Hooray for Hollywood

And so there we were, zipping down the Harbor Freeway (yes, we actually were zipping) toward downtown Los Angeles, headed for Forest Lawn Cemetery so my half-cousin from Pennsylvania, who had never met our grandpa, could see his grave. My sister was driving and doing her part as tour guide. She says “see that white thing there at the top of hills up ahead?” We all dutifully looked at the white thing there at the top of the hill, and we all agreed that yes, we could see it. “That’s the Hollywood sign,” she said. And my cousin and her husband were dutifully impressed. And so was I. I was more than impressed, I was stunned. True, at first it was just a white blob, but as we got closer to it – and before we lost sight of it as the freeway dipped and we went through an interchange and a couple of tunnels and went around behind Griffith Park--the letters became more evident and it was obviously The Sign. I had lived in LA until I was 27 years old and I had never “seen” the sign, even though I must have made hundreds of trips down the Harbor Freeway and looked right at it without realizing what I was looking at. Made me wonder what else I have “looked at” and not seen.