Gotta admit that I haven’t missed having every telephone pole and traffic light pole covered with those ubiquitous “Work from home” and “You can lose weight — ask me how!” signs that are all the work of poor deluded Herbalife salesmen who are quite sure that they’re going to find the last people in the city who haven’t a)heard of Herbalife and b)tried it.

Our Los Angeles house is finally gone. We got the check in the mail and everything (note to anybody receiving a rather large escrow check: you have to actually sign it, instead of using a For Deposit stamp, and they’re going to keep the money for seven business days, no matter how many managers you talk to, so get a money wire), so we are officially done with LA.

I’m still missing it though.

Yes, I know I can always go back down there, except the barriers are slightly higher: if we drive down I need a co-pilot (to attend to the radio, to the kids’ snacks, etc.), and flying down requires much advance planning (otherwise it’s $200 a person).

Forthwith, some things I really miss about LA:

• Our friends. I know finding friends takes time. It’s harder when your choice of friends is somewhat constrained by having kids—you basically look for other parents. Tamar, with Dan and Damian; Michele; Maureen, with Mark and the kids; Fernando; Neida and Augusto; Brent, Therese, Ellie; Al; and Harry…
• Sophia’s preschool. Don’t get me wrong, I like the preschool she goes to here. I loved the preschool she went to down there—the Neighborhood School in Sherman Oaks. She came home covered in paint and dirt. And it was in the afternoon, which was wonderful because I got to spend time with her in the morning, when we were both at our best—now her school gets the best of her in the mornings and we’re all exhausted in the afternoon. Grumble. And what’s up with the fact there hasn’t been one invitation to a birthday party from her new school yet? By the end of September last year Sophia had been invited to two or three. (The whole birthday thing got a little crazy, actually, but it’s how all the parents met one another!)
• The cost of living. Everything seems to cost 150% more here in Silicon Valley than it did in LA: housing, babysitters, plumbers. This adds up.
• Living near a great zoo. We lived about fifteen minutes from the LA Zoo. Needed something to do with the kids? Zoo. Since moving up north we’ve been to San Jose’s Happy Hollow (fun park with rides, stupid zoo, but the membership I bought gets us discounts at many other places), the San Francisco Zoo (an hour each way, making it a whole day’s excursion), and the Oakland Zoo (ditto).
• Proximity to Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm. Especially for the decade coming up, when we’re going to hear, “You moved me away from where?” a lot. Of course, moving away has also saved us from tithing a portion of our income to the Mouse by rote.
• Cafe Bizou, Sherman Oaks. An amazingly great restaurant just down the hill from our house. We went there so often with baby Sophia that they inquired about her whenever we didn’t take her with. The club sandwich. The tagallini. The ahi tuna salad. <weeps>
• Osteria Nonni, Atwater Village. Go there. Get the lemon chicken. Savor. I’m not even a huge fan of Italian food—I think we’ve been to one Italian restaurant since moving up here. After Osteria Nonni, why bother?
• Sweet Lady Jane, Los Angeles. There are great bakeries within walking distance of our house here. Better than SLJ, actually. But going to SLJ was such an adventure.
• Aroma Cafe, Studio City. Oh my God. It’s full of pastries. Really damn good pastries. Nearby is Caioti Pizza, also excellent.
• Movie theaters. I know there are a ton of new movie theaters iin this area too, but the ones in LA are just better. Maybe they put more effort into them because so many industry people will see them.
• Live Steamers. The Live Steamers are railroad enthusiasts who operate model trains on Sundays. Model trains you can ride. Sophia, train enthusiast, loved riding these trains. You go through a tunnel, you go over a bridge, you go past little dioramas of Western towns…it’s good stuff.
• Movie-town chat. Everyone’s tangentially related to the movie biz down there. It’s in the air, on the streets, and in every cafe. Everyone’s doing a deal, writing a script, yelling into their cell phone about points. The equivalent up here is computer industry talk. Not as sexy.
• UCLA Extension. Classes on everything for a reasonable price, with the classes held close to our house. Why didn’t I take Latin while I could? I took writing classes, most of which were very good.
• The Last Grenadier. This was one of the first things Darin mentioned. The Last Grenadier is a games shop in Burbank that has everything the gamer needs. Sophia liked the big bins of multi-sided dice.

I’m sure I missed a ton of stuff. I’ll probably keep adding to this list.

And now a few things I know I don’t miss about LA:

• The freeways. They ain’t got nothing like 280, “The world’s most beautiful freeway,” down there. They’re all like 101. I don’t drive 101 around here.
• The heat. Or at least the perception of heat. Darin found a website that compared temperatures for LA and the Silicon Valley and found they were comparable. I don’t believe it. It’s hotter down there.
• The Republicans. Down there, Tom McClintock is a viable candidate and people will vote for Arnold. WTF? Glad to be back up here for that reason alone.

Friday I was doing what I usually do, which is try to fill up the day with as many things to do as possible before it’s time for dinner, preferably with Daddy but, you know, if not then not. Whatever.

So I talked to Darin Friday afternoon about what we should do for dinner and he told me, “I have to work this weekend.”

“Oh,” said I. “Maybe we’ll go to LA.” I’ve been talking about wanting to come down here, and Darin thought that a weekend when he’d be busy would be perfect.

I called my friend Maureen and she said, Sure, c’mon down.

I called Darin back to tell her that we’d go down on Saturday when he laid it on me that he’d be working late Friday night too.

“Just a sec,” I said, and I called Maureen back. “Can we come down tonight?” I asked.

“Sure!” she said.

So I tossed some clothes in a bag and threw the kids in the car (albeit gently, and with proper strapping into their car seats) and headed off toward LA. A trip somewhat hampered by the fact that we left at 5:30pm, and also by the fact that the Pacheco Pass (the highway connecting 101 and 5) was a parking lot. Literally. The standstill was so literal that everyone turned off their engines and quite a few people were walking around. I still don’t know why.

Instead of getting in to LA at 10:30 we got there at 12:30am, and I realized that I’m not exactly built for spur-of-the-moment roadtrips any more. (Note to self: when possible, bring a co-pilot.) But the kids were pretty good companions and so far we’ve been having a blast seeing the old ‘hood and the friends Sophia talks about incessantly.

The past five weeks (It’s been five weeks! How can it have been five weeks?) have been difficult on everyone—Sophia hasn’t had her preschool or her circle of buds, and I haven’t had very much adult companionship. I’m not the most gregarious of people (she said with obvious understatement) but during this move I’ve been accosting other moms in the park—”Hi, how old are you kids? Belong to any mommy groups? Are there any other parks around here?” And so on.

Sophia starts preschool and dance class soon. Help is on the way. Life will become normal again.

What’s funny is, though I lived in LA for 6+ years—the longest I’ve lived anywhere since leaving my parents’ house—I don’t exactly feel being here is natural. I had to fill up my car Saturday morning and I couldn’t quite remember where the nearest gas station was. I drove by the old homestead and thought, Hey, I used to live there. It didn’t immediately bring up nostalgic feelings.

In a few days we’ll head back home (or, as Sophia put it when she was getting sleepy and cranky this afternoon, “Let’s go back to our new house now“)…hopefully with no parking lot on the Pacheco Pass. I’m glad to be back here in LA. But this isn’t home any more.

Addendum: This morning, as Maureen was getting a small passel of gifts together, I discovered today is Father’s Day. Darin isn’t exactly the Hallmark type but…what a weekend to go away. Happy Father’s Day, dude! Don’t stay up too late playing Zelda every night.

“What’re we doing today?”

“I dunno.”

“Everyone we know is out of town…Well, to be more exact, all of Sophia’s friends are out of town.”

For a couple of seconds we contemplated going to Disneyland, but today was a blocked out day for the Annual Pass holders (like us), so we decided to do other touristy things instead.

§

We started off in Pasadena, where we had breakfast at Mi Piace, which has a very, very good brunch. I was biased against Mi Piace for the first several years we were here, because we went to the one in Burbank a couple of times with Darin’s friends and every time we went something horrible went wrong. The Pasadena location, however, has always been very, very good to us.

We hit the Barnes and Noble for an hour of so of story reading time (and Darin went nuts buying books, something he hasn’t done for a long stretch—yes, we’re about to move, but hey, someone else will be carrying the boxes), and then we hit the road.

“How about we go to Malibu?” Darin said.

I said that was fine with me. Probably not too many Malibu driving trips on the agenda in the near future.

There was terrible traffic on the Pacific Coast Highway, but who cared: it wasn’t like we were trying to get anywhere, and the kids were asleep anyhow. I looked out at the beach as we drove.

“We never took them to the beach!” I wailed.

“Hon, we’re still going to be in California. It’ll be the same ocean even.”

Okay, so I’ve been freaking out about the little things.

We parked in Santa Monica and decided to get some lunch at Il Fornaio. I wasn’t terribly hungry, so I just had soup. Darin had a small plate of ravioli. Sophia ate nothing. Simon ate almost an entire plate of pasta with cheese. Every stereotype I’ve ever heard about the differences in eating between boys and girls…well, let’s just say the kids aren’t dispelling them right now.

Then we got very touristy and did something Darin and I have never done, with or without kids.

The Santa Monica Pier is a boardwalk filled with junky food (cotton candy and churros), junky clothing (does anyone except anorexic fifteen-year-olds wear those clothes?), games where you win gigantic stuffed animals, and carnival rides, including a pretty big roller coaster. But everything was for the taller end of the human spectrum.

We thought we were going to get out of there scott-free, until we discovered the kids’ part of the boardwalk: rides just for the 48-inch and under set. You tell me if Sophia wanted to go on rides and whether she enjoyed any second of it:

Crying. Hysteria. “I don’t want to leave.”

Daddy took Sophia down to the beach, where she could kick off her sandals and run free:

(Poor Simon. Trapped in the stroller. Although if the past few days give any indication, he’ll be running on that beach with Fia in less than a week.)

When it was time to leave the beach…Crying. Hysteria. “I don’t want to leave.”

We were dragging her off the pier when we discovered the Carousel. Oh, can’t resist a carousel. Mommy and Daughter rode the Carousel twice. Before the second ride I explained that this was the last time. At the end of the second ride, Sophia began to negotiate for “just one more ride.” We said no. Crying. Hysteria. Etc.

By now Sophia was finally hungry and wanted chicken. More specifically, she wanted chicken with peapods, which is her favorite dish at PF Chang’s. So we found a Chinese restaurant.

“Does she eat Chinese food?” the waitress asked.

“In fact, she’s why we’re here,” Darin said.

Sophia ate—and, to no one’s surprise, so did Simon—and then we headed home. Amazingly, none of us (including parents) fell asleep in the car. The kids fussed a little about going to bed, but it was strictly pro forma fussing.

It took a while for us to find restaurants in LA that we thought were something special. I think I spent the first year here thinking that there was no decent food in Los Angeles.

But we eventually did develop a repertoire of excellent little places. One of the places we discovered—okay, we found it via Zagat, which isn’t exactly like a secret passed on in a back alley—is Osteria Nonni, a fantastic little Italian restaurant in Silverlake. The neighborhood doesn’t exactly scream “great restaurant”; it kind of screams “slightly seedy part of town we’d never visit otherwise.”

If you decide to go there, do not skip this important step: get the sautéed lemon chicken with spaghetti. The standard way they prepare the spaghetti is with oil and garlic, but we always ask for it with butter and parmesan. The lemon butter sauce on the chicken is…well, how can I put this? I’m not a religious woman, but if I were, this sauce would be proof of Divine Intervention in this universe.

If the lemon chicken isn’t your thing—what are you, a Communist?—then get the penne with eggplant. I’ve never actually had the penne with eggplant, because once I found the chicken I stopped there, but Darin assures me the penne is quite tasty. The porcini mushroom ravioli is fabulous. The arancini appetizer (rice balls with cheese and peas inside) is extremely tasty.

Osteria Nonni is hardly next door to us, but we manage to get there at least once a month. It’s completely worth the effort if you want to try it out. 3219 Glendale Blvd., in case you need the address.

Because you go to your daughter’s dance recital at North Hollywood High and amidst the clutter and nonsense of parents getting tots and slightly-bigger-than-tots ready for their appearance on stage, you say to yourself, “Hey, that’s John Wells in the row ahead of me.” He delivered the commencement when you graduated with your MFA from USC. You wonder if you should introduce yourself.

Because your friend whose daughter is in the other dance class for 3-year-olds mentions that Eddie Murphy’s daughter is in their class and you wonder if you should switch to that class, just to see the kid, ’cause you know the dad ain’t dropping by.

Because when you take your kids to Art’s Deli for lunch, you say to yourself, “Hey, Joe Mantegna! And that guy is…Paul Williams? The Phantom of the Paradise guy?” You still remember the day you were there with your friends after yoga and Paul Thomas Anderson and Fiona Apple came in. Before your friend confirmed who the couple were, you thought Fiona Apple kind of looked like another goddamn Fiona Apple clone.

Because every single barista at Starbucks is a musician, plays in a band, or already has a friggin’ recording contract and they’re still mixin’ the Frappucinos.

Because your friend Mary is in town to pitch every studio and producer in sight with her latest sure-fire pitch, and she makes you realize that you don’t have to live in LA. Well, I guess that’s not so much scary as unbelievably empowering. Although you’re sad she won’t be able to stay with you on future visits, because you won’t have a house here for her to crash at. However, she’ll probably be able to afford a little pied-a-terre in Beverly Hills any minute now.

Because you just don’t expect to be able to go through a green light until 3 or 4 cars going the other direction have finished going through the intersection.

Because it’s March 11 and unbelievably gorgeous out. 80 yesterday, maybe 75 today.