Summer 2021. Vagrancy revisited

  Part 12 A moment of unasked for kindness from a Barista this morning. I am struggling with my anxiety in regards to my children and the fact that each of them are young women living in a large city, with all of the dangers inherent in living in a large city,  but beyond my immediate protections. I experienced a pretty bad moment of this the other night when I could not reach Mara after sending her two texts and a phone call with no response over a period of 3 days.  My vivid imagination got the worst of me and I spent a sleepless night as a result.    It is not something I want to revisit. Usually when I have bad moments, and know that I need to find a way past them, it is not that I do know how to resolve them, I always know the surest path through them.  This is not the hard part.   The hard part is in fact taking the path that I know I need to take. A short digression.      There are two philosophies that I have gotten close to lately, and that is the teachings that come out of th

  Part 11 The seven beat transition Another strip mall morning along the side of some highway somewhere in some other part of Denver.   Find a corner seat by the window so I can see the bike.  Pull out my laptop.  Sit down and set the scattered thoughts to the wind.   Tack hard when nothing immediately comes. Music provides structure that allows the mind to anticipate not only the ending of a phrase, but also when a of new phrase will begin.    In a way it allows the mind to settle within a cognitive womb of safety, finding a quiet solace within the musical structure.   And once inside the safety of that structure,  inspiring contemplation.  Like sitting by a stream, the mind becomes free to wander. Or not.    Music spins this magic for most, but we all have a small handful of other things that allow us to relax, and usually for most of us it involves keeping the hands busy so that the mind can wander.    Someone said somewhere that       The Hand is The Cutting Edge of the Mind. And I

  Part X Expensive shades of attraction riding the consciousness stream Aug 26 Hi Ken. Englewood Colorado.    Well I finally found the expensive areas here.   grand houses with expansive lawns with horses grazing out front.   tennis courts. on the side.  hard packed and wide bike paths running by lazy streams.    lots of white folk.   expensive haircuts and clothes.   the  effortless comfortable life.    makes me wonder the various paths that people took to get here.    In the bay area this place would be a lot like Los Gatos or a bit higher on the scale Atherton or Marin or Corte Madera, where my good friend Bruno lives.    You could usually throw a dart and have a good chance of guessing for most it was technology that got them there, but here, south of Denver, don't know if you could guess technology.   Coors executives?   Denver Broncos players?  Too black probably.    I feel uncomfortable in these places because they are TOO COMFORTABLE.   Go figure.   But I come here because

  Part 9.   My 65th Birthday The setting Moon at 5:30am Today should be a time for reflection, and a look back on my life.   Instead I will duck the issue and just post a picture of the moon this morning as it was setting to the west over the rocky mountains, as seen from the Englewood Colorado train station platform.   I rode down there on my bike in the dark just to see it. A brief and beautiful moment.  An ephemeral blink of an eye, lost in time's engulfing seas, where each of us, and everything around us, will eventually return.  Jan once said to me, as we were walking alone together one night "The moon is a ghostly galleon, set upon cloudy seas".    I don't know where she got it from, and I never asked, but I have always remembered it.  40 years ago now.     Funny the things that stay with us.

  Part 8.  Prescott to Denver. Ghosting it When I am on the road, it always feels like something out of a dreamscape.   Alone in the car, drifting through towns, hour after hour.  Day after day.   Its almost as if I am in a space capsule  hurtling through an alien space, and each window in the car is its own digital screen, beyond a void, and nothing outside is real. Especially now on this trip, with all of the Climate Change heat waves and fires - and the COVID pandemic layered on top of that, it does not feel like the America I grew up with, but instead feels more like the last days of a passing world, and the beginnings of another world that  - because of my age - a world that I will never really get to know.   A strange landscape of which I am only an outside observer, and one which I will never get to know.   Maybe apocalyptical novels are just metaphors for how life continually needs to rebuild itself from the ashes of what came before.     I will be ashes soon.    Where will my

  Part 7.   Littleton Colorado Pic: Mara and a friend.    Mara was not due into Austin until the 1st of August, so she ended up staying the week at Jill's.    I was planning to drive up to Denver (or more specifically Lakewood) to Scott's house, but was not in a hurry so hung out for the week with Mara and Jill and family, Joe, Cody, Leo and Charlie, and of course Tamale. Mara's second family has always been Jill's family, and she always seems to fit right in there.     She has a hidden competitive ferocity that syncs with that family, as they are all fairly serious game players, and it suits Mara's competitive edge.    Alex, the infamous daughter in law has said of Mara "She smiles so sweetly and innocently at you, then will lay a killer card down, and rip you apart".    I relayed this quote to Mara, and she replies casually "Well that's how you do it". So we played games every night for the week, and at the end of the week I offered to driv

  Part 6.  Mango Tree Coffee The future comes to you looking like something else. Late July morning.  Mara gets up at 3am in Alameda and picks me up in her old model BMW in Santa Clara and we switch off driving all day, meandering down through the California Central Valley - breadbasket to America -  then over across on Interstate 40, Tehapachi, Barstow, etc,  and finally make it to Prescott Arizona 800 or so miles later, and Jill's house by late dinner time. It was nice for me to get a whole day with Mara.    Just me and her.  With both her and Jana, and now that they are starting up on their lives, I don't know how many of these Whole Days I will have with either one of them, so I try to hold onto each one.   Of course I drive them a little crazy along the way with my dad advice and such, but I do try to keep that to a minimum. I was thinking on this, then found an old unread email this morning that I had saved along the way, and it said: “You have to assemble your life yours

  Part 5.  Truths of Existence vs Facts of Reality Anchorage Somewhere around early to mid July or so,  I felt that Tamale had gained an acceptable degree of comfort at Jill's house, so I got on a plane out of Prescot and headed to Denver with the intention of flying into Anchorage within the next day or so.     My brother Scott had just retired from United Airlines and had "buddy passes" that came with a steep discount on flying, as long as you were willing to fly "standby" which meant that if they had no seats you waited until the next flight, with empty seats, and so on.      The nice part about this though was that  - unlike that past where you never knew if seats would be available - now there are is an app, and before you go to the airport, you can look on the app and it tells you how many seats are available, so - unlike earlier family days when my dad flew for American Airlines, and the whole family would or would not get on an airplane -  I now have a p

Part 4.   comedy is easy.  family is hard. Unsettled Visiting my brother Scott and his wife Tammy last night and talking about my late father and it quickly becomes apparent that we had different fathers.   We have always known this.   The conversation gets a little heated.   Because Scott is an airline pilot, he has spent his entire life with our father, easily visiting over the years.   A lifetime relationship.   I on the other hand, only had contact with our father twice in the last 35 years of his life, despite me writing to him over the years, and never getting a response.    Hard to take.   With me and my sister Jill, he chose not to spend his life with us, and gave up having a relationship with not only us, but with our kids as well.   To his own detriment, of course, but painful for us nonetheless.  He just never made the effort, or seemed to care, like you would imagine any other normal person would do.  Not the father we had hoped for.   Like I said, Scott and I had different

  Part 3.    The Vagrant. Colorado Springs sky this morning Bandon OR to Prescott AZ. Tamale and I left Bandon early on a Friday morning at the end of June during what turned out to be the beginning of the first major heatwave in the Southwest.   I was a little nervous about the mini cooper driving through the heat going through the California central valley but I had committed to the departure and hoped for the best.. Tamale meowed for the entire first hour, but then eventually settled down on my lap for the duration of the entire day.   Not sleeping.  Not eating.  Not using the litter box the whole way.  Sort of in a suspended state.     Went inland up rte 52 to Interstate 5 then spent almost the entire day on 5 heading south down towards Bakersfield. Hot all day.  Over 100 degrees F all day all through the valley.   By 10pm we had reached Tehapachi (Te-HAH-cha-pee), about 800 miles for the day.   Found a dark, residential street and slept in the back of the car nestled inside a slee

   Part 2.    Summer 2021.   Vagrancy revisited The Transition There is a book that had been given to me by a good friend, called "Transitions"  which describes major life changes as being a story of new beginnings rather than traumatic endings, as with each ending, you find yourself having to rebuild your life again from scratch, all old habits having been washed away.   your old life gone.  It is a fearful moment.   Rather instead to look at the rebuilding as a positive moment of rebirth. Truth is, we all go through one or two of these in life, and when you are young, there can be much excitement in meeting the rebuilding challenge.    As you get older though, and more secure in yourself, in Who You Are, suddenly having to change course and find a new way of living forces open the core challenge of re-examing Who You Are, a person you always thought you knew.  You never thought you would have to reexamine such a question this far down the line, but here you are. Reading &qu

  Part 1.  S ummer 2021.   Vagrancy revisited On Memories.  A number of years ago, back when Mara was not yet 3 and Jana was not born yet, I had been told that nobody retains their memories before the age of 3, and I thought shit, if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, Mara will have no real memories of me.   This after all the countless hours of work I had done raising her, taking care of her, helping her figure out the world, and just spending endless time with her. I didn't trust that Michelle would ever be able to give a true reckoning of my life to Mara.    Michelle, as we all probably do, lives in her own narrow rationalized worldview, and she never really showed an interest in my life beyond the life we shared together, shockingly to me not even asking me any real questions about my life, so I took it upon myself that if I was to be hit by that bus, to at least write a summation of my life up until that point, my first 43 years, so that Mara (and subsequently Jana) would have an id