Blue Moon

I wrote this post last Saturday night, published it, then pulled it.  I've done that a couple of times with posts, either thinking something was too much fluff, or too personal.  This one felt a little too much of the latter.  It's all a matter of trying to figure out what I want to write about on this blog.  Is it me?  Or is it subject matter that I'm interested in, whether it pertains to me or not.

Hard to say.  I'm undecided.  But for now, I decided to put this back up.

Eleven years ago tonight, I arrived in Walnut Creek.  It was Halloween, a Saturday night.  I had recently found a place to live and was moving in the next day.  The person I was in love with, a woman from another country, was due in town shortly.  Moving here was her idea.  Marriage was the eventual hope or plan.

Three weeks later, we'd broken up, she'd gone back to her country, and I was roughly a thousand miles from home, friends and family, in a location where I knew no one, with no job and no immediate prospects.

Time to turn tail and go home, right?  I almost did.  But I felt as though I had nothing to go back to.  Life in the Pacific Northwest had run its course. I decided to stay in California and make the best of a tough situation.

After a couple of years of doing odd jobs to keep body and soul together, I got a little help and landed at a school.  That was the work angle.

The personal one has been tougher.  It has taken a long time for my heart to heal.  In part, it was the cumulative effect of having lost nearly everyone I loved over the previous twenty year period.  A marriage had come and gone.  With my latest attempt at love, I had tried with all my might to will it to work out, but it didn't.  I'd given it all I had, and when it ended, I had nothing left.  Just another person who'd loved and lost.

Because the other person kept coming up to visit the area (not to see me, it should be said), it took longer than usual to get over that break-up. It took a full five years.  Sometimes I thought the pain would never end.

It probably goes without saying that I wasn't open to love with anyone else.  You couldn't pry my heart open with a crowbar.  Only with children was I able to express any human warmth.  Their spontaneity was a saving grace.

In order to heal my relationship with the Feminine, I took a unique tack.  I started listening to female musicians from around the world.  My rule of thumb was that they couldn't be singing in English.  I didn't want my mind involved in any direct way; I wanted to viscerally respond to the music.  So either I listened to female folk artists from other cultures singing in their own language, or to female instrumentalists.  I also watched many kinds of folk dance, and delved into the visual art of women from other cultures.  I took a break from the women I'd known.  For ten years.  I needed a more positive impression of the Feminine to counteract the one I had.

And for the most part, it worked.  My heart eventually healed.  Maybe not entirely.  One year I asked four different women out; all four said "no."  My guess is that it had to do with my not being entirely healed.  People pick up on that whether they can articulate it or not.

I had one rough attempt at dating, which was about 50% ok, and 50% pure hell.  That confirmed a situation that I had long intuited as being suspect.

But I find that even at my age, I'm still working on family of origin issues.  After spending maybe 20 years working out mother stuff, strangely enough, I find in the past 20 years I've been working out father issues.  It's just that I seem to be working them out through relationships with women.  Who knew that was even possible?  I find the women I am attracted to are a lot like my father was, emotionally.

I have a friend in his seventies who has bemoaned the fact that he's still working on remnants of issues with his own father.  Some of this is really trenchant.

However, eventually my heart re-opened.  I met someone I was interested in and that motivated me to get to work on myself.  It has taken about two years of intense labor, including a misguided detour with a female therapist who was perhaps the most misogynistic woman I've ever met.  She had nothing good to say about women.  What's nice about being this age is that I trust my own judgement.  I didn't waste any time on that therapeutic relationship.  I moved on, on my own.

I now feel capable of, ready even, for love.  I'm just not sure if love is ready for me?

As I write this tonight, I feel myself at a crossroads in life.  In many ways, I am in my full maturity.  That doesn't mean that I know everything; quite the contrary.  I have a lot to learn.  And I look forward to learning it.  Some people just have that in their DNA.  They will learn until the day they drop.  Hopefully, I'm one of those.

I know I want to write.  I have a plan for that.  I know I want to love.  For that, I have no plan.  I think that's best, at least for me.  I'm simply open.  Open to what life brings my way.  

Love is nothing if not spontaneous.  It really does come out of the blue sometimes.

And so, as the days and weeks and months worked towards this day, when time would seem to emulate my plopping down unannounced in Walnut Creek so many years ago, it felt like it was time to do a little review.  A year ago, I may have written that I had found no real friendship or love here.  But secretly, I knew that was my own fault.  You can't find either with a closed heart.

I guess I have to cop to my own naivete.  And I am a little guarded.  I've learned this year that I'm none the wiser and can still be hurt.  But that just means my heart is open -- codependence aside, it simply means I care.  My heart has not shut down this time.  Still, Life does not brook naivete in any domain.  No doubt there is more to learn in the realm of human love.

I hope so. What brings the deepest pain, also gives us our greatest joy.

An Odd Conversation

 I had a short conversation with my roommate.  Short, but odd.  We were walking her two dogs.  I'm an extra set of hands and legs in that instance.

Anyway, out of the blue, my roomie asked me, "If you could have any car you want, any make or model and price was not an issue, what kind of car would you choose?"

I never think about things like that so I was a little taken aback, but I gave it a moment's thought.

"My truck," I said.  

I have a fifteen year old Ford F-150 half-ton pickup.  Gold in color.  A little damage to the body (my fault), a little damage to the tailgate (the previous owner's fault), but all in all, I'm happy with it.  Despite having to say "no" to all the people who feel entitled to borrow it (the previous owner's fault) and who are now disappointed that I own it (my fault), I really like having a used pickup truck.

I had a dream once, maybe twenty or thirty years ago, that I bought an old, beat-up, banged-to-hell late 1950's white Ford pickup.  I can still see it in my mind's eye.  I woke from that dream maybe the happiest I've ever been.  Go figure.

"My truck. I like the truck I have."

Then my roomie asked, "If you could live anywhere on earth, in any country anywhere, where would you want to live?"

I briefly thought of New Zealand, where my great grandfather was born, emigrating to San Francisco 150 years ago to become a scout in the Old West (we had his powder horn and bowie knife on the wall when I was growing up), marrying a mixed breed woman in Kansas whom the family euphemistically referred to as "French Canadian," before he struck gold on a mountain in what is now British Columbia, but alas, was murdered for his claim -- at least the mountain is named after him.   

I spent a winter/summer in New Zealand once.  That's not what I said, though.  I surprised myself by saying, "I don't think it matters where one lives."  Meaning, I suppose, that "place" does not necessarily define happiness.  You can choose to be happy -- to have a good attitude -- no matter where you live.

"But what about a home?" my roomie asked.  "Don't you want a home?"

"Home is wherever I am," I replied.  

And I mean that. With the caveat that, yeah, it would be nice to have a home.  I can't even begin to count the number of places I've lived in my life.

And then came the final capping question: "If you could have any meal, from any culture, what would your favorite meal be?"

I like almost any kind of international dish.  I like Chinese, I like Indian.  I like Middle Eastern.  Vietnamese.  Mexican.  I like Thai but that's because I like peanut sauce.  The best meal I ever had was in the Latin quarter in Paris.  I bethought myself a moment and gave the most honest answer.  

"A hot piece of toast with butter on it."  

Now it was my roommate's turn to laugh and shake her head.  And I have to admit, my answers were offbeat.  They surprised me, too.  But they were my real unpremeditated answers to questions that I never ask myself.  I was struck by how simple my own choices were.

And as I write this, I am eating that piece of toast.  But I'm living large.  I slathered some peanut butter on it.

Half Moon Bay

What with Covid and 2020 just generally being the year from Hell, I decided to get out of the East Bay for the weekend.  Haven't been anywhere beyond about a five mile radius since the virus hit last spring and although I can be relatively happy as a homebody, I have felt at times like I was about to go crazy doing the same damned thing, day in and day out.  Sometimes you just need to move your body to a different locale and it will change your mind up as well.

It was a three and a half hour drive.  It didn't need to be.  I was winging it.  Driving west on 24, the on-ramp for SF was a parking lot, so I thought I'd head on down thru Oakland, hit the San Mateo bridge and cross over on 92.  Once the freeway stopped over on the peninsula, it was another parking lot.  Took a sharp left on a little country road, hit 280, missed the turnoff to 84, which would have been a nice drive, so I decided to just make a day of it.  I drove on down to Santa Cruz then up the coast.  

Once I turned north, Hwy 1 was a really pleasant and refreshing drive.  There's just something about being out on the open road.  It's such a quintessential American experience.  I've driven about half the country, done several drives of about 2,000 miles each, and I always love the sense of freedom in just being out on the open road.  The weather was overcast and turned to rain as I approached Half Moon Bay proper, but that's alright.  I'm from Seattle.

Holed up for the night, spent the morning strolling on Main St. in HMB, people watching with a nice cup of coffee.  Rather than drive anymore, I simply walked down to the beach and then headed north.  Despite the intermittent crowds, it was such a lovely and mostly private experience.  Just me and the sea.  The wind and the water.  That sea air blowing out all the stultified and toxic energy that had built up over the spring and summer, releasing it into the crashing surf, making room for something new to come in.  Barefootin' it.

Along the way, I saw a very determined little red spider, inexplicably heading down the slope towards the water, which duly engulfed him and swept him away. I googled little red sea spiders and by golly, there really is such a thing.  No wonder he seemed so determined!  It wasn't just inadvertent self-destruction, like with human beings.

A little farther along, I looked down and noticed two honey bees wrestling viscerally in the heel of somebody's footprint.  At first they seemed at war, but on closer inspection, it seemed that one bee was incapacitated and the second was trying its level best to help in some undefined way that involved alot of hustle and bustle and climbing all over the one that couldn't seem to right itself.

Lots of kids in the water, or going one-on-one with the ocean, running down to the edge of the surf, then back up the beach as the water raced in.  A few kites, including one massive black orca which occasionally dove straight down into the sand and could easily have swallowed me in one gulp.

I loved the diversity of the crowd on the beach.  Just about every ethnicity known to man was in evidence.  To me, that's what this country is really all about, is its secret strength.  More on that in a later post.

Heading north, I was walking into the wind.  After about an hour and a half, I decided to turn around and was shocked at what a different experience it was.  The way the sun was positioned in the sky, I had my back to it as I was heading north.  Once I turned south, the sun shone down upon me, glistening on the water and showing in clear relief every stone and shell on the sand.  The wind was at my back.  It was an Irish blessing enacted.

A short stop to eat a sandwich up by the bluff, clambering up and out of sight to take a pee, then resumed my southward journey.  Incredulously watched as a seal shuffled its body out of the surf and up onto the sand, where it plopped down for a rest and maybe a hoped-for snooze.  It was not to be, though, as people immediately approached within a few feet of it, and the seal (or sea lion) wisely returned, just as immediately, to the sea.

A good three and a half hour stretch of the legs, to even out the three and a half hours spent behind the wheel of my truck yesterday.  Tomorrow, another morning walk further south along the bluff above the beach, perhaps a return along the water, a quick cup of joe, and the drive home.  A little sun-burnt, a little wind-burnt, but ultimately, quite refreshed.