Ode to the Original Millennial Women

Sometimes the rites of passage that mark our lives are simple and manifest, like the landmasses on a nautical chart. We know the currents and depths with astonishing precision. They’re indisputable. There are moments, too, that are like emotional compass points. They tell us we have reached a distinct era in our personal history. Such junctures arrive with an almost magical clarity, erased of complexity and ambiguity. I felt this sort of unassailable definition when I purchased my new address book. It was proof that I was no longer on an extended vacation. I held a lilac pen.

I had, in fact, moved. It wasn’t a hallucination and it wasn’t temporary. But a new address book implies much more. It’s a moment of confronting one’s old identity and taking stock. It’s like spring cleaning on an intense, molecular level. One doesn’t simply transcribe old entries onto fresh pages. There is a winnowing, an evaluation and a discarding. Now I saw clearly the many who had become marginal, problematic, just business. Then there were the beautiful and charming, adornments to anyone’s life, but, in truth, we hadn’t crossed the bridge to actual friendship and we never would. They were the names I dropped. In reality, they wouldn’t be coming to my apple orchard and their ZIP codes were no longer relevant. Had they ever been?

Some of the entries were more than casual--were, in fact, friends. There was a disorienting moment when I realized that the only things binding me to another were time and its wounds. Did a collection of shared bruises form an adequate basis for a relationship? Does nostalgia have limits? And with a single pen line, a woman I knew for decades disappeared.

A new address book is an astonishment, a piece of time gouged out from the continuum, geometric and tangible. It’s where we define our new identity, see the new borders and what’s shifted in the dark while we slept. Behaviors have accumulated and made their own shape, their own unmistakable morphology.

For instance, we can say that certain acts or omissions were unacceptable. We can pronounce the perpetrator an offender and remove his or her names and (new) phone prefixes from our lives. It’s an enactment of our new values, requiring an examination of motivation, and the nature of loyalty and forgiveness. Decisions of a monumental philosophical and psychological order are occurring. And there’s nothing simple about any of this.

The people I was carrying into the future with me dwindled. Then I began to notice who was left. Rather than traditional families, there was a surprising number of women alone. And a significant number of them did not live in Los Angeles anymore, though it was in Los Angeles that we had met and become friends.

Sometimes a new address book is not only a moral document but a suggestion of sociological phenomena. Where were all these former Los Angeles women, and, most importantly, why had they departed the city, and where are they living?

I remembered meeting D. when I taught a poetry writing workshop in San Bernardino. The Santa Anas were a kind of liquid calligraphy, the hills were burning as if by a fluid red hand. (They had considered canceling the class.) The air was charged beyond electric. D. was writing poetry, studying Spanish, learning California Indian creation myths, collecting animal bones and bird feathers and felt she might be moving toward sculpture. In time, we would drive back roads of the Baja, bartering for white bones in tent and shack fishing villages. We would sail to Catalina, take the dingy skimming across phosphorescent coves, the sea floor seeming like a continent beneath my sunburned thigh, seeming alive and opening, preparing to speak like a vivid, glittering inked mouth.

Once F. decided I needed snow for my February birthday. It was an ad hoc surprise party, car full, as we drove to Santa Barbara, then inland, into mountains. I was startled, watching snow fall through groves of orange trees. In the distance, a sound, also indigenous, like fog horns and wind--the cathedral bells from a mission, announced the official invitation to prayer. Who would not want to fall to their knees, there, in the barest mist with snow asserting itself like a lace veil between the fat and bright-as-lanterns oranges?

I think of J. starting her life over at 40, how extraordinary that seemed, 20 years ago. She resigned the bar to study painting at Santa Cruz. Her studio, with skylights, was under redwood trees on a bluff near the ocean, which was, that day, a glassy violet. There were redwood flakes on the ground, scattered like cinnamon, and the wind smelled of sea and mint. Why not begin an entirely separate career at 40, discover a discrete internal and external geography within, a further kingdom? The idea was fully plausible. Certainly there are random resurrections, inexplicable and continual, just as certainly as there are tumors, fires and plague. We are struck down. We are risen. There is another competing logic, more elegant and subtle than what science knows. But I let the sea breeze take this thought. It would be 20 years before I would reconsider it.

We who have lived vast portions of our lives in Los Angeles possess an openness for alternative systems of interpretation. Perhaps we have a greater ease with the fluid, the transitory, the concept that life itself may be a sequence of slippery temporary solutions. This is what the landscape tells us. It’s in the crumbling cliffs above Malibu. It’s in the sea and shore tango that isn’t erosion but a form of seduction.

There is revelation in my new address book. D. now resides on a mesa outside Taos in a house she built herself. F. lives an hour’s drive from Portland, Ore., and J. an hour and a half from Missoula, Mont. Together, they are a representative sample of the divorced, the widowed and the ambiguous. Their children have gone to college, or they never had children. What they share in common is the unprecedented freedom to define themselves outside the patriarchy.

Until the relatively recent aberration of the nuclear family, women have always lived in extended blood groups, tribes, villages and cities. Technology has made it viable for females to live outside of this dubious protection. With the availability of the fax, cell phone and e-mail, the parameters aren’t about physical survival anymore--they’re psychological. A woman can check e-mail and pile wood into a stove as well as a man. The issues aren’t hatchet-wielding techniques but the more fragile areas of loneliness, of solitude, of a landscape seen, interpreted and perhaps loved alone.

Los Angeles will always be the prototypal feminine city for me, with its mysterious and flagrant insistence on the tropical, its sun setting in a debauchery of magenta, with the spill of bougainvillea across alleys like inland seas of soft fire.

Nuestra Senora, La Reina, Queen of the Angels, has given us a fertile postmodern world filled with women bearing the names of film stars and saints. Women with bottles of sloe gin in their bathrobes, hanging frayed sheets on terraces in a grit of dusk. Women with faces like epics. Women with eyes like the last lighthouse on the final peninsula at the end of the world.

It is not a rejection of Nuestra Senora, Our Lady of tolerance and citrus, of salt air and a sky above the desert that is a triumphant blue, a distillation and a statement. A sky that looks alive, like a cobalt skinned lizard, organic above the ocotillo and barrel cactus. That my address book is largely composed of women without traditional families or the occupations they began their adult lives with is not a negative reflection on Los Angeles. In fact, it’s just the opposite. Los Angeles, so wildly experimental, with its end-of-the-trail, rough-hewn pragmatism, its fascination with originality and its relentless recognition of aesthetics as a player, has birthed a unique individual for a radically different historical climate.

After all, the American experience has always been about physical passages. The European immigrant Atlantic crossing. Manifest Destiny and the wagon trains. Each generation redefines its latitudes of necessity. When I turn the pages in my address book, I can tell you something about the L.A. Woman, 30 years after Jim Morrison gave her a universal identity. It’s three decades later, and the L.A. Woman is entering the millennium, unencumbered by tradition, rules and hundreds of thousands of generations that tell her where she can’t live and what she can’t do.

In her time, the L.A. Woman has been the Lady of the Canyon, both Laurel and Topanga. She’s carpooled as a Valley housewife in Woodland Hills and Encino. She’s shared an artist’s loft in downtown Pasadena. She’s lived by the ocean in Laguna and Santa Monica.

Now the L.A. Woman has moved on. This millennial babe has built her own house. She’s learning to ride and keep horses in mountain pastures. She’s living by kerosene and learning Sanskrit and calligraphy by candlelight and lantern. She’s closing mortgages by fax then practicing her tai chi by a tributary of the Colorado. This year, she might spend her birthday in Paris or Calcutta.

I can decode my address book, and this is what it says. Los Angeles did not fail the L.A. Woman. Rather, it prepared her to realize that she never met a landscape she didn’t like. And somewhere along the line, she just graduated, turned 40 something and realized that, for the first time in history, cities are optional for females. My address book is filled with women living alone, on the extreme edges of the map, looking out at mountains, arroyos and rivers, knowing it’s the millennium. And they’re not afraid.