My fireplace mantle is stuffed &\’9;with get-well cards. They come from people I know and many I\’ve never met. One of them might have come from you. In the two months since I started writing about my lung cancer, the cards have been flowing in, plus an equal number or more of e-mails. They touch me deeply.
Only eight years ago, when Richard Riordan and Mike Woo faced off in the mayoral election, Los Angeles was not like this.
What right had I to hope? Cancer is an expensive disease, draining huge chunks of time and money, not to mention enthusiasm. To hire the artist Susan Krieg for my doorway project, I had to dig into capital that would have scared me even during my most productive years.
Does it matter to you what ethnicity the next L.A. mayor will represent? In the upcoming April primary, there are two Jewish candidates, long-time city councilmember Joel Wachs and real estate broker Steve Soboroff.
My brother and I are sitting on the kitchen floor cutting pipe. Actually, he\’s cutting and I\’m criticizing. This combines two venerable family traditions.
One of the most engrossing reality-based television shows is the thrice-weekly KLCS public broadcasting program, \”Conversation with Roy Romer.\” Unlike \”Survivor\” and \”Temptation Island,\” where contestants wearing cruise and safari garb compete against each other and the weather, \”Conversation\” features little more than a white-haired man in a black suit talking to off-camera live callers wearing who knows what. Nevertheless, the sharks are out. Romer is superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), and what is at stake on the show is the education of some 700,000 Los Angeles children.
I am determined to learn nothing from my cancer. Last month, I had lung surgery known as a thoracotomy. A cancerous tumor in my lower left lobe is gone. I\’ll have chemotherapy, and pretty soon I\’ll be bald. That\’s all I care to know about this completely hideous, unprovoked and unpredictable disease until the CT scan says that the cancer on my chest wall is under control.
Nostalgia for Bill Clinton? Don\’t say I didn\’t warn you. Even as George W. Bush takes office, the Jewish community is weeping sentimental tears for the almost lethally charismatic president who, in the words of The Forward, \”had come to embody the hopes of Jewish liberals in America and Israel during the 1990s.\” Clinton, who is no stranger to schmaltz, had policy wonks and foreign affairs careerists alike publicly weeping when he chose the Israel Policy Institute as the site of his last address last week, hinting that yet one more attempt at an Arab-Israeli solution was still in the works.
Pauline Bebe, France\’s first and only female rabbi, was in town last week, soaking up not only the winter California warmth but our spiritual rays, too.
We were too late for the early bird special at the Swiss Chalet restaurant in Delray Beach, Fla., but there was a line anyway for the roast chicken that is widely acclaimed as being almost as good as my mother\’s.
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