MacArthur Park Postcard

I taught first grade at a public school here last year and we were lucky, really lucky, to have volunteers from 826LA visit us and write with us on mondays. The tutors were in fact so thoughtful and so kind that when one of them went away to New York for a couple of weeks, she sent all 22 kids in the class postcards. The postcards had pictures of all of New York’s most iconic monuments: Union Square, the Empire State Building, maps of NYC’s transit system. Later, when Elizabeth’s job demanded all of her and she could no longer come back, I asked the kids to make postcards of the neighborhood to send to her as a thank you. We reviewed what goes on a postcard: important, sometimes beautiful things in a place. I thought they were all going to draw the lake, maybe the park with the rose garden. But in fact, only a few of them did. Instead most of them completed the sentence frame The Empire State Building is to New York as ___ is to MacArthur Park with: the Food 4 Less. Since they had never really left the neighborhood, it hadn’t occurred to them that most of the stores in the area are chain stores, and are everywhere. Marlon, author of the postcard shown above, also drew the 99¢ store, the bank, and five cockroaches, two of which are crawling on people’s heads.