News of the Arroyo
Title: | Parsing Pas' real, unreal |
Subtitle: | |
Date: | 2005-10-23 |
Summary: | October 23, 2005 - Dog-walking in the Arroyo hits the New Yorker, or at least Larry Wilson thinks so. |
Author: | Larry Wilson |
Publication: | Pasadena Star News |
Content: | I don\'t believe frequent New Yorker writer Tom Drury lives in Pasadena -- bios say Connecticut, the Pasadena of the East -- but from his short story \"Path Lights,\" published in last week\'s issue, he\'s sure spent time here. The whole funny, odd shebang takes place here, and centers around, sort of, a quintessential Pasadena ritual: dog-walking in the South Arroyo Seco. Damn good idea, and naturally a fellow writer reading it has a few \"Why didn\'t I think of that?\" moments, as, perhaps, a million Dubliners who\'d also strolled their town did on first dive into \"Ulysses.\" \"One day, a bottle almost hits us,\" Drury begins. \"It\'s a brown quart bottle that falls out of the sky. We are in the arroyo, the dogs and me, walking.\" The bottle has been tossed from the San Rafael Bridge. Our protagonist picks it up, makes a mental note of the \"The Gods Must Be Crazy\" parallels and sees that, now empty, \"Blind Street Ale is what it held.\" A plot involving finding the bottle-tosser ensues, more involved than the plots of stories people who used to complain about New Yorker fiction complained about, but not exactly, I don\'t know, Ross MacDonald. I liked it. Of course I am a reader of a certain sort when it comes to that mini-genre that is fiction set in Pasadena. Thirty-five years on the edge of the arroyo myself and all that. So I\'d be lying if I didn\'t say I\'m looking for the things that hit home, the things that are or were \"really\" there and the things that aren\'t or weren\'t. In \"Path Lights,\" those that are: JPL, where the protagonist\'s migraine-prone companion Ingrid works as an aerospace engineer, though her Mars mission is interestingly called Phaeton, a heretofore unknown Red Planet probe. Glendale, where our hero makes a living performing recorded books. If Martians were to \"build their conception of an Earth city, I suspect it would look like Glendale,\" Drury writes. The \"open streets, the trees that line up a little too well, the eccentric and vaguely futuristic architecture.\" More real: Mi Piace in Old Pas, where our couple likes the \"white tablecloths and vast cold Martinis.\" Funny, I hadn\'t even remembered the place had a full bar. When Councilman Isaac Richard used to make me pick up the tab there, we stuck to wine. ADT Security signs on a lawn. The Linda Vista neighborhood, where the bottle-thrower is tracked down. A deep-green Maserati, which I\'m seeing more and more of now that the dealership opened on Del Mar. And I dig Drury\'s description of the head of the Phaeton team: \"unshaven, jowly, with the mysterious light of extreme knowledge in his eyes.\" But I could be way wrong, and it makes no artistic difference whatsoever -- Drury can set his liquor stores where he likes in his own interior Pasadena --but I don\'t believe there is or ever has been a bottle shop anywhere on relatively short DeLacey, where the Blind Street Ale -- 12 bucks a quart! --\"flowery, with a tranquilizing undercurrent\" -- is sold. No matter. That liquor store is out there in the imagined cosmos now. I\'d just like to know where to get ahold of a quart of Blind Street. Larry Wilson is editor of the Pasadena Star-News. His column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Write him at larry.wilson@sgvn.com. |
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