As I walk around the streets close to home, it seems that the old neighborhood
doesn’t change much from day to day, and sometimes it’s easy to think it
doesn’t even change so very much from year to year. Certainly some of the neighbors put out the
same decorations every Christmas. I
don’t blame them since I, of course, don’t put out any decorations at all. I mean there are plenty in the house but not
outside for passing gawkers/walkers.
One of the things my kind of casual local walking does
is make you more observant of small changes.
So, the photograph above was taken yesterday, on Christmas Day, and any
fool could tell that things weren’t quite as they’d been in previous
years. For one very obvious thing, it has
been rather wet in Hollywood this last week or two, wet enough that your poodle
decoration would definitely need some protection from the elements. I took the photograph above, and knowing that I’d
taken a similar photograph a couple of years back, when I got home I did some
compare and contrast.
I saw they’d painted the mailbox for one thing (maybe I
noticed that because I know my own mailbox needs repainting). Also they’d got some new and more plentiful
Christmas lights. And some work had been
done on the tiny patch of, for want of a better word, garden: goodbye to the
agaves, hello to some things in pots that I can’t name.
Also the fine old car (was it a Buick?) that had been sitting
in the driveway next door for a good long time, and looked like it was never
going to move, has moved - to be replaced by a Mercedes. Some would say that’s a step in the right
direction. Me, I’m not so sure.
