An L.A. moment

I had a book talk and signing Thursday evening at the Los Feliz library, so I departed lovely Mar Vista early to beat the crush. To be more precise, I pulled out of the Starbucks at Barrington and National (1), fortified with caffeine for the Santa Monica Freeway, right about 4:30. Ten minutes into the trip, my editor at Los Angeles Magazine called. She had just left Wilshire and Ogden (2), headed for Altadena (4) via surface streets. We chatted about gossip, did some serious work and compared traffic notes. Mine was flowing smooth and easy, so I decided to keep it simple and barrel straight up Vermont. With luck I'd get an hour at Fred 62 (3) to collect my thoughts.

Her drive was a grind, hammered by buses and short lights. We had time to discuss a story and dissect the day's headlines. I'm not sure when we realized what might be coming. In retrospect, perhaps we should have given it the reverence you afford a perfect game in baseball and let the feat go unmentioned until it was official. But we didn't. She began to call off the street names. Catalina slipped past. "Can you see El Pollo Loco?"

I could. As I rolled north on Vermont, she idled three cars back from the red light on eastbound Olympic. "Oh look," she reported. "There's a bicycle behind you."

Two Angelenos passing in the sprawl, our paths intersecting in time and space and the ether of cell phone technology.