El Palomar

“I left home, a small village in the mountains, when I was still a child, but it haunts my memory even now. I walk its streets in my dreams -- the rough paving stones; the shops with whitewashed walls and red tile roofs; our village church with its pretty campanile standing tall; and of course the mountains, lush with trees and flowers, touched by clouds and cooling rain. Sometimes the dreams are so real that I can hear my grandmothers’s voice calling me. It is a voice I have not heard for years and years and years, but I recognize it instantly and I reply. ‘I am coming, Abuelita, please wait for me.

“I have a customer, he wants a mural on the building that houses his bar. Something cool and inviting, he says, something that will catch the eye of passersby and draw them in. Very well, I will make it inviting and very, very real -- so real that the viewer will be gripped for a moment by the thought that he can enter the picture and walk its streets and feel the mountain breezes. All right, very well. Yes, I will do it! I will summon all my skill, all my art. There is magic in my eye and my arm and I will throw my magic on the wall. There! I have finished.

“I want to cry. There is magic in me, more than I ever knew. It speaks to me, it beckons me, and I will follow the voice – follow it back to the streets of my childhood. I will find my grandmother and kiss her cheek and we will laugh and I will eat the sweets she has prepared for me.

"There. I am through. I am through! I am on the quiet street of my dreams. I can feel the cool air and the hint of rain. I am home.”

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This mural decorates the external wall of El Palomar, 1400 S. Western Avenue in the Mid-City Los Angeles neighborhood of Harvard Heights. In the bottom left-hand corner, the words "Pintor Artistico Dimas" have been appended.

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Postscript: Just shy of a year after posting this entry, I drove by 1400 S. Western and discovered that this mural no longer exists. Sadly, it has been completely painted over.