There are few things that make me more homesick for the 20-plus years I spent in Los Angeles than watching “Bosch” on Amazon Prime.
It’s really only one thing.
It’s the view from the balcony of Bosch’s home in the Hollywood Hills, usually at night. Look out to the south and west and the city just goes on forever. all the way to the darkness of the Pacific Ocean in the west.
The City of Angels isn’t the world’s most beautiful city — not by a long shot — and it wasn’t my first choice for where I wanted to live in California. But my first view from the upper parking lot at Dodger Stadium after a night game literally took my breath away.
I was born in Southern California, but my parents moved east when I was an infant and never even visited until I was 28 years old. That was when I decided I wanted my career to take me to California, and I worked my way across the country and reached the threshold in late 1988 when I got a job in Reno.
I lived there for a year and a half without ever shooting a man just to watch him die.
I mention Reno because five or six times in the year and a half I lived there, I made trips — usually just for three- or four-day weekends — down to visit my friend in Los Angeles. It’s funny. Except for seeing the opening night of “Back to the Future II” at Universal Studios in November 1988, I don’t really remember much of what I did on those weekends.
I remember one weekend that was nearly a disaster. The night before I was scheduled to drive 500 miles back to Reno, my friend was suffering from a kidney stone. I was up most of the night taking him to the emergency room.
I left for home at 6 a.m. and got to Reno in time to work an eight-hour shift. If there’s one thing I wish I could remember, it’s how much easier life was to be 39 years old.
I don’t think I ever spent as much time driving as I did when I lived in Reno. All those trips to L.A., at least six or eight trips down to the Bay Area, trips around and across Nevada. The trips to San Francisco were the ones I liked best. It has always been one of my two or three favorite cities in the world, although I haven’t visited there since 2004.
But L.A. became home. I lived in the Southland from the spring of 1990 until the late fall of 2010, the most years I ever lived in one area. If it weren’t so damned expensive to live there, we would have stayed.
I honestly don’t know if I’ll ever make it back to my old stomping ground. We really don’t travel all that much anymore, and our top priorities are trips to see our children and grandchildren.
But if I ever miss it, all I’ve got to do is put on “Bosch” and look out at the City of the Angels.