My parents purchased a 2 bedroom/1 bath bungalow on Tahquitz Place in Pacific Palisades in 1968, captivated by great public schools, a central downtown which called itself a Village, and the temperate climate. 

Homeownership was a big deal for my mom and dad. They had downpayment help from my grandparents who’d lived in apartments in Chicago their whole lives, raising the next generation the same way. 

My father often regaled us with tales of the austerity of the early years in their own home, including how scary it was to buy a house that cost the astronomical amount of $28,000. How dining out meant a celebratory pizza at the end of the workweek. How their chief forms of entertainment were their library cards and a black-and-white TV. 

When my parents arrived, certain sections of the Palisades had long been an enclave for the very upper classes and old moneyed California families, as well as celebrities who wanted the privacy provided by its distance from Bel Air and Beverly Hills. 

The Palisades, like all beach towns in Los Angeles, wore its comparative casualness like an honor badge. California, and the ocean, were the end point for millions who had moved westward since the mid 19th century, escaping the social mores and economies that had cinched The Way It’s Always Done tightly to the necks and waists of people seeking the freedom to express themselves and to grow. Fast-forward to Southern California’s 20th century, and you would find a different kind of tethering, to surf culture, to leisure, to good times, all emblematic, all connected to the waves of the Pacific, which is right there, omnipresent. Behemoth. The only things worth doing would be done in a swimsuit.

Even if people who lived in the Palisades felt they lived casually and with less pretension than the rest of Westside L.A., the country, and the world, they were still experiencing a major quality of life advantage not everyone could access. The real economic and racial divides that have plagued our country since its inception came along for the ride with the people who settled California. And so for those last generations who would actually be able to afford it, my parents’ included, the Palisades was home to (mostly white) folks who would never consider themselves uber wealthy or even aspire to it. The middle class was able to gain a footing in the shadows of extreme wealth. Lawyers, and doctors, sure, but also teachers, inventors, accountants, aerospace engineers, artists, intellectuals, therapists, in short, people from all kinds of professional classes, but who crucially considered themselves more regular, less fancy, more average, less curated. More often to be found in shorts and sandals than gussied up.

After a few years, when I was 7, my parents bought a house right across the street. It had an extra bedroom and bathroom to give us more space after the arrival of my brother and sister. By the time my father sold it 15 years later, it would have appreciated to 10x its purchase price. By then a storm surge of affluence was crashing over the Palisades, with wave after wave of the upwardly mobile pushing property values ever higher. The bougie-fication of our town was well underway. 

It marked a cultural shift toward ostentation that baffled many. In fact, shortly after the closing, the new couple who’d bought our home knocked on the door of our long-time neighbors who were elementary school teachers, to introduce themselves. Our friends remembered feeling examined. The newbies looked around the property, taking in the original footprint, the simple landscaping, the 25-year old VW’s in the driveway, and with straight faces asked, “If you don’t mind us asking, how exactly can you afford to live here?”

*

The last full summer I lived at home was after my freshman year in college. After that, I really never came back for more than a weekend. I built my adult life in San Diego and bypassed the Westside entirely when I visited my father who had settled in Calabasas. Many of my friends’ families had sold up and moved away by then as well, and my life was pointed firmly away from the bubble I’d grown up in.

*

I loved San Diego so much. I still do. Every time I visit, I notice how the coastal communities are gentrifying in similar ways to the Palisades, but when I first lived there I was so happy to be “home”, meaning that it reminded me of the way California had been great for me as a child. Less traffic. Friendlier. Simpler. All the things, basically, you hear from middle-aged people facing the firehoses of progress in the Information Age, as the world gets more complicated, cruel, and frenzied.

San Diego was the place I began, from a safe distance, to piece through my intuitive awakening on my 21st birthday, and to take my first steps on the healing journey of a lifetime, while the Palisades was continuing to eagerly conspicuously consume, and as a result it became completely uncompelling to me. Part of why I never felt pulled to return was because of the complications of what had happened to me growing up there, the severe trauma that I had to unpack which made the ethos of living there so brutally shallow to me. There were years of heavy emotional labor in front of me, so much to process from my childhood that had nothing to do with the outside world. In the memories of the homes I’d lived in, the classrooms I’d studied in, the friendships and relationships I’d had, there was so much that needed to be reconsecrated. So I kept my back to what I couldn’t change, and kept my focus not on recreating my childhood, but reengineering my life toward healing. 

Of course it goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, that my experience is my own. The Palisades means something completely unique for every single one of us who lived there. When I say my heart breaks for all of us, that means I share the grief of anyone who had any experience of living there, no matter what that was. It might be similar, or not. What we all have in common now is that physically it’s almost entirely gone. And we share that with those who lived in other towns and neighborhoods all over California consumed by fire. Fire is a great equalizer, it simply needs fuel and it cares not a whit what it destroys as it burns. Fire itself is amoral, blameless, neutral. The reckoning it leaves in its wake, like all of what we experience in life, is for us to own and use for our transformation, or not. 

So the question remains, which losses will we choose to sift through, when nothing is left? Do we have the courage to face the devastation in a way that makes it easier for those who come after us to live? Do we finally, finally admit we have abandoned our jobs as stewards of the earth? As guardians, of our own hearts? 

*

Perhaps the only uniquely Socal wound I carried for a time was the pervasive feeling I had of being a Snow White in a sea of Malibu Barbies. The kind of objectification I experienced as a girl was pointed, and harsh, and I never ever felt like I fit in. What I know now about the 60’s, 70’s, and beyond, and before, is that all girls feel this way no matter what we look like, even if some are winning at whatever set of impossible beauty standards are currently being shoved down our throats. I was socialized to be pretty and pleasing and pleasant to men and to serve them and their needs. When I meet women much younger than me I become hopeful that it’s getting better, I see an agency in their lives and in the way they hold themselves that is so fucking inspirational. They are teaching me how to ask for more and how to be even more comfortable in my own skin, and I also know their stories are a continuing chapter in the same saga of what has been hard won. And I decry all the ways they are still fighting the same battles we did, only now with fewer rights and protections. 

My own generation grew up in the shadow of second wave feminism so at least we had emerging examples of adult women who were shaking off the shackles of oppressive marriages and laws successfully, but the ways we and subsequent generations are all still struggling with how that exact progress has made the patriarchy even more infuriated and vengeful and more determined to control us? It’s easy to imagine a rage that would be the envy of a fire that can burn five football fields a minute. So add “not become consumed by bitterness and resentment” to the list of what we learn to do. 

In addition to (or maybe because of the patriarchy) I am a survivor of almost every single kind of childhood abuse you can survive. Emotional neglect, abandonment, physical abuse, verbal abuse, sexual abuse and assault. The traumas I experienced should have destabilized me permanently, so the fact that I had assistance early in life to become as healthy as I am, emotionally, mentally, physically, and spiritually, and as potently happy as I am, is a miracle. Discovering my intuition at a very young age could have guaranteed my self destruction, simply because it can be a blueprint for becoming too highly sensitive too quickly, in ways that left me even more exposed and unprotected. In my case my gifts lay just dormant enough until life sounded an all-clear and it could help me to flourish. My intuitive life also gave me access to an internal world where I absolutely felt safe enough to trust myself and to connect to a power greater than myself, and these two practices have sustained me ever since. 

But even before I knew I was intuitive, most of my internal world was nourished by reading. I was an early and voracious reader, and as soon as I could walk to the library myself I would check out as many books as I could carry, easily polishing off up to a dozen books a week during school vacations. Books were my companions, my comfort, my portals and guides to a world that was personally overwhelming. Through reading I began to imagine a time when I would find it navigable. 

So of all the places the fire incinerated, it was the news about the library’s destruction that hit me like a gut punch. A loss that honestly felt personal to me. 

The library was my refuge. It was always safe. Most of the adults there were kind. The privacy of my mind was never interrupted. I studied there, but I had plenty of time to explore the stacks. And it was there that I discovered the early predecessors of what would become the explosion of self-help/new age/wellness writing: the “psychic phenomena” section.

It was a place to start. Not where I would end up with my thinking, but a safe place to start. 

Since there was no one safe I could talk to about my intuition, I had no language to describe what I was experiencing. I did have an uncle who was also interested in the subjects, but when I discovered he too was reading the same books (not surprising since I can trace the intuitive line back up to my grandmother), he used my interest as a way to groom me and ultimately molested me. 

The library, then, was the only utterly safe space in my life for what was important to me. It helped me learn about myself. In those stacks, I found books about “ESP”, past lives, personal narratives from people who were courageous enough to write down what they had experienced. Sometimes I was too afraid to check these books out, I was smart enough to understand most people considered this a sub genre of fantasy. Since I already knew I was different, already made to feel like a weirdo anytime I stepped across the lines of what was acceptable for a young lady, already chastised anytime my needs were inconvenient, punished harshly anytime I god forbid had feelings that could not be kept under wraps, I was cautious. Luckily no one paid attention to what was interesting to me, so I often could bring them home and read them without drawing attention to myself. But I was so compelled by what I was learning in these books I would just polish them off right there, seated at the same heavy wooden tables in the sturdy chairs in which I did schoolwork and prepared for the liberation college would bring. 

*

I did bring Junior Gorman the Elder up once as a baby in 2003 so I could take them to the park I once played in, which was not the same, filled with nannies and kids. I was the only parent. In the Village, the storefronts were mostly the same but the stores were completely different. There was a Jimmy Choo’s boutique. The deli had changed hands, the menu sanitized to reflect what was faddish. We grabbed a sandwich there and promptly left.

Junior Gorman the Younger and I visited L.A. in 2019 after my father died and we traveled out to scatter his ashes in Malibu. We took an afternoon to drive through the Palisades and didn’t get out of the car. Saw the old house which had been completely gutted and remodeled. Tallied the juice bars and yoga studios

Both visits felt like bringing flowers to a graveyard. Bringing my children to see the places I had lived felt like a duty I had, a gesture of respect, for them to see where I’d grown up, but also for myself: to show myself that  this is where my life began but isn’t who I am today. 

When I saw the first images of the utter devastation there, I had a memory surface, of when I’d come to get the boxes of clothes and childhood memorabilia from our garage as my dad was packing to move. I discovered that my stepmother had unilaterally already disposed of most of it. My grief was inconvenient, met with shrugs, irritation. 

What breaks my heart today is watching incinerated lot after incinerated lot knowing that folks there won’t even have anything left to pick through. They won’t have this but not that. Their choice was to risk saving their homes, their stuff, or keep on living. And too many didn’t even have that. 

It’s a different kind of fire that burns it all down in our hearts, by choice. That intends to rebuild from strength. That keeps the sustaining memories and accepts the gifts of the ones that are hardest to hold. 

Whether that inner fire is hotter or crueler or better or worse is for each of us to determine. In the meantime, I wish for the deepest healing for all, the most transformation, the best results for anyone who is suffering. 

We all deserve to stand on the bluffs and feel the softer, cooler air of the ocean on our faces.