[sic]

So the great Silver Lake Reservoir draining is finally complete and the big water bowl is empty… until they get around to refilling it. All of its potentially toxic water has been flushed away through a series of subterranean tubes connecting to the Ballona Creek which pours onward into the Santa Monica Bay where the carcinogenic parts per million of all that bromate-tainted water will be diluted into inert nothingness, or an unexpected complex chemical reaction with the saltwater and the bacteria and the styrofoam and the plastic bags and the shopping carts and the gull shit and the hypodermics will ultimately create the monster for the three-quel to the coming sequel of “Cloverfield” who will then go on a rampage across the city. Could happen.

As the reservoir’s level has slowly lowered over the last 60 days, people have been either hopeful or apprehensive as to what might be revealed rusting and rotting away down there on the bottom, but there hasn’t been anything noted as of yet. Personally I know of one 27-year-old relic that’s down there somewheres, if it didn’t get swept down a pipe at some point in such a long interim. It’s a set of keys on a ring, one which I heaved over the fence into its southeastern waters one very early morning back in 1981.

The keys were to the Swensen’s Ice Cream Shoppe that used to be on Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills, across the street from and in between what used to be Fiorucci’s and RJ’s restaurant. I had worked at Swensen’s for a while during my first and second year at Beverly Hills High School, promoted to night manager before I was fired by the owner’s daughter — Desiree or Dell-something; who badly managed the place for her dad — for not being willing to hold some marijuana for her.

I turned in my keys, cleaned out my locker and collected my final paycheck. I stayed pissed off for awhile not just because I was out of a job, but also because Swensen’s had been the center of my social universe. To have both yanked away so unfairly was a good lesson to learn early but nonetheless a hard one.

A few months later I ended up getting a stockclerk job at the long-gone Hunters Books on Rodeo Drive and Little Santa Monica (they’re calling it Santa Monica South nowadays), but in that unemployed interim I helped my mom, by then a distributor for the Herald Examiner whose territory included Echo Park, Silver Lake and Los Feliz and Franklin Hills. On weekends I’d get up with her at 2 a.m., and together we’d go pick up all the papers at the Herald Examiner plant downtown, then deliver whatever routes were open or down and we’d get home around sunrise. During the week I’d often have to go across town after school on my little Yamaha Champ scooter and help with collections or customer complaints. Sometimes I’d drive the old 1965 Ford Mustang and cover paper routes solo, especially those in the steeper areas of Silver Lake and Echo Park, where paperboys never lasted.

I don’t remember how long it was after I was fired from Swensen’s that I found the spare “just in case” set of Swensen’s keys I’d had made on my own at some point after I’d been promoted to night manager. Maybe it was a couple days later or a couple weeks. However long it was, when I discovered them I immediately saw dollar signs and started plotting a little payback heist. Ultimately I decided to hit the place in the morning on my way to school. Come up Wilshire to the alley between Beverly and Rodeo at something like 7 a.m., enter through the back — it would be easy pickings. There was no alarm and no surveillance system. And knowing exactly where the money was kept after closing, I could be in and out without turning on a light in a minute, tops, and a couple hundred bucks richer. Maybe a little more if sales had been exceptionally good.

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L.A. Blogfather and L.A. Times Blogmaster Tony Pierce has a picture I presume he took posted to his Busblog of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who in the frame I presume is in the midst of getting an assist with his new L.A. Times blog that Tony helped land — and all of which is awesome.

Tony’s proximity to the NBA’s All Time Leading Scorer and one of my All Time Leading Heroes reminded me of the night back in 1991 that I ended up over at the tennis courts off of Whitsett by the L.A. River playing tennis with Wilt Chamberlain.

The backstory is this. Before it was seen fit to destroy the fabled Racquet Centre that stood at the corner of Ventura and Vineland, I met a fellow by the name of Allan, via the regular men’s doubles drop-in tennis nights hosted there. Basically for $10 or so you got to play 2-3 hours of tennis with a variety of partners and opponents, and on one night I ended up across the net from Allan who was a very capable player. At the end of our set he apparently thought the same of me and asked if I’d like to play singles with him one of these nights. I said sure. We exchanged numbers and soon enough we were getting together once or twice a week either at the Racquet Centre or the courts on Whitsett and playing.

Starting off Allan consistently defeated me. But as we kept on eventually I raised the level of my play and the matches got much closer, with me winning more games and even the occasional set. Now the thing about Allan was that for as good a player as he was he wasn’t as good a sport. I’d bet he went through three maybe four racquets in the course of our matches. And by “went through” I mean destroyed, as in purposefully broken. He’d miss an easy lob and next thing he’d be cursing heartily and flinging his stick either into the ground or against the fence. Repeatedly. Sometimes he’d spare its life and continue. Other times he’d just whack the thing until it cracked. And whenever that happened he’d calmly walk over to his bag, extract the next victim and continue as if nothing had happened.

The behavior was always ridiculous but whereas it would genuinely unnerve me in the beginning, I eventually grew to accept that this was just an inevitable part of a game with him — especially when I started winning. The one thing I could never get around were the bad calls he’d make. If things weren’t going well for him, inevitably he’d call a fair first serve long or a deep volley out that was in. I’d put up with the first couple but eventually I’d call bullshit and he’d tell me to fuck off and we’d argue until he’d show how big he was by allowing us to replay the point. What a guy.

Why he had these flagrant (and expensive!) tantrums was a mystery. But even more of a curiosity was who he was or what he did. Always sporting the best fake-bake tan that money could by coupled to a long, wet-look tightly curled perm that seemed straight outta the ’70s, he finished the fashion statement with a slew of gold chains around his neck perhaps to match the gold-trimmed gold Mercedes convertible coupe he drove. He never talked about what he did, nor did I really ask. The only info I got of him was that he had a kid or kids, knew plenty of rich folk and did a lot of partying with them at a lot of swank westside bars and clubs.

So one night I’d just biked back to Sherman Oaks from the Racquet Centre after the end of drop-in session. Allan hadn’t been there that evening. A few minutes after I got home the phone rings and its him and all he tells me is that their fourth has dropped out at the last minute and would I be interested in joining them for some late-night doubles at the Whitsett courts. I look at the clock and it’s after 9 p.m. but I say what the hell and bike over there.

When I arrive I make my way past empty courts toward the sound of Allan cussing and upon my arrival at the courtside gate, I see him off in the corner beating himself and his racquet up for some botched play. A few feet from him is some guy who later I find out owns a $12-million mansion up on Mulholland. And when I look to the other side of the court I see none other than 400-foot-tall Wilt Fucking Chamberlain standing at the net and smiling at Allan’s antics.

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The kind comment of the LA Fire Department’s Brian Humphrey calling me courageous in response to yesterday’s post about the last few months of my job search is greatly appreciated, but it takes a different kind of bravery to post a photo of me I found this morning while looking for my map of Death Valley. You’ll have to check it out after the jump because I’m too chicken to put it up ffront here, but first some background info to help soften the ridiculousness of the shot.

It was taken 17 years ago in September of 1990 in what I would hyperbolize as the prime of my resurrected life. I was about eight months separated from my first wife (and my then less-than-one-year-old daughter Katie). I had an apartment in the south of Glendale and a good enough job with Sparkletts with a route that included parts of Eagle Rock, Glassell Park, Atwater Village and Glendale. In addition the physical rigors of the job had helped me to drop about 40 pounds, aided by the fact that the bulk of my diet no longer consisted of delivery pizza and bags of Reese’s peanut butter cups. As a bonus I enjoyed an increased social life. In short it was a time for me to feel my oats.

Having said all that, hindsight is not kindsight… especially when it comes to the fashions of the past, which ryhmes with aghast which is how I feel seeing the then-me now. So without further delay hence, let the pointing and laughing commence:

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Sadly, in preparing for tonight’s game I have been unable to locate my Dodgers cap and can only ashamedly assume I suffered a major league brainfart in including it in my last clothing purge/donation to Goodwill. What an idiot!

But in the process of searching for it I did find some Dodger memorabilia that I would never get rid of no matter how big the brainfart, but no it will not be coming with us to the stadium tonight:

Though I’m guilty of not doing near enough over the years to care properly for it, even in its ratty state it is still a treasure to me: a souvenir pennant from the first Dodger game I attended way the heck back as a six year old in 1971. I even have the program stored away somewhere.

I can remember sitting field level on the first base side with my PeeWee League mitt hoping to catch a foul ball. I can’t remember who they played or who won, but I can remember falling in love with baseball and the Dodgers and their home.

Maybe I’ve written of it before, but my favorite time of my childhood was when I lived on Holly Drive in Hollywood in the mid-1970s, primarily because there were a bunch of neighborhood kids around my age and there was a vacant lot on the corner where we’d have occasional baseball games and dirtclod fights. We traded baseball cards and skateboarded and rode bikes up to the Hollywood reservoir and played a fair amount of war and saw films together like “Earthquake” and “The Bad News Bears” and “Carwash.”

I was reminded of the following incident by Tim who blogs at L.A. Daddy and who was one of the participants in last Thursday’s L.A. Bloggers Live event. He read a wonderful post that recalled him painfully learning to ride a bike and the lesson included a pretty disasterous trip down a steep hill.

My incident also involved attempting to negotiate a grade on wheels, but in my case it was a skateboard, not a bike. It was spring of 1976 that I got my first polyurethane-wheeled skateboard (that my mom bought me from the old The Akron store on Melrose near Western for my 12th birthday). Around that same time the big event me and my buddies were all looking forward to was the debut of a 7-11 down on the corner of Yucca and Cahuenga. Each day was spent on the lookout the better to keep ourselves informed as the store drew closer to opening for business and we got ever more eager to waste our allowances on Slurpees and such.

When that big day finally came it also coincided with plans we had that morning to “bomb” Primose, a nearby avenue that featured the steepest and straightest drop of all the streets in the immediate vicinity. It wasn’t anything crazily graded, but there was no denying the opportunity to go downhill fast. So thrillseekers all we all rode our skateboards north through the tunnel under the 101 Freeway and then continued up until we arrived at the bottom of Primrose.  Any thrill I was seeking at that point pretty much disappeared as I looked up at the summit of the street. Sure, it was one thing to come down it on my 10-speed as I’d done dozens of times, but looking up at the top and imagining coming down on four wheels and a plank was something else entirely. But as is the case with these things, there was no backing out now. To do so would be to suffer being called a chicken by your peers and I would have none of that.

In all honesty, I don’t know how many of my pals went before I did, but I know no one came down after me and my spectacular wipeout — which started out well enough. With heart pounding and a couple pushes I was over the crest and well balanced with knees bent as I immediately picked up speed coming down the face of the frozen swell. It wasn’t long after that — perhaps a hundred yards down — when things started to go wrong thanks to my ignorance in neglecting to tighten up my board’s trucks from the loosened and flexible state I kept them in to better execute sharper turns as part of the substantial freestyling I enjoyed down on level terrain.

When that first relatively minor wobble hit and reverberated through my legs, I tensed up pretty much instinctively knew that once the wobbles started there was really no stopping them from getting progressively worse. But despite my mind screaming “BAIL OUT NOW!” I lamely tried to counter defeat the wobble, which of course only succeeded in making it worse and almost immediately the  board was sidewinding wider and wider back and forth beneath my feet. It was someplace right around here and again in some pretty serious ignorance that I attempted to step off the board. My fatally flawed thinking seemed entirely logical at that moment. I figured I’d get one foot on the ground and hustle to bring the other in front of it and then de-accelerate until I was at a fully stopped and upright position. That had a good chance of working if I’d been rolling at 10 mph, but I was moving up near or beyond  the 2o-mph mark and when my right foot landed before my left foot could follow in that footstep I was entirely surprised to find myself suddenly airborne and traveling headfirst for whatever time and distance it took for my left shoulder and the left side of my face to land on the asphalt where I continued sliding for what seemed like forever until finally coming up against the curb and to a stop in the gutter.

I was immediately surrounded by my pals some of whom I heard say aloud that they thought I was dead.  I slowly got up to prove that I wasn’t, but my face from temple to check was spectacularly abrasioned and bleeding profusely, which may have grossed them out more than my corpse would have.

Someone retrieved my skateboard where it had come to rest somewhere further down the road and while I didn’t remount it from there on the incline, like a true gamer once we got back down closer to sea level I did climb back aboard for the roll home with everyone else behind me and silent as if following a hearse.

Upon arrival at home and after my mom got over her inital shock at seeing her son so severely shredded, she cleaned and dressed my wounds while everyone else went and enjoyed the new 7-11 without me… none even willing to bring me back a Slurpee, dammit.

I never attempted to bomb Primose ever again.

The new folks over at L.A. Voice want to know just how bad L.A. is at historic preservation. Linking to a Preserve LA post that links to a Preservation Online article by Chris Epting titled “Lost in Los Angeles,”  L.A. Voice’s Ryan Knoll takes issue with Epting’s characterization of L.A. as one of the worst cities in the country in terms of preservation of its historic landmarks. Knoll sites Epting’s examples of the Ambassador Hotel and the Garden of Allah residential complex as just not being very heavy hitters in the history ring:

The Garden of Allah was a compound of bungalows that served as pieds a terre for celebs like Gretta Garbo, Humphrey Bogart, and Ernest Hemmingway. It was built in 1927 and bulldozed in 1959. Does a 32 year old apartment complex merit the “Historic” tag? If so, I want a tax deduction for my house.

You can make a strong argument for and against the Ambassador Hotel. It’s greatest claim to fame (or infamy), of course was as the spot of Robert F. Kennedy’s assasination. But the Kennedy family (I believe) wasn’t all that fired up about saving the building, and if you remove the Kennedy factor from consideration, the Ambassador becomes just another hotel that hosted famous people.

As an issue near and dear to my heart of course I started posting a comment in response to Ryan but it quickly rambled and so instead I decided to pop it up here, as follows:

Ryan, I would be interested to know where the line is to be drawn. If we look at a landmark and shrug about it not being old enough or that its only claim to fame is that it housed some celebs or hosted the murder of a presidential candidate then it shouldn’t be too difficult to shrug off all those vacant theaters on Broadway or that Frank Lloyd Wright house up on the hills or that luggage shop on Vine Street.

You can make the argument that historically speaking there’s not all that much going on and I wouldn’t necessarily disagree — not because few things actually qualify, but because there are so few things left. L.A. may be 225 years old but in the last 100 or so this city’s become the capital of reinvention and make-believe where the automobile is king, and our sprawled out drive-through cityscapes can’t help but reflect that.

As a prime example very near and dear to my heart, I site the “1,000 year old” oak tree that for the first 950 years of its undisturbed and unencumbered life was one of hundreds upon hundreds of oak trees growing in the area. But for its final 50 years or so it became isolated and imprisoned in what became the suburban bedroom community of Encino a hundred yards or so south of Ventura Boulevard until it finally succumbed to years of illness and indifference along with that winter’s relentless El Nino storms and fell in 1998. Sure, it was recognized in 1963 by the city as an historic and cultural monument (No. 74), but did that prevent the grand arbor from being relegated to a small island surrounded by the asphalt encroachment of the post-war boom? Of course not. City planners were so reckless in their disregard that they actually split Louise Avenue’s lanes around the tree, allocating a mid-sized shopping center to the north and a bank building to the south and multi-unit aparment buildings behind it. Why? Because what was it other than nothing but a big old tree. Never mind that it deserved a park of its own and even the slightest in protective distance from the pavement and pollution, this historic and cultural icon couldn’t even get the slightest consideration beyond being acknowledge for its longevity in a city whose residents ceaselessly strive to ignore the clock rather than recognize its forward progress.

And now it’s gone.

So while historic significance might be an oxymoron in L.A., it would be from a perspective of cultural significance that I would definitely say L.A. qualifies as one of the most ignorant cities at preservation. On a small scale countless are the landmark businesses that are nothing more than memories and pictures: Perino’s, C.C. Brown’s, Wallach’s Music City, Pickwick Books, Jay’s Jayburgers. Hell, rather than restore it the city came very close to razing downtown’s central library after it was torched by arsonists in the 1980s.

And the erasure is easily evident on a larger scale, too – and not without some irony. Union Station is an untouchable landmark in its own right, but it resides on what used to be the original location of Chinatown. Same with Dodger Stadium. I would throw myself in front of any bulldozer that threatened my beloved House of Blue, but it was built on the dirt that buried the barrancas and canyons and history of Chavez Ravine. And what they couldn’t fill in they chopped down. Bunker Hill used to be much more of a hill than it is now, but it was lopped off and trucked down and leveled and with it went so much of one of the city’s most historic residential cores.

The bottom line for me is that be it historic or cultural, Los Angeles’ past is a slate that’s historically been far more easily and regretlessly cleaned than most other American cities.

I’m fuzzy about dates when anything happened while I was in high school. I wanna say the Palm Springs trip with my volunteer Big Brother Lloyd Miller took place in the summer of 1980 — in fact now that I think about it I’m as certain as I can be in part because I was 16 and had my learner’s permit and on the drive down was sooooo hoping Lloyd would pull his spiff 1979 Cadillac Seville over and let me take the wheel for a bit down the 10 Freeway, but he didn’t and I was too chicken to ask.

I do know without a doubt that Christopher Cross’ “Sailing” was topping the charts because you couldn’t not hear it on the radio. In fact, whenever I hear that song now instead of being transported to some seaside, I’m instead taken back to poolside of the desert condo we were staying in with not a boat anywhere nearby and the sun dancing on the water and the extreme heat and the sweat and the luxury as Cross via a nearby transistor radio chirped about where his paradise could be found.

I’d found mine, too.

On our way to go get breakfast the next morning, we were traveling down some side road bordered by a tall stucco’d wall on the other side of which was a private golf course. It was Lloyd who noticed the helicopter hovering over the course and I had no idea why he suddenly pulled off the road onto the dirt shoulder, pulling up tight against the wall.

Hopping out he answered my quizical look with “You wanna see a president?” Dutifully and still clueless I clambered across the seat and out the driver’s side door. Lloyd was already climbing up onto the Seville’s trunk. “I think Gerald Ford is golfing on the other side of this wall!” he said conspiratorially to my still dumbstruck expression.

So I climbed up, too, and together we stood up poking our heads over the top of the wall. Sure enough about 100 feet away there was Former President of the United States Gerald R. Ford, standing on a green bent over his putter.

The next thing we noticed was the large number of secret service agents stationed in a perimeter around the president. They noticed us as well and did not take at all kindly to our univited proximity. In fact in a sudden burst of radio chatter static, the ones closest to the president interrupted his concentration by positioning themselves between us and him (and the hole), and as Ford stood up to see what all the commotion was about, the agents closest to us started coming even closer. Quickly.

I’d like to say that I or Lloyd yelled out “Hello Mr. President!” or “Have fun golfing President Ford!” and that he smiled and waved, but what happened was Lloyd grabbed my shoulder and pulled me down and said “Time to go!” and we hopped off the trunk dove back into the Caddy and we went. Fast and clean leaving behind several agents straddling the top of the wall and eating our dust.

I tell that story not just because Gerald Ford died yesterday or because that’s the closest I’ve ever been to one of this nation’s leaders, but also because he is and always will be one of my favorite presidents — and here’s why: Because at one of the most disenchanting and most disheartening and most disgraceful times in this country’s history he stood up unelected and all alone in front of the beat-up country that had little confidence in him and even less in its political processes and said he we were down but we were not out. He said he believed our country had never been stronger.

“Our Constitution works,” he said, upon taking the oath of office on August 9, 1974. “Our great republic is a government of laws and not of men.”

Then with quiet dignity and strength and leadership he showed us he was right.

One of the first things he did was give Richard Nixon a get-out-of-jail-free card. Sure, initially I thought that was a bad call. I was angry with what I thought was a major-league backroom-brokered chickenshit cop out. I wanted blood. The country did. But Ford said it’s time to look forward, not back. It took awhile, but later I came around to agree with his choice, or at least his reason for it: that it was time for the country to move on.

We did and now he has too. Rest in peace, President Ford. You were one of this nation’s greatest and finest public servants.

The complete text of Ford’s swearing-in speech appears after the jump.

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Despite my efforts I could uncover neither the original column nor the photograph assignment referenced in the previous post.

But I did find this long-lost relic of me and Sparkletts Water making friends in Atwater Village on my route back in 1990, taken by a customer of mine on Brunswick just south of Los Feliz Boulevard:

[large version here]

I thought this was lost forever.

Two Mays ago Susan and I pitched in and picked up trash along the L.A. River:

May 1, 2004 — As planned, but a little later than expected, Susan and I made it over to the Friends of the Los Angeles River’s annual clean-up at the Los Feliz station (one of 10 stretching from the Tujunga Wash in Sun Valley down to Long Beach.

We kicked ass and not only scored free t-shirts, but also two tickets (a $38 value) to the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, a place I’ve not yet been. Coolio. Plus it was a gorgeous morning and a beautiful day.

Parking at equestrian center where the LAPD’s gorgeous Mounted Division’s horses are stabled, Susan and I walked back down to the sign-up table just north of Los Feliz Boulevard and were set up with trash bags and work gloves.

Deciding to head south of the boulevard picking up crap along the west bank, then cross the river at the Sunnynook Drive footbridge and head back up the eastbank to the boulevard.

As we’d gotten there about 10 a.m., the first several hundred feet of riverside were picked up pretty well. So I finally found a way to hop some rocks onto one of the river’s islands and found a motherlode of papers and plastic wrappers and such (Susan was sure I would be taking an unplanned dip in the brackish waters at some pointl; I didn’t disagree).

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Upon Arrival & After Pick-up

The majority of crap looked like the content’s of a students notebook (it chilled across my mind fleetingly to hope that the student’s body wasn’t nearby), and most noteable of the stash I picked up was an L.A. Times Calendar section from June 15, 1990, an unused hair curling iron (still in its plastic bag) and an item (also still in its original packaging called “Bear Paws,” an item that looked like giant brass knuckles (but made of plastic) with a series of sharp-ass claws used to skewer and transport large hunks of meat from pan to the table.

They look like something X-Man Wolverine might envy.

Of course, I Googled the brand name and found a link on barbecue-store.com to the horrible things. And I quote, verbatim:

“Famous in the north and east, these sharp prongs can quickly turn barbecued pork shoulders & butts into PULLED PORK!”

Well shit-howdy, I’ll take two!

Anyway, by the time I hopped back onto dry land from the island, my haul was about 20 pounds. I was just getting started.

A couple more hundred feet down and we found another volunteer hauling a shopping cart out of the water. I helped haul it up the inclined bank to the bike path rail, hoping I’d be able to pull a cart of my own out of the muck.

Ask and the river shall provide, baby. Down at one of the Sunnynook footbridge’s supports, I found my prey wrapped around it. Another volunteer a few feet downstream suggested somewhat skeptically that if I wanted to test my strength I should give it a yank.

In no time, off came my backpack and onto the slippery rocks out over the water I went.

Bad knee and all, it took some serious concerted effort, soaked shoess and several dozen pulls, but damn if I didn’t feel as if I could move a mountain and soon up out of its watery grave it came — in several pieces.

Last but not left behind was a long piece of rebar that wouldn’t give up without a fight, but I twisted and turned and eventually took it out as well. Behold the proud hunter with his quarry:

After hauling everything up the bank to the edge of the bike path, we crossed the footbridge…

The Sunnynook Footbridge

…and Susan got a picture looking north at the stretch of river from which our salvage operations were running.

Bag on the river if you must, but it was gorgeous and serene and we saw a variety of waterfowl and swifts and swallows and silky smooth water this morning — made all the more beautiful by the hearts and souls and efforts of all who came out to pretty it up by getting rid of just a small portion of the shit with which we make things filthy.

Heading back north, we found, beer cans, bottles, butts, and even women’s hosiery, but once again, the place had been picked-up pretty well by those who had come before us. And without any islands in the stream upon which to hop, we resigned ourselves to wrapping it up.

Well, almost. Turns out I still had one last haul in me.

Up near Los Feliz Boulevard there was a green area at the bank and after traipsing down the concrete bank, at the edge I found a large rusted metal pole whose end had been planted into a large bucket of concrete… something that may have once been a tetherball set-up.

It had to go, and so it went.

It was one thing to wrestle it out of the reeds and rocks, but then I had to cope with dragging the ungainly thing up the craggy rise of the bank — and it easily weighed at least 200 pounds. Every six feet up I had to set the thing down and catch my breath.

Halfway up, another volunteer thankfully came to my rescue and shaved four minutes off the five more minutes it would’ve taken me to get it all the way up on my own.

With that mission accomplished, Susan and I meandered along the bank and picked up assorted bits of refuse until we arrived at the water station set up just south of the boulevard where we relinquished our work gloves and happily received our 15th Annual L.A. River Clean-Up t-shirts.

Back at the sign-in station north of the boulevard, we were awarded our choice of two tickets to the L.A. Zoo or the Long Beach aquarium. “I work at the Zoo,” I told the lady with a laugh. She handed me the aquarium tix.

With our work well done and finished, I was already looking forward to next year’s clean-up and thinking how handy a kayak would be in getting out to the untouched islands in the middle of the river.

I’m sorry it took me 15 years to get involved, but I’m certain that my efforts today made up more than a little for lost time.

Went over to mother’s pad today to help her move a piece of furniture and go through a stack of old albums of my deceased stepfather’s that she thought I might be interested in bringing home. There was some cool stuff. Old oldies of “Fats” Waller and Louie Armstrong and Jimmy Durante and Earl Hines and Bing Crosby — even a waaaaay old platter of famed tenor Enrico Caruso.

Alas most of them were not only in pretty scratched-up shape, but they run at 78 RPMs, of which my turntable only does the 33 1/3 and 45 RPM thing so I didn’t bring any back with me. But it might be a worth it to seek out a company that specializes in digitizing old records.

The moms and I actually had a pretty good talk. She was pleased to see the newer, 20-pounds-lighter version of me and we talked about my new commitment to self-improvement and my writing and what I need to do to spur my creative dogs to hunt.

I’m getting there.

But then she was telling me about an episode of the TV show Medium that she was watching recently. She said it concerned the ghost of a dead boy who was haunting his mom. Through the show’s star, Patricia Arquette, he’s finally able to communicate with his exasperated mom who couldn’t understand why the kid who she’d spoiled rotten when he was alive was now playing Caspar the unfriendly ghost.

“I got you everything you ever wanted!” the mom cried.

“But what I never got was you,” he replied… through Arquette I guess.

My mom said that hit her pretty hard. And made her think about how tough it was a single parent to raise me and how she could see me feeling the same way as a young boy.

To some degree that’s true. As a latchkey kid growing up I never much had the luxury of mom attending my little league games or regularly taking the time to play with me. She worked hard all during the week juggling a job and raising a boy on very little money and there wasn’t much left over most of the time for anything extra-curricular. As a result I became a pretty self-sufficient little punk. I taught myself to ride a bike. Walked by myself to school the first day of first grade — even knew how to find my way home from one end of Beverly Hills back to its slums when my mom dropped me off for a morning at the YMCA on Little Santa Monica with neither of us knowing it was closed for the day and split to her errands before I could catch her after finding the front doors locked.

Eight years old and I didn’t waste any time crying about my predicament. Just marched myself over to Wilshire and all the way down it back to Tower Drive three blocks east of La Cienega. I knew I was heading the right way when I passed the Bud Get car place just east of Robertson… knew my way around town but didn’t know how to pronounce “budget.”

Regrets, there may be a few. But beyond them I’m very appreciative and respectful of what my mother went through and did to keep me from becoming a serial killer. Or a rightwing nut job. And whatever I felt was missed through my formative years, what I relayed back to my mom today to quell any retroguilt she might be feeling was just that: she was there for me. She clothed me and fed me and got me to the hospital when I messed myself up and disciplined me when I screwed up, and loved me and encouraged me and taught me. As best she could.

And that’s plenty enough for me.