If you've been listening to our Wives with a Me podcast for a while, you've heard lots of episodes that were recorded with me sitting in my cozy little office in Pacific Palisades, California, surrounded by my beautiful things, momentos, photos of my family and my friends, books that were very important to me, and art that made me comfortable or inspired me or both, definitely both.

Well, all of that is gone now. burned up in the Pacific Palisades fire at the beginning of the year.

It was a fire that destroyed everything in our home, and of course the structure itself.

It was a 1929 Spanish revival home built and designed by a painter named George Barker.

I remember a long time ago when we drove up to look at that house, 32 years ago.

It was a lot more house than we could afford at the time, and we pulled up in front of the house,

and I took one look at it, and I said,

uh-oh.

So in these little stories that I tell before episodes of the podcast, in those stories this

year, you're probably going to hear a bit about what we lost in that fire, because, you know,

it's actually, it's totally on my mind. This was a community tragedy

for the whole palisades and Altadena. And to tell you the truth, it's still raw. Every once in a

while, I'll think of something, something that I need that's in a file in my office or something,

and then I'll realize, oh, God, no, it's gone.

It's burned up. It's gone forever. And that just happened to me a few days ago. I love a good

cartoon, a good magazine-style one-panel cartoon. I actually think cartoons are like poetry in a way.

Poetry is the most distilled form of literature.

The poet has the incredible ability to choose the right words and only the right words in

just the right order for a poem. And in the same way, a cartoon can almost magically, in just a

drawing and a caption, paint a comic picture that has all

the elements, surprise, cleverness, wit, and sometimes even real profundity. But first,

they're funny. God, I love cartoons so much that I have, well, I had a file in my office of cartoons. And now, of course, they're gone.

...