Watch Duty, or Second Breakfast #13
Hello, this is Meghan McCarron, and you're reading my newsletter, Second Breakfast. If you no longer want to receive it, you can unsubscribe here. I live in Los Angeles.
We’re safe, and we’re ok. That’s what everyone asks, and as my friend and colleague Tejal Rao so beautifully put it, that’s all we can say.
Last Tuesday morning, my partner and I started texting about a fire in the Pacific Palisades, which isn’t far from where she works. Sirens were screaming down Sunset Boulevard — lots of them. I texted, “if they don’t stop this now, it’s gonna be bad.”
Twenty-four hours later, our texts were about friends who lost their houses not only in the Palisades, but in Altadena. About how I’d packed up three days of clothes, handmade blankets and our cat’s asthma medication before going on assignment. About her watching the kid when daycare shut down, about where people had evacuated and who might be next, about sending money to an ever-growing list of friends, about the toys and extra changing pad we could take to a family that had lost everything.
Gone are restaurants, art, records, photographs, toys, books, libraries, schools, neighborhoods, communities. Hiking trails where anyone in Los Angeles could get a million dollar view. Houses where I’d brought over old cookbooks or helped pick oranges and squeeze them into juice.
Saturday afternoon, I was making bagels and listening to KCRW’s music programming when a cover of “This Must Be The Place” came on. It was folky, even a little syrupy. Listening to a singer I didn’t care for sing “Home is where I want to be,” balls of dough tightening under my palms, was the thing that finally made me cry.
Some things to read, especially if you’re not in LA
I contributed some reporting to the New York Times’ ongoing and comprehensive live coverage of the fires. With Tejal Rao, I spoke to restaurant owners navigating the crisis. And I reported out how restaurant workers in the Palisades, one of the area’s richest zip codes, also lost their homes
The LA Times is doing essential work, including this piece on LA missing out on state fire preparedness funds
Khushbu Shah wrote passionately about the small, independent LA restaurants stepping up to feed thousands, even when they’re barely scraping by themselves
A comprehensive guide to how restaurants are helping, and other ways to give, over at The Angel
Priyanka Mattoo on how to actually help (largely, give money)
Thank you for reading this week. If you are in Los Angeles, and you’ve been seeing the endless discourse around air quality on social media, I’m hoping this webinar at 3pm will be helpful.
Meghan
