Today a headline on AOL caught my eye-- "Apocalypse Now Star dies at 53." This rang a bell for me, and I clicked on the link and sure enough, it brought me back to a former life (not in the literal sense-- I'm hormonal, but not totally out of it!).

A few months before I decided to come back to Maine, I ended up moving to L.A. with a friend to do an internship at a movie production company. It was pretty spur-of-the-moment and kind of nuts, especially for a homebody like me. I ended up interning at a small production company for the woman who had just won all sorts of awards for Traffic. I was pretty sure I was going to meet Benecio del Toro and have a bunch of dark little babies, but (fortunately) that was not to be.

I drove down from Olympia, Washington to L.A. right after 9/11 and so I was also pretty sure that the Universal Studios lot where I was working would be the next target of the terrorists. Getting the underbelly of my car checked with mirrors for bombs every day as I drove onto the lot didn't assuage that fear.

Both my roommate -- who had set me up with the internship, as she had one at another nearby studio--and I quickly grew to hate L.A. It was sunny every friggin' day which was jarring to this Southeast Alaskan girl-- where was the rain? I began to fantasize about winter coats in place of Benicio-- a sure sign that the end was near. Besides, the people-- at least the ones I worked for--were pretty ridiculous. One day I was asked to drive to the home of the head of the production company and fetch her special "meeting shoes" as she'd forgotten them. It was on this occasion that I briefly met her husband, Sam Bottoms, who had been in Apocalypse Now. He seemed nice enough as he handed over the shoes, but I wasn't much a fan of his wife-to-be. On one particularly bad day, while she had asked me to listen in on a phone call of hers (in Hollywood there are generally at least four people on phone calls-- the "important" ones and a few others to do the actual dialling and note-taking) she badmouthed me to the person she was speaking to, knowing full well that I was on the line.

Still, there were some good times-- mostly created by my roommate and I. This being right after 9/11, we both developed crushes on Tony Blair and created a Tony Blair shrine over the mantle of our fireplace. We'd purchased one of those Mexican "Our Lady of" candles and taped a small perky newspaper picture of Tony Blair's face over the face of the saint. And there was the famous poo in the pool incident that I won't go into, but suffice to say that a trip to the pet store and dark hooded sweatshirts were involved.

But, my roommate and I broke our lease and headed back to Olympia. Never was I so happy to see rain, and I even splurged on a J. Crew pea coat before I left L.A.

Not long after that, my roommate and I broke our lease and I made the drive back to Olympia. Soon I decided to make the next road trip-- the one that brought me back to Maine and set my life here in motion.

That other life seems like a million years ago instead of seven. Sitting here in our nice, old home (my brother-in-law is currently crouched at one of our windows with a hair dryer trying to fix the symptoms of an ice dam on our roof-- ah, home ownership!) with a big baby belly and a sweet husband. Life is good, and I won't be fetchin' anyones shoes but my own these days.