My commute to UCLA is a full hour, each way…but I have been lucky enough to get into a carpool that picks me up at my doorway and drops me off, quite conveniently, only steps from my classroom.  I’m usually the driver—my wife hates to get behind the wheel–so it’s liberating not to play chauffeur.  I can look out the window or space out or clean my backpack.  I feel like a dog off to the park–leashless.  I always keep the window open just a crack.

The two women who play a part in my commute—Dianne and Linda–are bonded:  they’ve been commuting together for six months prior to my intrusion and they’re like mother and daughter—one much older and wiser, the other, ready to take the teachings of a woman whose every word is gospel.  Dianne is basically a mom without the blood ties (which makes her better than a mom) and she holds forth, dropping knowledge-bombs like Dear Abby.

I know their routine:  I know they want to crank up the talk radio–that my presence is an interruption of a morning ritual–and they would rather gab about movie stars and boyfriends and love, without my eavesdropping.  So, we exchange pleasantries and, after a while, I put on my noise cancelling headphones and watch from the backseat as their hands move, ever more animated—fluttering doves—and they lean in:  a pantomime of friendship.

We take the kind of route that only true LA people use—all shortcuts through scenic neighborhoods:  Bel Air, Sherman Oaks, Holmby Hills.  We’re hardly ever on the freeway but crest over the mountain pass of the Hollywood Hills, scuddering through Mulholland Drive.  The artist David Hockney memorialized this drive in one of his most famous paintings—an effusion of colors girdling in a twisting road through a part of LA that is as close to rural as the urban sprawl can ever allow.  Whenever tourist-friends come to LA, I take them on this route at night so they can see the grid of the city, like a jewelry case, glimmering.  The next day, I take them to see Hockney’s oversized painting—Mulholland Drive–at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The painting documents the commute between David Hockney’s house and his painter’s studio.  And so I feel that during this special moment—these few weeks of commute—that the great British artist and I are fellow travelers;  doing this teaching has ignited the creative juices in my life; I feel like I’m going somewhere, headed to a place—a consequential place—a destination:  beautiful, lofty, cool.

I always listen to instrumental music.  Occasionally, I’ll check my iphone to see what the kids have posted to the Course Website on Discussion Board.  Then, I meditate.  It’s a pleasant time.  A time when I think about what I want to write but, due to circumstances, cannot yet.  It is the time before the starting gate when the horse and the jockey listen intently for the sound of a pistol that will make the animal’s muscles twitch so fast that, eventually, they foam.