L.A. Lost and Found:
The Grove

"The lean days, blue skies with never a cloud, a sea of blue day after day, the sun floating through it. The days of plenty – plenty of worries, plenty of oranges. Eat them in bed, eat them for lunch, push them down for dinner. Oranges, five cents a dozen. Sunshine in the sky, sun juice in my stomach." – John Fante, Ask the Dust









Park your car up in the megalopolis ramp a bit off Fairfax and walk down into the Grove in the heart of LA. Here's the place where the Disneyland world meets the grit of the surrounding city, another oasis, where there is a drop-off valet for mall walking customers who ring their Jaguars and Lexus in for a car wash as they shop. You descend down five flights of stairs at the edge of the parking ramp and by the third you catch a glimpse of the washrack, where the guys are washing those cars, keeping them buff and tight for the long ride back home up along the curves and galleys of highway 1 under a sun that do doubt bakes on every bird stain and every grain of dust. Walk past the trolley car garage, closed in right now by an luxurious glass door, there it sits this fine machine ready to chug out at certain hours, creating an effect of old home old town LA pleasantville. One day we visited the back

end of the Grove, past all the chic shops and spent time meandering through the farmer's market stalls, meat shops, model shops, coffee plazas and taco tanks. Today we had a couple of hours to kill and stopped at an elegant little sushi shop called Blue Ribbon, fine interior, wood and glass mixed and sternly beachy, five sushi operators behind their counter cutting out the sushi bites. These are the moments of oranges for us – these little respites against the cacophony of this particular city, where we can sink in somewhere, see the clean lines, the clean food; Fante talks much of the gritty tough and surviving days of LA in the early 30's. They made him hungry and gave him some subject matter, sprayed all over the place, to pluck like oranges themselves. I'll take the oasis's as a visitor. Tried a fine tuna and soba noodles bowl and those little ruby red cubes of tuna were sparkling jewels of soft meat. Two glasses of a good pinot noir and the waiter sharp as a tack, what else do we need? The

Grove, just outside the door? A wonderful post-meal walk of shops and a brick walkway, fountains for the sound, all the folks in their couture cloths walking hand in hand with their gelato and espresso dixie cups. As the sun sets out over this long shopping stretch, there is some hope, there is a stalling of the noise and anarchy of the LA street. It is the person who never walks down these cobbled rocks and sees the jet stream of sunshine across the windows that don't find oasis except in redoubled vice, redoubled want, the redoubled monotony of hunger which so often turns to judgement and bitterness, the very essence, it seems, that stirs in Fante's book. We walk briefly back into the stalls of the farmer's market. It is a bustle of preparation for the night. Clinking glasses, voices rising up in volume, and as I look back out west, I can see some jutting of mountains turning to dust themselves by the dark. I have now found two places worthwhile to land in LA: the dusty rough mountains of San Gabriel, and right here, its opposite, at the Grove.