In Memoriam: My Childhood Home
TL;DR: Help, Get Help, and Know the Facts
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Know the Facts, Stop Disinformation:
My parents’ home of over three decades, my childhood home, the home to my late aunt’s children since 2020, the manifestation of a second generation committed to the California Dream, and the site of so many family gatherings and memories, is gone.
I think of many Thanksgiving dinners, birthday parties, and recent Yom Kippur break fasts and Passover Seders when they were no longer at my Bubby’s house. The brunch the morning after Adam’s and my wedding. My Grandma and Grandpa’s 50th anniversary party. Events for my friends Sen. Scott Wiener and then-VA Delegate David Englin (Eric Garcetti, attended as newly-elected LA City Councilmember, long before he ran for mayor).
But it wasn’t just big events I think about. I also think of our daily life.
Countless hours of daydreaming, studying, and conversations of all kinds. Dinners where my sister and I watched Jeopardy! with our nanny, Andrea. College applications and test prep. Adolescent pining over crushes and recovering from heartbreak. Visits from my Grandma and Grandpa before they moved back to LA in 2001.
Listening to CDs of Spice Girls, Britney Spears, Celine Dion, Aqua, and Christina Aguilera in my childhood bedroom, and later breaking my desktop PC with Limewire viruses back in the mp3 era. Watching every episode of The Golden Girls and The Nanny. The ottoman that doubled as a DVD and VHS storage space.
Gone are generations of wedding and b’nai mitzvot albums, yearbooks, and photos from over a century of our family since its arrival in this country by 1907. Countless heirlooms from my grandparents and Aunt Michelle are no more.
I think of the Buddha statue covered in gold leaf that my maternal grandparents got on their 1970 trip to Hong Kong that sat in their front hall for decades before gracing my parents’ dining room. And the dining room table and chairs that belonged to my great-grandparents, Molly and Jack.
Perhaps my sister’s Furby survived and will be found in the rubble. Those creepy critters always seem indestructible!
Built in the California-Spanish style that enjoyed a resurgence among Boomers in the 1980s-early 2000s, this house manifested my parents’ achievement of the California Dream.
Like my Bubby and Papa’s in nearby Santa Monica, the house had beautiful canyon view. I’m sure it reminded my mother regularly of where she grew up nearby.
My parents had so much work done on the house - often out of necessity, but not always - that they joked that they’d rebuild the entire thing from the inside out before it got sold one day.
How painful that joke feels now.
We took nine months to clear things out of my Bubby’s house. My family even had a small Havdalah service in the backyard to end its chapter of serving as the epicenter of my family’s life for five decades.
There’s no closure or goodbye to my childhood home.
Our devastating loss is just one of thousands. I know dozens of people who lost their homes. The fire incinerated 88 of the 90 homes in my parents’ neighborhood alone.
Climate change supercharged the fires, giving us 100mph winds. Even if the water system wasn’t overwhelmed with use all at once, the FEMA director said it wouldn’t have been enough to stop a fire moving up to 3 football fields per minute.
The outpouring of volunteering, donations, and community is awe-inspiring. Despite LA’s vast collection of neighborhoods that contributes to a feeling of atomization, people are coming together. Helpers are everywhere. Community exists.
Yet as the fire still burns and dangerous windstorms are heading LA’s way, we’ve seen cynical weaponization of my family and wider community’s tragedy by Rick Caruso locally and the GOP nationally.
Rick Caruso, who owns the ultra-high end Palisades Village shopping center, deployed his army of private firefighters to save his expensive commercial real estate. With his property safe, he took to national TV to slam Mayor Karen Bass.
If Caruso loved LA as much as he says he does, he would’ve deployed those same resources to save homes like my parents’, as well as schools and the library.
He now has private fire fighters protecting his Brentwood home and Palisades shopping center again in the winds hitting Southern California as I type while the rest of us wait. Most people can’t afford $10,000-per-day, per-person private firefighters.
True civically-minded aspiring public servants don’t hoard resources this way. Besides, Caruso once served as an LADWP water commissioner. Where was he on funding infrastructure to make our water systems ready for climate change? Nowhere.
Caruso already spent $104 million in 2022 and still lost to Karen Bass. Talk about being a sore loser looking to capitalize on my family and community’s tragedy.
People affiliated with Caruso and the wider MAGA crowds have amplified massive disinformation campaigns filled with lies about local government budgeting.
Of course, they don’t dare discuss the Eaton Fire, where there are Republican elected officials and the community of Altadena suffered the same fate as Pacific Palisades. Even under the claims that money was removed from LAFD, they never mention that they were the same people pushing for more money to go to LAPD instead in the first place.
Too many people I know - people who claim to care about ending the spread of disinformation! - are sharing, liking, and parroting these lies all over social media.
Then there are claims that the fire happened because of DEI or the fact that the GOP seeks to condition disaster aid. California pays far more federal taxes than what gets reinvested back in our state. We don’t demand that those GOP-run states end their climate-cooking policies before we agree to them taking our tax dollars to recover from hurricanes.
Mike Johnson of Louisiana, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, and Donald Trump of Florida can shove it.
There’s no doubt that some current people in office have made mistakes. But seeing our tragedy weaponized this way and to see so many people I know believing whatever they see in a meme without critical thinking fuels my grief.
Don’t take anyone seriously if they don’t include the impact of climate change in anything related to how the fire started, how we end it, and how we recover.
When I was 13, I read the August 2002 Time cover story, which put me on an adolescent-manic mission to fight climate change.
I wrote over 3,000 public officials around the world asking them to do something about climate change. I was proud at the time to get an over 18% response rate, keeping every single letter and hardcopy of emails sent back.
By the time I finished high school, we were an all-hybrid household, installed compact fluorescent lights (the precursor to LED), and my parents even installed a trash compactor for recycling only. I organized a screening of An Inconvenient Truth with producer Laurie David, and launched a Green Club on campus.
My very first internship was at the Natural Resources Defense Council office in Santa Monica, which back then was the greenest building in the U.S. When my parents remodeled my childhood bathroom, they used recycled concrete and glass for the countertop and installed a dual-flush toilet.
I thought I did my part and that others would take the baton.
But here we are. All of those letters from civic leader I kept? They were violently incinerated by the very forces I sought to stop over 20 years ago.
Exclusively blaming current elected leadership is too shortsighted. Generations of elected officials and the people who voted for them bear the lion’s share the blame, as do the fossil fuel companies, who knowingly cooked our planet despite knowing the science for nearly 50 years.
Small sacrifices or simply changing the way things were done back then could have saved my parents’ house. But nope, short-term rugged individualism won the day then and harms us now.
The fire began on January 7th, my Bubby’s Gregorian calendar yahrzeit, exactly six years since her passing.
It felt like a cruel assault on the California Dream she built for herself - and us.
Bubby and Papa were the biggest California evangelists I ever knew. They were latecomers, moving from Minnesota in 1970, leaving my grandfather’s thriving legal career and car dealership businesses to start over in their own Promised Land anew at the ages of 40 and 36. A year later they found their midcentury modern paradise in Santa Monica, a home that looked similar to the one they custom-built in suburban Minneapolis that they left behind after living in it for only two years.
It’s no surprise that my parents knew they found their “forever home” when they discovered the canyon views in 1991. This house was a continuation of their hopes and dreams, but also my maternal grandparents’, who I remember visiting the house with endless pride.
Every year at their legendary Passover Seders with 50 people, we’d end the Seder by saying, “Next year in Santa Monica!” instead of the traditional “Next Year in Jerusalem.” Even my Israeli cousins would travel to be there.
California was their Jerusalem, their Promised Land.
My grandparents didn’t care where we lived so long as it was in California. Ideally, we’d be living with them in their house or next door, but anywhere in California sufficed. My parents’ beautiful, California-style home just eight minutes away certainly met that standard.
“Anything you can do, you can do in California!” I can hear my Papa saying.
How desperately I want him to still be right.