Current mood:

sad

Losing parts of one's life
I once wrote this back when we first moved to Silver Lake:

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Some things in life are so - sweet - that they help to strip away some of one's cynicism and bitterness.

Across the street from our apartment is a small, battered two-story house, with outside stairs leading to the second floor, on which lives an elderly gentleman. He is tall, wispy and white-haired in a Peter O'Toole kind of way, and has a quiet smile that we see sometimes when he is outside smoking and chatting with two of the other old men who live nearby.

This elderly gentleman is always busy: he takes energetic walks up our forbidding Tularosa hill, works endlessly on his front lawn/garden, and wakes early. He has a dog - a pug, I think - something definitely along the lines of small, inclined to plumpness, and friendly-looking. The dog strikes me also as elderly.

It's just the two of them. An old man, and his little dog.

And they have probably lived there forever. They take walks together, and smile at you when you pass by in your car on your way elsewhere. When he talks to his neighbors the dog is there too, sitting in the sun and nodding sagely. Sometimes he just sits at the top of the stairs, with his dog, petting the dog and probably having a pretty good conversation with him. He and the dog are the best of friends. It touches the heart, if you have one.

I have never properly met them, and I do not know their names, but I know they're there, and they're our neighbors. Which is a comforting thing, for Bianca and myself, who rarely know our neighbors and harbor a healthy disrespect and distrust for much of the world.

I can only hope they will always live there... because the world will be much less sweet when they do not.

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Over the years we've lived here, we discovered that the man's name was Mike. The dog? Spike. Mike and Spike. Perfect.

From a small memorial on his front lawn, we discovered that Mike had passed away on April 28th. He'd had a stroke and other complications. Spike is living elsewhere, presumably with Mike's son. We keep thinking of Spike and how he must be feeling the loss and not understanding it except as a hollow void in a dog's life. We think he will join Mike soon, and we think it will be good because they will be together, although we are sad because we know we will never see either of them again, ever. We look at their house and wonder what will happen to it, whether someone with money will come and try to fix it up and sell it to other people with money, who will never know the steady friendships and legacies of this neighborhood.

Wally, a white mop of a dog that lived with my sister's family, also passed away recently after far too few years.

Right before April, the resident patrol hound of Silver Lake, Bingo, also died. We attended his memorial service on the 6th, and he is now part of the mural on Sunset and Hyperion.

April was a bad month. I am too emotionally exhausted for this.