Monday night band practice is over. In our small clarinet section someone who also is band historian has returned so I'm certain she will note this and much else. The player who led the sub section, second clarinet, which puts up with me has been in the Bay Area with her job promotion.

The Bay Area has been a place of mystique for me, especially if you go back a few years. I often compared here, a. k. a. home, and there.

I'm coming around the hill behind the band's practice site to the street which will take me to the freeway. To my right I see a fence and some lights I haven't noticed before in the big posts. They remind me, not sharp but vivid, of the old street lights in Pasadena when the family would be coming out of a Sunday visit to an Aunt; something to reflect on in anxieties over the coming week, though this night I'm not concerned about school.

Behind the fence is William S. Hart Park. In the darkness I know water fowl are at rest and up the slope is the house the namesake built and lived in.

Coming through the hills approaching Sylmar Pass on a temperate night with alluring cirrus squirts above, I know the huge grading took out part of a wagon trail into the 1800's San Fernando Valley, still visible under the duress of crumbling time from the nearby Sierra Highway, called Beale's Cut.

Into the said San Fernando Valley a museum building called San Sylmar is off a mile or so to my left. Oddly, I have yet to go there but among its treasures are vintage cars, many of which can still run.

To my right as the wilderness part of Sylmar I've known since childhood but the Van Norman Lake holds reflections of preoccupied jewels, the lights of the Encino Hills and busy cascade of the 405 down another grade. You're over there, says the lake, but in my sights when you need water.

And law enforcement on two wheels. Look closely at the foreground to the lake and you will see some paving. Motorcycle cops are trained there, including one whose interest you might pique if you look closely but don't watch your driving.

Huell Howser, who died the day before, did a feature on that training center. And one on San Sylmar, including a ride in a vintage steam car. And how about the show on Hart's home, as well as the chunk of a show, shared with something I can't recall well north, on Beale's Cut.

My bandmate's company, an ecologically oriented home dismantling firm, was featured by Howser, how about that. Shards of songs the band played, or perhaps dismantled to a degree our first night back from a break, are with me. And memories of places all over the state I've been blessed to see that Mr. Huell highlighted in the low-key manner no glitter can match in intensity.

His-tor-ic, the man iconically said so many times. I'm afraid dismantling is an end state for so much and so many. But while we're here in California we work with many pieces and make some more history.