Today I took a walk across town to hear a couple of old friends doing a jazz concert to benefit the Land Trust. I have known them since the 70's when I first landed here but its only lately they have started to perform together--just Scott on the stand-up bass and Laura singing. I remember back when Laura and I first met. She was one of the only straight women in some group I was in. I can't remember what we were up to--saving the world in some way, no doubt.8) She had a gorgeous voice, I remember that. We lost touch for a while then reconnected years later, both of us mothers. She recorded lullabies that I learned to sing to my own boys. Scott was developing music software by then and she was a lawyer. They both played music, just not together. About 6 years ago they started doing jazz together--brave, with no band, only the bass and Laura's voice even though she never used to sing jazz.
The walk I took was around 3 miles maybe. It occurred to me how stupid it was that I hike a lot and take long walks on the beach and in the woods, but for some reason I have become conditioned to jumping in my car if my destination is across town. So I started out and as I walked it was peaceful to have the neighborhoods give way one into another at such a slow pace and to let my mind free associate, memories of 2/3 of a lifetime falling in step beside me. Usually it is Caleb I think of but today I was thinking of myself as the girl that fell into this town in a storm of tears, distraught over my cat getting run over in Big Sur, numb, confused, really alone but finding her feet.
I live on the east side now but where I was headed was over on the west side, our town being neatly divided as such by a river. Crossing over the bridge I stopped for a fish taco. I sat at a table with a few older Mexican workers but the bulk of the patrons of the taquería were students--mostly asian-- and people my age who were obviously gearing up for some Dead tribute or something judging by the T-shirts. When I got my food I automatically said Buen Provecho to my table mates and one of them asked me where I was from. I told him, "Here." It is so strange to say that, never having been from anywhere for so long and then just falling out of the sky here one day and never leaving. I thought about how I didn't speak a word of Spanish when I came, how half the population was a mystery to me. I also thought about being a student at UCSC, after being a fuck-up and a runaway I felt like I had survived it all back then-- being a student and having goals meant I must have reached some safe place where my life would now stream out as I imagined it.
Walking up the hill, past the town clock, I was back to being that 19 year old girl. She made me laugh really. I passed the place where I went dancing by myself every night for a few weeks in a sexy red dress and wouldn't let anyone pick me up as some kind of feminist statement about not being afraid. The bar is gone and now there is a restaurant and a head shop. Further up the hill I remembered once climbing into a huge magnolia tree tripping on LSD and spending the whole night up there--my friend that I had started the trip with and i having forgotten each others existence. I was sad to see the tree was gone and there was a small ornamental plum in its place. There was the high school where Wendy and I used to sneak over the fence into the pool doing naked laps and then getting tangled up trying to put our clothes back onto wet bodies. I remembered how my banjo playing boyfriend, Paul, used to stop his jeep on the steep hill at the red light and then freak me out pretending he was going to just get out and walk away. He would slide his right foot over onto the brake and open the door and step out with his other foot just to hear me scream. years later, when Brian taught me to drive, I avoided this hill if I could.
Finally I was on my old street. I knew that the old victorian student house had long ago been carved up and turned into condos. Still, I stopped on the curb in front and shut my eyes for a minute and went back. I remembered the dream I had there--the one where I had born out of huge wave and literally thrown onto a foamy shore only to be slapped by this man who demanded that I tell him why I was here. Each time I answered, "I don't know", he slapped my face. After a while he told me to follow him and we trudged up dunes to what was my room in this house. It was beautiful, full of light, my few belongings already there. "Here, is where you will start to answer that question." strange how a dream can come back to you after 40 years. Stranger still that he was right--that I did start to craft answers to the question--or at least ask it of myself in that room.
Time has a way of looping in and out of itself. Before you know it there is a life almost lived up. I could not have forseen that I would stay, that I would move all over town and leave lover after lover--each one surely the love of my life at the outset; that I would eventually create a family with one man and bring two blonde little surfers into existence; that they would themselves grow to nineteen in this town; that I would plant trees and sit in their shade and eat their fruit year after year; that some of the fields I worked to save did get saved and others paved over; that lots of my friends would become my family of choice, that some of them would die young and some would survive to hold me up when Caleb died, younger than anyone could fathom.
I feel ready to leave this town, this country. This town holds so much of me that is gone. But it does hold that, and today as I walked back through it, marveling at how young I was when I came here and the rich and wonderful life that seemed to simply unfold in front of me, I almost cried with gratitude. Did I ever imagine--in all those imagined lives--that I could live this one?
