Living in L.A. in my twenties, I was always meeting new people; people like me who were actively seeking a meaningful community to take part in. I was meeting people whom I would never ever ever see again.
“I’m seeking community” was the third thing that the new person who I never saw again would tell me, right after “I’m writing a screenplay” and “What do you pay for rent?”
Seeking community was an obsession: like a late twentieth century gold rush. And like the 1849 California yore, we mined the greater Los Angeles basin for emotional wealth and found a lot of fool’s gold.
Looking back, I realize in the whole eight years that I spent out in La La Land searching for that gleaming prize nugget of community that would set me up for life, I never once stopped to ask myself what exactly community was or what I’d do with it if I ever found it.
I was like a dog chasing a car.
The new people I met that I never saw again spoke about “community” like it was something you could find on aisle five of the Whole Foods next to the nutritional supplements.
Maybe it was. I could never afford to shop at Whole Foods anyway. The place I shopped was an old Persian market in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood where you had to fight with old ladies for one of the ten shopping carts in the store.
The old Persian ladies at the old Persian market had community coming out of their ears but I wanted nothing to do with it. I just wanted their shopping carts.
Not that the community I was seeking was unrealistic in any way. All I wanted was a place that I could show up, get a hot meal, talk about not selling screenplays with other twenty-something east coast transplants, find some spiritual nourishment and be validated as a person at the end of a hellish week of attempted prostitution in the film industry. If we got bored in this utopia, I imagined that we could compare our exorbitant rents.
My ideal community was a warm loving Family that didn’t make me set the table, do the laundry, listen to stories I’d heard a hundred times before, or deal with their neuroses.
In other words, the Bradys.
I wanted everything that I could get by moving back in with my parents but without having to constantly explain to anyone what I planned to do with myself when I grew up.
I wanted college dorm life without the midterms.
I wanted everything that a decent name brand Cult could offer; except with better hours and casual Fridays.
I wanted what Laura Ingalls, Ma, Pa, Carrie and Mary had in the Michael Landon TV series, but with hot indoor showers, THX movie screens and sushi.
I wanted that moment when everyone on the team hoists the rookie on their shoulders after the surprise win, but without having to join a team or learn to catch a ball.
Club Med without the cash outlay. The Army without boot camp.
I couldn’t understand why this kind of community was so damn elusive.
Now, years later, living in a neighborhood with my wife and kids, being on the board of my synagogue, teaching Sunday School, driving my daughter to ballet class, visiting my parents and in-laws on Thanksgiving and birthdays, meeting new people who I not only see again but who become regular friends, I don’t have time to seek community anymore.
