EULOGY FOR ALTADENA

Culture Honey Magazine, 1/11/2025

34 Christmases.

That’s how many we got at

486 East Concha Street, Altadena, California 91001.

Too few,

Considering me and my two siblings were supposed to inherit the house

Some day.

Grief is a strange thing,

Though, to be fair,

Every thing in life is a strange thing.

(What is time, for example?)

I remember

My 7^th birthday in the backyard, where Raphael from Ninja Turtles made an appearance,

and I remember

my infant brother covered in ants in a patio that no longer exists,

and I remember

my Bushhouse, which my dad built cuz we didn’t have a treehouse tree,

and the time capsules I buried

and the Christmas tree ornament stand I manned on the street (in lieu of a lemonade stand)

and learning to swim, saving my infant brother from drowning,

Pool parties,

Countless parties,

It was the party house for many years.

Everyone had a good time there, for sure.

I remember

My brother’s band practices

And my band Whatnot’s practices this past year and a half with Zakk

And “Go Banana” stunts in the early 2000s

And filming movies with RJ and Raf and Jared and Daniel and Colin

And Nintendo Blowouts with Joey and Brian and Damian and Paul and Ian and Nick and Andy

And my dad filming Christmas mornings on his crappy camcorder

Like when I got the Nintendo 64 (unknowingly then the greatest day of my life)

And visits from Santa

And memorizing my lines for the next day’s scenes of “Problem Child 3” or “Jingle All the Way” or “BASEketball” or “Walker, Texas Ranger” or, or, or…

And my surprise 18^th birthday party

And sneaking into Farnsworth Park with my friends in the middle of the night

And dressing up for Boy Scouts and karate

And reading Goosebumps books, instilling a life-long love of reading

And my small room before my dad added onto the house

And spending time with my Irish grandma and grandpa (man, I wish they met my daughter)

And preparing for my trips abroad (30+ countries, most of them launched from Concha)

And experimenting with new technologies

Like DVD players and computers

And my own phone line

And watching “The Daily Show” and “King of the Hill” religiously

And losing my virginity on a mattress on the floor of my second floor bedroom

And

I remember the self-destructive mistakes I made in that upstairs bedroom

My dad built for me

Just as high school was getting going,

What a fateful room that turned out to be.

I guess karma is real—couldn’t’ve happened to a nicer person, right? Right.

And my brother’s wedding in the backyard

For which I served as best man

And teaching my daughter how to swim in the same pool I learned

Now strewn with charred, jagged detritus and unrecognizable memories.

I remember

Too many memories

To remember

I remember

My whole life

There

on Concha Street.

It was all destined, somehow, all along, to burn to the fucking ground.

Houses aren’t just homes.

They’re settings and even characters in our lives.

They provide the walls and the doors and the windows and the spaces in which

We reach each other,

And perhaps, sometimes, connect.

One thing did survive: the stone castle, in the front yard,

Transplanted from my late grandparents’ home in lower Hastings.

A survivor.

But nothing else.

The worst part about pain

Is that you have to endure it alone,

No matter your support network or community

Your loss is yours to feel and experience alone

Just like death.

Perhaps Freddie said it best:

“Nothing really matters,

Anyone can see…”

My dad’s 33 years of sweat equity

In which he quadrupled the size of the house?

Snap! Gone.

Altadena’s history and identity, of which I was so proud to play a small part?

Roasted like chestnuts on an open fire.

Strange memories on this emotionally depleted night in Pasadena,

Cuz that’s all we homeless refugees have left.

For now.

But of course,

This wasn’t just a personal loss

Or a familial one,

Though it was certainly those two, too.

It was an entire community wiped off the map

Like we don’t matter.

Because, perhaps, we don’t.

What strikes me most is the utter meaninglessness of it all.

This wasn’t a terrorist attack,

Or a Russian nuclear strike.

It was an Act of God,

A freak accident of nature,

No rhyme nor reason discernible in the rubble.

The entire district that I represented on the

Altadena Town Council—

Census Tract 4602 (mostly residential), and beyond—

Completely decimated

Like it never existed.

Fire, like life, is a cruel, shark-eyed cleanser,

Taking no emotion or sentiment into its calculus.

No, fire is Magic,

Which giveths and takeths away

At will.

We’d been here before, of course.

I remember it, I was eight, just two years older than my daughter is now.

1993, the Kinneloa Fire, which started just before dawn on October 27, first as a small campfire lit by a schizophrenic unhoused man living in the hillsides, until soon

The entire fucking mountain was in flames, the same mountain currently ablaze.

My brother was barely one, my sister a year out from conception.

Our car at the same house was packed, ready to go,

School was canceled,

But the fire never reached out from the hills to kiss Concha Street,

Perhaps imbuing us with a false sense of security.

‘We’re by the foothills so surely we’re protected.’

Sure, protected for another 31 or so years,

But no more, no less.

This time, in the Year of Our Lord 2025 (because who can truly reconcile their Faith in a time like this, both locally, nationally, and internationally?),

We battened down the hatches following warnings of severe winds

And we cast a wary and weary eye on the sprouting brushfires, especially the one

Picking up clip in Upper Hastings Ranch—
the Christmas lights neighborhood (please tell me Harbeck Lights survived?!),

Which we enjoyed perhaps for the last time just a couple weeks ago—

Just like we enjoyed Christmas dinner at Concha Street exactly two weeks ago today, our very last Christmas at home—  

And we held out the slimmest of hope as January 7 turned to January 8,

But, alas, awoke (though we never fell asleep)

To behold the charred landscape

The eviscerated memories at

Fox’s

Christmas Tree Lane

Rite Aid

Eliot

St. Mark’s

Aveson

Odyssey

Waldorf

Altadena Hardware

Rancho Bar

Steve’s Bikes where my sister worked

And countless other beloved businesses and establishments

Up and down Lake Avenue (ironically named),

A sea of loss, pain, devastation

A sea of ash, crispy memories

A sea of singular nothingness.

All aboard the Ghost Train.

It only took a few measly hours to wipe out our entire lives,

To execute a Scorched Earth Strategy on an entire vibrant community.

The point was driven home with a glaring lack of subtlety:

Nothing lasts forever, don’t you remember?

So enjoy what you’ve got while you’ve got it.

Cuz it’s going to be over soon.

Sooner than any of you even realize.

But why?

Oh, Altadena (the “Dena,” to those in the know)—

You were my favorite place

on earth.