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Tar Pits

        The La Brea Tar Pits, a favorite place for me since childhood.  Seems that all kids must love it. The bubbling tar, the statues of trapped mammoths. The smell of crude oil. The observation pit is very special to me, bones still encased in tar. I would go visit the pit whenever I would go to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It has always been a plan to volunteer there and help extract and clean the bones.

       Once I started driving, there would always be a kite in the car. There is little to compare to flying a kite. The field east of LACMA was a great place to fly kites with no electrical lines and a lot of space. But then they built the hill of the Page Museum, and that took away some of the area. But it was still a good place to fly a kite.

      When they opened the Page Museum of Ice Age Fossils I went there with a friend whose name was Elaine, she was black, which is important to this story. There was a lot of security, paparazzi and hoopla going on. Prince Charles was there to see the new Page Museum. We are walking around the building and who comes through the museum doors, but the Prince himself. We were walking one way, he was walking the other, and he said hello to us, or at least nodded to us. Elaine said, “Who's that?" 

That was Prince Charles, he will be the king of England someday. 

"That man gonna be a king? He ugly."

      Thea liked the tar pits when she was wee, and we would fly kites. A few times people from the Park La Brea Apartments would come down to see who was flying a kite and say hello.

        Hal Perry, who was more famous for hanging out on Venice Beach in summertime, he was the guy playing guitar on roller skates in a turban and white flowing robes. He would always sing to Thea, he knew us by name, and if we didn’t run into him Thea would be very disappointed.

       When Thea was about three years old, Hana was about six months old, we were there to fly a kite. Hana in a backpack. The kite was flying, and a woman came up to us with another baby, a little older, also in a backpack. We admired each other‘s babies. I let her baby touch the string of the kite and we had a nice interchange. 

          Many years later Sarah and I remembered that that is where we first met, with Hana and Frannie in backpacks.

                                                                                                                                                                          Fossils are nature’s selfies