By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The page preserves a small Los Angeles memory in which mutual waving across a car window briefly feels like proof of being known.
Its power lies in uncertainty. The scan-reviewed transcription clarifies the small street scene, and the insistence that 'they knew me' gives it an ache for contact, belonging, and urban intimacy that vanishes almost as soon as it appears.
Short memory sketch - the last time in Los Angeles going slow along a shopping street, guys hanging out on the left, waving out of the back seat, all smiling, all recognizing each other. Quiet belonging-note against the harsher material elsewhere in the notebook.