Everything changes. Everything. Especially in Southern California.
[...]

Twenty-two years ago, late in the evening one night in March of 1981, to be specific, my mother was killed in an auto accident on Foothill Boulevard in a town called Claremont. This was one town over from ours. She was on her way home. She was killed instantly --- at least in every meaningful sense of the word. And the impact of her car left a softball-sized dent in the foot-thick metal pole that held up the street lights at the intersection where she died.

The street, Foothill Boulevard, is the main drag in the region. It's actually the westernmost part of the legendary, cross-country Highway 66 and for years after I'd see that dent --- hard to notice for most people, but hard for me to miss. First as a passenger in other people's cars I'd see it and then as a driver myself cruising over the same path countless times.
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