Missing Ocean Park

Last May we returned to Santa Monica for a visit, our first in over three pandemic paralyzed years. We were greeted by the same weather that had welcomed me when I moved to Ocean Park 20 years ago. May Gray, late spring in Southern California, when the marine layer, formerly known as fog, settles along the coast for an extended stay. It was soothing if more than a little chilly.

The gloom didn't stop me from wandering my old neighborhood remembering why it had been so hard to leave those few blocks west of Lincoln, south of Pico and north of Rose. It’s not any one aspect of the neighborhood that attached me to the eclectic mix of houses, apartments, and shops. Not the beach with breathtaking views of the Pacific. Not the Diebenkorn palette of the cityscape. Not the walkability (walk score 90+) or that some of my favorite restaurants anywhere were just down the street. Most of those things could be found, often at a lower price, within a few miles.

It was about all of them and how they combined to make me feel like I belonged. Years before, I couldn't quite believe that I managed to pull off my escape. In just two months I sold my New York apartment at a crazy profit and bought the perfect place right next door to my dear friend Charlotte who had been my roommate in another beach town during our senior year at UCSD. She introduced me to the neighborhood when she purchased her home and called to tell me when the condo next to hers went on the market. That’s a true friend.

Raised in Ventura, a coastal city 65 miles north, I am a Southern Californian at heart. In Ocean Park I felt I had found my tribe. Not that I knew very many of my neighbors, but there was an ease to my circumnavigation of the place that I have not always found. And I have lived in and loved a lot of places. The neighborhood around Rice University in Houston, Fitler Square in Philadelphia, near Harvard Square in Cambridge. Then there are the places where I never really felt at home. Even though they were wonderful, exciting cities they weren’t my towns. Not Paris, not New York nor two miles down the road in Venice. 

Walking down Main Street or shopping at the Sunday Farmer’s Market, I believed I could strike up a conversation with most anyone and we would have something to say to one another. People who were making many of the same choices that I had, living at the urban beach where the issues of the environment and the city are inseparable.  People who use Little Free Libraries, listen to KCRW and head to Lula’s for margaritas. 

Some things had changed in the four years since we gave up our last apartment overlooking the ocean. Favorite shops and restaurants had closed, traffic seemed more congested, parking impossible. But Harry's Berries were still for sale and sampling at the Farmer's Market, the jacaranda were in bloom and walking the beach to the Pier was a tonic.

Santa Fe, New Mexico is home now. It's beautiful, quirky, livable and I am finding my community here. Creative, committed people who look in awe at the high desert sky the way I used to look at the ocean. More and more I understand.