Miranda and Phil Youngren live down the street. They are two of my very favorite people and are who I want to be when I grow up. See, they have this fantastic apartment with these huge floor-to-ceiling windows that stretch the entire length of both their kitchen and living room. Which allows them to look out onto this adorable terrace that Miranda just “flung together.” The apartment didn’t come with this ideal outdoor escape, she just decided it needed one. So she spent an afternoon (yes, just an afternoon) creating a grassy clearing among the tall shrubs that are fragrantly freckled with freesia and some ivy that grows up the building. Then she put some wooden planks on the ground, hammered them together and adorned them with some vintage iron patio furniture that she tenderly repainted. She sits out there and has afternoon tea while she reads or writes. And sometimes she gets distracted and begins to prune all the plants nearby. She hums while doing so and doesn’t know it. I haven’t told her about her little humming habit yet, but maybe I will when I can finally place the song and start singing along.
The Youngrens are in their sixties. They seem like they’ve been married about 50 of those years, but in reality, it’s only been nine. They met late in life, as both had been too preoccupied with careers to actually fall in love. Which isn’t to say that they didn’t marry when they were young, because they did. It just wasn’t to each other. Their respective relationships just fizzled as they each began to realize that life wasn’t what they’d hoped it would be. It wasn’t the dancing cheek-to-cheek in the kitchen to classic jazz late at night. It wasn’t the sitting next to each other on the couch and being happy as a clam without having to say anything. And it wasn’t the “work hard, so you can play hard” spectacle they had envisioned. It was really just all work.
And so. They started over.
They met at a coffee shop. The same coffee shop they each stopped at every morning for years. And when Phil finally decided to sit down, instead of getting his token cup to-go, Miranda was there sitting too. Well one sip led to another and something much more than coffee started brewing. Within months, Phil quit his job as a computer analyst at a major entertainment company and moved down to a less managerial role elsewhere, while Miranda became a freelance writer from home. It was significantly less lucrative than their previous gigs, but seriously less stressful as well. And the benefits that came with it were far better than fancy flex accounts. It was time. Time that wasn’t spent on the clock.
And now, nine years later, they don’t live in some pretentious Pasadena palace with a pool and areas that are referred to as “quarters.” They have a modest, but incredibly kitschy-cool apartment in West Hollywood, that has a small kitchen stocked with silly souvenirs from their travels. Their living room has built-in bookshelves made of oak, that are imperfectly stacked with a gazillion old classics that at least one of them has read. They walk to the wine bar down the street, ride their bikes to the farmer’s markets in matching straw hats and, as they always have, pop-in to the coffee shop next door for early AM caffeination.
They might be in their sixties, but at the time in life when most people are pretending they can’t hear their significant other, the Youngrens really are in the kitchen dancing cheek-to-cheek. And when they aren’t, you can usually find Phil sitting in the living room, feet up on the rugged coffee table, nestled into their big oversized sofa with his red wine. Cabernet preferably. Miranda sips hers in the kitchen as she whips up another Italian speciality that has way too much garlic, fresh basil from her garden and a generous portion of mozzarella. And as she prepares it, she sings along to opera music (quite well, I must say) loud enough for all the neighbors to hear.
I hear her when I walk by in the evenings with my dog. And I can’t help but peer in. Not just into their window, but into their lives. Because I don’t really know the Youngrens. Nor do I know if that’s even their name. It’s just what I’ve decided it is. And their life together is just what I’ve made it, simply crafted by what I’ve witnessed on my sidewalk strolls. So maybe that’s totally creepy. Or it’s just a healthy dose of imagination that gives me something to daydream about during my bouts of sadness with my own life. Ok - I’ll go with creepy. I mean sure, they might really be siblings who are living together because they’re broke, the rest of their family croaked and they were left with nothing else but this apartment, when all they really want is a glorious mansion in Pasadena.
But the “Youngrens” are still my favorite neighbors. Although, I will say, the Rosen family next door is starting to grow on me...
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