HOLLYWOOD — The jacaranda on my corner opened about a week ahead of schedule this year, and I took it personally.
I have lived under that tree for a long time, long enough to treat its bloom as a calendar the city does not print. Sometime in the back half of May it lets go all at once, and the whole street turns the color of a bruise healing — a purple so saturated it looks staged, like someone dressed the set overnight. The blossoms come down in drifts. They stick to windshields and shoe soles and the hoods of parked cars, and they make the sidewalk slick enough that the man who walks his terrier past my window has started taking the other side of the street. It is a mess. It is the best mess we get.
What the jacarandas announce, really, is the light. For most of the year the sun sets on Hollywood at a reasonable hour and the neighborhood goes about closing up. Then late spring stretches the evenings out, and suddenly it is a quarter past eight and still blue overhead, and the marquees along the boulevards come on into a sky that has not finished with the day. There is a particular half hour when the neon is lit but the streetlights have not caught up, and the old signs look the way they must have looked to somebody arriving here in 1948 with a suitcase and a bad idea. I try to be outside for that half hour when I can.
It is also the season the tourists come back in force, and I have made an uneasy peace with them. They stand in the middle of the sidewalk photographing things I stopped seeing years ago, and every so often one of them asks me to take the picture, and I do, and I am reminded that I live somewhere people save up to look at once. That is worth a little inconvenience on the sidewalk. Not a lot. A little.
Late May is graduation, too. The high school lets out its seniors into the same warm evenings, and for a couple of weeks the neighborhood is thick with kids in gowns being photographed by families who drove a long way to see it. I watched a group of them last week posing under a jacaranda in full bloom, and the girl in the middle kept brushing blossoms off her shoulders, laughing, losing the battle. Nobody told her to stop. Some pictures are better with the mess left in.
The bloom will be gone in a couple of weeks. By the middle of June the tree is green and ordinary again and the sidewalk is just a sidewalk, swept clean by the same wind that made the mess. That is the deal with the jacarandas, and with a lot of things here — brief, gaudy, impossible to keep. Go stand under one before it quits. I will be doing the same, on my slippery corner, not quite ready.