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.

These Are The People In My Building

It's been a few days since the last time I wrote about my apartment building, which means quite naturally that it's time for the next time. Some things about the place were obvious from the start, but others were only going to become apparent to me over time, and one of them is the people in the building. I already knew four people who lived there, and of course began to know the landlady early on (Should I call her the building manager or supervisor? It seems so cold and impersonal). The strangers in the building are at last becoming known to me at a glacial pace.

Several have become friends, but the jury is out on the others. I'm just now seeing some more than once, and I know their faces if not their names. Getting to know them is a curious dance. I ought to have introduced myself the first time I saw them, but I didn't, and so now it will be weird. I'm putting it off. I am getting to know them purely by observation and periodic, clipped verbal exchanges of one or two words. As I said, it's a slow process.

Great For Freight

For the first time since I finished college, I live in a building with an elevator. Those college dwellings were ambitious ones indeed. The first was 25 stories, and I was on a floor somewhere in the middle- my memory isn't what it was, but I believe I may have been on the fifteenth floor. Obviously I was high up enough to justify the regular use of that building's elevator. It was kind of neat, although much of the novelty was gone as I found how difficult it often was to use when demand for space exceeded supply. It was quick so long as one could get on though, and as it initially had mirrored walls, I found it a useful last chance to see how I looked before it was too late.

The second building I lived in during college was of basically equivalent size, so the elevator was the de rigueur means for getting up and down. The stairs were unthinkable except in case of fire or getting from the ground floor to the communal floor immediately above. As I think I may have said, this building is a mere three stories, and while I do live on the uppermost floor, the value of the elevator is dubious. It exists probably only because the law demands it. The edifice is probably just enough to trigger regulations that compel such things as an elevator, but the practicality of using it is limited.