The fourth of July BBQ I could walk to was too good to pass up. At not quite two miles away, and up a dusty trail through a park, many Angelenos would not consider this walkable, but I was determined. When it came to picking out shoes, I wavered, and I was not super-cutely attired — indeed, I was sweaty and winded — when I arrived, but there you go. I’d walked.
Of course, I mooched a ride home.
But before that it was a lovely BBQ, with lots of food and drink and 3 year-olds the size of 5 year-olds careening around, not at all in control of their ever-growing limbs. We sat on a large patio, watching the sun go down and sparks of fireworks rise up along the horizon.
Where I live, I am hemmed in with no view, but it’s easy enough to find one if you hike up a steep hill.
I’d been there once before, at this home of a longtime acquaintance, when it was full of stuff. Yesterday the stuff was there but pushed away, tidied, and I took the time to appreciate the off-kilter rectangle-ness of the space, the wall of windows, the studio-type floor, the rock fireplace and short rock wall with a square velvet couch that seemed built for its spot, a bedroom that was a just a nook with a wide open wall to the rest of the space. There was another part of the house I hadn’t seen, a roommate, a kitchen, but I stood there thinking that this was the way to do it right, to create the open space and the windows over the trees and the big wide patio and the space to work in. I just kind of stood there taking it in.
The place is really great, I told my longtime acquaintance, who was cranking the windows open, or shut. How did you find it? Well, someone they knew was working on a Schindler documentary, and there was this house…
This is a Schindler house? I asked.
Yes, they said.
Oh, I didn’t say. Wow, I didn’t say. I was just quiet, which for me is saying both those things, really.
I thought of other places of sublime, out-of-reach beauty. Like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water, or those Newport mansions I grew up close to, or the houses in Malibu I drove past on Thursday. Every time I’d seen one of those places I’d imagined what it would be like to live in them, to have that as the texture of your life, every day. How the physical space would be a like a gift that would secretly inform your actions, even when you stopped noticing it, if you could ever stop noticing it.
And here I was, in a place like this not as a museum but as a place where someone — not rich — lived for real, who made potato salad and drank tequila. I felt fortunate to have used this bathroom and seen this view and done ordinary things like help string the christmas lights and neglect to carry food back to the kitchen. I could have driven someplace else and I would have missed it; but yesterday, the sublimity of that Schindler house was the texture of my life, too.
