The Laker Street Irregulars

Again I write about my own apartment building, whether anyone wants to hear it or not. I continue to find interest in the people I live around. It's funny the kind of partial connection you have to dozens of people in a place like this. You get to know a lot of people in an extremely narrow and superficial sense.You see them as you're both coming or going. You exchange a couple of words in the laundry room, the lobby, or perhaps the grill area.

Then, in the case of the building's few children, you watch them from a distance as you would any other devastating force of nature. Actually, I guess they're mainly not that bad, but I keep a wary distance even so. In my adult life, I've lived apart from kids more than I've lived among them. Our neighborhood when I was a kid had plenty. The one we moved to from there had few if any. The ones out here in LA have had plenty, but I was not in such close proximity.

I must have given this one little boy a fright when he came to the door selling cookies or some such thing. I had to decline on account of not feeling able to spare the expense, but looking as I do, I'll bet I was rather intimidating. How little the boy knew what a flimsy facade that is. Adults that meet me in passing must see through any kind of rough exterior I might present. Kids, though, are less perceptive and more sensitive.

Other kids are whirling dervishes of energy. You just do your best to maintain a safe distance, and from there you both envy and resent their boundless energy and enthusiasm. I don't recall that I had what they have when I was their age, and I certainly don't have anything like it now. I'm just getting to where I'm kind of smart and can put out some decent stuff, but I'll never have what these kids have. I like them, though. They seem nice.