Bell

I grew up in Bell.
Bell is a little bedroom community near Vernon.
Vernon is a big industrial area near Los Angeles.
Los Angeles is ... umm.. you probably know where LA is.

Today if you were to take a drive down Beck St you would
notice that it is in pretty poor shape compared to what it was
in the 50s… actually, you wouldn't know the difference because you
didn't live on Beck St in the 50's so you will have to take
my word for it.

It was a perfect lower middle class neighborhood. Clean and
quiet and warm and marginally full of happiness and love and adolescent pain/angst like most of America in the 50s… we all had to be 15 once…
digressing…

After a recent drive through my old haunts, looking for my old house
and my old ball field and looking for the totems of my dead
friends - some in spirit, others in body - I began to wonder why things change. How do they change? and then I thought that probably nothing has changed (re reading what I just wrote). Indeed.. they are all there still. Tommy and Dave and Curtis and Dennis and the old fart across the street and the little Italian market on the corner and beautiful Wanda (first love I suppose) and all of it.. even the dreams.

It was, indeed, a slice of life.

Don’t bother driving down Beck St now. Today it is a private gated community and you cant really get in.

cathartisarus Ron