Golden Hour
I frequently walk my two small mongrels in the same circuit around our suburban LA town. Usually it’s golden hour when a warm glow makes everything more attractive, like candlelight at a dinner party. Good light is the savior of a city that doesn’t see rain from May until November. A coworker and I moved to LA from the east coast in 2005 and were appalled when a broken jar of tomato sauce that appeared on the sidewalk outside our building in June wasn’t washed away until Thanksgiving. By then, six months of unrelenting LA sun had baked the sauce into the concrete like a blood stain. Until the rain comes, the golden hour is like a nightly baptism of the streets; we are all saved.
A cast of regulars joins me on these evening walks. A tall, slender Black man lopes toward the park. He carries a book which he’ll read on a bench with his shoes off, long toes rooting back and forth through the bristly grass. An obese, middle-aged man lurches past astride an aqua cruiser bike. Always in a white tee shirt and dark blue jeans, his potbelly rests on his waist band, his slow thighs work the pedals, and a plastic bag with a six pack of beer dangles from one handle. I pity these characters and their nightly rituals. Tonight, a new woman approaches on the sidewalk ahead. She is tall, slender, and pale with shoulder length dark hair: my doppelganger. Her stride is confident, a challenge, as if to say, “Did you think you were the only one?” I cross the street and register her soft upper arms that suggest the muscle-wasting of a woman in middle-age. Grey flecks her hairline. Her skin is slack, a day-old balloon.
I drag the dogs’ snouts away from a discarded wrapper and think, “I’m not that old.” In truth, a criminal line up in a detective show could reasonably include both of us. The witness would linger between our faces, biting a lip and wincing slightly, unsure. I decide that while she is the “lone woman”, I am “the woman with two small dogs.” This distinction mollifies me a bit. I walk to the park where I remove my shoes, toes rooting back and forth through the bristly grass. On the way home, I stop at the liquor store to buy a six pack of beer. Then I go home and drink them one by one.
