REFUGE

With all the misery in the world around us, it's a relief to find a spot of refuge.  This past weekend we found it in family.  My son Matthew, his wife Diane and their three children, Alice, 15 and the twins Georgia and Joe, 13...

Joe, Alice, Georgia

... arrived from London on Saturday afternoon.  Our house is small, so Ellie and I vacated for three nights and left it to the family--spending those nights ourselves across the street at our snow-birding neighbors', currently back east.  We should have taken more pictures of the house.  With five big suitcases emptied of their contents and spread throughout, it looked like a thrift store following an earthquake...  Then, too, our two-and-a-half year old grandson, Luka, arrived with his Mom and distributed the contents of his toy boxes everywhere...

A fine, joyful chaos, then.  Saturday, we brought them all home from the airport in time for a great spread of soup and cheeses laid on by Ellie; Sunday, an equally fine spread for a lox and bagel brunch, then off to spend the afternoon at the museum--where we all enjoyed Chris Burden's huge reconstruction of a city, replete with busy transportation systems, freeways, trains and trams; Richard Serra's huge corten steel maze...

... and a walk out to Michael Heizer's Big Rock, balanced above its concrete trench...

... a special joy for Luka, who is "into" rocks these days.

Back home, we all "hung out" for a while...

Alice and Luka

Sarah and her nieces, Luka in the background

... and in the evening, Sarah drove all the kids over to her place for a "sleepover", and Matthew and Diane took us out for a wonderful, quiet dinner at the Parkway Grill in Pasadena.

Good food, good booze, good talk...  Monday, the mob returned and we took separate routes--the girls for a Beverly Hills shopping extravanganza (well, window-shopping, and lunch at Nordstrom's)...

Diane says, "We didn't buy much at Van Cleef & Arpels"!

... and the guys, with Luka, up the hill for a nostalgic walk around the Griffith Park Observatory...

... and on to the zoo, where we found a birdless aviary--very strange!--and wandered up through Africa and India in burning heat.  Before all getting back together at home for a take-out Mexican meal in the evening.

Tuesday, a misguided search for the House of Pancakes led us finally to the Astro diner, where we shared an oversized American breakfast...

So sad to see them all crowd into the airport limo at noon.  The English family are now off to Las Vegas and a cross-country trip to Iowa, where they spend a few days with Matthew's Mom and brother.  For us, meantime, it's back to the quiet of our Laguna cottage...