Arthur Rackham
                                                                                                                  "The Twa Corbies" from
                                                                                                                  Some British Ballads (1919)
                                                                                                                   From Old Books

Though you may think I live a quiet and uneventful existence, I am no stranger to adventure.  In fact I relish peril and a little danger now and then, or just the occasional diversion from routine, and so I leapt at the invitation to a pre-dawn cross-city jaunt with an old friend who had been far too kind of late not to be building up to asking a favor.  As it turned out, the request was simplicity itself, nothing more than being his chauffeur for yet another of his in-and-out hospital visits.  I observed that, figuratively speaking and given the frequency of these cosmetic procedures, there was a well-worn path from his door to the surgeon's knife and back, but didn't he worry he ran the risk of becoming unrecognizable even to his closest kin?

"That's why I bring this," my friend retorted, waving a photograph in my direction.  It appeared to be his high-school graduation picture.

"My headshot," he corrected.   When I gently tried to remind him that his acting career had ended with the introduction of sound, he abruptly changed the subject.  

"I'll show you a shortcut," he announced brusquely.  "Make a left up there.  And mind the traffic."

As we were on a particularly curvy bit of Sunset Blvd. headed west, his warning was more than justified.  Narrowly dodging a Porsche and a school bus both doing 120 on the blind curve, In the next instant we had plunged into near darkness onto a narrow lane descending between towering hedges.   'There's Heff's place," he said, pointing.  "You announce yourself by talking into that rock."

A large faux boulder rested in a bed of ivy by a stately gate leading up to the Playboy Mansion.  We made a right and began a slow winding incline.  "Mapleton Drive," my friend explained.  "Everyone lived here once -- Bogart and Bacall, Bing Crosby, Lana Turner..." 

Glimpses of stately homes and ersatz mansions loomed up on either side, cheek by jowl above dense shrubbery.   "STOP," he commanded, at a break in the otherwise inpenetrable foliage, where a rambling white clapboard and green shuttered edifice suddenly revealed itself.

"Judy," he whispered reverently.  "Judy's place.  It's one of the few that hasn't been torn down or altered beyond recognition."

Unlike himself, I could not help suggesting, but he pretended not to hear me.  

In the next moment we rounded a bend and came up against a towering dark mass that blotted out the sky.  The scale was disorienting, as though the Death Star had landed on the hillside above us, or, as my eyes began to focus, as if somehow we'd been transported to a parallel universe and were now in a land of giants who possessed a vague taste for Louis Quatorze.  "Dear lord have mercy," I cried out.

"It's The Manor," my friend replied.  "Candy and Aaron's place.  Make a right."

Later, after dropping my friend at his destination with a final plea to him to exercise some restraint and not have everything done, I headed east again with some time to kill (no pun intended), this time on Wilshire.  The sun rose and a fierce wind kicked up and I reflected that, unlike Nicky Haslam, whose memoir I had recently finished reading with immense pleasure, my own life if translated to print would not be quite so filled with the names of the very rich and famous unless you counted the gates and mailboxes (and apartment numbers and doorman-guarded entrances) it's been my fate to pass and drive by over the years, here and there, in this town and places like it.  But towns and places change, of course.  We go back and visit and find them altered.  Time can be unkind, if not downright cruel.  

Speaking of cruel, you will be interested to know that "The Twa Corbies" is a rather ghoulish tale of two crows talking about whether to eat the handsome young knight who's lying dead in the field, killed by his lover's new boyfriend.  You can just make out the body through the gnarled branches.  If I had more time I would elaborate on the rich symbolism here about the ways in which Time can ravage Love and Physical Beauty and Real Estate, but you get the idea.

Now, tell me what the difference is between a corbie (corby) and a crow.  Or a corby and a raven.  Or a rook.  Is a rook the same as a corby?

"And in memory's free fall I saw the plume of blue smoke, smelled the scent of fiery ashes, saw phantoms running in rust-gold summer bracken.  Somewhere in the low chalk woods, rooks cawed, heralding winter.  I closed the window."

-- Nicholas Haslam, Redeeming Features, a Memoir (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009)