Signal Hill

Have no recall about meeting up with other homeless people when I walked to Signal Hill and hung out for hours. The Signal Hill park was a dirt Lover’s Lane when in 1994 when I moved to Long Beach. My daughter lived on Redondo Avenue which is where I stayed for my first six months in town, until I got my own apartment on First Street. Leaving the building by the alley gate, I was ½ a block from the beach. Heaven! I could go to the beach every day and it did not cost money. I stopped mentioning that bit about the free beach. Seems some people thought it a good idea to start charging admittance fees to use it, when I told them about the Jersey Shore. I do get sidetracked when I write.

Dawn liked to walk to Signal Hill. She was trying to lose weight. I enjoyed walking with her although that street leading up the hill from Redondo was quite steep ~ a killer. And I was in fairly good physical shape at the time. Do not remember if I ever went to Signal Hill via Redondo during my homeless days. I do know I walked from Willow Street south on Redondo quite a few times.

I would sit on one of Hilltop Park’s benches thinking. The day I took this photo, I could see Los Angeles skyscrapers in the distance. Can not see them in the photo. Dawn and I watched 4th of July fireworks from Signal Hill one year. Amazing sight. I think I counted 13 displays going on off in the distance, including Disney Land’s in Orange County.

Other days I would sit on a bench, no photo yet, below the park. I would look down over the city of Long Beach thinking.

White blob, slightly to right of center which might look like part of the sky but is actually the ocean is the Spruce Goose dome. Former home of Howard Hughes airplane. It was slightly more visible before I let Windows Auto Adjust the exposure. I was thinking about my homeless peers down there on the streets. Somewhere, I thought, a man is beating his wife, someone is being robbed, someone is being raped, someone is being abused. A lot of some ones are working like I used to be doing.

I never spread my blanket to take naps at Hilltop Park, even though I some times laid a towel down in the grass to sun bathe there when I was still homed. The park has two unisex restrooms. The ceilings are wired. Nice on hot, sunny days, wished I could take a nap inside. Not so nice when raining.

Not sure which was worse, walking up Signal Hill with my heavy backpack or the walk back down, when gravity seemed to be pulling me faster than I was walking. There is a fence railing that I hung onto when I used the road that lead down to Cherry Avenue. When in that area, I walked past Universal Care, remembering…