ROOTS

Sometimes it takes a jolt to make you realize how important it is to have that root in the ground that provides security about life—especially if your career is filled with the kind of insecurity that comes with being a novelist.  

A jolt like being evicted by your landlord.

“I’m completely renovating all the apartments,” his letter said. “So I’m giving all of you exactly five weeks to get the Hell out,” was the vein in which it continued, though in more lawyerly words that we later found were absolutely illegal when it came to the five weeks. (Eight weeks is mandatory under California law.) On everything else his fingers were gripped tight around our throats.

So after a month of looking Rita and I are moving from our beloved Santa Monica to Brentwood. It’s the distance of a whole mile and a half. A seven-minute drive. But with the emotional toll it took we might as well have been moving to Bangkok.

I’m sure I will come to love Brentwood and its sophistication as much or more than Santa Monica and its proximity to the ocean and its Third Street Promenade, so handy for turning visiting children and grandchildren loose for a whole afternoon.

But the agony of feeling rootless for three long, miserable, frightening weeks made me realize how important that root in the ground is—having a comfortable place to live that you can call your own.

Sure it makes for terrific storytelling—being forced from the castle or kicked out of the house by the evil stepfather or sent to prison for stealing a loaf of bread or simply being forced to relocate across the country or around the world and finding yourself without a proper roof over your head.

As for me, I need that roof above and that root below.