INDIAN HILL

At 7 AM Mark and I had fresh coffee and we spread out the map of California on the kitchen counter.  Dawn was a wet gray and wouldn't bring the sun out for a while.  I'd grabbed the AAA map from the Jeep when Mark said he'd save me forty five minutes and get me some new scenery 'to go', when I left Arnold and headed back to Los Angeles this morning. 'This is the way the locals head down to Merced from here'.  He pointed to Highway 49, the meandering route through the gold country, through Angels Camp and Sonora, but I'd cut down through Rawhide and head into Jamestown for breakfast.  The highlighter put a glow on the road map and stirred my imagination with fresh current. We'd looked at maps a hundred times in the past, but it had been a while.  Topographical maps, hiking trails in the high Sierra, Yosemite, we'd hiked and camped the high country with everything on our back when we could grunt and climb the steep switchbacks with anybody.  We...

I'd heard about it, the possibility of the downturn in the economy and what it might mean.  More crime, watching out where I never had to watch out before, and then I heard what sounded like a gunshot, the whine of sirens.  Can't be sure what it was, but a gunshot sounds like no other blast that I know, and sirens don't signal good news. People I know who live nearby in other communities in the San Gabriel Valley report crimes in their neighborhoods, in their homes, in the homes of family members.  Violent crimes; robberies of car keys, coming back later for a 3 AM car theft; a man leaves a house for fifteen minutes and comes home to a home robbery in progress; streets where I drive alone, sometimes at night, just to get away, aren't safe at night, they tell me. The Eastland Mall neighorhood just off the 10 freeway, my friends say, has outsiders (unspecified, but they're driving in from all over, theyre saying) surging in and robbing parked cars.  Hacienda Boulevard...

Squirrels are mating in the trees.  Bouncing off the walls, scratching and clawing up bark trunks and along garage ledges four deep, scrambling, chasing, squealing, cooing, grunting, and a humming bird floats two feet away watching, eight feet off my upstairs perch. Had to be something going on early, some instinct at work on this Sunday, scurrying and leaping across branches, leaves quivering and shaking and dancing when there is no wind.  Chattering, thumping and banging outside walls while my coffee dripped. Morning madness.   The woman next to me on Friday rubbed her thighs all morning and I tried not to notice while the instructor said 'Turn to page C-19' and then we took a break.

It was going to be all local, all the time, this Indian Hill blog.  It's a cheapie, the freebie from google, but everybody uses the format.  Indian Hill started as a thought process to digest musical leanings, get out frustration at the traffic downtown and the scrubbed 'midwest-like' town of Claremont, where I live.  Then along came West Coast Blues.  I don't know where it came from but it came along.  Just showed up one day and I liked the title and posted some stuff and spent too many hours trying to fit in colors that didn't blend.  Ended up looking like a tie rack at a Salvation Army and that's when I decided, Hey, it ain't bad . That was West Coast Blues.  That was then.  It still rings true, on occasion, where I spend a lot of time editing posts, segments of short stories and stuff I sort of care about, so that's where Indian Hill fits in.  Right. . .about. . .here.  Miles Davis is the man, was the man, and will always be, so he ...

We all talked amid the noise, at the wooden table in the center of the coffee house, about Tiger, about global warming—'it seemed pretty cold this morning'—and Pilar drew eyes, a mouth, and a crooked nose on a napkin. She’s two years old. And the four of us. ‘Tiger shouldn’t get any more adulation.’ ‘Even if he wins golf tournaments?’ ‘He’s a scoundrel.’ ‘Obama’s front-page photo says he fixed global warming.’ ‘Been colder now a couple of mornings.’ ‘Maybe there’s residual racism against Tiger,’ he said. ‘Crossed over into the country club demographic, now’s he’s just a black guy who cheated.’ ‘He wants a legacy,’ I said. ‘How’s that work? He’s a cheater.’ ‘With a pretty good golf record.’ And Pilar squealed when we saw her face drawing. Eyes with lashes--two, and a line-mouth-nose. Later we had breakfast at the diner. Just two of us. Everybody else breaking up, going their way after sitting and talking at the table in the center of the coffee house. I said ‘What ...