Nostalgia: My California Eulogy (or, making up for journaling sporadically for 12 years)

[This is exactly what it sounds like, is super long, and I won't be offended if you skip it.]

I first came to Los Angeles alone. I was 24, it was 1996. I had to leave David home to pack and get us ready to move because I'd been offered a great-paying job (a whopping $36K!) with a very impatient boss who insisted I start immediately. I stayed with David's cousin in La Crescenta and immediately began the local ritual of the LA commute through the San Fernando Valley, over Coldwater Canyon into to Beverly Hills. I was an office manager for the independent Laboratory run by Cedars Sinai Hospital, where my first son would be born three years later.

I was so homesick and felt I would never adjust. But it only took me the week to be comfortable navigating the traffic and knowing my way around. I visited the temple that first week by myself one night after work, and as I walked up the steps, never having been there before, I felt more homesick than ever. But as I walked in the doors, an overwhelming peace came over me and I felt a voice say, "This is your home, come back often." Anytime I felt homesick after that, I went "home" to the temple.

We'd already come down for a hasty weekend to pick an apartment in Hollywood. When we finally moved in, realized quickly that we'd been indeed hasty and far too rent-minded (only $725--we'd paid a steep $525 for our swank Capitol Hill apartment). Although it was a relatively nice building, we got a swift introduction to Hollyweird via our stoner neighbors and the gay couple next door with their super-loud (and somewhat hilarious) slap fights. I remember a night waking up to crashing sounds--some crazy person stole a car and drove it at breakneck speeds up our very narrow street lined on both sides with tightly-packed cars. The driver jumped out of the car, ran away, not to be seen again. Ah, Hollywood.

But the Hollywood ward, just as quirky and sometimes eyebrow-raising as the rest of the town, was where I got my testimony of buckling down and doing the work of the Kingdom. It was the kind of place where, as the Primary 1st Counselor, I may be the only adult there to show up, and might find myself conducting, leading music (sometimes while playing), doing sharing time, then teaching a combined class. I might have to keep the Primary President from cussing in front of the kids, and I probably would have to feed the kids granola bars because no breakfast was had at home. I'd leave feeling like I'd given a lot of blood.

It was the first time where it was very clear that if I didn't show up, an important ward auxillary just wouldn't happen. I was accustomed to riding along in the handcart of the church while all the old people pulled us along. Hollywood was where I learned to get out and push.

So, after our 9-month lease ended, we were on to Westwood. This time we we sacrificed space (only 500 feet), but paid the same and got location, location, location, where we could walk to wonderful movie theaters and restaurants, and boy, did we take advantage of all of them. I always say if I could take back the money and the calories from this time I would be rich and thin.

In the short period at Hollywood, we'd been able to walk to the Chinese theater, albeit somewhat timidly at night, but the Westside perks won out.


Although I knew the Hollywood ward needed us, we were led to start going to the UCLA Student Ward over in Westwood, and I think this is where David began to make his spiritual strides. Like our wonderful ward here in Pasadena, it was a ward heavy on the academic crowd, scientists and PhDs and post-docs, and it was an intellectually and spiritually stimulating place.


David was getting his undergrad at USC, now in Religion and Judaic Studies (although we'd come down to study film, he wasn't enjoying the program), and as soon as we came down I auditioned for and began studying opera with with Shigemi Matsumoto's studio in Northridge, paying what was essentially another tithing for the privilege. But this was the reason for my being open to coming to LA.


Meanwhile the lab where I worked was having stability issues and my boss announced he was leaving and suggested I should leave to avoid being laid off, so I took a job with our telephone system provider at the same salary. I was laid off after only 4 months, when the very small company realized they were paying me too much and didn't have anything for me to do.

I was nervous but relieved to leave that dysfuntional pit in Van Nuys, and this firing opened the way for me to interview with the Sprint PCS LA Area Sales and Marketing office, which had only 11 people when I was hired on 5/12/1997, when they had no network, but a bunch of plans, excitement, momentum and tons of money to throw around. Another proud, impatient and demanding boss here, although at least with some cult of personality, and I was hired as a generic project person--he liked me, he just didn't know what he was going to use me for.

He soon persuaded me (against all my protests that I was "past" that stage of my career) to be his Exec. Assistant. He persuaded me with money, which does indeed talk. I should have caught on quick that I would have a lot of fodder for a big, lucrative law suit in that conversation, where my religion, our faith's disinclination toward premarital sex, and later even my bra size managed to come up without any encouragement from me. He called me the "Emperor's Assistant" or his "work wife," a relationship which was never anything but platonic, although most of the office assumed otherwise. Why-oh-why am a nice girl who laughs red-faced instead of calling a lawyer?

The launch of SPCS was a crazy-intense, super-educational, career-boosting and income-generating ride, and left me well-versed in the corporate world, but clear on the ridiculous illusions of its meaningfulness that one must hold when working in it. It was here I met my dear, dear friend Doris, who has become essential to my existence.

Very shortly after taking the job at SPCS we realized that regardless of the fun of living in the "Village," the 500-sq foot thing just wasn't working for the two of us and our cat, Toe Jam. We moved into one of the fancy haunted hospital towers at Park La Brea, coming to terms with the idea that for long-term living we were going to have to deal with the $1150 rent. Our sweet almost-child Toe Jam committed suicide out our 8-story window, a very traumatic experience. We were soon joined by cats Ingrid and Bogey.

During the first two years here, I continued the annoying, expensive and roller-coasteresque ride of infertility treatments that I'd begun years before in Utah, and regular surgeries and hormone treatments were an integral part of life--thank heavens for good benefits! We'd given up many times, but after the most invasive laparotomy (that big, smiley-face belly cut) and ovarian reconstruction, we really felt "done" and started looking into adoption. That surgery was in May of 1998, and we turned down the next round of hormone treatment follow-ups, much to our specialist's disappointment.

Although the surprise career jump at SPCS really made the opera ambition more difficult, since I had much less time for practice, in the fall of 1998 I got one of the lead roles in the Santa Monica Community Opera, my second role with them, coincidentally playing a beatific nun in both: Dialogues of the Carmelites and Suor Angelica. At 26 I was playing in a shortened version (20 minutes) of a heavy-hitting Lyric Soprano role Verdi designed for 40 year olds where I had to cry, scream, sing a high-C and then commit suicide on stage. I'd say I did the best I could with what I had at the time.

But the story was significant personally: having been sent to the nunnery by my wealthy family for having an illegitimate son, my evil aunt comes to have me sign away my portion of the estate for my sister who is marrying. As I desperately and repeatedly ask about my son, she casually mentions the boy got sick and died, and coldly leaves. I am driven suicidal in an attempt to be with my son, take some poison, then suddenly realize suicide is a mortal sin and I'll never be reunited with him in heaven, but then I see a vision of Mother Mary and my son and am redeemed. As I sang and sobbed, lamenting my son and how much I wanted to hold him, I couldn't know that I'd he'd actually been conceived earlier that week.

Due to this, it was my first and last operatic lead. David started law school just a week after Ben was born. After ten weeks, I negotiated a part-time from home deal for a while until other employees' whining about my cushy life (probably due to once being being the big guys "work wife) was unfair. (Let them kiss up to a demanding guy for three years if they want perks!) So, they offered a promotion from my current role as Marketing Analyst and I went back to work full time, now as a Business Operations Manager. I just couldn't do it, I missed Ben too much, and although I liked his day care, he just seemed to have a lost look whenever I went to pick him up.

My last day at SPCS was three years to the day of my first (all us start-up type folks were getting bored with the monotony of daily operations and leaving anyway). I started doing contract graphic design for their ad pieces, and the money crunch, which we never really have escaped for too long, began. I tried odds and ends to bring in money, including my first jabs at entrepreneur efforts and a night job for a law firm downtown. We couldn't afford to continue the voice lessons, but Ben came first.

We bought a condo in Pasadena when Ben was 1, and Sophie was born about a year later--only one surgery required! Then we started the business, and I expanded it quickly although I was undercapitalized. Next I childishly insisted that we sell our condo so I could rent a house with a yard, which we did, making what we thought was a good profit, although the place reached triple that price in the coming years. At the same time, we agreed David would turn down a good job with a good firm because our business was doing well. Those three decisions, all made within a few months of each other, set the financial climate of what looks to be the rest of our lives to "Stormy Weather."

But, I didn't know that then, and I loved the two years we had in that little white house. That was where we had (and lost) Eden, where I had my only miscarriage, where Noah was born (in a birth tub in the bedroom), where we lived when my dad and grandpa died, and where the business thrived then died. That was when we came closer to our friends in the ward, like my sweet friend Michele, who lived just a block away. We entertained a lot, with lots of baby showers, a Mardi-gras party, and, of course, the ritual Thanksgivings. It was an event-filled time, where I felt I aged much more than two years.

In the aftermath of the business going down, we moved briefly to Sierra Madre for a summer, where we enjoyed the pool, the Sierra Madre July 4th festivities, Sophie's fourth birthday, Noah's first, and where he learned to sleep through the night (much to the frustration of our apartment neighbors). Then we were off to Redlands for 7 months where we enjoyed another little white house and our wonderful friends, the Mosses, who then went off and moved to Utah, and we missed Pasadena terribly. In Redlands I became pregnant with Lucy.

While in Redlands, I had a strong prompting in the temple that we would end up back in Utah. David didn't like this prompting. Barring complete necessity, he wasn't ever going back.

So, due to events just as chaotic as was the norm during these years, we moved back to Pasadena rather suddenly, to our current townhouse duplex, with rents now up to $2000 for such a place. We moved just in time for Lucy to arrive eleven weeks early and put us at the wonderfully generous and tender mercies of our old ward family. The almost two years we've been back have drawn us so much closer to the Lord and to the ward, put us more in His service, and has strengthened our friendships as well as our resolve to be of use in his Kingdom.

Our tenure in California has been a tremendous education. I hope I'm not just older, but wiser. Although it took me seven years to come to terms with staying forever, I've spent five years thinking I'd die here. I know I'll miss it terribly, but I'm in "doing" mode now. I'm sure after I'm unpacked, I'll sit on the couch in my living room and think, "Where am I?" Where are all my California friends?" And the reality will sink in.

But the thing I feel most for my time here and for the people I love here and for the Lord for bringing us here, is gratitude.