The Golden Toothpick

Living with the paradox of luxurious leisure, and my dad's favorite gadget

The most shocking thing I saw in my early days in California was a $600 cashmere sweatshirt. This was in 2005, when I came to Los Angeles for what was supposed to be a one-month stint. My husband didn’t want to come, claiming he hated Los Angeles, but I was working on a book (Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend) and there was tons of research material I needed to see in Los Angeles. My son was a toddler, and I didn’t want to leave him for weeks on end, so I suggested that we pack up the entire kit and caboodle (child, dog, husband, babysitter) and decamp to LA.

Photo by Ioann-Mark Kuznietsov on Unsplash

We lucked into a wonderful Airbnb in Malibu—a cute house on five acres that were literally on the beach. The house was perpetually sandy. That year, the weather in California was almost surreally perfect, averaging around 74 and brilliantly sunny every day. Back home, in New York, there were thirteen snowstorms. I felt like a genius, and my husband reversed his antipathy towards Los Angeles in an instant.

Malibu is a strange place. It’s long and skinny, split asunder by one long, skinny high-speed road, the Pacific Coast Highway. You don’t pass through Malibu as much as you whip through it, the surf shops and plant stores blurring as you fly past. The PCH, as it’s known, is almost like a whitewater river with Class 5 rapids running through town. Getting from one bank to the other is a perilous adventure. If perchance you accidentally drove past the store or cafe you were looking for on, say, the ocean side of the PCH (as opposed to the mountain side), you might end up driving all the way to Santa Monica before you were able to turn around and make your way back to your destination.

Along the PCH, there are clutches of old cottages next to vast estates next to rickety commercial clumps next to shiny new developments. The character of the town, though, is still mostly rural. Once, when we were leaving our house, a horse leaped out of the yard a few doors down from us onto the PCH, landing just ahead of our car, and then it headed down the road at a dead run.