The backdrop to this year's poem

For various reasons, loss and fragility have been on my mind this year.

I've had to spend time with loss a great deal in my work: it's the subject matter of both the novel of mine publishing this year, and the novel of mine I'm editing for publication in the future.

In my interests beyond writing, too, loss has turned out to be a persistent contemplation. In summer, for example, I returned for the first time to the trail in the San Gabriel mountains destroyed in the Eaton Fire of January 2025. In my second marathon of the year, less than a month away at time of writing, I will remember again Captain Rebecca Marie Lobach, the extraordinary young woman who died in the Potomac mid-air collision, coincidentally also in January of last year. Rebecca's picture will appear alongside other fallen military members in the Wear Blue Mile of the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington DC on October 25th.

Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles, analysis released in March shows that homeless folks in L.A. County continue to die at a rate of almost seven per day. (This is an increase on the 2023 figure I report on in this video.) These numbers - public information that is not, in my experience, broad public knowledge - captures L.A.'s unnerving potential to be a thousand parallel universes, each one sealed against the others, so that there is intersection without insight. Under the same blue sky the color of devotion, I might be idling in my back yard, vaguely making plans for the windfallen figs amassed on the woodchip, while a heart clenches for the last time just one block away, out in the street, and goes unregistered by me, even peripherally. (Of course I cannot hold every L.A. story in my head at any one time - my consciousness is just one small porthole on the universe. But a death in the community, out on the sidewalk and just a few minutes away... I feel like that is something that should reverberate to me naturally. Shouldn't community itself do that?)

Before these grim musings bum you out, let me finish.

That trail in the San Gabriel mountains decimated by wild fire last January? I did not find up there the bleak scene of recovery I expected - far from it. Rebecca's death will remain infinitely tragic - there will be no lessening over time of what the world lost when she passed. But what is equally true is that the memory and inspiration of her accomplishments in her twenty-eight years have no half-life either. Rebecca lives on in the possibility and resolve imparted every time those accomplishments are encountered by someone in need of example. (I know this firsthand, having realized a long-held dream and qualified for the 2027 Boston Marathon in the 2025 marathon I ran in Rebecca's memory.)

As for the loss of those homeless men, women and children: there is no softening of their passing either. But this has been another year in which a seemingly paradoxical truth has brought itself to my attention time and time again: L.A. might feel positively veined by indifference, but Angelenos give a damn.

Take the day in June when, on an LA Metro train, I befriended a man living in a homeless shelter. He had early-stage dementia and cautiously imploring eyes that settled on me after I made the sliding doors with a split-second to spare. He needed to top up his phone at a Metro PCS store. For some reason I never grasped, that store had to be in North Hollywood, many stops ahead on the line. Once our train arrived there, a bus ride and a short but convoluted walk would be necessary. After drawing my new friend a series of maps on torn-out journal pages, which he contemplated like treasure maps of Mars, I just accepted the lost hour and accompanied him on the train to North Hollywood myself. But know I'm not the hero in this story. That would be the bus driver, once we'd alighted in North Hollywood, to whom I yelled a quick download of my friend's situation through the bus doors from the sidewalk. (I couldn't do this final stretch with him - my hour was up.)

"Miss," the bus driver said (his only lapse - age wise, I'm a certain "Ma'am" by now), "I'll take him to Runnymede"—the appropriate intersection—"and not take my eyes off him, not until he's walked inna that store, I promise you."

I believed him. You would too, had you been there. Yes, there is falsity and cunning in this world, plenty of it. There is also straight-up kindness as unvarnished and real as a burn barrel in the night.

Because I walk everywhere or take public transit, and hitting up the sidewalks and strap-hanging are my personal nominations for "the real L.A." (everyone's got a nomination), I have many stories like this. Perhaps someday I will write them all down.

Until then, the top-line summary is that there are so many good people in the City of elusive Angels. I am often contemplating why exactly it is that the damns collectively given by the folks of L.A. do not always feel solid or close by when you need them. (Who would do a trust fall into a crowd of random Angelenos? Show of hands.) I think - and this is not exactly a groundbreaking hypothesis - that it's the freakin' roads. They might get you from A to B - eventually - but with their constant motion, noise, aggravation, and threat of injury or death, roads also fragment and suppress communities. Tuning out the neighborhood begins with tuning out the endless drama from the nearby road - drama that is meaningless to us personally, is a stranger's problem. I believe that's how the structural indifference of the city starts - literally with its structure. The roads are round-the-clock slashes of dehumanization. My fervent wish for Los Angeles in my lifetime is that more and more people reject this, take public transit or walk instead, and reclaim the space given to the most corrosive method of getting around. All these cars eat into the future, and eat into communities. It doesn't have to be this way.

These are the thoughts - of loss, the other side of loss, muffled connection, urban spaces - brought together in this year's Thanksgiving poem.