I walk along dusty streets at the base of the Verdugo Mountains just north of Los Angeles, my gaze fixed upon the jagged horizon, where an angry orange line burns, jumping and snapping, devouring brush and charring the landscape. Last night, shifting winds pushed wildfire over the canyon close to my home, the one I share with my husband and our daughter, who, like the city, is named after angels.

There are no arrival cards to scribble in, no scanner for my fingerprints. Just two ladies at a desk. One asks the questions, the other stamps passports. The questioner wants to know if I'm here “on business.”

I moved back to my hometown in rural Ohio in the dead of winter, intent upon making the best of things at a time when only the worst things seemed to be happening. It was a dreadful February of oxygen tanks, life-thieving coughing fits, bedside vigils, and late-night weeping in the darkened room where my grandfather lay dying.

If there is one thing that has always stood in the way of my father and me being friends, it is distance, and if there is one thing that has always brought us back together, it is movies. Even when we lived in the same house, I mostly saw my father on the weekends.

The road is straight for miles: not that you can see that with the gentle roll of the land but you’ve driven and walked and run it for thirty years and you have it in your heart dull and gray on a moonless night…

Back in the fifties Friday night was usually a fight night. This particular Friday I had a scheduled four rounder at Sunnyside Garden in Queens NY. This was supposed to be a milk run. The guy was an older, over the hill welterweight looking for a payday. The way that works was, the payday knew he was in the ring for some bucks and I was there to climb another rung on the ladder.

One of the EMTs talks about a medic walking into his ambulance company to ask for directions. The H.R. person is there, gives him the directions. Before he leaves, he happens to mention that he’s a medic.

Resurrect the girl getting off the Trailways in Raleigh, a backwater capital. The bus has stopped in every town since the Blue Ridge Mountains and the smell of the coach is steeped in cold tobacco smoke and the guts of meat lunches.