My father hates L.A.
Growing up on Livonia Avenue,
Los Angeles was a place
of deficit for him —
little money,
a father lost at seventeen,
a strict Jewish upbringing,
a family circle
limited by the Holocaust.

On the other side of town,
my father tells the story,
a cousin was a hotel doorman
where Howard Hughes resided.
Hughes helped the cousin’s son
into medical school
when school after school
rejected the Jewish young man.
Success was serendipity.

For my father at seventeen,
long hours bagging at a grocery store
helped pay his family’s bills —
no Hughes or good luck story.

Instead,
he worked, studied, scrimped, saved
to pull himself
over the horizon of Los Angeles.
Discrimination, death, circumstance
marked this son of an immigrant’s path.

My father hates L.A.
But for me,
L.A. is a classroom
in which to learn
about overcoming.