only person around. That feeling, my friends, was a gift that I don’t have words to describe.
If I will miss anything, that will be it. But when you get a gift like that, how could you be anything but grateful?
I confess that I didn’t read the instructions very closely, but I’m pretty sure we can stop being thankful now that the holiday has passed. I’m not 100% positive on this, but since we are apparently expected to line up at midnight and explode out of the starting blocks like Usain Bolt to beat our fellow citizens to the hottest deals, it seems that the time to appreciate what we already have has now passed and that we need new things for which to give thanks!
Starting to Look Up 