Still Amazed

Stepping Out and Moving Forward

It was Friday night in Santa Barbara and the sky was still blushing slightly while a crescent moon rose above the palm trees, and despite October’s hint of crispness in the air, the flip-flop girls were out and about, and the ones in little skirts and summer dresses. Couples sat over wine at outdoor tables and ordered hors d’ouevres in chic cafés and the aroma of wood chip barbecue drifted towards us along with the sounds of Latin music. Business was downright brisk and spirits bright and financial hard times had clearly not yet trickled down to State Street. “Wait ‘til this time next year,” said my companion ominously. Then we walked beneath an arch covered with bougainvillea, paused at the crosswalk, and watched the signal until that little man appeared with his purposeful stride and faintly lavender light.

I’d never really looked at that funny little fellow. It was our friend Jill, visiting from England last month, who pointed him out in the way an outsider helps you see anew the ordinary things you take for granted. She was charmed at the way he alerted pedestrians that it was time to step off the curb, and even modeled in his stance the proper way to do it. She noted, too, the hint of color in the light of him. Now I smiled and stood poised and I mimicked his approach when he appeared. I pushed forward with resolve and decided I was feeling a little better. 

It had been a wearisome week for all of us, but I'd found comfort that very morning in a workshop with teachers and writers, the kind of place where poetry matters and thought is valued and people encourage each other. We were still weirded out by the previous night’s debate, wondering why so many assessments of Palin’s mélange of incoherent word salad, hollow colloquialisms, misinformation and aggressive lies had been so generous. I suppose the bar had already been set so low she would have had to stagger on drunk, expose a boob, and puke on Biden’s shoe for her performance to be deemed anything but a success. But it was nice to hear intelligent and compassionate people confirming the reality and discussing issues and making plans and finding hope.

One of the presenters, Lois Klein, shared these familiar lines from William Carlos Williams:

 It is difficult

to get the news from poetry

yet men die miserably

every day

for lack

of what is found there.

There was no lack of it in this room.

Now I was headed to the Arlington Theater to see Jackson Browne in concert. It’s no secret among my friends that I have a special fondness for Jackson Browne, but even the Arlington itself is a treat. Built in the 1930’s in a Mission revival style, the interior is designed to give the audience the sense of being outdoors under the night sky in the piazza of an old Spanish colonial town. The facades of stucco houses jut out from the walls, the white lights of little stars adorn the great domed ceiling, and one almost expects to see a señorita with mantilla and fan step out onto a balcony to be serenaded by her lover.

The crowd was mostly middle-aged, but what would you expect? A friendly stranger next to us looked around and said, “So this is what we look like now.”

And so we do, and come to think of it, ‘middle-age’ is a rather generous term.

Jackson, though, despite the title of his new album, was unconquered by time, and he was on. It was a generous show filled with dearly loved classics and fabulous new songs, enriched by the extraordinary gospel voices of Alethea Mills and Chavonne Morris, and it just kept getting better and better, until finally, with the entire audience on its feet, it became a shared acknowledgement of our profound desire for justice and peace and a transcendent call for change.

Back out on the street I again strode forward with the stalwart earnestness of the little lavender man in the signal. And maybe that's silly, but he seemed a kind of metaphor for something, and I'm calling it determination. 

We are in the limbo window at this moment, that small eternity before the next step, when anything is still possible. We may just do it right this time.

 

 

Brief Respite

On a day of anger, frustration and disillusionment that threaten to become the new normal, I retreated briefly into a certain room where a handful of white-haired ladies were tending to the past with quiet, gentle diligence. It was the Lompoc Historical Society, where the shelves are lined with volumes of family histories and the cabinets are crammed with old photographs, newspaper clippings, letters and memorabilia sorted and labeled by volunteers with a focused sense of mission. It's an ongoing labor of love.

Shirley was identifying the line-up in an old school photo. 

“That was Rosie Maloney, I guess. And who’s that on the end? Mary Lou?  We don’t know who that is on the other side of Esther Harris either. Maybe Hazel?”

“I don’t remember her maiden name,” said Myra. “She’d be in the annual. That’s the best place to check.”

As for me, I was just poking around. I wanted to find some stories and this was a good place to look.  My friend Kam Jacoby had clued me in. He’s been scanning historical photographs of Lompc houses and buildings and street scenes, re-photographing each from the identical angle and location of the original, creating hauntingly beautiful composites of the past and present in seamless coexistence.

I too am fond of time traveling. In particular, I thought it would be fun to see whether any memories of Camp Cooke were housed in this shed. My father had been stationed there in the 1940s; in fact he wrote for the Camp Cooke Clarion, not exactly a big-time newspaper, but Myra had heard of it.

She placed three heaping files on the table in front of me, all labeled “Camp Cooke” in blue marker pen.  I voraciously perused black and white photographs of soldiers and barracks and pretty girls, read letters, telegrams, and get well cards, even savored a fancy printed menu for an officers’ holiday dinner, and it was a thorough meal indeed: roast tom turkey with sage dressing, snowflake potatoes, giblet gravy, carrots and peas, lettuce and tomato salad, chocolate cake, ice cream, cigars, cigarettes, mints, coffee, punch, and beer.

At this point, a charming fellow named Jim Reynolds walked in. Myra told him I was interested in Camp Cooke.

“Camp Cooke? I was one of the surveyors. My last day there was March 2, 1942. We watched the first company roll in and then went on to build the road to Hunter Liggett. All sagebrush and chaparral back then.”

 “I remember going out there in a ’46 Ford," said Myra. "Someone was sitting on the fender and we hit a bump and he bounced up and left a big dent in the fender.”

 “Yes, it was all open country,” said Jim. “We'd go out there and hunt coyotes in the old days.”

“And it would get real foggy,” Myra continued. “You couldn’t see a thing. We got lost once and we just went ‘til we heard the ocean, then we knew which way to turn.”

 “We would work for a few hours, and then go down to the surf and have lunch,” said Jim.

I was enjoying their casual reminiscences as much as the odds and ends within the folders on the table, and I began to regret that I hadn’t brought my tape recorder.

But as I flipped through pages a familiar image caught my eye. It was Zombie, the beloved wire-haired terrier of Camp Cooke’s Buzzer Company canine corps. When I was a little girl, I’d seen a snapshot of Zombie in my father’s long-since-vanished photo album. I had a recollection, too, of an article he had written about him in the Camp Cooke Clarion.  

I had a feeling…

There it was. The story by my father, with the byline Pfc. S.W. Carbone, dear and familiar and clear as day. Not a Xerox copy, either, but my father’s article, lovingly clipped by some anonymous reader and pasted into an album to be discovered by me decades later in this most unlikely place.  It was a sad one, about Zombie’s death, but touching and beautifully written. Someone else had thought so too.

I would have been gleefully satisfied with that, but there was a second article by him as well, this one a humorous profile about a fellow soldier written for a column he called “Private Lives”. I recognized not only my father’s name here but his voice -- his easy, natural eloquence embarked this time upon a laugh. 

 And something that had receded like dreams in fog suddenly seemed real again. I smiled.

It was a good day to hang out in the old days.

 

Changes

Yesterday there was a snakeskin on the ground, nearly transparent and slightly opalescent, in its own way beautiful and perfect. Hollow and seemingly brittle, it glistened faintly in the sunlight like a plastic necklace dropped and forgotten. Somehow its former inhabitant had slipped from its bounds, leaving it empty and intact, then slithered silently off into the next episode of its life.

And the much-maligned snake evokes very few associations that are positive, but I have to admit there was something enviable about the idea of shedding one’s skin and slinking away to a new incarnation and new possibilities.  I indulged the metaphor and applied it to many things: my life, the economy, the presidency. 

But the changes we face as a nation today are more than a superficial shedding of the outer layer. There is a sea change coming at us, whether we like it or not, and it will take great strength to guide it in ways that will ensure the viability of our future. We have heard the platitudes of denial, the regressive slogans, the cynical attempts to scare us, but we have learned that the best decisions are based on reason, not fear, and we are ready to move forward -- with Obama of course. 

The snake in the picture right now is a man named John Mc Cain, whose hunger for power trumps all else, whose misplaced priorities and recklessness of judgment were never more apparent than during the crisis days of the previous week, and whose bizarre choice of a running mate is insulting and disturbing to thinking people everywhere. At times during the debate Friday night I almost felt sorry for McCain, the kind of sorry you feel when someone is so removed from reality, wanting something so much but so desperately off key you feel a little sad for him. My sympathy dissolved, though, when I heard his message and watched his condescending attitude toward the brilliant man beside him, a man he seemed unable to look at and speak to directly, a man who tried to be respectful and even sought some common ground but always made the point. 

But I digress. I guess I am a little obsessed about this election.

And we may be at the end of something but we are at the cusp of something too. 

I remain hopeful.

-----

Paul Newman died. I don’t usually write about movie stars and celebrities, but wasn’t there something about him that was better than most? A couple of years ago my friend Kelley and I saw him and Joanne Woodward just a few rows away from us in the audience at a play in Manhattan. He looked thin and frail, but still handsome and dignified, and everyone knew darned well who he was, but there was an implicit understanding to give him and his wife their privacy and their space. After the play, people paused and let them pass and not a single person called their names or intruded in any way, and judging by the way he gazed straight ahead as he walked, I think he really appreciated it. He was obviously very loved and respected. Maybe it was partly because he had a sense of humor about himself. He didn’t let that movie star business go to his head but he generously used what benefits it yielded to do good things for the world.  So his passing makes me sad, even though I didn’t know him. Here’s to Paul Newman.

 -------

The following poem by William Stafford found its way to me on wings of its own and it somehow feels right to share it here.  It’s called Allegiances:

It is time for all the heroes to go home

if they have any, time for all of us common ones

to locate ourselves by the real things

we live by.

Far to the north, or indeed in any direction,

strange mountains and creatures have always lurked-

elves, goblins, trolls and spiders: - we

encounter them in dread and wonder,

But once we have tasted far streams, touched the gold,

found some limit by the waterfall,

a season changes, and we come back, changed

but safe, quiet, grateful.

Suppose an insane wind holds all the hills

while strange beliefs whine at the traveler's ears,

we ordinary beings can cling to the earth and love

where we are, sturdy for common things.

 ---------

Here, in the backcountry, off the grid, nowhere in particular, the stars shone brightly in the night and now the morning fog is crawling up the canyon and to the east beyond the vaqueros the sky is beginning to blue.

I remain hopeful.

 

 

 

 

Childhood Economics

  Even as a child, I knew if I had a dime I could buy two candy bars or a comic book, but not both. All of my financial transactions involved some element of choice and deprivation, or perhaps some systematic deferral with a goal at the end, an option I was not particularly fond of.  Isn’t it funny how it all goes back to the earliest wisdom you possessed?

Years later, I took a required economics class in college and struggled. It was a basic 101 course, but its abstractions and formulae intimidated me. Although set in a world of markets and goods, its bright metallic certainty seemed divorced from human influence. It was a complicated game whose rules I could not grasp, a little too close to math, but without math’s purity. I usually understood the first concrete illustrations but felt lost when these meandered off into large-scale applications and brain-straining complexities. 

My lack of imagination and inability to comprehend the system left me in an arrested state of economic development. I was woefully inept at financial planning and gave little thought to retirement. (Thank goodness my husband did.)  But because I grew up poor (though not impoverished) I have always been aware of the pending fall of that other shoe, even when things were going well. Despite a weakness for books and baubles and bargains that don’t hold up, I tend to live closer to the bone than needed, taking very few risks, and generally rather boring and frugal in my spending. Money is a fickle friend and it makes me a little uneasy.

 As a couple, my husband and I handle finances based on the old common sense understandings, but those basics seem to have served us well. Owning one house is adequate and nothing short of amazing; we were well into our forties when we made that dream real. Our vehicles are small and fuel-efficient, often pre-owned, and purchased with cash. We pay off our credit card bills each month, and our daughter managed to graduate from college last year without debt. We have deferred small portions of our income and invested with caution, and we figured our retirement years would not be flashy, but reasonably secure, though at this point, who can say?  Yet even now, I feel affluent and blessed and fully aware that I live better than 99% of the world’s population, and I try to contribute what I can to help alleviate the world’s collective misery, even if the net effect is miniscule.

 And I realize all that may sound smug and self-righteous, but it is spoken with the utmost humility and a profound awareness that the world is not a level playing field. Many people start out with incalculable disadvantages, and there are elements of luck in all outcomes. I don’t believe democracy means every man for himself, and survival of the fittest, and trusting that everything will sort itself out in the free market, the streets, or the playground.

Yes, even as a child, I knew some kids needed a hand and life wasn’t fair. I knew, too, that when the teacher left the room, there would be those who behaved and those who went wild, and we all got in trouble. It’s the way of the world. Always was.

 It’s apparent in the mess we’re in right now. A bunch of selfish jerks went wild and we’re all bracing for the punishment. I understand the need to borrow, and I know that much of our economy was built on easy available credit, and this was a sound enough practice while the economy was growing and people could pay back their loans.

Enter greed and bad judgment, with borrowers, like addicts, craving more and more and getting in over their heads, and lenders, like drug dealers, encouraging that addiction, luring them in, leveraging themselves to the hilt, offering predatory mortgages and short-sighted scams all guaranteed to backfire.

Because here’s another one of those basic facts you learn early on: bubbles burst.  But the wizards of Wall Street shamelessly scrambled to maximize their own obscene wealth, and our leaders in Washington assumed a hands-off posture, ‘cause they basically think greed is fine. One of the key advocates of deregulation, of course, was John McCain -- yeah, the one who wants to be our president, the one who would love to apply the same failed laissez faire principle to the shameful mess that is our health care system.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration just kept on spending, including billions for a war we didn’t need, and all on credit, of course, leaving us with a staggering unprecedented federal deficit.

Now they are asking us to trust them. To the tune of $700 billion. 

Well, it wasn’t my screw-up, and it wasn’t my greed, but I still have a sense that we’re all in this together, and I figure we’re all going to have to cut corners and make some sacrifices. I’m willing. We’ve got to keep this ship afloat, one way or another. And I believe we will get over this.

I just don’t think that a bail-out should come without accountability.  To draw upon childhood economics once again, even a child knows that if you haven’t been sharing the profits of your ultra glitzy lemonade stand, it isn’t reasonable to expect others to cover your losses when it flounders, or clean up the mess. 

Risky business has its risks, and irresponsible behavior should not be rewarded.

 So let there be caveats. And payback. And accountability. And oversight. 

Let the public have some ownership in the companies we are rescuing.

Let compassion extend to the poor as well as the rich.

And please, dear God, let there be change.

 

 

Traffic School

Out in the world there were bail-outs and wipe-outs and shake-ups that week, there were speeches and rants and debates, there were bombings and battles and baseball games. But in here, the California DMV code ruled. This is traffic school, baby, get used to it. 

It was held in a meeting room just beyond the lobby of the Holiday Inn. The egg and coffee smell of a buffet breakfast wafted in the air as I wandered in,  a little too punctual as usual. It was a familiar smell of hotels and conferences, but the restaurant clientele on this Saturday morning was leisure rather than business, sleepy-eyed tourists in frumpy sweats and bright white athletic shoes, people enjoying brief low-budget vacations in the last gasp of summer. I envied their freedom to spend the day as they wished. I braced myself for captivity.

We were variously in for speeding, illegal turns, or failures to halt at stop signs, pedestrian crossings, or, as in my case, red lights. We seemed collectively to represent the colorful demographics of California: there were numerous Asians, Hispanics, and multi-ethnics among us and even a red-head from Iowa, there were folks with halting accents and folks who were glib, there were old and young, the unwashed and the well-groomed, some who still felt wronged and angry, and others like myself just resigned to take my punishment. It was called Great Comedy Traffic School, but the joke was on us. We had been sentenced to eight hours in this room.

“I did get a joke or two off the internet for you,” said Don, our affable instructor, “but I hope you weren't expecting a comedian. It's traffic school, after all.” 

Don was a retired Marine, which elicited a warm response from Randy, who had also been a Marine. The two compared notes during a break. “Were you in Eye-Raq? I got a nice tan in Eye-Raq,” said Randy, who seemed quite happy to be here at the Holiday Inn instead.

The rules of the road are not inherently interesting, but Don did his best with the material. He divided us into two teams and we played a quiz show game, shouting out our best guesses about different types of auto insurance, what to do if our brakes fail, and the top ten causes of driver distraction. He showed us a couple of videos, too, the earnest kind with lame music, stilted acting, and styles from the early 90s.  They emphasized the importance of watching out for oblivious children, not driving while even mildly intoxicated, and controlling our anger behind the wheel. We watched a scene in which a man with a baseball bat stood poised to hit the car that had cut him off in traffic, and just as we were thinking how stupid the guy in the car was to have pulled over, we were shown an interior view in which his hand is seen reaching for a gun in the glove compartment. Let that be a lesson to you.

 “What is this road-a-rage?” asked a bespectacled Asian woman. “I don’t know this term. I don’t know why we talk so much about this term. All I do is turn when person crossing street. It take long time. I think it is okay and then officer come and give me ticket. Not even guilty.”

“I’m sorry, m’am,” said Don. “If you don’t feel you were treated fairly, you’ll have to tell it to the judge. I’m just the traffic school instructor.”

She exhibited no signs of rage, but she did retain an aura of befuddled indignation for the rest of the day.

“Moving right along,” said Don, “Any questions?”

“Anyone know the maximum range of an M-16?” asked Randy.

“I had a guy pull a gun on me,” offered James.

“I saw someone throw his burrito at another car,” said Wendall.

 “You know who really pisses me off? Guys on motorcycles. In and out of lanes…” said someone else.

"Hey, hey. Watch it there," said the motorcyclist in our midst.

The woman from Iowa tapped me on the shoulder. “I never know if I should say something or not,” she whispered. “But are you aware that you have a tear in your jeans? It isn’t huge, and you can’t really see anything, but I thought you’d like to know.”

 Damn it.  A tear in my jeans?  Again?  These are my favorite jeans, too, so soft and faded from years of wear. In fact, I just recently had a patch sewn on. Damn.

 Outside, the day grew warm and pleasant and we were given intermittent breaks to take a breath of it.

There was discussion about littering, trunking, tailgating, passing, reckless driving, and tests for inebriation. We heard about the meanings of colored curbs and the danger of driving with feet clad only in nylons, the nuances of the new cell phone law and what to do if you hit a parked car.  

But I was doing time for going through a red light and I wanted to make sure I got the whole scoop on that. I know I am obnoxious but I raised my hand and asked for unequivocal clarification.

“Oh, you got bit by the camera,” said Don. “Changes you forever – don’t it?” and he explained that the rear wheels must be over the second line in the intersection or I didn’t make the light. My new inclination is to screech on the brakes the moment I see yellow.

Just as my sixth grade students always did, I was getting weirdly nervous about the test. “Have we covered everything that’s on it?” I found myself asking, despite the fact that I had filled up three pages of notes. Clearly I have issues.

But it was an easy test, multiple choice, and you could have passed even if you’d only gotten 6 right, and I had the impression that even then Don might have given you a hint or two and let you make a change.

 And I’d like to say that I bonded with my fellow traffic outlaws or gained some brand new insight or emerged in some way better than I was.

 But really, I’m just glad it’s over. 

And I'll never be bad again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Choice is Crystal Clear

This is what he wrote to me:

Obviously, we are on different pages on this issue.  I have become very pro-life and that point is very clear in this election between the two sides, so my choice is crystal clear. Your view is very different. I will not send political info to you anymore.

Maybe I should go back to the beginning of the exchange. It started when he forwarded some bizarre viral spam to me about how much John McCain loves his country and how much “Barack HUSSEIN (his real name!) Obama” does not. At the end of the ravings, accusations, and snide remarks, there was counsel to live simply, love generously, and trust in God.

How could I not respond? I felt I should at least ask him to take me off that particular mailing list.

I should mention, too, that he is a nice man, an educated person in a respected profession who hails from immigrant working class roots much like my own. I know a lot about him, you see, because once upon a time he was my husband. It was a very long time ago, but a fact is a fact.

And I don’t know what kind of kool-aid he’s been drinking in the decades since, but his message was dissonant on so many levels. First, that he considers the presidential election to be nothing more than a referendum on abortion, well, that’s pretty disturbing right there, and I realize there are others who share this peculiar sense of mission, but I never knew I knew one (although I suppose I don’t). Then, there is the notion that the hateful drivel he was passing around constitutes “political information”. Finally, there is the smug implication that I am somehow anti-life.

Because isn’t that essentially what he is saying?

Heck, I am passionately in favor of life. Which might be why I hate unnecessary war and the rape of the environment, why I care, in fact, about what happens to generations beyond our own.

And I may be wandering into irrelevance here, but for the record, I am not gung-ho on abortion, and I am grateful never to have had reason to consider one. But I also came of age in the 1960s, and I can tell you with certainty that the illegality of abortions was not a life-affirming reality or a deterrent to anything. I recall one of my best friends desperately flying to Puerto Rico to meet a stranger who drove her in silence to a secret location for a crude, unsanitary abortion that left her weak and traumatized, and this alternative was available to her only because she had quick access to cash; I am sure that others faced even scarier ordeals. 

Perhaps I would not have made the same choice, who can say? But having a belief does not give me the right to impose that belief on everyone else or make it difficult or impossible for them to take action not consistent with it. No one opts to have an abortion on a whim. Why are so many self-professed lovers of life so determined to add more danger and anguish to an already agonizing personal decision? And why has this assumed such disproportionate significance on the political agenda if not as a nod to the so-called religious right? And isn't that more than a little worrisome?

How much more sense it would make to address the quality of our schools, try to overhaul our nation’s shameful health care system, acknowledge the environmental crisis and seek real solutions, create more jobs, and work to eradicate hunger and poverty so that parents and potential parents would be more likely to make decisions based on hope and the children born into this world would have opportunities for the kind of lives all children deserve. These are the issues. Life issues.

And why, when we express our outrage that U.S. soldiers were sent with insufficient resources, no strategy, and a rationale that kept mutating, to invade a country unconnected to the attacks of 9/11, in which five years, thousands of deaths, and billions of dollars later, we are still embroiled, are we accused of not supporting our troops? The Bush administration violated the most sacred trust of all by dispatching our soldiers in such an irresponsible and unconscionable manner, neglecting the front that might have mattered, and continuing to shortchange the many veterans who are returning home to very hard times. This, too, is an issue. A life issue.

Our nation faces serious and daunting challenges today, and my choice is crystal clear: Barack Obama, because he is committed to unification rather than divisive politics as usual, diplomacy rather than anachronistic posturing, and judgment rather than recklessness. (Yes, we actually want leaders who blink and think.) He is a man of vision, inclusiveness, and intelligence, a man who sets a different tone and a higher standard and inspires that in others. 

I realize that there are deep undercurrents in this country of racism, fear, and irrational hatred, but how heartbreaking it would be if we allowed those forces to prevail. I believe that if we do not elect Barack Obama, we will have missed a shining moment in the history of this nation, the turning point we so desperately need. 

As for John McCain, I have to admit I have been skeptical of him all along; he's a long-term Washington insider whose loyalty to lobbyists, ties to big business, and disturbingly hawkish world view were already enough to give me pause. 

In naming Sarah Palin as his running mate, however, he revealed himself to be even more despicable, cynical, and dangerous than I ever imagined. 

Sarah Palin? She is a perfect storm of ignorance combined with chilling hubris, a "true believer" whose finger I would not want anywhere near a trigger, let alone a nuclear switch. 

But she seems to have her fans.

And so history will remember how the Republican National Convention turned into a guns-and-God, drill-and-kill hate fest. Service to community was disparaged, lies were perpetrated shamelessly, and decent people were mocked with a mean-spiritedness I haven’t seen since high school. 

They have certainly given us a bleak version of the future: endless war, unmitigated ravaging of the earth’s resources, a disrespect for life, both animal and human, and a blurring of the lines between church and state that should be alarming to thinking people everywhere. 

And after eight devastating years of the Bush administration, they honestly think we’ll just trust them and dig the hole deeper.

But as Gloria Steinem said somewhere, “I’m a hope-aholic.” Even despite the 2004 election, I simply cannot stop believing that the majority of voters is not that gullible or intolerant, that people really do want true change and better lives for their children and grandchildren, that they learn from experience and recognize Trojan horses with or without lipstick.

I love my country, yes. But I also love the world. And I don’t think we have ever faced a more important vote.

I suppose you could say I am very pro-life.

We Come In Peace, Bearing Tomatoes

This year we grew tomatoes in our garden, and tomatoes only. I craved nothing more than the sugar-sweet yellow ones, small as grapes, the kind Chris Cadwell grows at Tutti-Frutti farms, and maybe a few dense fleshy heirlooms, and certainly some firm little Romas for salad and sauce, but tomatoes only. I wanted texture and flavor, true pomodoro, no settling for less. So early in the season, I hunched beneath the protective wire screen that encloses the patch we call our garden and tenderly placed the fledgling plants into the rich black soil, poking a cone of metal around each one for its future support. I watered by hand as often as needed and watched as the plants grew tall and leafy. Soon the verdant foliage extended throughout the garden like a beautiful jungle, and eventually tiny yellow flowers appeared, but they lingered too long, and it seemed to me we were growing a lot of leaf and very little fruit. 

“It’s been that way even on the farm,” said Chris, which reassured me. Maybe the summer had been too cool. Or maybe too mild. Chris said his tomatoes did better with a little stress.

So I tended and waited and watched, and suddenly we came into our season. In the old tradition of feast or famine, our plants, now crammed and crowded beneath their wire housing, had all at once erupted into fruit. My gardening task at this point was to crawl around and gather: bending, squatting, and stretching, plucking as many tomatoes as I could, and in the process contorting myself into all sorts of uncomfortable positions, my own special gardening yoga. Often I left the fruit too long and the little yellow ones burst into juice and seed at my touch, while others grew sun-dried on the vine and many fell to earth where curious lizards scampered up close to them like spectators to a crime. I carried swollen sacks of tomatoes back to the house each day. I blanched and skinned them, then squashed them down and turned them into puree to freeze for future sauce. I popped them into my mouth like candy and sprinkled them into salads and sliced them onto sandwiches and watched them rot in bowls.

Yesterday we decided to make a serious dent by giving them away to neighbors. We met with some refusals, but a couple of friends within walking distance humored us, so Monte and I packed a few bags and began our stroll up the canyon. I was listening to Pavarotti on my i-pod, which lately has seemed  the only appropriate soundtrack to a life set here and now, and although the air was warm, we noticed that the slant of light had softly gone autumnal, and I watched our shadows, side by side, and it occurred to me as we walked along that this is probably what happiness looks like. We passed a certain ancient oak and remembered a certain little girl measuring its circumference for a science project. A hawk screeched in the distance, and we left a gift of music tied to Jeanne’s gate with a ribbon, then walked past the place where the creek will cross the road in winter, and we came to the house where Emilie, Sameer and Ravi are staying. We had tea with them, and we talked and left tomatoes, then we climbed the hill to Lee and Margaret’s house, and we talked and left tomatoes, and finally, feeling both munificent and unburdened, we ventured back home. 

The Body's Natural Tendency

On a gray afternoon I walked by the sea with my friend Linette. We paused to watch some young guys surfing, and they moved with grace and snap, and it was nice to be out there, enveloped by the day. There was a middling sort of tide, the air was damp and salty, and a fog-thickened sky blurred the edges of things and muffled the noise of the beach. The day had almost the aura of a dream, but it was all a tad too compelling and too luminous to view as unreal, and those boys on their boards possessed a fully awake exuberance and athleticism. 

My friend Linette likes being by the ocean. It's in her spirit and her history, and I was happy she could come. Her father Henry Lum had been a surfer in Hawaii during the 1950s, a Makaha regular, the “skinny Chinaman” who rode twenty-foot waves but could barely manage to dog paddle. “He really didn’t know how to swim,” said Linette, “but he read in a book that the body has a natural tendency to float, and he took it on faith.” 

Silly me. I have always assumed that swimming would be a prerequisite to surfing. But folks are forever stretching the boundaries of what you thought was possible. I’ve been wondering lately what it would feel like to be out there, and I watch with a new kind of wistfulness. 

“Like a magic carpet ride,” Andy Neumann once said.

“That sounds pretty nice,” said Linette, “but for me it was more like being a dish rag caught up in the spin cycle of a washing machine.”

“Maybe you weren’t ready,” I suggested.

Not that first time. But she learned, and she even went on to instruct others. “Don’t worry,” she would tell them, “The body has a natural tendency to float...”

Linette and I have been sharing family stories as we walk, and she has convinced me that despite my being Jewish and Italian (and maybe because of it) I’ve had a rather Chinese upbringing, and this could explain why we seem to understand each other so well. There’s a lot of  hilarity and similarity in the guilt thing, for example, or ambitions thrust upon you whether you like 'em or not, personal desires that could never meet approval, and that brave historic moment when you make the break, defy the rules, become yourself. But of course you never really get away. It’s all in your head and your heart forever. 

And I think we're both missing our fathers today.

In time you find yourself looking for them in the places that they loved, or you discover them anew in the ways they are remembered by people who knew them differently, or you glimpse them in some aspects of yourself. 

Now one of the surfers we've been watching, a boy named Nole, comes in and shows us a wooden surfboard he shaped and built with $7 worth of materials. It’s heavy and primitive, a virtual plank, but lovely in its simplicity, and no doubt hard to ride but he does okay.  I tell him that Linette’s father was riding wooden boards back in the 1950s, riding them on big waves, in fact. Henry Lum? Nole hasn’t heard of him.  Well, guys like Woody Brown knew him, and Jock Sutherland. And ol’ Ray Kunze was sure impressed.

Linette and I walk on, laughing so hard at times that I can’t believe we aren’t regular buddies, and I guess that's what we'll be.  I pull up to the mailbox on the way back to the house and there  among the junk mail and bills is a genuine package wrapped in brown paper and hand-addressed to me. It turns out to be a little journal that three dear friends and I have been circulating among ourselves over the course of several years. The idea is to hold onto it for awhile, write your thoughts, then pass it on to someone else in the group to do the same, and collectively it becomes a story over time. It had been in Teresa’s possession for so long we had almost given up on ever seeing it again. And now I read Teresa's words and I understood the powerful current that had knocked her down and swept her off course. 

She is back, though, cancer-free, and missing us.

At the end she has written: “I take more time to enjoy the little things for I have realized they are the big things. The moment is now. All we really have is now."

 And reading this message from an old friend with a new friend by my side, I feel lifted. I feel a sense of  levity and a lightness so pure that I think it must be true: the body has a natural tendency to float.

 

The View from Back Here: May Reason Prevail

The other day as I rode my bicycle up the winding dirt road of Coyote Canyon, I found myself directly behind a herd of cattle being moved along from all sides by a couple of cowgirl friends (and, I hasten to add, a cowboy) along with two clever dogs. I jangled my trusty handlebar bell, not certain whether to turn around or ride on through. 

“Just stay behind and follow us for awhile,” said Kathy. “We’ll be turning and heading up the ridge about a half mile up ahead.”

And with these words she bestowed on me the (perhaps dubious) honor of watching the rear view of the procession at close range from the saddle of my bike. To be sure, there was a lot of dust and dung back there, but the cowboy thing still holds a bit of novelty and romance in my mind, and it’s always fascinating to watch competent people do what they do, and anyway, it was hot riding up that canyon, so I paused for a bit and then pedaled along, feeling quite content to contemplate those bovine buttocks for awhile.

Sometimes I need to learn patience. Sometimes I need to slow way down and consider where I stand and how I got here. I am a city girl by origin but I live now on a ranch, and my life has been that way: a series of surprising outcomes and unlikely convergences, a collection of truths that don’t always mesh comfortably but somehow coexist.  I am not a member of an organized religion, for example, but in some private way I am a person with faith, and I think church is great for those who choose church, but I hold no principle more fundamental to our democracy than the separation of church and state, and I am appalled and concerned about the erosion of that barrier, particularly in this election season. 

I am dismayed, in fact, by the kind of intolerance that reared its head in St. Paul last week, and the nastiness as well. It's alarming when a candidate demeans community organizing and grass roots effort, trivializes the debilitating downward spiral that so many have experienced over the disastrous course of the Bush administration, and tries to sell us the same party and the same failed policies by slapping on the word ‘change’ and trotting out a plucky prom queen who believes the war in Iraq is our special task from God – oh, it’s a chilling choice for next in line to a president who would be starting out already in his seventies. This is a woman who despite empirical evidence remains unconvinced that global warming has human causes, thinks the personal choices of others are her business, drove a city of 5,000 souls into debt while mayor, and as governor of Alaska is respected for being good with a gun and putting Alaskans first...but Alaska is real close to Russia, so that's sort of like foreign policy expertise. I suppose it would be funny if it weren’t so disturbing.

But with or without her, anyone whose primary calling cards to the future are “drill” and “fight” makes me pretty nervous. I feel deep unease when a prisoner of war story is played and replayed as evidence of a candidate’s character to the exclusion of his more recent history of misjudgment. He's had a lot of years in Washington to demonstrate what he's about: consider Keating Five and all it implied, the telecom legislation and its benefits to big business, the insane rush to invade Iraq -- and he pushed for it hard, and a 90 percent endorsement of the policies of George W. Bush, despite the media mythology that the man is a maverick. 

Which brings me back to cattle, I suppose, and the competence of those cowhands, addressing their task from all angles but functioning as a team, doing the work of season and circumstance. When I slow down to pay attention, even from the dusty irrelevant rear, I see with new clarity the breathtaking incongruity of my being here, and I sense in turn astonishing facts in all our varied lives. I remember the bigger cycles, too, and how we ready ourselves for what is to come by working and thinking and making sense out of things, learning from what happens, and recognizing complexities and challenges -- and when it’s clearly time to change direction, we rise to the occasion, as now we must.

Getting Giddy on Gaviota Peak

“I’m walking up to Gaviota Peak this afternoon,” said Dave. “Wanna come?”

I love spontaneous invitations, and it sounded like fun, an especially fine thing to do on the first day of September, a new beginning. Our friend Steve-from-Utah was on his way to visit us but I called him on his cell phone and asked how he’d feel about going for a little hike when he arrived. 

“Sure,” said Steve.

And so it came to pass that at nearly 5 p.m. we set out on the trail, and by 5:15 I was wondering why I had been so eager to do it. It was hot and sort of humid, and there were little bugs, and the trail is just a long steady ascent to the peak, and did I mention that it was hot and sort of humid, and there were little bugs?

But it helps to have good company, and there was plenty of laughter along the way, and the light grew softer as the day ebbed, and when we reached the peak, Dave dug into his two-ton backpack and pulled out a couple of frosty cold beers. For me, who has never developed a taste for beer, there was an icy can of Coke, and I don’t regularly drink the stuff, but at this moment it provided the perfect infusion of liquid, sugar, and caffeine. 

Below us to the south the coastal hills rolled out to the hazy blue of sea, and to the west, the Ranch grew golden in the dusk, and Highway 1 rose up the grade toward Lompoc. I could even discern the little lights of Vista de las Cruces, the school where I was once a teacher. And if ever there was any doubt that this is an enchanting part of the world, from this vantage point, it is indisputable. 

There is an aluminum canister at the peak, and if you lift the lid you’ll find a few lined notebooks in which to write your name and comments. Some folks get spiritual up there, leaving words about blessings and gratitude, while others choose to complain -- the books are packed with four-letter words and hilarious variations along the lines of never again. It was hard to imagine how anyone could feel disappointed, though, even without a Coke to guzzle.

A chorus of crickets serenaded us as we descended and the distant lights winked and twinkled. 

And then there was the palest sliver of a moon.