Véronique and I have known each other sixty nine years, more or less. I won't say that we've been friends all that length of time - lop a few years off - because the first time I met her, her mother (my own mother's best friend from school) thought that I might like to help change her diaper, which three year old me thought was completely gross...
The last time we were in Century City together, however, would have been ... in March 1988, when I was doing some work in UCLA library before giving talks at UC Riverside and Cal Tech. That was my first trip to LA, and mercifully she baled me out of the horrible hotel I'd landed in on Sepulveda - probably a Day's Inn? I had no money to speak of. A few hours into my visit, I thought Los Angeles was all oil derricks and pouring rain, which proved to be a misleading impression, in the long run. But I found a pay phone, and called Véronique, and she swept me off to stay in her apartment in Santa Monica, which was ... a change of scenery, and wonderful. It still rained, though ... One day, and that was before the Mall was a consumerist dream, she took me to her office which was high up in one of the towers, and I looked down on the hazy city ...that was a long time before I had even the faintest idea we'd both end up in the same place.
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