Daily News, July 24, 1994

Strange events are afoot in the land: My friend decides to move to San Clemente after someone shoots himself during a party in the house next door to where his two little girls are asleep in bed; O.J. Simpson's attorneys decide to play the ever-powerful race card, thus guaranteeing that Simpson won't be convicted if he's innocent and won't be convicted if he's guilty, either; and the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashes into Jupiter with the impact of 6 million megatons of TNT, thrilling astronomers, encouraging Star Wars engineers who need another mission for their talents, and filling sensitive souls with dread about the end of life as we know it. Well, I tend to be pretty sympathetic to this latter group myself. Every generation has its cross to bear. In the age of the Vikings, residents of small English coastal towns prayed every night that God would protect them from the Norsemen. The early settlers worried about Indian attacks and grizzly bears. Our own parents had the decade long terror of depression or the horror of World War II.

Ours was the first generation which had it different. Those of us who grew up in the '50s escaped all that. If we avoided going to Vietnam, which was easy enough for college students, there was no real personal trauma. The economy was booming. We were the world's pre-eminent industrial and cultural power. Things got better every year.

With the end of the Cold War we thought we had seen the end of potential major catastrophes. Then suddenly into our national consciousness along comes the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 smashing into Jupiter to remind us that we are a pitiful species on an obscure planet, orbiting a third-rate star in an undistinguished galaxy hurtling through a universe which not only doesn't care about us but doesn't even know we're here.

Of course, in the long run, it doesn't really matter if a comet comes along and does to us what the Yucatan asteroid did to the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. What difference does it make if we spend a few less years on Earth now when you compare that to eternity? All it does is move up the timetable for the endless dark fate we all face anyway. The important thing is to keep busy, keep our minds off it and keep working -- preferably in a safe place.

I remember once I was in college taking a final exam in quantum mechanics. This was a serious exam for professional physicists and, if the truth be told, way over my head. After the course was over, the professor, who unaccountably took pity on me, told me he'd be happy to give me a C for the course if I promised never to take a course in advanced physics again. Of course, the chance of that was zilch anyway. But the final exam was the thing that stuck with me.

I was sitting there with my ankle on my knee looking at Schrodinger's Equation, which I'd written in ball-point pen on the soft white rubber of the instep of my tennis shoe and suddenly I had this vision of myself in the country, on a hilltop farm, with flowing fields and a meandering stream down below lined with bushy green trees. It was so vivid I could have counted the trees, walked off the fields with a measuring rod and drawn you a survey map.

At the time, I didn't know what was happening. It was so real I could barely concentrate on the exam. Now I understand that it was my mind telling me in the most vivid possible way that it didn't want to be there. And the strange thing is, I still have these little daydream-visions all these many years later.

I'll be sitting up here in my secure little office, on the second floor of my home, with windows on three sides, looking out on the hills of Eagle Rock, watching the trailer trucks on the 134 Freeway, and suddenly I'm in a big old house on a pine-covered mountainside high above a mountain valley. Then I trudge out the back door through the knee-high snow to my little private writing shack, fire up the Franklin stove, pour myself a cup of steaming French roast, align my satellite antenna, then sit down in front of the keyboard and start pounding away.

Woody Allen once said that he loved New York because he liked the sidewalks and he could get roast Peking duck at 3 a.m. In this sense, human beings are like baby ducklings - the first thing they see that moves after they hatch (a dog, a wooden pull-toy, it doesn't matter) is always their mother. The difference is, with human beings, what imprints on them is the place where they grew up.

For Woody Allen, there will never be anything like New York. I, on the other hand, spent my first couple of years in one-half of a rented yellow brick house, high on a steep hillside overlooking a small glass-and-rubber manufacturing town in western Pennsylvania. A long, wide sidewalk/verandah ran the length of the house and then continued on as a little narrow grass-lined path to a battered chicken coop 100 feet to the north. Stretching down from the verandah was a steep terraced hillside of tomato and pepper plants.

There's a picture of me at age 14 months in some kind of kid-propelled stroller on the old cracked verandah in the bright sunshine. And that's what I remember when I have these vision/flashes - a bright warm day, a high hillside with a sweeping view, a grassy narrow path and chickens cackling in a funky old wooden coop in the early morning sun.

Ever since I've had an unaccountably benign view of chickens. There's a rooster in my neighborhood and sometimes in the morning when I'm half asleep I hear it crow. It's such an agreeable sound. It reminds me of remote villages, summer mornings and the natural rhythms of country life. Once I asked a man down the street who had a few chickens if the rooster belong to him. I only wanted to thank him, but he resolutely denied it, for fear, I suppose that I'd report such a noisy bird to the police. My early imprinting had another effect - it made me recoil with passion from neat streets, manicured lawns, well-maintained houses up to code set back nicely from the street. When I take a bike ride, I avoid such neighborhoods, much preferring a little dirt and grassy alleyway running between people's back yards with their fishing boats and their barbecues, paint-flaking old benches and worn patio stones.

Over the years I've become an aficionado of steep two- and three-story wooden stairs, the kind with multiple landings, crowded railings filled with potted plants, cat dishes, wind chimes and rusty iron stands for holding bottled water. When I'm forced to ride down paved streets, I find myself still looking for the human scale - broken curbs, grass sprouting out of cracks, steep, broken, concrete stairs leading down old untended hillsides.

There are spots (some in the most unlikely places) that feel unaccountably warm and secure to me (one is the stretch of Broadway on the downtown side of the L.A. River with the high embankments leading up to Elysian Park). I've tried to analyze these places and find out what makes them safe and cozy, but it has so much to do with deep personal needs that I'm not sure my criteria apply very much to other people. I remember once many years ago when I was still a teen-ager I visited my uncle, who ran a tombstone business, in the workshop where he carved the stones. Off the large main workroom, there was a smaller room with old rotating machinery and off that an even smaller room - this greasy, dark, dirty place with dusty shelves full of battered rusty chisels, a grinding stone, a bare greasy overhead bulb and a small dirt-obscured window facing a gas station parking lot.

I was standing in there with my uncle, who wasn't known for his ease with other people, when all of a sudden he got this strange embarrassed look on his face. "I like to work in here when it's raining," he said. I was startled. The place was a dirty black grease pit. But even at that age, I knew he was sharing something important. He was telling what made him feel personally safe -- from the rain, from other people and, I now understand, from catastrophic cosmic visitors that come sweeping in from outer space like comet Shoemaker-Levy 9.