Lifestyle
L.A. Affairs: I've miss L.A. The wildfires caused me to revisit the love I lost
We used to drive up the coast on a motorcycle. Me, with my arms tightly wrapped around him and my earbuds in, listening to Puccini and singing “O mio babbino caro” on the back of the bike, as I watched the glitter on the Pacific, the palm trees, the surfers and people at the beaches, some jogging, others waiting for valet parking services. I was a woman in my early 20s.
We met at Greg and Yvonne’s dinner party on Buchanan Street in San Francisco. When I arrived, Yvonne, who’s from Paris, whispered in my ear, “We invited two bachelors. You can pick and choose one.”
In those days, I didn’t even know yet what a bachelor was. Eric’s eyes were glued on me all night. Before I left, he said, “If you ever come to L.A., call me” and then handed me his number. I called him a few months later from San Francisco and went to visit him for three days, just before my friend at the time, Hélène, an au pair from Lyon, France, and I left the U.S. to return to Europe.
The January wildfires in L.A. have made me revisit my entire relationship with Eric, the good and the bad, and those first three days after he picked me up from the Burbank airport in his convertible. During my visit, he gave me his room, with the checkered flannel sheets on the bed, and slept on the couch. (His sister, Tina, also was visiting from Seattle with her fiancé.)
Eric took me to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Rodeo Drive, Hollywood, Venice and up the coast to Malibu to meet Dori and Larry, who had a house on Big Rock. He was so grateful that I didn’t want to go to Disneyland and preferred having a picnic at the beach instead. Then he showed me Las Virgenes Road, and we drove through the tunnel and then on Mulholland Drive toward Topanga Canyon.
He loved Richard Bach’s “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” and gave me a copy of it.
Later, when I moved in with him in a house in the San Fernando Valley, we went to eat at a little fish place on Topanga Canyon Boulevard, where I had toasted marshmallows for the first time. We also sometimes dined at the Reel Inn and Moonshadows, but Geoffrey’s in Malibu was my favorite.
Sitting in this elevated space overlooking the blue ocean felt like being in the South of France, and the food was presented artistically. There, Eric took a photograph of my reflection on a glass table. I was reminded of Erich Fromm’s “The Art of Loving,” which I read when I was 15. “Love isn’t something natural. Rather, it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith and the overcoming of narcissism.”
In 2002, Eric died of an aneurysm when he was 49. He was buried in Glen Haven & Sholom Memorial Park in Sylmar, where the Hurst fire was recently contained. When I saw the flames and smoke of the fires on the screen from thousands of miles away, it felt as though I had lost Eric all over again. Silent tears turned into sobs as video showed the damage along Pacific Coast Highway. These sobs came from deep within.
I had built my life on this love, living in L.A. for nearly half my years. I studied at Santa Monica College and UCLA, and then took up American studies in Berlin and analyzed “Mildred Pierce,” watching Joan Crawford gaze hopelessly at the Pacific before being saved by an L.A. police officer.
So I’ve been looking at old photographs and letters. There was the one from Eric from May 5, 1987.
“It is evening now, and the sky is a beautiful, strange shade of purple above, fading to silver in the west, then to a soft gold color on the horizon,” he wrote.
“There is a bright half-moon shining directly above. An airplane crosses the face of the moon, and I can see the people silhouetted in the windows. It turns, and makes its way east across the desert, toward the night. It’s quiet again.”
Eric and I didn’t even make it to three years, but we decided to take a trip to Hawaii to have a memorable longer separation before we parted for good. When we returned from our trip, he couldn’t take me to Los Angeles International Airport for my flight to Stuttgart, Germany. His mom had been hospitalized due to a brain tumor, and so he had to rush to Seattle.
I still remember our trip well, that crispy ahi with pineapple salsa, the rainbows in Kauai and the sweet smell of the orchids and plumeria of the leis.
During our separation, Eric sent me a letter: “The reason I haven’t called is not because I don’t like you but because it would be so hard to talk to you. I think all we would do is cry and not get anything said. Hopefully, we’ll be able to talk soon. I had a wonderful time with you in Hawaii. I will never forget it.”
Recently, I called Geoffrey’s from Le Havre, France, where I live, to check if it was still standing. I was so relieved when the woman on the phone said, “We’re still cleaning up today but will reopen tomorrow.”
“Is it possible to get there on PCH?” I asked.
“You have to take the 101,” she said.
When I heard 101, I felt like being home again in L.A. These were my streets, the city I had lived in for longer than my hometown, the city that shaped me, but I don’t think I will ever have that sensation again, that feeling when I arrived at LAX, seeing the flickering lights of Los Angeles and its grids, thinking that the world was full of possibilities and knowing Eric was waiting there for me.
Although so many years have passed, I still see him in my mind, feeding seagulls at Zuma Beach, as I watch the gulls over the gray-green English Channel. And I think how we drove on California 118, me holding the steering wheel, my hair blowing in the wind as he tried to hold it back, cheerfully chatting away. When I hear one of Eric’s favorite songs, “What a Wonderful World” by Louis Armstrong, I feel he’s still somewhere out there, trying to tell me he loves me.
The author is a freelance writer and art critic. She has written for The Times, various L.A. art magazines and the Times of Israel. She lives in Le Havre, France. She’s on Instagram: @simonesuzannekussatz
L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
Students walk on the Stanford University campus on March 14, 2019, in Stanford, Calif.
Ben Margot/AP
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Ben Margot/AP
When Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University a few years ago, he joined the student newspaper, following the path of his journalist parents, Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, and Susan Glasser, a writer for The New Yorker.
Through his reporting as a student journalist, he eventually broke a story about manipulated data in Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s neuroscience research that helped lead to the university president’s resignation.
Theo Baker’s book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University was released May 19. In it, Baker describes Stanford as a place where proximity to Silicon Valley gives rise to a parallel system of influence, recruitment and money, with investors looking to identify promising students almost as soon as they arrive on campus.
He told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep there was “a sort of Stanford inside Stanford,” where elite students are drawn into an “alternate reality” of excess and access to cut corners.
In the interview, he discusses how Stanford is not just a university but also a pipeline where status and power can matter as much as ideas.
We reached out to Stanford University for comment and have not heard back.
Listen to the interview by clicking play on the blue box above.
The scoreboard shows the results of the women’s singles final match between Iga Swiatek of Poland and Amanda Anisimova of the U.S. at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
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Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Fifteen points in tennis? Nice. Thirty, 40 — even better. Advantage — that sounds good. “Love” — that also must be great, right? Well, not quite.
As the French Open rolls on and Serena Williams has announced her return to the sport, maybe you’ve been paying a little more attention to tennis. The sport’s scoring system is notably distinct, and can sometimes be hard to grasp for newcomers. But even tennis aficionados might not know why, or how, “love” became the unmistakable callout for zero points. For this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, we’re exploring how a word that signifies trailing behind got such a sweet name.
“Love” comes from the heart — or an egg?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the first tennis ball went over the net. Tennis is a derivative of lots of other sports, such as “jeu de paume,” a handball game played in France, said JT Buzanga, the collections manager at the International Tennis Hall of Fame museum.
But tennis became a patented, official sport in 1874, said Steve Flink, a journalist whose tennis coverage got him inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It has retained its unique, mysterious scoring system ever since.
“By and large, the original system has held up almost entirely,” Flink said.
The use of “love” goes back to the late 18th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer. But it was used earlier than that in card games such as whist and bridge. Before the term made its way to tennis, the sport favored plain old “nothing,” or “nil,” he said.
Why love in the first place, though? Historians don’t really know for sure, but there are a few theories.
The French could have something to do with it. Some historians believe “love” derives from “l’oeuf,” which means “the egg” in French. Because eggs are shaped like zeros, terms such as “goose egg” and “duck’s egg” have been used in other contexts to mean zero, Sheidlower said.
It’s also possible English speakers mispronounced l’oeuf as “love.” But Sheidlower isn’t convinced that’s the answer.
“It’s the French equivalent of an English expression. But since that expression doesn’t appear in French, the French word wouldn’t have been used,” he said.
To be sure, France has had a lot of influence on tennis culture, Buzanga said. For example, “deuce” or a game tied at 40 points, comes from the French word for “two”: “deux.” But he prefers another prominent theory: that “love” comes from the idiom “for the love of the game.” Even if a player hasn’t scored, it doesn’t matter, because their heart is in it. It’s the theory Sheidlower said is the most plausible, because the idiom was used by the English before tennis was popularized.
Another variation of the “love of the game” theory is that the word could have come from the Dutch “lof,” or “honor” — or the Latin “amare,” meaning “to love,” Flink said.
But if tennis’ “love” doesn’t come from a French word, the theory at least has a French sensibility.
“I think the ‘for the love of the game’ is kind of romantic,” Buzanga said.
“Love” probably isn’t going anywhere
Tennis used to be a sport of leisure. The style of play has changed a lot over the years; players are more athletic and competitive, for instance, Flink said. But the rules of the sport are more steadfast, he said.
“There’s this incredible, enduring respect for tradition in tennis,” he said. “Changes are not made easily.”
There has been one major change in modern history: the tie-break. Matches can go on and on because players have to score two consecutive points to break a deuce, or by two games to break a tied set. But the onset of television meant matches would have to get shorter if the sport wanted to capture a larger audience, Flink said.
Change even came for “love.” An alternative sprouted up in the 1970s, and is still used today: “bagel,” named for its zero shape, Sheidlower said. Novices may say “zero,” and insiders will understand what they mean, but they “will needle them about it,” Flink said.
But “love” still prevails.
“People kind of like it,” Flink said. “It’s different. Why say zero when you can say love?”
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