It was wide with a collection of indifferent modern houses. She was one of five people who paid $600 each per month for a three-bedroom place in a building that looked like a motel. Fifteen years back Echo Park was considered borderline no-go. Rundown. Gang warfare. Dangerous. Now it was all young professionals and arty kids who had to share a place to pay the excessive rent. Klara moved into this place just over a year ago after she’d finished her BA at UC Santa Cruz. I was proud of my girl coming out of one of the top UC schools with a cum laude degree and then choosing the social work path – working with migrants from south of the border. Privately I might have wished that she’d done the law school thing she kept telling me she would follow. But I knew that if I even hinted this to Klara it would get her back up. She’d say that I was pushing her into ‘a secure career option’ … just as my father had done before with me. I could hear her tell me: ‘I don’t want to do safe, Poppa. Just as I know you’d really like to run away from that too.’

Maybe she had a point here. I said nothing. Because when my daughter felt cornered she refused to budge from a position taken on something. Two years previously she’d been seeing this real deadbeat guy, ‘an artist biker’, whose dream was to open his own tattoo parlor, and who struck me about as artistic as a garbage can. I also sensed that he had this resentful streak. Still, Klara was crazy about him. When Agnieska finally met him she went hysterical afterwards and gave our daughter a crazed earful about her bad choice in boyfriends. This naturally made Klara defend the guy even more ferociously. She was with him for another eight long months … until she found out that he’d cheated on her with a fellow tattoo designer. I was quietly pleased that the clown had destroyed any feelings that my daughter had for him and that I had managed for once to put my foot down with Agnieska. I insisted that she did not go into her ‘I told you so’ routine which she liked to pull whenever something she disapproved of went wrong for somebody else. Especially as Klara showed real smarts and maturity in shoving the guy out the door. It was another important sign to me that, after a roller coaster of an adolescence, my daughter had become rational and focused – even though she got me a little worried when she told me a few months back that the shelter for battered women where she worked had suffered a security breach. Their armed guard had stepped away from the back exit for a two-minute bathroom break. It allowed the furious, crazy violent husband of a woman they’d been sheltering to burst in. He was brandishing a pistol and threatened to shoot the staff. Fortunately the other security guy on the front door was alerted and came running in, slamming his rifle butt into the guy’s head.