La Loma Park in Berkeley is nestled in the upper reaches of a valley where quarrying has left a deep cut in the hills and a wide flat shelf overlooking the city and the bay. On foot you can reach it by walking up the Rose steps from Euclid, following Rose to where it vanishes under La Loma’s curving overpass and a second set of stairs leads from Rose to La Loma. Quarry Road, to the left, will take you to the base of the park and the baseball field. Just beyond right field the ground falls off and a stand of gray-barked trees has colonized the slope, each successive rank of offspring reaching their limbs more precariously westward, their blind thirst for light defying a reasonable attitude toward gravity. In these crumbly California hills you often see half circles of live oak trees clinging to sunny cliffs like this, reverentially gathered around the spot where their mother dropped her acorns before vanishing into atoms of dirt and air. These trees, faster growing than oak, still live in the company of their progenitor, a hoary old bastard with a scarred, gnarled trunk and yellow lichen-encrusted branches: a stranger, alien to the oaks and redwoods, planted by the miners in the scarred, compacted earth as they left.

On one of these trees, grown out almost parallel to the earth, you can sit comfortably, surrounded by the bare, rattling branches as if in the palm of an infinitely fingered hand. The grass in winter is an unearthly shade of green, and as low clouds pass over the face of the low sun each blade is lit from behind, luminous with the sky’s subtle, shifting palette of yellow and blue. A good place to sit and feel your own wonderful life.

With the new Pink Panther film and a biography of Peter Sellers coming out soon, I was in the mood to see Being There again. It is even better than I remember it, alive with Sellers’ comedic genius, beautifully filmed, and with a superb, subtle soundtrack of Brahms, Satie, and Deodato’s funky remix of “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”. A parable of that quiet, lonely child we all remain, who has no need of the various words and instruments of adulthood to be curious, show love or pity, or weep over another person’s sorrow.