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In more ways than one, this is a love story, and it begins in 1970.

Paul Cummins, headmaster of a Santa Monica elementary school called St. Augustine-by-the-Sea, was in the market for a music teacher and a colleague suggested he call a Rustic Canyon pianist named Mary Ann.

Mary Ann wasn’t interested in the job but agreed to host a get-together at her home and introduce Cummins to two teachers. But Cummins didn’t want the other two. He wanted Mary Ann.

“I’ve just seen the best teacher I’ve ever seen in my life,” he told a friend after visiting Mary Ann and hearing about her teaching techniques.

Cummins talked Mary Ann into taking the job, and before long, she joined the faculty of a brand-new middle school Cummins co-founded by the name of Crossroads.

That was in 1971.

But 1972 was a year of new beginnings, too. That was the year Paul and Mary Ann got married.

Fifty-five years later, Mr. and Mrs. Cummins live together in the house where they met. And Mary Ann is still teaching at Crossroads, among other places.

“She’s 93 and she’s got the energy of a teenager,” Paul Cummins, 88, said of his wife. “She’s kind of a freak of nature.”

I can attest to that after spending several hours with her on Tuesday, hustling to keep up as she taught at two schools and then hurried home to greet her private students.

At St. Anne School in Santa Monica, I watched Cummins harness the squirmy energy of second-graders wielding xylophone mallets. She’s been using the Orff Schulwerk Approach for decades, in which students create music in something of a percussion-driven jamboree of singing, dancing and moving.

“Two, three, four,” Cummins counted down, and her eager little ensemble broke into song: “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.”

When the session was done, Cummins, who bakes more cookies than Famous Amos, sent each of her students out the door with a treat.

Next stop, Crossroads School, where the level of musicianship rose several notches. A high school keyboard class came first, followed by a music theory class, and Cummins handled both like a conductor leading an orchestra, showering her students with “bravos.”

And then I followed Cummins home to watch her give lessons to two of her 18 or so private students. One, a 7-year-old girl named Birdie, was accompanied by her mother, who sat at the same piano stool a generation ago as a student.

“Look, there is something genetically askew,” said Emily Cummins Polk, the youngest of Mary Ann Cummins’ four daughters. “She has incredible genes, but you can’t discount the fact that she’s up at 6 and going to yoga. She’s active seven days a week … and I don’t think she has any intention of slowing down.”

I told Polk her mother seemed equally adept working with second-graders and high school students, and that her age does not appear to be something anyone is conscious of, including the teacher. That’s partly because — especially with the advanced classical musicians — teacher and students are speaking the same language. But there’s more to it than that.

“I think it’s because she has so many passions … and still approaches the world with the curiosity of a child,” Polk said. “If she sees something in pop culture that the kids relate to, she has to understand it. She’s in every world, whether it’s politics, movies, yoga, gourmet cooking, the Dodgers. … She just has a crazy lust for life.”

Polk said that when she was a child, her parents were plugged into a pipeline of international musicians who needed a place to stay while studying in the U.S. They opened their home, for months at a time and sometimes longer, Polk said, creating a vast extended family that has kept close ties.

Anna Cummins, another of the four daughters, said music was a tool her mother used to teach “life lessons, way beyond piano or music theory.”

“She weaves in literature and philosophy and emphasizes the point that music should make you a more whole person,” Anna said. “It’s not about being a concert pianist. It’s about ... connecting to something spiritual that’s bigger than yourself.”

When she was a young violinist, Anna said, her mother taught her that to keep improving, she’d have to set her ego aside and accept mistakes as part of the bargain. Anna’s daughter, now 13, takes lessons from her grandmother.

It should be noted that Paul Cummins is no slacker himself. The longtime teacher, headmaster and arts advocate is still involved with schools he helped launch after Crossroads, including Camino Nuevo Charter and the Tree Academy. And he’s the founder of P.S. Arts, a nonprofit funded initially by musician Herb Alpert to help fill the gap in arts education for thousands of public school students.

A published poet, Cummins writes daily, and as he describes it, that means he is sometimes “wallowing in nostalgia” or “angsting over the future.” But the shape of time is different for a musician, he said, and he once wrote a poem that captured the essence of his wife’s ageless grace.

“I find myself staring across the studio, for forty-three years now: her focus, always, in the moment, riveted upon her students.”

Gina Coletti, director of the Elizabeth Mandel Music Institute at Crossroads, told me many of those students graduated to elite music schools and went on to professional careers, even as Mary Ann Cummins shifted her focus to the next generation, and the next, and the next. Teaching is “like an elixir of youth” for Cummins, said Coletti, who wasn’t surprised to hear that it took a bit of arm-twisting for Cummins to open her door to me.

“I think it’s rare to find somebody who does the work without their ego involved,” Coletti said. “And I think that’s what Mary Ann does. It’s about the music. It’s always about the students.”

Two years ago, Cummins was named to the Steinway & Sons Teacher Hall of Fame. Later this year, a new performing arts center will open at Crossroads, and the recital hall will be called The Mary Ann.

When the music theory class came to a close Tuesday at Crossroads, a senior named Lola Goetz asked me if she could say something about Cummins.

“I wouldn’t be … the person I am, the musician I am, without Mary Ann,” said Goetz, a classical and jazz musician and composer who began taking lessons with Cummins in first grade.

“Would you say that if I weren’t in the room?” Cummins asked.

“Yes,” said Goetz, who has several college options in front of her. “She’s so modest, but I want you … to know that she’s like the best, literally.”

Polk told me she’s often asked if her mother ever slows down.

“And the way I see it,” said Polk, “is that she just doesn’t have time to slow down.”

Music, Mary Ann Cummins told me, is language “that reaches deeper into you than other languages. It gets to places in you.” In the theory class, she and her students took turns at the keyboard, trying to break down the language of Chopin’s music.

It seemed to me that in asking what Chopin was thinking 200 years ago in a particular composition, she was indirectly asking her students what they’re thinking now. About themselves, about the infinite expanse of creativity, about the power of music to cross borders, outlast wars, span centuries and still inspire.

Cummins was in the moment, time suspended, her focus riveted on her students.

“It feeds me,” she says. “Music is my life, and I can’t not do it.”

steve.lopez@latimes.com

Los Angeles, CA (March 21, 2026) — On Thursday, 2 Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies sustained injuries in a traffic collision on North Fairfax Avenue while responding to a call for assistance.

The collision happened around noon at North Fairfax Avenue and West Sunset Boulevard. The deputies were traveling in a patrol vehicle when it collided with another car in the intersection.

Both deputies suffered minor injuries and were taken to a hospital for treatment. Authorities confirmed that the occupants of the other vehicle were unharmed and remained at the scene.

Officials continue to review the circumstances surrounding the crash.

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More than three decades after a landmark decision called for Los Angeles to limit its taking of water to raise the level of Mono Lake, California regulators are reexamining why the lake still hasn’t rebounded and what should be done about it.

At the request of state water officials, UCLA climate scientists developed a new model to analyze why the lake remains far below its state-mandated target level. In a new report, they said that without L.A.’s use of water from creeks that feed the lake, its waters would be about 4 feet higher — closer to that required threshold.

“The way the exports are regulated, meeting lake level objectives is unlikely,” Alex Hall, a UCLA climate scientist, told members of the California State Water Resources Control Board at a meeting Tuesday.

While his UCLA team estimated that climate change has also played a role, keeping Mono Lake about 2.6 feet lower than it would otherwise be, the researchers concluded that halting L.A.’s water exports would roughly double the likelihood of the lake reaching its target level within the next 20 years.

In a 1994 decision, state water regulators required the L.A. Department of Water and Power to limit diversions and take steps to raise the lake level 17 feet. Mono Lake is now higher than it was then, but is still about 9 feet below the required level.

DWP managers said they have questions and want to vet the UCLA analysis.

Eric Tillemans, DWP’s interim aqueduct manager, told the state board that the city’s studies have found Mono Lake’s levels are “more dependent on precipitation, evaporation and runoff than any other factors.”

“It’s highly technical and a scientifically novel modeling effort, but it wasn’t developed through a facilitated process or expert peer-reviewed,” Tillemans said, adding that it “requires additional time to complete a thorough review.”

Anselmo Collins, DWP’s chief operating officer and senior assistant general manager, the analysis by UCLA researchers should be thoroughly vetted before state officials consider whether it should be used to guide policy decisions.

In recent years, L.A. has gotten about 2% of its water from the Eastern Sierra creeks in the Mono Basin. Environmental advocates have called for the city to take less water to help the lake and support an ecosystem that is vital for migratory birds.

Richard Katz, of the Los Angeles Board of Water and Power Commissioners, proposed in a to the state board that DWP should pause its use of water from the Mono Basin. He wrote that doing this would be the “fastest and most cost-effective way” to raise the lake level.

Katz also said a recent city decision to of a water-recycling project provides a “unique opportunity” to increase local water while also letting Mono Lake recover.

Others who spoke at Tuesday’s in Sacramento called for the state water board to intervene and require L.A. to take less water to enable the lake to rise, or to stop taking water altogether.

“It’s been far too long that this has been allowed to happen,” said Noah Williams, a member of the Bishop Paiute Tribe, adding that the focus should be on “really addressing the issue of raising the lake elevation.”

Former L.A. City Councilmember Ruth Galanter, who helped broker an agreement that laid the groundwork for the 1994 decision, urged the state board to insist that DWP fulfill its commitment.

“This kind of delay is what gives regulation a bad name, and it makes people lose faith in the notion that the government is here to serve you,” Galanter said. “So it’s not just Mono Lake that’s at stake here. It’s the credibility of our legal system and our regulatory system.“

Geoffrey McQuilkin, executive director of the nonprofit Mono Lake Committee, urged the state water board to act, saying in three decades DWP “has shown that it will not restore this national treasure voluntarily.” He agreed with Katz that the city should pause its use of water from the area until Mono Lake can rise.

Janisse Quiñones, DWP’s , disagreed. She told the state water board in a March 13 that Los Angeles has reduced its use of water from the Mono Basin since 1994, but that further reducing the amount is not likely to significantly hasten the lake’s rise.

Quiñones also said the protections the state water board put in place, as well as additional steps by DWP, “have been a success.”

“Mono Lake stands in stark contrast to all other saline lakes in the West — including the Salton Sea and the Great Salt Lake — that are declining in elevation and facing significant environmental issues,” she wrote.

Quiñones told the board that reducing or halting the city’s use of water from the Mono Basin would be “unwarranted, imprudent, and place undue financial burden on LADWP’s ratepayers.”

It’s not clear when the state water board might convene another meeting on the matter.

ARVIN, Calif. — In the southern San Joaquin Valley, where roads cut through thousands of acres of orange groves, grapevines and carrot fields, a canal reaches a linchpin that keeps the farming economy going: dozens of oblong ponds filled with shimmering water.

While many parts of California’s Central Valley are struggling to counter widespread overpumping and declining underground water levels, the irrigation agency here is using the ponds to effectively swallow gulps of river water, getting it to seep into the soil and recharge the groundwater.

“That sandy ground, when you put the water on it, it percolates into the groundwater and it recharges,” said Jeevan Muhar, chief executive officer of Arvin-Edison Water Storage District. “So it’s underneath us. We can see that water come up.”

The irrigation district tracks groundwater levels. In dry times, when it needs to tap into stored water, it uses dozens of wells to pump it out and send it flowing to farms.

A new scientific study cites Arvin-Edison as one of dozens of areas where local efforts have managed to halt declines in water levels and allow aquifers to come back up.

“Unfortunately, groundwater is being depleted rapidly in many areas. However, groundwater depletion can be solved,” said Scott Jasechko, a UC Santa Barbara professor of water resources who authored the in the journal Science.

Jaseshko examined 67 cases of groundwater recovery around the world, where water levels rose after prolonged decline. It happened three main ways: policy changes, tapping alternative water sources and replenishing aquifers.

In most cases, getting river water was key. In California, groundwater has rebounded in areas that obtained more water from canals or pipelines decades ago, including Santa Clara Valley, Livermore-Amador Valley, South Yuba Basin, Yucca Valley and parts of Los Angeles.

Arvin-Edison Water Storage District, near Bakersfield, started building levees and digging basins for imported water in the 1960s. As the water sank into the soil, it helped raise groundwater levels in the following decades.

If it weren’t for these efforts over the years, Muhar said, levels would have dropped several hundred feet.

Still, he said the last 15 years have been particularly challenging. The agency has received less imported water during severe droughts, and average groundwater levels have gone down again.

He said some areas in Arvin-Edison’s 132,000-acre territory require more work to stabilize the aquifer because it is declining.

Muhar walked beside a pond at the Tejon Spreading Works, where ducks bobbed in the shallow water.

“You want to take advantage of the wet years, grab that water before it’s lost to the ocean or other locations, and bring it into these types of areas,” he said.

In 2023, which was extremely wet, the agency took in that abundant water and banked it underground. This year, by contrast, Muhar said Arvin-Edison will pump out more than it deposits underground.

“It’s managing the extremes of California water,” he said.

When that saved water is pumped from wells, it flows via canals and pipes to the fields of about 120 growers, irrigating onions, peaches, almonds, pistachios, potatoes, tomatoes and other crops.

Other agencies are recharging aquifers at across California and are building more facilities to replenish groundwater.

Some projects in the San Joaquin Valley are successful and well-known enough that water managers and researchers have visited from other parts of the world, including China and Ukraine, to see how agencies are doing it, Muhar said.

“It is the water banking capital of the world,” he said, “and we’ve been doing it for a long time.”

Arvin-Edison is doing a good job managing groundwater together with river water, said Bridget Scanlon, a research professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s Jackson School of Geosciences, who was not involved in the latest study.

It takes a sophisticated approach, she said, while keeping the system going through wet periods and droughts.

The study also examined different cases in where it was a policy change that helped groundwater levels rise.

In Tokyo, regulations imposed limits on pumping. In Lima, Peru, well-drilling was banned in some areas. And in Bangkok, higher pumping fees helped water levels rebound.

In farming areas of Saudi Arabia, groundwater levels have risen since the country began phasing out water-intensive alfalfa and other hay crops.

Fast-growing urban areas in the western United States have found ways to raise groundwater levels by tapping river water and channeling it underground.

Las Vegas injects Colorado River water directly into the aquifer using special wells, and has done so since the late 1980s.

In Arizona, parts of the Phoenix and Tucson areas have by routing Colorado River water to basins carved into the desert, where it sinks underground.

The Colorado River, however, is overtapped and to cutbacks as global warming drives .

In a 2025 , Scanlon and other researchers wrote that cuts in Colorado River water will “decrease critical replenishment of the aquifers” in central Arizona in the coming years, and could lead to further groundwater declines.

In California, the 2014 set requirements for local agencies to curb overpumping and stabilize aquifer levels by 2040.

The farmers in Arvin-Edison are better positioned than those in other areas that depend entirely on groundwater. Researchers have calculated that large portions of California’s irrigated cropland will need to be in the coming years.

To reduce water use and comply with the groundwater law, Arvin-Edison is starting to buy some farmland and leave the fields fallow.

Muhar said the agency recently transformed 350 acres into more ponds to replenish groundwater, and it plans to buy and retire more farmland.

Los Angeles, CA – A large outside fire at a scrap metal facility in Los Angeles prompted a significant emergency response Friday morning, sending heavy smoke into the air but resulting in no reported injuries.

According to the Los Angeles Fire Department, crews responded around 11:23 a.m. Friday to a fire at 1820 E. 48th Place in the Central-Alameda area. The blaze involved burning metals in an exterior yard, creating thick plumes of smoke visible from surrounding neighborhoods.

Firefighters initially took a defensive approach as the fire intensified, calling in additional resources to contain the flames. 53 firefighters worked to bring the situation under control while heavy equipment operators on-site assisted by moving unburned materials away from the fire’s path.

Officials said the coordinated effort helped prevent the flames from spreading beyond the immediate area. No nearby structures were threatened during the incident, and crews were able to stop forward progress relatively quickly.

The fire was officially knocked down within about 25 minutes from the time of the initial 911 call, highlighting what officials described as an efficient and controlled response under challenging conditions involving combustible scrap materials.

Images released by the department show aerial ladder operations and crews working among piles of metal debris as smoke filled the sky above the industrial yard.

The cause of the fire remains under investigation. No evacuations were ordered, and no hazardous conditions affecting surrounding residential areas were immediately reported.

Fire officials continue to remind businesses handling combustible materials to follow proper storage and safety protocols to reduce the risk of similar incidents.

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