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Feb. 3, 2025

It could never...

After losing their home of 40 years in a devastating fire, Arthur Gilbert reflects on the irreplaceable memories and items they lost, yet finds solace in resilience, the support of loved ones, and the enduring value of experiences.

2nd Appellate District, Division 6

Arthur Gilbert

Presiding Justice, 2nd District Court of Appeal, Division 6

UC Berkeley School of Law, 1963

Arthur's previous columns are available on gilbertsubmits.blogspot.com.

Photo Courtesy of Arthur Gilbert

It did... our home, the house where Barbara and I lived for 40 years, burned to the ground. Nothing remained but charred rubble and debris. We lost everything.

Notice - "things." Many have monetary value, some no monetary value, but to us, they held value beyond calculation. The loss burns deeply.

Forty years ago, Barbara and I and our dear friend, architect Richard Appel, designed and built our home in Pacific Palisades. In another era, so many decades earlier, Richard and I were friends and classmates at Cheremoya Grammar School in Hollywood. In those days excellent grammar schools were free. There was, however, a fee to attend Hollywood Professional School. That was the school for kids, many I knew, who were actors and could not be in class every day. I still wonder if the money the kids made wound up in trust for their, not their parents' benefit.

Getting back to the things we lost. They include artwork, the concert grand piano, the books, the photos, and the cabinet behind the piano that housed the stereo equipment where our cats, Wardell and Natalie, listened disapprovingly as I practiced. And the loss goes further. No longer will Gary Greene's Big Band of Barristers rehearse in our front room.

We are now temporarily living in Hollywood next to the home where I grew up. Thomas Wolfe was wrong. You can go home again... at least when you have no choice. When I was 14, I read all his books, "Look Homeward, Angel," "Of Time and the River," "You Can't Go Home Again," and "The Web and the Rock."

After finishing "The Web and the Rock," I began turning in term papers in the florid bath of words that characterized Thomas Wolfe's undisciplined style. My English teachers thought counseling was in order. With maturity I weaned myself from Wolfe in favor of Hemingway's tip of the iceberg. I mastered the "tip" but not what was beneath the surface.

When people lose a home and the things in it, if they are like me, they review their lives spent in that home. During those days and later, I wanted to be a jazz pianist and a writer. The two do not mix well. I was playing a gig and we were about to do Monk's famous tune, "Epistrophe." I announced the tune as "Apostrophe." So later in life I compromised and went to law school. In high school I wrote a column for a slick magazine called the Junior Journal. The editor was Andrea Ordin. I interviewed exponents of what was known as West Coast jazz. They included Shorty Rogers and his Giants and percussionist Chico Hamilton, who headed a trio with the unusual mix of cello, bass and drums. I recall describing Shorty Rogers' flugelhorn as a trumpet with a thyroid condition. It cracked him up. I also interviewed the then-dean of USC Law School, Robert Kingsley, who was vehemently opposed to the death penalty. What would I have thought had I known we were to become colleagues some 30 years later on the Court of Appeal?

During the decade I was practicing law, I attended a party where as part of the entertainment there was a palm reader. The exotic lady carefully surveyed the lines in my right hand. She looked directly in my eyes and said, "You will be a published author of many works." She didn't tell me they would be in Cal.App.3d, 4th and 5th.

We lost things. But we do not define ourselves by our things. We did not lose ourselves. We have resilience and the support of family and so many friends. And we have deep sympathy for my colleagues and the thousands of people who have suffered the same loss.

And there is much more to do, like writing this column.

Postscript: My dear friend Neven sent me this poem by Elizabeth Bishop. Its wit and irony give perspective. No doubt she wrote it for me. 

ONE ART

The art of losing isn't hard to master; 

so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day.

Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. 

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant 

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! My last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went. 

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, 

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. 

I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster. 

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture 

I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident 

the art of losing's not too hard to master 

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

#383186


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