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My life has been a veritable ‘horn of plenty.’ Everywhere I go, there’s plenty of food.

There’s food everywhere. At fundraisers, there’s food. At galas, there’s food. If someone’s running for office, the food can cost about $2000 a plate. Meetings, weddings, funerals — there’s food. We’ve laughed at the ubiquitous rubber chicken dinner. Ironically, the sport of my friends is avoiding this food as much as possible.

It’s always striking to me that almost every week I’m in rooms with very thin women avoiding baskets and baskets of food. News specials are all about avoiding food.

Yet every affair has food more lavish than the last. “Ohh,” people will say, “they had colossal shrimp, caviar in an ice sculpture, a champagne fountain.”

“How was the food,” you’ll ask them.

“Oh, I didn’t eat anything,” some skinny minnie’s say, “I’m on the grapefruit/Atkins/Zone diet.”

Yet, every day I see people begging on the side of the road, on La Brea, under the downtown underpasses, on La Cienega in Beverly Hills — begging for food. The limousine liberals not a few blocks away raising thousands of dollars for the homeless, or the disease of the week, or ‘orphaned’ children, or John Kerry — should invite these folks to eat. Surely, they wont walk by the buffet — and not eat the food. They would probably eat as least one rubber chicken dinner, maybe even enjoy the always present Caesar salad.

Children who can’t afford breakfast or lunch — eating junk food the Federal lunch program calls healthy — may like a taste. They probably wouldn’t shun dessert, or turn down the carb infused bread. It’s too bad the people who need the food can’t get it.

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I’m not one to keep things, really. Every so often, I actually fill up the huge Department of Water and Power garbage can with stuff that really needs to go.

I was just cleaning out the garage today. It was filled with stuff the movers took from our last home in their successful attempt to pack EVERYTHING.

But still some things linger. That extra DSL modem that came from an aborted attempt to use earthlink DSL service — it never worked — the DSL. not the modem. That credit card machine that the bank never wanted back, two electric typewriters. “The Club” which I used to use on my old 1989 Camry — still one of the most stolen cars — it was stolen twice, I think.

I’ve tried giving this stuff away. But in America’s throwaway society — everyone wants something new — and they can probably get it at WalMart — for a cheap price.

Even the Salvation Army wont take half your stuff these days. They actually rejected my oak and maple hardwood furniture — because it doesn’t sell on the floor. Since when have the poor become finicky?

Don’t even mention EBay — I couldn’t sell my stuff on there — most of my stuff is being sold on there — brand new — with bids starting at 99&cent.

So, after lunch, I think it’s all going to the dump — maybe someone will rescue it from there.

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With all the ‘talk’ surrounding the fiftieth anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, I’ve been thinking a lot about segregation, desegregation, and resegregation of the places where we live.

In the last six years, I’ve had two completely different perspectives on neighborhood segregation.

Before moving to sunny Los Angeles, I lived in a town in Ohio — Shaker Heights. When I first looked for a house there, I was young — and broke. My Realtor brought a great program to my attention — the Fund for the Future of Shaker Heights. The purpose of the fund as I understood it was to encourage integration of Shaker Heights. Like many cities and towns, though, diverse by the numbers, it was well known that the blacks lived on the south side of town — south of the Van Aken/Blue Line — and whites lived on the north side of town.

My husband and I were thrilled — low interest down payment assistance — it couldn’t get any better financially. That was less money we had to come up with up front. The dilemma — because there’s always a dilemma — where did we fit in? As an interracial couple — the city of Shaker Heights had not come upon a case like ours. The loan was for white people moving to the black/south side of town — or black people moving to the white/north side of town. There was a map, it was all decided. Then we came.

After a conference between those in the know, it was decided that we could move anywhere and still qualify for the loan — we qualified as ‘Other’. Not having any money — we moved to the south side of town. Adam’s was often the only white face on the Van Aken line coming home every night.

Then we came looking for a house in Los Angeles. Again, this city, like all others, is divided. The black people live on the south (central) side of town. The Latino people live on the east side. Whites live on the west side (if they can afford it), the South Bay, or in the San Fernando Valley. Oh, the lines may be a little more blurry — Pacoima? — but we all know how it shakes out.

Choosing a place to live was again a challenge. Our first priority is always proximity — so we started in the middle of Los Angeles. Due to a number of factors including house size — we decided to move to an area just south of Hancock Park. This area had traditionally housed the city’s ‘black elite.’ Architects, lawyers, doctors — who hadn’t been allowed, because of restrictive covenants, to live in Hancock Park or Beverly Hills, lived here. You know the type of place — large stately homes — now surrounded by urban blight.

While the area had been and remains predominantly black, the population is slowly changing. Our new neighbors are young white and interracial couples looking for affordable L.A. housing.

What has been quite surprising is the backlash I hear and read about from black neighbors. One neighbor told me she didn’t like another because he was a young white guy trying to change a middle-class black neighborhood. It was too bad, she thought, that housing prices were exceeding the budgets of the black middle class who she believed should populate the neighborhood.

The same sentiment was expressed in a Los Angeles Sentinel article about erecting Historic Preservation Overlay Zones in our neighborhoods.

“Older residents who are mainly African American fear they are losing what
once was a neighborhood where hardworking blacks felt safe and comfortable.
The neighborhood is still safe, but some residents feel blacks are not
being allowed in because they either cannot afford to or they are excluded from
viewing homes that are up for sale,” the article said.

As the American population grows, swells, and becomes less homogeneous, it appears that the natural order of things will lead to more diversity. But the folks who have been relegated to some areas are fighting integration.

In Shaker Heights, many people I talked to resented the Fund’s purpose. White folks were getting a break, they said, to come in and change our black neighborhoods. In L.A., many seem to resent the reinvigoration if our neighborhoods with new non-African American faces.

Call it reinvigoration, gentrification, whatever — I think we’re better off integrated than segregated.

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Well, I’ve finally done it. I’ve gone wireless. That’s right. I’m no longer tethered to a messy tangle of wires.

As I’m writing this blog, I’m at my kitchen counter watching my dinner on the stove. There’s jazz on the tv via the DVD player, and I’m feeling the ocean breeze through my back door . . .

For just a few dollars and a few minutes of plug-n-play configuration, I can enjoy DSL from my kitchen without a phone line. It’s the greatest liberation.

Let’s face it, most of us are on the computer several hours a day, checking and sending e-mail, reading and writing documents, surfing the Internet. Usually, I was confined to my office — the warmest room in the house. Now don’t get me wrong, I love my office, its rich red walls, the warm honey hued wood furniture, my chair and ottoman. But just sometimes, I get tired of forgetting that I’ve got a tea kettle on (to the demise of many tea kettles, mind you), of running downstairs to answer an insistent doorbell, of trying to write e-mails and cook at the same time.

Now, I’m free to do all of those things virtually at once. I’ve always marveled at how computers have changed our lives. Now, for the first time, I’m changing my life to the way it used to be . . . and I’m dragging my computer along for the ride.

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All anyone has been talking about for days is the end of ‘Friends.’ Now this is a television show I never watched. I’ve never been able to understand the fascination with six white people with a big apartment who never seem to work.

I think once, one of my in-laws (who were hooked to the show) talked about how it seemed so realistic. For whom?

I’ll admit that I did watch one episode, last season I think, with Aisha Tyler — ’cause I’d heard through the grapevine that there was (at least temporarily) a ‘black’ friend.

Not watching the show, I don’t have much more to say on the subject. So, I’ll paraphrase a joke from the Real Time with Bill Maher filming I attended. He was discussing — Ross Perot style, with visual aids — how George Bush was raising money from some of the whitest organizations in America. Ad the end of the joke, he remarked that next thing you know, he’d be raising money from the cast of ‘Friends.’

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