Still Amazed

Ring the Bells That Still Can Ring

Ring the bells that still can ring.

Forget your perfect offering.

There is a crack in everything.

That's how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen

My friend Christine sent me a bell for my bicycle. Not just any bell, either, but a lime green one with pink flowers. I mounted it on my handlebar this morning and rolled down the hill jingling, feeling frisky and cheerful and ten years old. I figured it would be a good alert for the mountain lions that I always imagine are lurking at the edge of things – here I come, don’t be startled, let’s not surprise each other. But in truth no rationale was necessary. It’s a bell. It’s fun to ring.

Back at the middle school where I was a teacher, a big clanging iron bell was used to mark the end of recess.  I loved recess and the way it sometimes spilled over into class time, not excessively, but just enough to know that we were not about to suffocate under a rigid and oppressive schedule. We were an enlightened group, you see, and we knew that academics were important but play was a priority too, and schoolyard exploration, as well as tree climbing and pogo stick jumping, if that’s what had to happen. And we believed that the social interactions that took place during recess were a part of learning for students and staff. But then Linda would suddenly look up from a conversation by the picnic table or poke her head out of her office and ask some hapless soul to ring the bell. Now that one was a bad news bell, and I hated to be the ringer.

But this bicycle bell is juvenile joy. It’s my spurs that jingle jangle jingle as I go riding merrily along. It’s goofy and affirmative and it’s lime green and it makes me smile. 

Last night we were in Goleta directly beneath the wildfire that has been raging off West Camino Cielo Road. Dubbed the Gap Fire, it seemed to intensify with a disconcerting suddenness. The sky took on that eerie light that we have come to know too well, the sun was a bright red disk, and blizzards of ash swirled around us. The power went out all over town and we could see bursts of bright flames shooting upward from the mountains. And then of course there came the familiar sense of vulnerability, the mounting sense of worry, the premonition of loss.

The mutability and evanescence of life. 

How many ways is the message given? 

I see it all around me.

Earlier in the week, a surfer drowned out here. 

“He died in the saddle,” says a rancher friend, “doing what he loved. It’s what all old cowboys hope for.”

Unfortunately, he wasn’t very old. 

And I didn’t know him, but I thought of him this morning as I stood on a bluff and looked out onto the ocean.

At my feet the bones of some tiny creature lay bleaching in the sun and in the sky a flock of pelicans scattered and soared and a whisper of smoke lingered in the air and I got back on my bike and rang my little lime green bell and it tolls for me and thee.

 

We'll Just Drive Down to L.A.

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,


Time held me green and dying


Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

                                    Dylan Thomas

“We’ll just drive down to L.A.”

Hearing my daughter speak those words made me realize anew that there's a fathomless gap between the world of twenty-somethings and that of fifty-somethings.

“But it’s already four o’clock,” I observed unhelpfully.

“So?”

 She is having some sort of crisis with her visa. This morning we took her to be fingerprinted at our local Application Support Office (who knew?), a storefront facility with darkened windows located in a K-Mart parking lot between the Nails and Waxing Salon and the Indo-Chinese take-out. Things are hushed and serious in the Application Support Office. There’s a flag in the reception area, and on the wall a framed photograph of an aging frat boy with a smirk (oh, never mind; it’s what’s-his-name) and a large sign forbidding cell phones, cameras, briefcases, tweezers, trench coats, chewing gum, whatever comes to mind. I decided to wait outside rather than forfeit so many of my possessions, so I don’t exactly know what transpired in there, but my daughter came out a half hour later with more papers and additional tasks. Apparently some crucial form now needs to be filed and something must be done to her passport but said passport must somehow be back in her hands in time for her flight to London Monday, and there’s that long 4^th of July weekend coming up, which doesn’t help. 

Not to worry. It turns out there are people you pay to expedite such things. (Again, I ask, who knew?)  There is in fact a woman in L.A. who can get everything processed in time, guaranteed, but she needs all the papers before 8 a.m. tomorrow morning.

That’s when my daughter casually suggests that she and her boyfriend simply borrow the car and head down there this afternoon, first driving thirty miles in the opposite direction to deposit me at home, then a hundred miles south to the house of the passport and visa expeditor, then home again tonight.

It’s inconvenient, sure, but certainly not insurmountable, so why in the world does this seem like such a huge deal to me when she first proposes it? I guess it's because I can’t imagine starting out on a spontaneous journey after 5, old fart that I am, especially if it involves turning around and coming right back the same night. And because I happen to be tired already, and every bone in my body is oriented towards getting home and settled after the errands of the day. God, I would hate to have to drive down to L.A. right now.

But no one is asking me to do this.

In fact, we are at one of those junctions where I sense that my opinion is not particularly relevant.

Still, I find I am uncomfortable with the plan. Aside from my personal resistance to it, there’s an element of worry here too. You know: the mother thing. 

My daughter reminds me at this point that she is twenty-one years old.

I try to remember what that was like. I flash back to the time Lynne and I drove six hours from Long Island to Oneonta purely on a whim and then back the same night, punchy and exhausted by the time we reached the Palisades Parkway into New York City at daybreak, which is where a policeman stopped me for speeding. It was a pointless adventure but we convinced ourselves it was evidence of our being free spirits, a couple of carpe diem gals who could act on an impulse, even a stupid one. I hadn’t even realized that my father was planning to use the car to get to work that morning until I pulled up and encountered him standing baffled in the driveway. I escaped his wrath only because he had reached the point where he was relieved rather than angry to see me. I can still picture him standing there in his paint-splattered overalls, buckets and brushes by his side and a ladder leaning against the garage.  I hope I had the sense to feel ashamed.

So, yes. There were adventures and misadventures aplenty. Sometimes I was taking care of business, other times just being a self-absorbed fool. Either way, I can see that I had an entirely different set of parameters back then. Distances seemed less daunting. Night meant bonus hours for living and I stayed awake by choice. (Sleep? Isn’t that why morning was invented?) Possibilities were endless and fear was not a factor. And no one could actually tell me what to do.

Here I must distinguish my daughter from myself and credit her for having serious goals and a vision. At her age I was still motivated mostly by immediate gratification and a desire to defer responsibility, although in my own defense I hasten to add that I came from a tragic and troubled family and had a great deal more to run away from. Still, I imagined there was something clever and almost noble in my avoidance of workaday ruts, as though I were somehow aspiring to a higher standard for myself. If I may speak in terms of my generation, I think we were all pretty certain we could avoid the traps our parents had walked into, and I swiftly transferred my loyalties to my peers and boyfriends, to whom I attributed great wisdom. I seem to have squandered staggering amounts of time doing nothing at all of value, but I was incapable of feeling any sense of urgency or even reality when it came to constructive life plans. 

“Youth is wasted on youth,” my father would say, and I would roll my eyes.

But I was one of them. 

––––––––––

Mission L.A.? It was easily accomplished. They even stopped at In & Out Burgers on the way home. It was sort of an adventure, I guess, and I’m sure there was laughter and intense conversation all the way, because who could be more fun and interesting than the person you are in love with in your twenties?  

Who cares that it could have been avoided with better planning? So what if they left the tank empty and are still fast asleep even now? They got home safely, and my daughter’s passport will be ready for her trip, and that sweet belief in the manageability of things has been reaffirmed.

What I want to know is when did I become the person who sees all the barriers? When did I become the one you tune out, the one who warns and chides, who craves spontaneity but would just as soon stay home? Who calculates costs and lies awake worrying? Who insists on being instructive knowing full well that the only teacher is life itself? 

Youth, you see, is a foreign country. Maybe even a different planet.

And I've left it far behind.

(But I’m not done singing in my chains.)

 

Swimming Through the Dark

It’s a regular pattern. Halfway into the night, I am rudely expelled from sleep, like a passenger kicked off a Greyhound bus at terminal nowhere. It’s an oh-shit kind of feeling, a heavy boot to the ass, and down I go, landing in the dark someplace.

It happened last night. This time, at least, the soundtrack was appropriate, an old Pink Floyd song playing in my head:

Hey you, out there in the cold,

getting lonely, getting old.

Can you feel me?

I’ve had worse tunes snagged in my brain, believe me. One night it was I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus. Of course an endless loop of even a suitable song becomes its own evidence of insanity. It doesn’t take long for the sounds in your mind to erode your belief that you are still sound of mind.

I’ve been here before, though. The advice I’ve usually gotten is to get up and go to another part of the house, and my husband certainly appreciates it when I do. But sometimes it’s awfully hard to extricate myself from the comfort of bed with no real plan in mind other than a walk to the living room. So I opted last night to just lie there, as still as possible, probably not still enough.

I try to be considerate. I actually have a special book light that is a little less obnoxious than the full-on bedside glare of a lamp, but I’d just finished a book and didn’t feel like starting something new at 2:30 in the morning, especially since the particular book I’d read, The Gathering, had stirred up so many ghosts and funerals in my brain and was still settling in. In any case, I always have plenty of small change anxiety to sort through -- so many things pending, so many things that might go wrong. 

I’m about to embark on a big project that’s making me awfully nervous, for example. And I’ve agreed to lead a three-day workshop and need to get back into teacher mode. And my daughter and her boyfriend have been staying with us for  a few weeks, and now that I am finally used to it, they will be leaving again very soon.

Those are just the little things. Don’t think for a minute that I ignore war, hunger, or climate change.

Don’t think I don’t flagellate myself for not playing a bigger role in finding solutions, either. 

Seems like a lot of suffering is going on while I look at lizards and pink clouds and fill up sheets of blank paper.

Then again, in the middle of the night it’s easy to feel you are just an ephemeral being in an indifferent universe. What does any of it matter?

This is when I think it’s time to re-read Viktor Frankl, whose Man’s Search for Meaning remains one of my favorite books of all time.  Frankl believed that the last of the human freedoms, when all else is stripped away, is the ability to choose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances.  He endured years in a concentration camp (which his own beloved wife did not survive) and yet was able to write this :

Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer on his lips.

Frankl made a case for what he called “tragic optimism” – you’ve got your pain, you’ve got your guilt, and sure enough, there’s the inevitability of death -- he refers to these as the ‘tragic triad’ -- but acknowledging these does not necessarily mean our spirits are destroyed. Our task is to turn suffering into accomplishment (though I'm not clear on how unless to transcend and defy it), view guilt as an invitation to change oneself for the better, and derive from life’s transitory nature an incentive to take responsible action. We must say yes to life and join the ranks of decent people, people whom Frankl felt were in the minority (and in this I disagree, but I guess I’ve led a pretty sheltered life).

He also believed that we should not search for an abstract meaning in life, but rather that each of us is unique and irreplaceable and has a concrete “assignment” that demands fulfillment. Maybe it's a small role, but collectively, small things surely matter.

Viktor Frankl has a lot more to say, and I've picked up his book again because it feels like some kind of tonic to me.

But back to this business of waking up in the night. Eventually, if I don’t get too worked up, I re-enter what I call Sleep, Part Two, and it’s lovely. 

In the meantime, I’m just another woman swimming through the dark. I have a feeling there are others out there. Can you feel me?

 

A Table for Two, A Bed of Kelp

On my third day at the writers' conference, I parked myself at a rear table in the hotel restaurant, planning to tap at my computer or peruse the schedule or maybe just sit there and think while enjoying a salad in solitude, but an elderly woman at an adjacent table turned to me and asked if I would join her for lunch. I was in a head-down, private kind of mood and had been looking forward to getting myself sorted out, and my first inner reaction was a most uncharitable Oh, please, just leave me alone  or something along those lines. I somehow assumed she would be tedious, that making friendly chit-chat would be an energy drain. But look at her, I thought. Do I really have the heart to reject her invitation after she’s been so forthcoming about her desire for company? Is anything I am doing that important? In a nutshell, I felt sorry for her. It was a pity date, but I said yes and relocated to her table. 

And it turns out she was the most interesting, irreverent, and spirited person I’d run into since the start of the conference. She told me about growing up during the Depression, living on her father's rum-runner boat, fishing for food. She told me about her days as a mountain climber, about her three concurrent husbands, and about the time she'd finally gotten the glint of attention from an agent on a manuscript she'd written by claiming she had committed a murder. Maybe she told me couple of fibs too; I didn’t really care. 

The important thing was that at 87 years of age, she was there, navigating her way around a writers’ conference, putting herself on the line, and making a point of meeting new people. Includng me -- who thought I was indulging her and turned out to be the dud.

 A reminder to be open.

Later in the week, my friend Tony called. Like the lady at the writers' conference, he, too, is in his eighties, and I have written about him in this blog before. Tony spent his boyhood on this Ranch, and it shaped his character. Endless days of unsupervised exploration made him self-sufficient and resilient,  and he still has a little wildness in his heart. 

“I left the Ranch,” is how he puts it, “but after all these years, the Ranch has never left me.” 

These are challenging times for Tony, though. His vision has deteriorated lately and his mobility is diminished, and I know there are days when he's in pain.  Still, I harbor the hope that he will manage to make the trip out here sometime. I think it will be good for him to smell the sea and the chaparral, and to show his grandson the tree he planted long ago.

In the meantime, he has a way of summoning up the Ranch in his mind, and I believe it is a comfort to him. On this day he told me how he used to go swimming in the ocean and fall asleep on the kelp beds far from the shore. He was that relaxed, that much in his element. 

I thanked him for the gift of that image, and I treasure it --  a little black-haired boy asleep on the sea in a cradle of seaweed. 

 A reminder to  listen.

 

 

 

Apparently I Need Help. Lots and Lots of Help.

I have been attending a writers’ conference this week, and I might as well admit from the start that I have a lot of ambivalence about this sort of thing. My ambivalence is not limited to writers’ conferences, though: I tend to steer clear of conventions in general. Maybe it’s the hotel context. I feel alien the moment I step into the lobby. I get uneasy just lining up to register and scanning the schedule and trying to find a place to sort things out, and I stink at schmoozing and strategizing and selling myself. 

I hate assemblies in grand ballrooms with garish carpeting and rows of folding chairs and someone at a distant podium pointing to an overhead. And put me in a meeting room for more than forty minutes and I start to feel like a caged animal, especially if I am surrounded by people wearing name tags and earnest expressions who have been schlepping laptops and folders and water bottles and swollen canvas book bags stamped with the names of publishing companies and an organization logo. 

It isn’t that I don’t want to succeed, and I know I have a great deal to learn from others. It’s just hard to sustain the energy level, the public face, the receptive mind. What’s more, where others might feel camaraderie, I sense competitiveness. And maybe it’s all in my head, but let’s face it: I spend a lot of time alone out here at the ranch; when it comes to social cues, I long ago lost my edge.  

What can I say? I'm an introvert.

But I won this. It was a contest, and I entered a couple of essays and was offered a scholarship to attend, and it was awfully hard to decline what is probably a fantastic opportunity. So I decided to accept and embrace it and participate with as much enthusiasm and effort as I can muster.  Don’t get me wrong: I am also grateful, because it’s a generous prize and an encouraging one. It’s just that I need to work myself into these kinds of experiences. I’m low threshold, high maintenance – okay? Anyone who knows me understands.

So on Day One I am engaged in small talk with a woman in the lobby and doing, I think, very well, almost like a normal person, when I somehow let slip that I have a manuscript ready to go and  I plan to publish it myself but just for the heck of it I made one of those ten-minute appointments to meet with an agent but I haven’t given it any further thought and I’m just going to play it by ear. 

Apparently this is just plain stupid. “You have to talk to X,” says the woman, rather insistently, referring to some fellow on the faculty. “I saw him in the bar.”

“Oh, no,” I reply sheepishly, "I don’t want to bother him if he’s in the bar. I don’t even know what I would say.”

“You tell him you have a manuscript and an appointment with an agent. Find out if you can just hand her the manuscript or if you need to write a proposal letter too. Ask him what you should say. Ask him what you should do. He’ll know. He’s The Guy.”

And this woman is like my new best friend and she literally takes me by the hand and pulls me into the bar and we veer around tables until she thinks she has glimpsed The-Guy-Who-Knows and she deposits me in front of his tiny round table in the corner where he is sipping white wine and engaged in deep conversation with a very suntanned blonde in a tangerine summer dress.

“She has a question for you,” says my new best friend.

And I feel like I am twelve years old and someone has just told the study hall teacher that I don’t really understand my math homework.

I stammer something.

 “Tell me in one sentence what your manuscript is about,” says The-Guy-Who-Knows, “If you can’t sell me on your book in one sentence, you’re never going to convince an agent.”

I think my first word is ‘um’ and then I mention that I wasn’t prepared for this…and see that woman who just darted away? She actually dragged me here…and well, frankly, I’m the sort of person who needs to think about things in advance and I’m really sorry to interrupt his private time and I appreciate his advice but...

“You should be able to explain it to me in one sentence right now. Ready, set, GO.”

I know what he’s doing and I notice he is the kind of person who can’t quite keep himself from smiling because he is so pleased with himself.  He is, after all, important around here, perched on a faculty, inspiring protégées, perhaps. He can be challenging. He can be indulgent. And my discomfort amuses him. Even the blonde is entertained.

But I’m such a good girl: the A-student, former school teacher, overzealous mom, all that stuff. We aim to please. I give it a shot.

It is a very long sentence.

He calls it a paragraph. He compliments me for using a big vocabulary word in there that maybe even the agent wouldn't understand. And he lets me know I haven’t made the sale.

“First of all,” he tells me, “relax.”

(Here’s the thing: I hate when people tell me to relax. Relaxing is simply not something one does on command. In fact, telling someone to relax has absolutely the opposite effect. Not only that, when he told me to relax, I already was relaxed. By my standards, anyway. Because relaxed is a relative term.)

 “This is me being relaxed,” I say to The Guy-Who-Knows, “Believe me, if you saw me otherwise, you’d understand.”

 We aren’t hitting it off. That much is clear.

 My new best friend reappears. 

“So how did it go?” she asks. “Has he told you what you need?”

“What she needs is help,” says The Guy-Who-Knows, “Lots and lots of help.”

 He tells me his workshop times.

 --------

I run into him later in the grand ballroom assembly. 

“You again,” he says.

“Yes. Thanks for giving me advice,” I say, always the girl scout, still trying hard.

“And devastating you in the process,” he says with a tinge of pride. His lips curl up into that smug little half smile.

“Not even close,” I tell him. 

He hasn't even seen me un-relaxed. 

 

 

Summer Heat, Morning Thoughts

I’ve just been abruptly rolled out of sleep like a bowling ball that's landed in some predawn gutter.  The air is barely moving and the sky is beginning to get light and it feels futile to just lie there waiting for sleep’s unlikely return, so I’ve relocated to the living room sofa. 

My fate is sealed: I already know I will spend the rest of this day with my brain slurring and my face drooping and my energy at the lethargy level. Undoubtedly there are others like me everywhere using this special time to air out their anxiety. Having failed to find relief in half an Ambien or the pages of a book or various arrangements of pillows fluffed and pounded, we rise, not to shine, but to sigh.

It doesn’t help that it’s been hot. Eerily hot. Yesterday you could feel the scorching heat radiating from dry straw hills and stucco walls, and the brass knob on the entry door felt scalding to the touch, and the thermometer registered 109 as the plants on the deck shriveled and drooped. It was ominous and unsettling.  The world seems precarious now, and thirsty, waiting and still but potentially violent.

But it sure does feel good to be home after several days in Orange County, the high point of which was visiting our old friend Mahin, who used to babysit for my daughter many years ago.  Mahin recently returned after three months in Iran, her first visit back since she emigrated to the United States about twenty-five years ago. Her life here has never been easy, and I think she had long harbored a fantasy about one day returning to the embrace of her native land. She discovered, of course, it is not the place she remembered.

“For me, it was a strange country,” she said, “It wasn’t the Iran I left. It wasn’t the Iran I could call ‘back home.’ I found some things were better than I was expecting and some things were worse than I was expecting, and I am happy I could go and come back, but now for the first time, I look at California and I know that this is home.”

I wasn’t surprised to hear this. Mahin has made her own way for a long time. She is one of the most spirited women I have ever known, and it is impossible to imagine her easily adjusting to a restrictive society. 

She described sitting down in the male section of a bus, for example. 

“Are you looking for trouble?” she was asked. 

“No,” she replied,  “I have been looking for a seat, and I found one. Right here.”

Sounds like a Persian Rosa Parks, but that’s vintage Mahin. Over the years I have seen her step into many battles, weathering ordeals she might have avoided if she could have ignored unfairness and stupidity, but Mahin simply cannot put her head down and keep silent if something is wrong. And she does not know how to lie. Someone once tried to explain to her that some lies are smart and smooth and can spare you lots of trouble: Better a peaceful lie than a violent truth, the saying goes. But Mahin is honesty personified. Even the peaceful lies are against her nature. 

She is kind, though, and generous, and she has built a good life here, a modest and dignified one. 

After dinner – chicken in a sauce of crushed walnuts and pomegranates, marinated beef kabobs, crispy rice called tahdig with three sauces – we had tea and pistachio nuts in Mahin’s apartment and she showed us family pictures and beautiful books about Iran and I thought about the epic histories and journeys that had brought us where we were and how unlikely it was that our lives would be connected and how grateful I am that they are. Someday I’d like to write the story of Mahin. 

We said good-bye and drove back to our motel beneath the strawberry moon. 

 ------------

Here, now, back at home, the room is filling up with daylight and birds are beginning their chatter and chirp, and maybe I’ll try for a little more sleep before the sun is too hot to ignore. 

My Little Box of Grief

About two weeks after my dog died, a small cardboard box arrived in the mail. There’s always an instant of pleasure and anticipation upon discovering an unexpected package in the mailbox, but the moment turned creepy when I saw the return address: it was from the local veterinary clinic where I had so recently taken Terra and returned home alone. Her ashes and collar are buried near our house now. End of story, adios vet. So I couldn’t fathom what this could be, although some macabre possibilities irrationally occurred to me. I shuddered, took a deep breath, and opened the box.

A pastel-colored brochure with the title 'Understanding Your Feelings of Loss' rested on top of a mound of bubble wrap. It was all about the grief I would no doubt be experiencing, the various stages I could expect to endure, how natural it was, even a word about how to dismiss the insensitivity of those cruel and uncaring others who may not understand. Grief is complicated, it said. I might feel anger and guilt on the way to acceptance. Day-to-day tasks can seem impossible to perform. I may even wonder if I can go on.  

The brochure's tone was tactful, kindly, and restrained; I imagined the soothing voice of a psychiatrist or a pastor, possibly even Garrison Keillor.  And I can now state with conviction that it is perfectly normal to grieve the loss of my pet, and that my feelings, whatever they are, are valid. As a matter of fact, they transcend mere validity; they may well offer evidence of my advanced state of enlightenment, an idea supported with a quote by Anatole France: Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened. 

So I should go for it, embrace my bereavement, grieve with confidence. 

On the other hand, in the event that I find I am unable get over it, a list of counselors, websites, and Pet Loss Support Telephone Hotlines was also enclosed. (I wondered for a moment if one of my neighbors had reported me.) 

Finally, tucked into the bottom of the box in a zip-loc baggie was a plaster plaque painted lilac and yellow, stamped with a flesh-colored paw print and adorned with a pink ribbon. The name Terra was engraved at the bottom. A sticker on the bag said, inexplicably, “Remove before baking.”

It was all very sweet and well-intentioned, if a little bit baffling.  My first reaction was that old leak at the eye, for I am still a little shaky when it comes to Terra, though it is reassuring to have been officially informed that a deep and lingering sense of hurt is normal. My second reaction was to laugh at the silliness of it – especially that little ornament that I have no clue what to do with.  

But isn’t life grand?  Lose a dog and get a first aid kit for the heart, a handy roster of resources and reassurances – a little bereavement box all your own to facilitate closure. Advice and comfort have now been dispatched, along with a keepsake personalized with your loved one’s name, and just look at you -- you’re on your way. There is something so crisp and affirmative about it. 

And I’m not cynical enough to trash a gesture well meant.

But as it turns out, I already had a little box of grief. I sort through it in the night, masochistically revisiting my losses, replaying mistakes that can never be undone, running my hands over the heartbreak it holds. Over the years its contents have been rubbed as smooth as polished stones, and even though I am afraid, each stone is a talisman reminding me what the spirit can survive. 

There is no balm but the distraction of daylight, no formula but the conversion of sadness to compassion, no choice but to set the box aside.

The Season of Lavender in the Year of the Lizard

This morning I went for a walk with my neighbor Jeanne and we inadvertently startled a doe and a small spotted fawn. The doe darted up a hill and quickly vanished and the fawn ran directly towards me in all its fear and vulnerability, looking so tiny and new I wondered if this might have been its first day in the world. Equally startled, I jumped aside, feeling clumsy and intrusive. I hope mother and baby were quickly reunited. 

Back at Jeanne’s house, we paused to pick berries, thrashing through the lavender that borders her garden. (A bear appeared behind her house recently, perhaps drawn to those berries, or maybe to test the not-quite-ready apricots.) Then I rode my bike home along the oak-lined road accompanied by intermittent birdsong. The scent of lavender still clung to my hands. 

And that's the way it is sometimes.

Jeanne wrote about our canyon in an email recently: The other day I needed to explain to someone where I lived. All I could really say was that I lived a good safe distance beyond the end of the road. How could I begin to describe what this canyon really is?  Or how the fence line along the ocean disappears into the dusk at twilight, headlands blurring softly into the distance as I make my way home from town in the evening?

Beyond the threshold of fog and dusk, there is this universe. It is impossible to ignore the strangeness and beauty of the natural world here -- its weirdnesses and wonders assert themselves daily. Just yesterday I watched as a redtail hawk danced with the wind, a family of wild pigs traversed the hill from Coyote Canyon, and a lizard with streaks of iridescent blue on its underbelly scampered up the window screen, its miniature hands looking eerily humanoid. 

On the beach a small sea lion pup lay dead on the sand -- I counted twenty-seven turkey vultures gnawing at the carcass or hovering nearby. A string of pelicans soared above and dolphins dipped and spun in the shine of the sea, and once again I was overcome by a sense of amazement and humility.

No doubt sharing life with a dog taught me to pay closer attention, too. I am sure I listen a little lower to the ground now, aware of another stratum of existence, of squirrels and quail and insects buzzing, the constant drone of industrious life in the orchard, the wildness at the edge of things, that bold coyote strutting close to the house, the cattle converging by the hammock near the creek, the clamor of invisible beings passing through the brush. These are the wavelengths Terra tuned into, and I cannot begin to understand them, but they seem valid and worthy and infinitely complex. I approach life more respectfully now.

I am the visitor, after all.

Meanwhile the century plant -- which I have since learned is actually a type of yucca, sometimes called Our Lord's Candle, which makes a lot of sense -- continues its ascent after thirty dormant years, rising now above the roofline and dropping yellow blossoms. Supposedly it blooms only once and that once is happening now. There is something epic and miraculous about it. 

So I live in a state of astonishment, a little bit crazy no doubt, and becoming somewhat feral, but comforted and not alone.  

William Stafford (of course) said it far better than I ever could:

Now I know why people worship, carry around

magic emblems, wake up talking dreams

they teach to their children: the world speaks.

The world speaks everything to us.

It is our only friend. 

--------------

Maybe this whole post is just a thank you song. 

I don’t know why I was so lucky to have landed here, but I am grateful I am grateful I am grateful.

Thrift Shop Finds

It’s been two years since I left teaching, and I’ve missed my friends from the middle school.  Every once in awhile there’s been an email and a sputtering attempt at getting together, but you know how it is.  People get busy in their separate lives and months go by without any contact and before long even the folks with whom you once greeted every morning and weathered great adventures and worked with side by side -- yes, even they grow distant and begin to feel like strangers. Unless someone gets proactive and persistent and creative. And someone did.

In this case it was Donna, who grabbed me at the graduation and gave me a two-week framework in which to choose a date when I could join her, Lynne, and Julie for an expedition to the thrift stores of Ventura. 

Now I realize there are those to whom this probably sounds like a voluntary field trip into purgatory, but I genuinely like thrift stores. Maybe it goes back to the days on Coney Island Avenue when neighbors with older children would deposit big bags of outgrown clothing at our door, or when my father’s affluent customers would send their hand-me-downs home with him. It never would have occurred to us to be offended. This was not charity but a kind of sharing that was quite customary and a lot of fun. My sister and I would go through the bags with greed and glee, choosing what was hers and what was mine. We seldom went shopping for anything brand new, and we felt no deprivation about that; those hand-me-down bags seemed like big friendly surprise packages, and all of it new to us.

Aside from those positive childhood associations connected to other people’s used stuff, I like the story and mystery of a good thrift store, the untold tales behind the wedding dresses that end up so uncherished, or the small wonder of a tarnished silver butter dish with an ornate monogram finding its place among a line-up of old coffeemakers and lampshades. Broken chairs once mended with wire, bric-brac so awful as to be funny, the slightly stretched out cashmere sweater among the teeny tacky tops from Forever 21 -- it's like a random gathering of orphans, or passengers disembarking from a Greyhound bus, cigarette-voiced malingerers who aren't sure where they're headed but have been around the block a couple of times. It's like piles of unpublished manuscripts, and maybe one of them is good. If approached in the right spirit, a thrift store provides a rambunctious sort of evidence that anything can happen. It's all about unlikely outcomes and the persistent possibility of discovery.

I suppose it is also about stuff, though, and how there is way too much of it.  A quick stroll through the aisles of any thrift store is all the evidence we need that our species has produced enough junk for all eternity.  With a bit of repair and redistribution, we could pretty much stop right here. But maybe that’s another thing that makes thrift store shopping so satisfying. It provides all the fun of recreational shopping without requiring the production of new goods. It’s a guilt free fix and the price is right and the money usually goes to a worthy nonprofit organization.

 But enough about the rationalization. Let’s focus on the fun.

 First you have to picture four giggling women rifling through the racks.

 “Oh, Donna! Check this out. It’s so YOU!”

 “Would I wear this? Even though it’s purple? Even though it’s very sheer?”

 “Pink suede high-heeled boots! And they’re just my size!”

Some people enjoy careening about like pinballs, planlessly pinging here and there.  As for me, I already have a bit of ADD going on, so it helps to start out with a quest. I decided that I was on the hunt for long ballroom gloves to give to my neighbor Jeanne for berry picking. I never found any, but it gave me a focus. 

Julie, on the other hand, was searching for summer shirts for her husband, and she found several -- one of them was silk. 

“Can you picture Marc in a silk shirt?” she asked.  

“Absolutely,” I lied. 

But despite its being made of silk, it was quite a casual-looking shirt, a short-sleeved blue print I could imagine someone wearing at a cabaña, looking cool and eating coconuts and listening to Cuban music.  

(I digress.)

Donna, as it turns out, has a good eye – among other things, she picked up an elegant wine-colored shawl and a smart looking suede jacket that looked like it was tailored just for her.  Lynne, to our disappointment, did not actually buy those pink boots, but she did find a classy silk blouse and some workout clothes.  My favorite purchase was a heavy wool pullover with a beautiful knit design – I now have something chic to wear if I ever go for a winter trek in the Norwegian fjords.

I also came upon an unusual black lace jacket that I somehow thought might be a cute little evening cover-up over a spaghetti-strap dress. Hard to explain -- the black lace fabric contrasted with the garment’s crisp cut, sort of Morticia Addams meets Mary Tyler Moore.  I called my daughter to see if she might like it. 

“Mom, what you’ve described so far sounds sort of frightening,” she said. 

Note to self: do not attempt to shop for daughter, especially not here.

Not trying to shop for my daughter was only one of many important lessons I learned from yesterday’s adventure. Put four girlfriends together for an afternoon and you’ve got a virtual tutorial on life. Women generously share the narratives of their experiences and the wisdom gleaned. We can't help it. 

One thing we have apparently all discovered is that with age we’ve become a bit more tolerant of others, more willing to accept the faults because we also see the good, or maybe because we realize how flawed we are ourselves. On the other hand, as Julie pointed out, getting older shouldn’t mean becoming lazy and complacent:  it’s healthy to be pissed off about something! May we never get used to injustice, may we never accept what we know isn’t right, and let’s not leave the fight solely to the young. 

With a story or two of her own, Lynne reminded us that it is essential to speak out sometimes -- feels damned good, in fact. On the other hand, Julie wisely warned that it is equally essential to know when to keep your mouth shut, and I’m working on that one.  Meanwhile Donna reminded me with her very demeanor -- and what I know of her history and accomplishments -- that the limits of determination and resilience are so far off as to be invisible.

We reminisced, of course. Remember that first year when we took 66 kids to Washington, D.C. and none of us quite knew what we were doing? Remember when we went camping and had to figure out how to put up that enormous tent while the wind was howling? 

Didn’t we laugh a lot? 

I thought about the festivals and deck meetings, the teaching that happens in the classroom and behind the scenes, the routines and intimacy that made us like a family, and the dramas both personal and historical that seared our souls together even more than we knew. The greatest find of all from our thrift shop day was rediscovering our friendship and making it current again.

 

 

 

 

Family Time

My brother, sister-in-law, and little niece were going to be in Orange County for two days on their way to someplace else, so we organized a reunion of sorts with my sister and my mother too. When people you love come from faraway for a too-short visit, you have to make the most of it, even if it requires delicately negotiating a minute by minute schedule in which each whim and logistic adds exhausting layers of complexity. 

Or is that just the way it is with my family?

With us, the ramifications and implications of every possible permutation must be closely examined before we get rolling -- behind the scenes, between the lines, and all along the way. How will it be perceived if we meet for coffee at the place closest to the motel where I am staying? Doesn’t that mean everyone is sort of coming to me? But isn’t my motel in a more central location? Then again, isn't this my sister's home territory, and isn’t she going through some very hard times, so shouldn’t we try to focus on her? But wasn't this supposed to be about our elderly mother meeting her grandchild? What does she have to look forward to, after all? Are we bad people, though, if we bring our mother right back to the assisted living facility immediately after lunch and take Rose to the Discovery Museum? And will we all be in the mood for dessert at my sister’s house now that she has bought ice cream, cake and decaf for the occasion? Will each of us have adequate time with little Rose? And honestly, don’t some of us tend to be a bit controlling? 

To add to the mirth, I broke my toe the other day and I’ve developed a rather comical gait. You wouldn’t think a tiny toe could cause so much discomfort, but whenever I forget and step down normally I experience a momentary surge of agony and it’s back to the limp. Monte has been calling me Festus, which doesn’t help.

And so we converged at my mother’s residence. She had forgotten we were coming and we found her asleep at 11 a.m. and guided her up and out. She wore a bright red sweater and carried her cane, dragging it behind her or swinging it about recklessly. As I hobbled along beside her, my sister observed that I had a triangle-shaped tear in the seat of my pants that occasionally flapped like a sail and revealed a bit of buttock.  I tied my sweater around my waist and tried to reclaim my dignity.

At the restaurant, my mother sat at the head of the table looking slightly bewildered. Since her hearing aid never seems functional, I have taken to communicating with her in writing. I asked her in a note how she was doing, and she wrote, in quite coherent cursive:  I am too surprised to speak but happy to be with my family. 

Rose, meanwhile, took out her tiny diary, undid the little lock, and began to draw what she explained were ‘abstract pitchers’. Then she asked me to tell my mother that at night the dolls come to life in her room to dance and sing in the moonlight.  My mother thought this was nice but not particularly unusual. Apparently her own dolls and stuffed animals have a bit of life in them too, but mostly they just listen. “I sing myself to sleep every night,” she told Rose.

My brother had very much wanted my mother and Rose to meet. “Maybe I’m crazy,” he said, “or too sentimental, but it somehow feels important.”

I agreed. It did seem important, and not something he needed to explain in rational terms.

Our history is complicated, you see.

And it turned out to be a good experience that yielded tender memories in a setting where a few of those were needed. It was delightful to see a tiny little girl in pink shoes walking through the corridors of my mother’s residence. Old faces leaned over from wheelchairs and walkers, trembling hands extended, and Rose was shy but gracious, carrying a brightly colored tote bag from which one of her model horses poked his head, and clutching her doll Sarah, otherwise known as Saddie-Gladdie. My mother gave Rose a little stuffed kitten, and Rose sang America the Beautiful in a voice as pure and sweet as clear spring water.

Later, at the Discovery Museum, my sister, my brother, and I entered a booth that simulated the feeling of an earthquake, starting with a deep-throated rolling and escalating into sudden jolts that startled us into inappropriate giggles. Sitting in an earthquake chamber with my siblings just seemed funny and familiar somehow.

And then I went to an exhibit that invited me to lie down in a bed of nails, and the guide said, “It will feel a little prickly. Is this your first time?”

“Hardly,” I said, as I climbed on board.