People like to tell me stories about themselves

The Los Angeles River is an unexpected example of the sublime--a vast expanse of white concrete, running dead straight for dozens of miles through the city, one hundred yards wide, with high, ramped banks. Long fins are fitted to the pillars of the numerous white bridges, to protect them during floods. But mostly the riverbed is nearly dry, as in the drag racing scene in the film Grease.

On my first morning at my friend James' in Long Beach, he and I and his ten-year-old son Jordan went on a bike ride down to and along the river, and I paused several times to simply stand and gaze and admire the strange and impressive feature. A few inches of green algaed water flowed in the bottom, the result of recent and, for this time of year, unusual rains. Black-necked stilts and american avocets stood up to their ankles in the water and poked at tiny crustaceans. Great blue herons perched on the occasional bit of flotsam, a tree branch or tire. Seagulls and terns and swallows swooped low over the riverbed, and one seagull dive-bombed a heron over and over.

The night before in Redondo Linda and Bruce had invited friends over for dinner. I stayed only long enough to meet everyone, including a man named Lou, who, after Linda said the word "bicycle" as something we had in common, launched into a monologue about his bike history--beginning with an Italian bike he bought in 1968 for $89, a purchase which outraged his father who thought it ridiculous to spend so much on a bike, but he, Lou, loved the bike, and then his next bike, in 1970, had also been Italian, some name that I can't remember but which Lou said translated as "pile of shit".... After ten minutes he took his first breath and just as he opened his mouth to continue I said, politely, that I had to be going and he looked annoyed at the interruption.... Actually, I would have liked to have stayed, if I could have extricated myself from Lou and taken up with some of the other guests. But I had said I would be at James' at seven.

I arrived forty-five minutes late, and when the front door opened I walked into another dinner party. James' wife Trish hugged me and said, "you're late! where've you been! We didn't know if you were still coming!" She hadn't understood why James hadn't just called me, and he protested that he had, but he had called my home number, and I had to explain that I didn't have a cellphone, and they looked astonished as this was a possibility they hadn't even considered.

Several adults and a half dozen children sat in the living room or out on the back patio and I was introduced around. James gave me a beer and then put meat and fish on the barbeque. "I got salmon for you," he said, "wild Alaska salmon."

Later I found myself on the patio with a woman named Vicki after she had had two cosmos. She told me the long story of her courtship with her husband twenty years before, and how before she'd married him, she had made him go on a two-week bike ride in the Rockies, to see if he would measure up. The key test, apparently, was to see if he would, when the going got tough, give in and ride in the support vehicle; but he never did, he rode all 900 miles, and when they got back she agreed to marry him. He in his turn required her to give up her job at Kellog's, the cereal company, where she was "very successful," and so she did quit, and anyway she wanted to stay home and have kids, which she did, three of them.

Later we played guitar hero in the den. One of Trish's friends, Pamela, a VP in Human Resources at NBC, tutored me on the essentials, and then I tried to play the "easy" version of Foghat's "Slow Ride." The result was largely discordant, but a couple times I briefly rocked out. After all the adults had had a go, ten-year-old Jordan played Metallica's "One," on "medium," and it seemed impossible that anyone could keep up--I couldn't even watch the screen for long without feeling disoriented--but he played flawlessly and afterwards I shook his hand.

James and Trish's other son, Brendon (17) is currently traveling with a jazz singing group and performing in various European capitols. I have his room, a museum to boyhood. Dozens of framed photographs trace the trajectory of his boy's life, the latest a prom photo of Brendon with his ravishing girlfriend Mitzi. Spread about are numerous trophies and plaques for accomplishments in cross country. Two Star Wars posters hang above the bed, and four guitars stand in a corner. The mounted horns of a mule deer hang on another wall, a trophy from a hunting trip with his grandfather; there's also a photo of Brendon with a large wild boar he has just dispatched.

I have occupied a number of rooms in the last three weeks, as I've shuttled from one relative or friend's house to another across the western U.S. And I've talked and reminisced my ass off.... Tomorrow, though, I'll be off to a new land, to new people with whom I have no history. I'm a little anxious.