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Just amazing how a community can come together. When I turned the corner yesterday afternoon and came upon the hundreds of people gathered at the Silver Lake Recreation Center, there for a walk organized to honor and remember Dr Marc Abrams — Silver Lake’s indefatigable “Walking Man” — I choked up at such a wondrous sight. It made me so proud to be a part of this neighborhood.

Flickr photoset is here.

I was greeted this pre-dawn with a tweet from my friend Walt, saddened by the death of the man well-known as the Silver Lake Walker, otherwise known to his patients as Dr. Marc Jacobs.

In shock and abject sadness over the sudden loss of such a fixture of the neighborhood I then went about posting up on Blogging.la a bit of what he meant to me as a treasured community icon who I encountered numerous times since moving to Silver Lake in 2003, such as in the series of images above (click for the bigger picture), captured as he passed by me and other cyclists outside Trader Joe’s as we readied for a ride.

I’m going for a walk today at lunch in honor of him.

UPDATE (3:46 p.m.): Well, I did it. Took an extended lunch and logged five miles walking in honor of Dr. Abrams, stopping at Trader Joe’s to pick up a couple  bouquets of flowers in hopes of recognizing his house on Moreno Drive and leaving one there and leaving another at the mural on Sunset. Alas, I couldn’t recall the house’s location so both bunches of flora ended up at the mural.

And if there’s anyone reading this who thinks I’m making too big a deal about the man’s impact on this neighborhood, here’s a short and wonderful documentary from Lauren Malkasian made about the Walking Man a few years back:

Friday was a sad day that just got progressively sadder. In reverse order of discovery, one of our three treefrogs died, the imminent demise of LA Metblogs was announced, and I lost a Twitter friend. It’s the last one that’s affected me the most.

Her Twitter name was @glittergran. Her real world name was Sonia and she was a retired fashion editor somewhere in England, and that’s about all I knew about her (which is a helluva lot more than I know about most of the tweeters I follow or am followed by). I’m not even sure how we found each other out there in the ether, but I fell in love with her because of her marvelous personality, which came shining through in 140 characters or less. In turn she enjoyed my tweets and my blog and always found time to encourage others Twitter followers to give me a looksee.

A few weeks earlier this month she suffered a stroke, but was released from the hospital and seemed to be recovering. Then came the news yesterday that she had passed Monday, provided by an assistant of hers who’d taken over her Twitter account.

It surprised me how much her death affected me — even moreso when I found that her final tweet had been to me.

It was sent at the end of a brief exchange (trivial even — but on Twitter aren’t they all?) that began when I sent out a brief harumph of a critique about the disappointing “The Lovely Bones.” In the tweet I said the best thing about the film was its somewhat out-of-nowhere use of The Hollies “Long Cool Woman.” She tweeted back that I made her feel old because she owned the original vinyl album that song is on. I tweeted back “Sweetheart, damn the years. If you’re old then I’m a martian,” followed up by another tweet: “PS. I have my own share of those LPs,” accompanied by a picture (at right) that I snapped of our shell-full of vinyl.

In the busy week that followed I didn’t really notice an absence of Sonia’s presence on twitter. I figured she had doctors’ visits and was doing more important things like resting and getting better. Then came the message to me Friday morning:

Hi I am glittergran’s PA. I know she tweeted to a cyclist in LA so I guess it must be you. In case you don’t know she sadly passed away on Monday. Her funeral is tomorrow at 11am – just in case you want to share a thought at that time. I know she was fond of your blog and tweets.

I was stunned, but handled the shock and the emotion until I was looking at her past tweets and found the last one she sent after I had tweeted that picture to her of my record collection:

Thanks WB. I was having a bad day, but that made me smile.X.

Then I lost it. Jeez, I just got choked up again. Whoo…

Rest in peace, Sonia. My Twitterverse has lost a lot of its sparkle, but I know Heaven’s that much brighter with you there.

Susan called me at work yesterday afternoon. There was a nervousness to her voice that I picked up immediately and I feared one of our animals had been hurt.

“Joe’s passed away,” she told me. Joe was her tenant, the last of the three renters who occupied the house when she bought it in 1999. He lived upstairs since 1986. She said Joe’s brother was there and there were men in white coats and gloves and by the time I got home at 6 p.m. his body had been removed and all looked like nothing had happened.

I last saw Joe when I came down to the garage to help get the rest of the groceries out of Susan’s car Saturday afternoon. He was on the sidewalk talking with another man I didn’t recognize. I said hi to Joe as I started back up the front steps with the bags and he nodded back at me. Joe was HIV positive and in his 60s and in the last couple years his physical bearing had deteriorated significantly to the point of Susan and I wondering how much longer it would be until he needed hospice care. He moved slower and more stooped whenever I saw him and as of a few weeks ago I noticed a delivery of oxygen tanks standing outside his front door.

Joe’s brother said to Susan that he was told by the attendants that the death looked to be a result of natural causes and that given the condition of the body he may have expired sometime over weekend. Susan said she could smell the decomposition as the whitecoats struggled getting him out of the house. His brother told her he’d opened up the windows and turned on the air conditions to help air the place out. It’s weird to think of Joe’s body right over our heads for two days. Maybe more. And that he might have died while we sat watching television or grilling in the backyard.

Apparently, he was discovered earlier in the day by his weekly housekeeper. Whatever her reaction might have been it was enough to alert our neighbor Ralph across the street who phoned the police and Joe’s brother. The police came, as did the coroner. I’m guessing the whitecoats were mortuary personnel. Ralph told Joe’s brother that when he last talked to Joe he’d mentioned having trouble breathing.

I didn’t know much about Joe in the almost four-years Susan and I have been together here. The extent of our contacts pretty much involved passing each other on the way in or out. Our longest conversations involved him complimenting the Halloween or Christmas decorations or telling me something that wasn’t working properly. I knew he could be a pain in the butt, but he was the type of person that would vent his frustrations in a letter or an email or a voicemail message about Ranger’s barking or a malfunctioning heater other such matters and then follow up with an apology the next day. Most months that he paid his rent, he’d adorn the envelopes with a happy face. He’d worked for the city painting out graffiti. He had a pizza delivered Friday night. He drove an increasingly dinged-up Dodge Neon. He walked with a cane. He like the colors we painted the house last year. On occasions recently he took to listening to the TV with the volume way up. There’s an old Univega bike of his down in the basement.

Joe played a part in Susan and I meeting. He’d taken the picture of her that she’d posted to her match.com profile. It was taken from above, with her looking up into the camera and the light vibrantly illuminating her blond hair. In one of his missives sometime after I moved in during the summer of 2004 expressing his outrage over a rent increase or similar matter he even took a modicum of credit for our relationship because of that snapshot as if it somehow should exempt him from such things. I’m pretty sure he said he was sorry for the outburst shortly thereafter.

Joe’s brother said he hopes to have the place cleared out in a week or so. I can only imagine what a chore that will be packing up and moving 22 years worth of stuff, emotionally as well as physically. And in the meantime, Susan and I are obviously shellshocked not only at the reality check that comes with death, but one that happened so close to home.

Rest in peace, Joe.

At the northwest corner of Crescent Heights and Wilshire this morning sat a weathered man holding a weathered piece of written-upon cardboard in one hand and a plastic cup in the other. I don’t remember what the sign said verbatim, but it included the words “Please Help” and gave information that the man was hungry and had no place to go and that he was a veteran of the Korean War.

Had the light been green to cross Wilshire and continue southward I would’ve just kept on going, but it was red and so I pulled beyond him and stopped and even though he was out of my sight he stayed in my mind — especially the word “hungry” — and so I pulled up onto the sidewalk and retrieved the container of yogurt and the banana and the Luna bar out of my backpack. It was to have been my 400-calorie breakfast consumed later at my desk, but suddenly I didn’t need it because he needed it more.

As I drew beside him, he jumped a little at the sound of my voice when I said “It ain’t much sir, but you’re welcome to it,” and then he gratefully accepted the items and said “God bless you” and I said “And you” and he caught sight of my bike with a sidelong glance and added “Be careful out there!” and I said “Thank you, take care” and I got on my way.

And so it was that a crew of five of us set out with about 40 fresh and piping hot burritos on last night’s revitalization of the dormant Hollywood Burrito Project ride and we learned that no good deed goes unpunished. We headed up Western Avenue where first I flatted my rear tire after nailing the sharp lip of a deep pothole between Melrose and Santa Monica. After innertubes were swapped and the new one inflated we found our next obstacle in the form of haggard, wild-eyed antagonistic Buddy Ebsen-looking transient bastard who arrived from across the street as we were passing out food to the six or seven homeless encamped at the Big Lots! store on Vine Street a couple blocks south of Sunset.

“What are you doing?” he demanded to know. “Are you bothering these people?” As if he was their guardian or some such shit.

“No,” I told him, “we’re just giving them something to eat.”

“Something to eat?” He inquired sarcastically.

“Yeah, burritos.” I held one out to him. “Would you like one?” He took it from me, but instead of it having any sort of calming effect on him, instead it set him off.

“A burrito?” he said it like I’d just handed him a used tissue. “Is that it?” Taken aback that someone would be so willing to bite the hand that literally feeds them, none of us said anything.

“Really? A burrito? That’s all you’ve got?” He looked at the people laying on the cement against the storefront bundled as best they could against the chill of the night — all of whom were appreciative of what we offered them. “These people probably eat better than all of you and all you give them is a burrito?”

Let me preface the short remainder of the post with the point that it was obvious to me that there would be no winning the argument this idiot was making — and a hypocritical idiot at that given that he accepted the burrito I gave him and when I indignantly asked for it back from the ingrate he refused to give it. Instead with an abject lack of regard of the good — however little — we were doing and the efforts we were making, he insisted that we “sell our bikes” and give the money to the poor.

At some point I finally ramped my own sarcasm and stepped up to thank him for the insulting buzzkill he was providing, and immediately after came a chorus of voices from the people prone before us who clearly did not share his warped point of view and instead thanked and blessed us profusely for our kindness.

Heading away from the jerk I pointed out that we’d be back next Wednesday if he wanted another burrito and to bitch at us some more, then I suggested to the crew that it might be high time to introduce the Knuckle Sandwich Project to the area.

Sitting in the parking lot next to Tacos Delta this afternoon, I spied the iconic Silver Lake Walking Dude across the street on Sunset. Whenever I see him he’s either reading a newspaper or talking on his cellphone.

Instead of the straight pixels I snapped I decided to put the digitally zoomed image through a random series of Photoshop filtrations and here’s the end result (click to triplify):

(click to quadruplify)

Another one from the archives, this one taken near the midway point of Franklin Avenue’s Great Pico Walk from Central Avenue to the sea last November.

On Gower under the Hollywood Freeway this was one of our last stops and certainly the location of the highest concentration of homeless. Overall we gave away 40 burritos last night. Here we fed seven  people as indicated by the notes in the snap at right posted to Flickr plus one more not pictured on the sidewalk behind me(click image to check it out).

It can be argued that feeding the homeless with no greater purpose leaves them dependent and does nothing to enable their escape from the streets. While that may be true, what is truer for me is that moment of transition when the food goes from my hands to theirs with no agenda and no judgment. In that brief interval of giving and receiving I stand apart from a society that shuns and instead acknowledges them as humans who matter, who count, who deserve. For that short span we are brothers and sisters helping each other.

Wow. That was weird. I’m out $15 and a couple hours sleep because of it.

The doorbell rings. Ranger barks. I’m awake. The clock reads 3:51 a.m. On the one previous occasion where we’ve been awakened by visitors at such an unsociable hour it’s been the cops and they did a whole lot of pounding and yelling incorrectly thinking I was the owner of a car whose alarm had been going off for hours.

I think: what now?

I pull on shorts and a shirt and approach the foyer. Susan follows me and watches from the livingroom. Through the glass in the door I see a solitary figure standing there, head bowed. The black jacket makes me first think police, but the heavy white sweater and the scarf the man wears beneath the jacket knock that down.

I open the door and immediately the guy in thickly accented English tells me his name is Juan Carlos and launches into a convulted story involving a truck with a broken transmission, something about his wife being away with the baby and his credit cards, and he only has $75 and the tow truck guy needs another $25 before he’ll do anything.

And I’m all huh?

He goes on to tell me that he’s a neighbor having just bought the “big place on the corner.”

“The red house?” I ask.

“No, the big place.”

I figure out he’s talking about the recording studio that once was a Pacific Red Car maintenance facility. Sure, it received a paint job a few months back but I hadn’t even seen so much as a For Sale shingle for that multi-million-dollar property.

Inside I’m skeptical, but outside I’m unable to just say no and slam the door. Instead I ask him why us and he says something about his next door neighbors not being home. I tell him that I don’t have $25 cash, I have $10, maybe $15. He counters that obstacle by saying that’s fine, whatever you have… anything.

I’m not stupid. Half asleep maybe but not a total idiot. Warning bells are ringing inside my head: the convenient story of woe; the “neighbor in distress” angle made more implausible by unlikely and apparently recent home purchase; the needing $25 but being willing to accept a lower amount. It’s all adding up to appear like a strange new waaaay-too-early residential version of those tweakers who’ll hit you up in supermarket parking lots needing gas money to get them and their children back to El Segundo.

Even so, color me the sucker: I still retreated to my wallet and returned with $15 that I handed over to him. Why? Maybe because it was easier way to get the guy gone than just saying no. Maybe there was a part of me that admired the balls it took to walk all the way up the stairs to wake a stranger up and ask for money. Maybe a veeeeeeeery small percentage of me believed he was telling the truth.

Whatever my reason, he was grateful and shook my hand, telling me “My home is your home” and promising to have the cash back to me under the front door mat later on in the morning.

Since I’m doubtful that’ll ever happen I should’ve told him to keep it and apply it to a AAA membership.

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