From now on, please look for Still Amazed at this new address!

And here you were thinking we were all unpacked and settled in. Sorry, dear readers. Turns out this was only a rest stop. You’re gonna like the new place, though. It includes not only the blog but will also feature an updated version of my website, Zacate Canyon, which I think is worth a wander now and then, and some brand new spaces to explore. Actually, I’m still working on the site, but it’s ready enough. So, please, change the address this one last time, and don’t get lost along the way.

From now on, go to STILL AMAZED.

I apologize for the confusion, and I thank you for making the effort to stay on board. Once you get over, you can kick off your shoes and relax — we’ll be done moving.

I’m feeling more tolerant of myself lately and therefore more favorably disposed toward the world in general.  And, well I guess this is a no-brainer, but I am noticing again that when you open yourself up to experience and assume a friendlier posture towards life, interactions with others are more satisfying, the day holds more delight, and good things just seem to happen.  One of the gifts that rolled onto my path last week was a wonderful email from a friend that included this verse from Rilke:

Give your heart a sign

that the winds are changing.

If this is seen by the gods,

hope is unsurpassed.

Rise up and hold still

in the great relatedness;

rigidity gently melts,

mildly the knot disappears.

Cracks appear in the walls

of your long-inhabited Fate,

and a more compassionate moon

shines in the strongest prison.

Those were the perfect words for me, because the winds certainly are changing, and I do feel as though I have given my heart a sign — and maybe, just maybe it has been noticed.  In short, I am hopeful, and that hope is irrational and amorphous, as hope often is, but I can feel it lightening my step and giving me license to try my hand at being happy.

The week was filled with funny little moments. How about the elderly lady I saw in a parking lot in Buellton the other day, sitting tall and straight in the driver’s seat of an avocado green Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight?  She had cat-eye glasses, red lipstick, and wrinkle-etched skin covered with pale pancake makeup. Normally I would have marveled at the car and walked on by, but I stopped to say hello to her and ask her about it.  She immediately brightened. “Oh, I love this old boat,” she said. “I’ll never drive anything else. Can you guess the year?” I stepped back and assessed its length (easily ten or eleven feet) and those upstart tail fins, the vinyl roof and vintage color. It reminded me a little of a car my father used to drive, and the one I came to California in, which was a ’73.  I guessed this one was from the late 60s or early 70s. “1971,” she said, “and still going strong. Ten miles to the gallon, but I don’t go far.”  How I wish I’d had a chance to hear that engine roar! And how I wish I’d taken a picture of this lady at the wheel. She was captain of her ship.

Or how about the phone call I received from local rancher Bob Isaacson yesterday? “Highway patrol says there’s cattle on the railroad track in Gaviota, about eight miles to the west. I don’t know why they thought maybe they were my cows, but I figure they’re Hollister or Bixby.  Can you get a’hold of John McCarty?” It felt like a message that might have come in 70 years ago. And how weird is it that a girl who grew up in Brooklyn, New York gets calls like this? That’s the thing about life. It just keeps surprising you.

I went for a bike ride in the Valley with Kelley the other day and we coasted along Ballard Canyon, still among my favorite rides. Mauve and magenta roses have bloomed and are dropping their drowsy petals from a blue vase and making the room fragrant.  A brown bear went stomping around at the neighbor’s house last night, Jeanne had a run-in with a snake, and our place has been a smorgasbord of oranges and peaches for raccoons, coyotes, and jays. (The remnants of the nightly feasts are scattered all about each morning.) Earlier today a roadrunner hit his head against the windowpane and stood there dazed for a long minute looking in. “Mr. Tambourine Man” is playing on the music computer right now and Bob Dylan is doing an amazing harmonica riff that is taking me away on currents of dancing spells and jingle-jangle mornings.

So I’m thinking that life is like a high risk game that goes very, very fast, and the object is to figure it out before it’s over, and if you’re lucky the blur around you resolves itself into coherent shapes and wonders…and you lean out and grab onto a few before they pass.

In recognition of our newest Poet Laureate, W.S. Merwin, here is a beautiful poem of his that is dear to my heart:

In the morning as the storm begins to blow away

the clear sky appears for a moment and it seems to me

that there has been something simpler than I could ever

believe

simpler than I could have begun to find words for

not patient not even waiting no more hidden

than the air itself that became part of me for a while

with every breath and remained with me unnoticed

something that was here unnamed unknown in the days

and the nights not separate from them

not separate from them as they came and were gone

it must have been here neither early nor late then

by what name can I address it now holding out my thanks

How I love these cool summer mornings, shushed by the marine layer, no sound outside but the hyphenated chatter of some morning birds. Today I get to set my own schedule, and I have quite a bit of work to do, but I can do it in pajamas if I want, and wander outside whenever I feel like, and explain myself to no one.

For the moment I have wrapped the morning around me like a shawl. I am drinking my coffee, now and then looking up at the white sky through the window, a bowl of lemons on the table, and a fragrant yellow rose in a small crystal vase.

I have been lazy. A few days ago I actually took a nap in the middle of the day and had that eerie sensation of waking up uncertain where I was, or when it was – - for a long moment or two, I was just a being floating there, completely out of context. My dreams had fled but I had not quite returned from wherever they had deposited me, and I felt myself suspended in a state of in-between, unable to place myself in time or location. I was awake but found no clues in the light or the view, and my thinking had not clicked into gear. Is this who I am when I am no one? It was disconcerting and exhilarating all in the same instant.

It’s a little bit like that now, a day out of context — no structure, no company, no roles or expectations to define me or remind me who I am. But maybe this is exactly when one discovers one’s true identity.

A memory, for no reason: When I was a child on Coney Island Avenue, there was an empty lot on the other side of the street a few blocks to the south, near the A & P, I think, not far from a mysteriously curtained store inhabited by gypsies. The lot was enclosed by tall buildings on each side and a wooden fence in front.  In the wooden fence I discovered a knothole through which, on tip-toes, I could peer, and through it I glimpsed what seemed a bit of heaven: ground of grass and earth, some flowering shrubs, a branchy tree where a robin perched, singing.

I suppose it was all just a scruffy bit of nature, a not-yet-built-upon city lot, but it called to me. I saw it as a secret garden, a fragment of the long ago that had broken off and remained intact, mysterious and lovely, hidden by a fence in the middle of a mundane street. I never passed without stopping to look through the knothole into that other world that seemed so magical to me.

When I look around at my life today, it is as though I have miraculously found my way to the other side of that fence. I am living on the inside, and it’s outside.

So I do hope I will fill this blank space of day constructively, but it suddenly seems that a walk is the best way to begin.

ARS POETICA #100: I BELIEVE by Elizabeth Alexander

Poetry, I tell my students,
 is idiosyncratic. Poetry

is where we are ourselves, 
(though Sterling Brown said

“Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”) 
digging in the clam flats

for the shell that snaps, 
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.

Poetry is what you find
 in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God 
in the details, the only way

to get from here to there.
 Poetry (and now my voice is rising)

is not all love, love, love,
 and I’m sorry the dog died.

Poetry (here I hear myself loudest) 
is the human voice,

and are we not of interest to each other?

Monte’s Aunt Mary slipped peacefully away last week at the age of nearly 90. Uncle Max, to whom she had been married for more than sixty years, had died just a few months earlier.  It brings to mind this poem by Linda Pastan called “Departures”:

That’s pretty much the way it was.  Aunt Mary took off a few trains behind Max. There was no fanfare for either of them, just a phone call announcement, and life goes on.

But I liked Aunt Mary, and though I’m told there’s no cause for sadness, I want to say a few words about her. When I was newly arrived from the East Coast, she was one of the first of Monte’s relatives that I met, and she was kind and welcoming from the start.  She was tiny and feisty, an unabashed liberal Democrat surrounded by Republicans, a good-hearted, irrepressible bleeding heart activist who also dressed well and lived comfortably. I remember her proudly showing me a photograph of herself with Hillary Clinton taken at a fund-raiser when Bill Clinton was running for President, and nobody’s eye-rolling or sarcasm could diminish her enthusiasm.  When Monte and I were married, she gave me an embroidered antique handkerchief to carry, a lovely and sentimental gesture. She encouraged me in my writing and always hoped I would do an oral history of the family. She had a lot to tell me, now forever lost.

In fact, her interest in oral history transcended family. As recently as a year ago, she had become so fascinated by the “goldmine of stories” she’d been hearing from fellow residents of the Orange County retirement community where she and Max had moved, that she invited me to come with tape recorder, notebook, and camera to interview these folks. She envisioned me as, in her words, “a Studs Terkel for the ‘Greatest Generation’”, and she was certain I would not be disappointed if I followed through. “These are interesting and important people,” she said, “I’ve heard enough of these stories to be very eager to have you document them.”

Alas, I was dealing with another elderly person that summer: my mother. She’d had a series of medical issues and other problems, and I was running myself ragged trying to help. When I went down to Orange County, I usually ended up frazzled and exhausted by the end of the day and couldn’t picture myself adding on this new dimension. I explained all this to Aunt Mary in an email, and here is her response, all in caps because that’s the way she typed:

DEAREST  CYNTHIA,  I DIDN’T MEAN TO PRESS MY IDEA SO STRONGLY.  THERE IS NO HURRY FOR ANY OF IT,  AND YOU MAY NOT EVER WANT TO DO IT.   IF YOUR INTEREST EVER REVIVES WE CAN TALK AGAIN.

IN THE MEANTIME I KNOW HOW STRESSED YOU MUST BE IN TRYING TO MAKE DECISIONS FOR YOUR MOTHER. IT IS HARD ENOUGH TO PLAN FOR OURSELVES!

BUT AS I ALWAYS SAY TO THOSE IN YOUR POSITION: YOUR MOTHER HAS ALREADY LIVED LONGER THAN YOU MIGHT, SO DON’T SACRIFICE TOO MUCH –  I KNOW YOU WILL NATURALLY DO YOUR BEST FOR HER, BUT PERHAPS YOU CAN’T MAKE HER HAPPY  AND YOU DON’T WANT TO TAKE AWAY FROM YOUR PLEASURE IN YOUR OWN FAMILY AND THEIR  PULL ON YOUR TIME.

I AM A GREAT FAN OF YOURS AND WILL BE SENDING ENERGY VIBES AND MUCH LOVE.

I treasured that message, in part because it so gracefully released me from any sense of obligation or fear of having disappointed her, which was so refreshingly different from the sort of guilt manipulation I grew up with. But even more important, because a woman of nearly 90 was reminding me that my own life had value, as did the newer family I had formed, and that I should focus on them, and it was not selfish to do so.

Aunt Mary herself seemed as spry and spirited as ever. Maybe one of these days I’ll get down there, I thought.

And I sure wish I had directed more of my effort in that direction, but Aunt Mary would not condone that sort of remorse.

I don’t recall it ever raining in July around here; Monte tells me it does happen, but it’s unusual. For me, summer rain has always been something I remember from the East coast. In any case, its sweetness rushed in and filled us with delight, and in the course of the night there were a series of such rainfalls passing through, occasionally accompanied by thunder and lightening. In the morning, things were puddled and refreshed. I went outside  and sighed.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

a tattered coat upon a stick, unless

soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

for every tatter in its mortal dress,

nor is there singing school but studying

monuments of its own magnificence,

and therefore I have sailed the seas and come

to the holy city of Byzantium.

*****

I can hardly believe it, but I bought my tickets — I am heading to Turkey in the fall! It will be a stretch for me. Even just making the decision and planning this out and purchasing the tickets were absurdly difficult, and I am sure I’ve been driving my friends crazy. But there’s been enough talk; it’s time to start the doing.

I can’t imagine how it will feel to step off that plane in Istanbul and figure things out on my own without Monte.

So maybe I’m crazy, but I’m sailing to Byzantium.

Followed by a few October days in England with some people that I love…and that will be the easy part, the touchstone.

As I have been saying lately, I feel that I am in the narrow border country between prime of life and old age.  It’s a border country in the same way that adolescence is, thus fraught with emotion, turmoil, questions, and changes. It’s like adolescence but without the energy, I suppose, or the ability to sleep like a baby. But it is a border country that should be traveled well with soul sung loudly.

As Helen Keller said, “Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.” Well, we shall see.

Maybe it’s just an annoying characteristic of the so-called Boomers, the way we are always talking about everything that happens to us, the way we act as though no one in generations past has ever had to deal with menopause, midlife crises, high cholesterol, decreased bone density, memory glitches, elderly parents, empty nests, insomnia, or finding the meaning of life, which is something I generally try to do in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep.  Then again, maybe it’s also just my personality. The yearning! The turmoil! The complexity of it all!

Last night I dreamed that I went back to the old brick house on Long Island where I spent my adolescent years. My family moved to that house from Brooklyn in 1962, becoming part of a great migration of working class families from the city to the suburbs, vacating urban neighborhoods in favor of small private patches of green, and dooming the fathers to long-distance commutes. At the time it seemed that owning a little house with a yard was the natural course of events, the culmination of a dream our grandfathers carried in their pockets from the old country. (I could go on and on about this, but it isn’t the point of this post. Point? This post has a point?) Back to the dream: the strange part is that instead of standing outside knocking on the door, I stood outside and heard knocking from within! It seemed frightening and dissonant. Was someone trapped in there? Then, in the strange desertion of chronological sense that often occurs in dreams, I had the thought that it might be my daughter, and I had to somehow enter and rescue her.

When I woke up it seemed to me that the dream was the usual fare: my past calling me back, no doubt so I could make amends. I’m a haunted woman, you see, and I do wonder if we are ever truly free of our childhoods. But the matter of my daughter being trapped in there was a new twist. Have I passed my pain (and nuttiness) along to her? I don’t think so. But when I recounted this dream to Monte — one of his jobs, I suddenly realize, is to listen to these boring narratives of my dreams before they fly away from memory, sort of like an interactive dream journal – he suggested that maybe in this dream Miranda represents me. (And heaven knows there is a blurring of the boundaries there sometimes. My problem, not hers.) Somehow Monte’s theory resonated, though. My daughter is the me I could have been, traveling the world with a sense of home in her heart, not without her foibles and insecurities, but relatively unencumbered, off and running, God bless her.

If this blog carried an alarm wired to sound each time I was about to get very heavy, it would be blaring right now, so be forewarned. Here may be the key to my personality: I was one of six children; the brother just before me and the sister just after me were born with a terrible kidney disease that marked them early on for dialysis, frailty, and a great deal of misery. They both grew up to be extraordinary and loving people who never had a fair chance to fully enjoy life or fulfill their abundant dreams and possibilities. I, on the other hand, was a lucky one; the disease skipped right over me. I always believed that because I somehow eluded a quirk of DNA that frequented my family, I had some special obligation to be more virtuous and wonderful than anyone could possibly be. There were simply no excuses to be less: To whom much has been given, much is expected. And I tried sometimes, I really tried, but I could not sustain it. I was too flawed in other ways – self-indulgent, erratic, and prone to depression — in essence, quite human, a maker of mistakes.

Certain situations bring this to the surface. For example, I am currently trying to decide whether to take that trip to Turkey, and I need to commit real soon, but I seem to have become immobilized. Part of the problem is that guilt has reared its ugly head: it seems like so much money for a personal adventure, for an optional and extravagant experience. I do want to go someplace; I have this travel fund saved up and I’m not getting any younger, and I’d like to see a bit more of the world before I am, as Yeats put it (in Sailing to Byzantium, of course) “a tattered coat upon a stick”.  Why Turkey? It’s where East meets West, I’m told, and so much history, a different culture, a fascinating place. I found a walking tour that seems to meet my parameters, so although I’d be going there solo I would join up with a small group, traveling within a structure as opposed to roaming around entirely by myself. I could combine it with a visit to my daughter in England too. I would become henceforth a Woman Who Has Been to Istanbul. It feels a bit daring; maybe I’d like myself better if I did something daring.

All very appealing. And then I think about my siblings who never got to go anyplace, and people who are hungry, and the worrisome state of the environment, and all the things that float around my head in the middle of the night. Why should I be the one who gets to go on such a journey? And if I do decide it’s okay to go on a big trip, what if this is the wrong one? What about all the other places I have never seen and will wish I had? And so it goes. It scares me how neurotic I am.

The other day I put all of this on hold and met my dear friend Vickie in Santa Barbara. We wandered around laughing and talking, as friends do, and I bought a pretty blouse on sale in Anthropologie, and we had dinner in an Indian restaurant (the early bird buffet), and it was so much fun. Maybe I’m that simple: dinner, a new blouse, time with a girlfriend. When I got home, I found a handwritten letter in the mailbox, something I always wish for — a real letter, from my friend Treacy. The next morning I put my bicycle in the car and drove to the Valley, cutting over along Alisal, where I glimpsed a buck with full antler standing nobly amidst the tawny hills. When I arrived in Solvang, there had been a sudden infusion of summer and happiness. It truly was, as I believe its name means, a sunny place. People were wearing straw hats and eating ice cream and driving around in convertibles, smiling, and Mexican music drifted over from an open window somewhere.  The woman who works in the dry cleaner gave me an icy cold bottle of water to take on my bike ride, and I met my friend Kam as I was unloading my bicycle, and the ride along Ballard Canyon was spectacular. At one point, descending along smooth rolling hills, I even dared to stop squeezing the brakes, and I coasted along with the wind in my face, and it was blissful. (Note to self: never underestimate the healing powers of a bicycle ride.) Then I heard an NPR podcast in which a reviewer described a new novel by David Mitchell and mentioned that the protagonist is compelled to make an outrageous declaration of love by “the inner whisperings of the ghost of future regret” – what a great phrase!

So I should probably be embarrassed, but here I am, once again, writing about myself: my own strivings and confusion, how much I want to enjoy life but also be a good person, the way time is rushing by my ears as I try to figure things out, and how death, meanwhile, seems to lurk at every corner, winking. But this has helped me so much (writing as therapy again) and I suddenly realize that the ghost of my past is arm wrestling now with my ghost of future regret, and I am rooting for the latter.