The World’s Fair came to New York in 1964, and a few of us skipped school to check it out, among them my friend Robert. We watched atoms collide at the General Electric exhibit, journeyed into space in the Hall of Science, flew to the moon in an easy chair courtesy of General Motors, saw ourselves on color television at RCA, then zipped above it all in a monorail.

At the Coca-Cola exhibit, we walked through a humid Cambodian rainforest, a noisy street in Hong Kong, and an Alpine ski lodge that smelled of snow and peppermint. Loftily dedicated to “man’s achievement on a shrinking globe in an expanding universe,” the fair was in fact mostly about big corporations and gee-whiz technology, but its official theme was “Peace Through Understanding,” and for a handful of kids from Central Islip, this was heady stuff.

At the Parker Pen Pavilion, Robert and I filled out forms for computer-matched pen pals. I answered in ways I believed would garner me a cute British boy, but my pen pal turned out to be a girl from the Netherlands, who really was a perfect match; we exchanged letters for years before we finally lost track of each other, and I still wish I could find her again. The grand finale of the day was ascending on an escalator in the Vatican Pavilion that moved us slowly past Michelangelo’s Pietà, its white marble lit eerily against a blue backdrop. I do recall an ominous display of global population growth sponsored by Equitable Life Assurance, whose astronomical and continually increasing numbers gave me a vague sense of anxiety, but overall, the fair presented a breathtakingly optimistic view of the future. Tomorrow would bring affluence, convenience, and steady, full-throttle progress, with American industry at the helm.

Oh, we knew there was turmoil in the world, and plenty of it: Cold War tensions, escalating war in Southeast Asia, and the civil rights movement heating up and impossible to ignore. Even the shiny facade of the World’s Fair itself hid ugly politics and behind-the-scenes racial inequities. But Robert and I were sailing ahead with idealism and confidence, certain of great possibilities. He was a restless and creative person, determined to get out of town as soon and as far as he could, and in the meantime, he approached life with curiosity and enthusiasm, paying attention, recognizing opportunities, and stepping forward from the sidelines.

When Bobby Kennedy’s Senate campaign announced a series of stops in Long Island later that year, it was Robert who knew we should be there. Robert had a sense of history, a sense of occasion. We walked downtown together and waited among the crowds that lined the main street. Soon the vehicles approached, and there was Kennedy himself, his hair a thick shock of sandy brown, his features youthful and handsome, smiling and waving and reaching down to accept the hands offered up to him, including ours.

“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself,” Kennedy said that year, “but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.”

The future arrived. It came far more swiftly than we could have ever imagined and, as the World’s Fair had predicted, a great many marvels unfolded, but things were also terrible and complex. In the spring of 1968, our senior year of high school, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and two months later, Robert Kennedy. Our class graduated, proceeded into summer jobs and colleges, or went to fight a war. The following year, a man walked on the moon, and we saw pictures of a tiny blue planet, fragile and beautiful and beleaguered, already threatened by the very industrial progress we had celebrated.

We drifted further into our challenging and distracting lives, and I never saw Robert again. He called me once, 20 years later. He had somehow discovered that we were both on the West Coast, not quite neighbors, but relatively close: I was living in Laguna Beach then and he in Los Angeles. He worked as a costume designer and wardrobe supervisor for a popular television show, and he was proud of that. He did not seem to be looking back on our Long Island years with affection or nostalgia. “There were some small minds in our town,” he said. “They’re still there, probably.”

Robert was a man who had gotten out, and was successful, and felt vindicated somehow. He wanted me to know that. As for me, I was just excited that he had called, and I felt a great surge of warmth and encouraged him to visit me, but even as we said good-bye, I sensed this was unlikely. A few years later, wondering if there was a chance we might reconnect somehow, I typed his name into a search engine, and an obituary appeared. It had been published in Variety in 1992; he was 42 years old when he died.

Robert had been a friend to me, and nothing can change that fact. We stood side-by-side at a remarkable moment in history, and we watched it all with wonder, imagining the future. We each endured our private pain and we each enjoyed our separate achievements, and perhaps we even changed our own small portion of events. I became a teacher and moved to a ranch in Gaviota where I would live for thirty years. The future has proven tricky—these are very troubled times. But I continue to believe that collectively and intentionally we have the power to bend history.

You see? Some kind of crazy hopefulness took root in me long ago, and I never did shake it.

My father was born on this day, March 29th, in 1911. He has been gone for nearly fifty years now, although “gone” is probably not the right word to use for someone who is such a constant presence in my heart, my head, and in my DNA. On this particular Sunday, 115 years after his birth, I am buoyed a bit by the historical protests of yesterday, but at the same time feeling overwhelmed and sad, wondering what my father would think of all that has been happening in this strange world that he would barely recognize. My own default state is one of bewilderment, but it is clad in dogged hopefulness, and even if I don’t always know what I’m supposed to be doing, I know what matters, and I refuse to give up, and I’m pretty sure this would have been my father’s attitude.  

He was born in Brooklyn just a few days after the horrific fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in Greenwich Village that took the lives of 146 workers, most of them young women, recent immigrants trying to make their way in a new country whose promise was difficult to access. I imagine the newspapers were still filled with the details of that tragedy and its aftermath when my father was an infant in his mother's arms. I try to picture the city as it must have been then, with its tenements and brownstones, peddlers and shopkeepers, street cars and horse drawn carriages. The New York Public Library Building on 5th Avenue was dedicated by President Taft that spring, and the song on everyone's lips was Alexander's Ragtime Band. Madame Curie won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of radium and polonium, Italy attacked Libya, and the first U.S. transcontinental flight was completed...from Sheepshead Bay to Pasadena in 49 days.

When my father was a boy, in fact, airplanes were still rare and exciting enough to cause everyone to stop what they were doing, point upward, and stare in wonder. The airy-plane! That's what they would sing out...the airy-plane... (He told me that himself.) He was the son of an immigrant from Naples and a first-generation Italian-American girl. He grew up in a rough neighborhood, the eldest of three surviving brothers, and he was tough and smart, but he had a lot of responsibility thrust upon him. He was expected to tend to his younger brothers and their ailing mother while Pop took to the road on mysterious business trips that lured him from New York to incongruous destinations like Kansas City, which may as well have been on the moon. At eleven years old, he became the family scribe, sending letters in care of General Delivery about progress at school, unanticipated household expenses, and a baby brother who toddled into the front room calling for his poppa. Written in a neat fledgling cursive and signed with his nickname, “Sonny”, the letters inevitably went unanswered, but they must have mattered – two of them survive to this day in a safe deposit box filled with things I deem treasures that will no doubt baffle my daughter when she one day comes upon them.

The pattern of being the responsible one continued throughout my father’s life. He was brilliant and eloquent, and he yearned to go to college, but the opportunity was not available to him. He spent some time in the military during World War II, stationed at Camp Cooke, and married my mother in the 1940s. Six kids, a great deal of struggle...he shelved his own dreams to take care of everyone, and he picked up the buckets and brushes he had hoped to leave behind, painting walls and murals in rich people’s houses. I remember him going to night school when I was a child, attaining a degree as a Doctor of Chiropractic, and the discipline and effort that must have taken is humbling to contemplate. But still, he rose in the pre-dawn hours, donned his paint-splattered overalls, and left us safe and sleeping.

He seldom bought anything for himself. A bag of candy, perhaps – he liked those orange sticks covered in dark chocolate. And once he went to Little Italy and came home with a couple of Italian records. One of them was Renato Carosene singing frivolous tunes like Tu Vuo' Fa' L'americano. He got a kick out of those. Another was an LP by Luciano Virgili, songs with names like Piccola Santa and Addio Signora, somewhat maudlin, yearning songs about love and loss—Italian schmaltz, as my husband would say. But I believe those songs were part of my father’s true essence, a deep-rooted sentimentality and sadness that the demands of his life would not allow him to linger on. Chocolate and opera were luxuries, and his own proclivity for prose and even poetry was a secret. Life was a battle.

A memory comes to me of a winter day with my father in Manhattan. How is it that I had him to myself that day? There is a jangle of traffic, city noise, gray sky, gray buildings, the marble steps of an imposing façade, maybe a bank. We are hurrying, and it’s cold, and he buys a small paper bag of hot steamed chestnuts from a vendor on the street, and I hold the bag up close to my face and feel its warmth. I am a gap-toothed girl in a red and white striped scarf and a blue coat missing two buttons, my ears are cold and my nose is running, and there’s a sense, as always, of worry and hurry, but the chestnuts beneath their hard brown skins are buttery and satisfying, and I am here with Daddy, safe and loved. I wish we didn’t have to go home, where this glorious day will end in a fight, where the best in him will be misunderstood, where all the proclaimed turning points will take us in circles and the patterns will repeat themselves into hopelessness. I wish we weren’t heading for the things I know about now.

“He who mounts a tiger cannot dismount,” was one of his sayings. And so he never quit, working through the last day of his life, teaching and guiding, cooking for the family, painting flowers on the walls, making everything more beautiful, loving us fully and unequivocally, and imagining so very far beyond what I could see.  

Because he was a writer, I can still read his words, and sometimes I find counsel in them to help me navigate the present. “Your object is survival,” he wrote to my Uncle Joe, who was stationed in the Pacific during World War II, “not merely within the strict limitations of the word, but more -- survival in the best manner possible. Not to emerge a sad sack, forlorn and beaten into submission by adverse circumstances. Not to come back an unreasoning savage, wild and hostile to each and all, eager and ready for revenge. But to come back with balance, with a reasoning mind, to hate your enemies and to be on the alert for them, to respect your friends and appreciate them, and to love those who love you...”

He contained contradictions. Though he described himself as a cynic and often spoke like one, he burned with passion, ambition, and desire. “My God damn mind insists on analyzing, weighing, thinking, scheming…” he declared, yet elsewhere he wrote about “the heart that sings its wild poetic song” -- so plainly his own.

He wrote to me directly, too. Some of those letters sting because I know I let him down, and that fact is painfully apparent in every sentence. I held great promise, and he loved me very much, but I was selfish, misguided, and stubborn, as young people often are --- and then he suddenly died. I didn’t get a chance to make amends.

“In the end, nothing matters but who loves you, and how they perform in this.” He wrote those words to me not long before his death. I was in my twenties then, childishly accepting any help he could provide, while rejecting advice and criticism. I was trying to figure things out in my own way. I couldn’t explain myself, even to myself, and I don’t think I understood what he was telling me. And I certainly did not know how little time there was.

But he also told me this: “It is possible to keep both feet on the earth and still have your head in the stars.” Was he warning me, or advising me to do that? Today I am quite certain that what he meant was that I, who was then so erratic and ungrounded, should create a practical infrastructure but not give up my ideals and aspirations.  And that’s my scripture now.  

We are being tested in this moment. The wrong people are in charge, generating cynicism, cruelty, corruption, and chaos. The values and precious blessings for which our forebears fought are being trampled. An unnecessary war has been unleashed by incompetent people who view it like a video game, children have been killed, the very planet is at risk, and a propaganda machine pumps lies, nonstop, into the heads of millions.

All the struggle, all the courage, all the dreams cannot whimper away into this. No, we won’t allow it.

On my father’s birthday, I hereby resolve not to be beaten into submission nor relinquish my heart’s wild, poetic song.  And I don’t know what tangible form our efforts to right the ship of state will take, but we have the compass and we have the drive, and yesterday I saw again that we are manifold and strong.

Meanwhile, I have learned to walk on air as well as earth, and I’m making peace with my befuddlement and finding a weird kind of freedom in being unmoored. The fact of missing my father has become such a fundamental part of my being I don’t know who I would be without it, but  I try to do good things in his memory. No one lives in vain who has changed someone else for the better. And the story has not ended.

I’m walking in our new neighborhood, early morning before it gets hot. I’m wearing a straw sombrero that was half-price at the local thrift store, and a white-on-white embroidered cotton top that I bought at a bazaar in Istanbul—yes, when I journeyed to Byzantium, which years later feels like a figment of my imagination. Anyway, as I walk I’m listening through an ear bud to the first Harry Potter book, which I started as a way to feel connected to my grandson, but is actually quite enjoyable and very well performed. Now a dog-walker waves and nods, and a gaggle of turkeys crosses my path, promenading in front of me with their plumage fanned out. (I understand that the correct term for a group of turkeys is “rafter” but “gaggle” seems more fitting.)

Everything is absurd and incongruous.

And so, I let myself be glad. Why not? It’s way too easy to go the other way.

Last night some friends had a belated birthday dinner for me. I guess when you turn 75, it’s okay to have a protracted celebration. It’s especially okay when you focus on gratitude and friendship. Also, there was pizza and ice cream.

Birthdays. I remember my birthday fifteen years ago, when I turned 60, which of course I thought was a pretty big deal. Then, as now, a walk was always a good way to commemorate an occasion, and Monte and I went walking. There had been recent rains, and we waded through the creek in tall rubber boots, exploring the water’s new meanderings and pulling out some of the debris from the previous week's storms. It was branches, mostly, and uprooted trees, but also pieces of fence, and wire road support, and a stray yellow rake, and most memorably, a volleyball, upon which was written the words "Life is Good.”

I always wonder about such things. Whose was it? Where did it begin its journey? How did it come to be caught here in the culvert? (It harkens back to one of my favorite fairy tales, The Steadfast Tin Soldier. Remember how a gust of wind -- or was it the mean, scary jack-in-the-box? -- blew the tin soldier out the window and he was picked up by a street urchin who placed him in a newspaper boat and set him sailing in a rushing gutter which swept him along and tumbled him into a deep canal where he was swallowed by a fish, and discovered by the cook who cut the fish open...)

I know. That is a major and irrelevant digression. But the idea of it intrigues me. Whether it's a tin soldier or a volleyball, a piece of beach glass or an Indian pestle, or me in a sombrero sharing the street with turkeys, I like unexpected travel and improbable outcomes.

And that gets me back to where I started, which is that my whole life has been about improbable outcomes, and my course has been determined as much by chance as by choice.

I am thinking too of one of my favorite poems, “Snow” by Louis Macneice. I found it in a book that my favorite (and only) daughter bought and presented to me in a little book shop in England more than a decade ago. And these are the lines I love most:

World is crazier and more of it than we think,

Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion

A tangerine and spit the pips and feel

The drunkenness of things being various.

Maybe just this once I will not obsess about the open wound that is festering on our country and our souls. You know what we’re dealing with, and it keeps getting worse.

But in this time of shared trauma, loss, and disillusionment, I aspire to what Nick Cave expresses here:

Collective grief can bring extraordinary change, a kind of conversion of the spirit, and with it a great opportunity. We can seize this opportunity, or we can squander it and let it pass us by. I hope it is the former. I feel there is a readiness for that, despite what we are led to believe.

Hope and protest and constructive activism acknowledge that our world is worth saving. Let’s stay strong and fight back and never relent, taking necessary time for walks and friends and whatever heals and fortifies.

In the words of the volleyball, “Life is Good.”

I walk in wonder and curiosity, collecting images, gathering fragments of voices and sounds, feeling the air, as my grandson would say. This is how I soothe myself. It’s therapy.

Last week, I walked along the mission trail, on the bike path, and through the back streets of town. The postman in his white van was whistling along to country western music. At a bakery in Solvang, I learned that the head baker is Armando, and he bakes the dense, fruity muffins that bear his name. There are five shy horses behind a fence now near the mission, daring to come a little nearer each day. On the bike path, someone has painted the word, DANCE, all in caps, more command than option, but I can’t. I run into a friend who is walking her dog and ask her what the meaning of life is. She says, “Fly first class if you can.” (This feels very true in certain situations.) I see a winding creek, an old wooden farm house with faded paint, a large crow taking wing from the branches of a tree.

In Santa Barbara that afternoon, three plump pelicans are paused on the boardwalk, completely unafraid, and there’s a sand sculpture of a rubenesque woman reclining on the beach. On the front wall of a white stucco building adjacent to a palm tree, someone has written a terse graffiti message in thick green spray paint: Fuck Ice. The farmer’s market is happening on State Street, an explosion of flowers and piles of picturesque produce, and busy vendors are weighing and bagging and counting out dollars. We walk to the Courthouse, the very place where Monte and I were married, and we take the elevator to the top and look out at red tile roofs and the mountains beyond, and down into the garden below where a wedding is taking place. We encounter the newlyweds afterwards and tell them that we were married there 42 years ago and–look at us–we’re still together, and the bride’s eyes fill with tears. “Now I feel that I’ve been blessed,” she says.

I chat with the sweet docent lady in the lobby; she wears a turquoise knit sweater and round spectacles, and she has been a volunteer here for decades, watching newlyweds and tourists come and go. In the mural room, we scan some centuries of California history as depicted on the painted walls. We hear the echoes of foot steps in a cool dark corridor, and head back onto the street outside. There’s an actual mobile library out there—a whole van filled with books and staffed by two earnest librarians guiding folks to reading discoveries. We look at landscapes in a gallery, and wind chimes and crystals in the metaphysical book store, wend our way past a tangle of streets and crossings and eventually climb stone steps through the campus of the community college, then back to the shoreline.

This morning I found an unexpected comment from a reader of my blog responding to a post from six years ago, early in the pandemic. It was a thoughtful and poetic comment, and I decided to revisit the post that had prompted it. This is what I had written, the post in its entirety:

Here is my new epiphany: hope is a seed that hitchhikes on our souls, and is carried far and wide, and it will take root if given a chance, and something good will grow. Hope is a traveling seed, and I want to be a host. There is no other way.

Strange times. Someone told me that the local Costcos are selling out of toilet paper, face masks, and Pepsi. Priority goods for the apocalypse. And it’s Super Tuesday, with a newly narrowed Democratic field, and the practical advice is to vote for Joe, and hopefully avoid an election day showdown between the orange clown-king and an angry old socialist who promises plenty but can’t deliver.

My tribe is traveling and checking in. When I last heard from my friend Diane, she was hurdling down Route 66, two hours from Amarillo. Kelley and Bill left this morning for New Zealand, Cornelia is in Berlin, and my daughter is in Paris. Connect these dots and a thousand others for a map of my heart. Thinking bigger still, these words of astronomer Jill Tarter come to mind: “We are part of a billion-year lineage of wandering stardust.”

All interconnected, I am certain of it. Light in search of sense, perhaps. But as individuals, we are not given the luxury of time, and so we are obliged to write it down, pass it along, remember, stay true, and build upon the learning. How is it that we have strayed so far?

Hope is a seed, clinging to me now, and may it catch onto you as well. Let’s share stories and find fecund soil and grow a small, good start to better days.

________________

A lot has happened in the ensuing six years. I don’t know if stores are still running low on toilet paper, and I see very few people in face masks lately, and I have come to respect and appreciate Bernie, but I was certainly right about the orange clown-king, although I would use a stronger term now.

And the messages I gleaned, the epiphany, these still hold true.

The wise and insightful Robert Hubbell has observed that a psychic wound has been inflicted on American democracy that will take a generation to erase. It’s hard to hear this, but it is the truth.

A young friend in his 40s said something to me recently that broke my heart: “I’ve been witnessing the thread being pulled from the American sweater, to where it’s just a pile of yarn on the ground right now. It’s embarrassing what the world sees us as.”

I refuse to believe our story ends in a sorry heap of unraveled threads, but this is certainly a scary and disillusioning time. I do indeed feel traumatized, wounded on a psychic level. And yet sometimes I also feel weirdly energized, determined, in love more than ever with the ordinary and astonishing ways that we are human, and this magnificent planet in need of our cherishing.

So I stand by these words I wrote six years ago:

Hope is a seed that hitchhikes on our souls, and is carried far and wide, and it will take root if given a chance, and something good will grow.

If you had happened to wander through River View Park that morning, you would have seen three older women huddled together at a picnic table. They were in brainstorming mode, words coming fast and swirling about. There was sense, and nonsense, and scribbles on a notepad, and sometimes the session seemed frenetic, but this was really urgency and passion.

Because, let’s face it: the relentless assault on all we care about is scary and exhausting. The deranged and depraved are empowered, the guardrails are down, and, as if it weren’t rough enough already, we’ve now been plunged into a war.

But silence and submission are forms of complicity, and we have chosen to respond by becoming larger, louder, more courageous. “Our choice,” as the poet and essayist David Whyte has said, “is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully.”

And in this full and robust mind set, we were riffing, rambling, and searching for ideas.

We fervently believe that each of us must find a way to help, to do something(!) as opposed to nothing, to seek our lane and apply whatever abilities we each possess, and that such actions cumulatively constitute powerful resistance. These activities take a variety of forms, and even the smallest have a ripple effect, but the most potent actions occur in the context of community.

So here we were, three silver-haired women at a picnic table in a small-town park adjacent to the local botanic garden, trying to generate ideas to make visible and more effectual the community we know is here. Sometimes the suggestions were extravagant, and who would do the work? And sometimes they were silly and impractical and maybe even futile, but we were certain that this free-wheeling flinging of ideas into the air was necessary, and certainly preferable to the panic or paralysis that lies in wait.

Meanwhile, the trellis above the table cast a crisscross pattern of sun and shade, the air smelled fresh and grassy, and the strands of our voices wove themselves into a murmuring kind of music. A dog-walker passed, and a runner, and a young mom pushing a stroller. Jan is working on a song, Rebecca had ideas for collaborative art. We talked of rallies and networking and raising funds for vital causes. We gradually felt nourished and heartened and a little bit lighter. Now and then a fragment of our own laughter took us by surprise.

We decided to take a walk across a wooden bridge and enter the botanic garden, a labor of love created largely by local volunteers. It is a 2.5-acre area that was once a wasteland of cement, construction debris, and gravel, but was gradually transformed into a living replica of the natural landscapes of the Valley, a sanctuary for plants and wildlife. There are also Chumash-inspired stone carvings, colorful mosaic animal images, and a dome-shaped Chumash hut constructed of bundled tule reeds attached to a willow branch framework.

As we strolled, we came upon the wishing tree whose branches are hung with touching messages handwritten on brown paper slips. We paused to read the wishes and found them to be a poignant form of poetry, a quiet litany of longing. 

 I wish my grandpa would get better.

I wish for a sleepover for my birthday.

I wish for a bigger bike and to be healthy.

I miss my grandma.

I will find inner peace and light to find my destinations.

I wish my family was all together.

I wish for my green card.

Try to come home.

We walked further along magical trails, entering the hut whose earth floor was dappled with sunlight, and passing a wooden airplane once piloted by my grandson in his toddler adventure days. In the shade of a nearby tree, a group of preschool children were resting on the ground for nap time. The smallest child was held in the arms of a young woman with long golden hair wearing a white dress, like a fairy tale, I swear. And another woman was humming a lullaby--a haunting, lovely melody that hovered in the air. The world was timeless, and we were here.

I’d like to say we emerged with a definite plan for what to do next, but resistance and transcendence entail gradual processes and multiple branches, with inconsistent visibility ahead. All I know is that our cause is just, our commitment is real, and, as it says in the song Jan is writing: “It’s not too late.”

I found further guidance in a poem by Stuart Kestenbaum, which reads, in part:

Gather up whatever is 
glittering in the gutter,
whatever has tumbled 
in the waves or fallen 
in flames out of the sky,

for it’s not only our
hearts that are broken, 
but the heart
of the world as well.
Stitch it back together. 

We are seamstresses, storytellers, spinners of dreams, stumblers and strugglers, stepping on air, no longer young but ablaze with anger and lit by love, and the pool of our allies is vast and expanding, and we will not go gently. I wish for the return of decency and kindness to our country. I wish for a better world.

______________________

A NOTE FROM CYNTHIA: Please step out on March 28, 2026, wherever you happen to be, and help make the nationwide, nonviolent “No Kings” protest the largest in history. Your presence makes a difference. Let us demonstrate the will and power of the people in epic numbers.

A few days ago, as I was walking, I noticed a pair of coins on the ground. They were dull and partially covered in dirt, and I suppose it says something about me that I bothered to bend over and pick them up. They were a quarter and a penny, twenty-six cents, and I dusted them off and tucked them in my pocket, not even sure why. Then I started to think about how rich I would have felt in possession of a sum like that when I was a child on Coney Island Avenue. Imagine finding such a bounty on the sidewalk? I would have been drunk with wealth! I would have gone straight to the corner store to spend like a tycoon, procuring some blissful combination of candy and comics. Happiness was easy.

I continued my walk along the road that skirts the golf course. It always feels surreal…everything so green and groomed and luminous. I found a few errant golf balls and flung them back onto the course, which is always fun, and I asked myself the usual question: How did I end up here? It’s like the grounds of a very exclusive sanitarium. Then there's the procession of dog walkers, and the women in their yoga pants, and I'm startled by the middle school boys speeding back and forth, up and down the hills on their fancy e-bikes, which, Old Biddy that I am, annoys me. (I mean, seriously, you’re 12 years old, use your muscles!)

Old dead trees have been cleared from our yard now, and we can see the mountains in full glory. Monte has put blue tape on the floor to show where walls will come down and counters put up, and in March we will get permits to begin remodeling, but in the meantime, I have gotten used to being in a weird state of uncertainty and unfinished-ness which mirrors my state of mind (or maybe has helped create my state of mind). There's no solid ground. It’s good practice, walking where there is no solidity or certitude, leaning back sometimes and letting circumstances catch me, supported by beams of light. I planted crocus bulbs outside the door, and tiny yellow flowers have erupted like smiles. I could be happy here. In fact, I am happy here. It’s the hellscape beyond that is breaking my heart.

I just finished reading a book called The Correspondent about a woman who writes letters, written in the form of letters. It has me thinking about the importance of letters and words, something I have always intuitively known. I do sometimes miss the pages and pages of handwritten letters stuffed into plump stamped envelopes I used to exchange with some friends back in the 70s, and I cherish the letters I still have from my father in his bold, distinctive cursive; I parse his words like scripture. And it occurs to me that this “blog” (unfortunate term) is a form of letter-writing too.

See? It’s the old familiar pleasures and habits that bring comfort. Walks and books and letters and the bright little burst of a crocus.

I grow old, as J. Alfred Prufrock said. I grow old ... I grow old ...I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. (But I actually don’t, because my legs are so banged up and sun-damaged, they are best left unseen.) Sometimes I wake up at night in pain from my arthritic hip, which there has been talk of replacing. In the interim, I have been working on strength, flexibility, and balance at a gym, where my last visit involved, among other things, crawling across the floor, apparently a useful skill, and where with every session I learn new reasons not to take myself too seriously.

I think about my 94-year-old friend who assures me that whatever I am feeling now, if I live to be his age, I will wish I felt that good. Sometimes he just seems tired of living. On the other hand, he looks out at the ocean at Point Conception every day and a shimmering meadow of wind-rippled grass, and he has a room filled with books, and he dons his 1970s trench coat and gets behind the wheel of his little Mercedes and drives a bit fast, and he gave me a calendar called "In Love with Earth 2026".

We are all such contradictions. Being alive is an unlikely gift, but it is also incredibly confusing and challenging. I try to find the balance between masochistic doomscrolling and staying informed. The difference lately blurs. And I mostly feel compassion for humanity, but I am unable to find forgiveness for the ones who are destroying our world and desecrating all that matters, and now, starting a new war—or for those who are complicit.

Meanwhile, as E.B. White famously said, “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

My friend Kappy and I often talk about the lens through which we choose to see. It’s tricky sometimes..

Anyway, I have 26 cents in my pocket.

“Given so few clues —
we bow to what is gone
what continues to grow”

Those lines conclude a beautiful poem called “Morning Birds” by my friend Naomi Shihab Nye. I share them here because I’ve been thinking so much lately about the gone-ness of beloved people and once familiar things, the regrets that haunt me, and the many questions left unanswered.

The other night, there was a storm. I’m not referring to a storm outside, but a storm in my head. It was blue and bleak, and all of my anxieties, fears, and sorrows swirled about. I lay in bed and hosted the usual ghosts, replayed mistakes and missteps both recent and long ago, then shifted to a larger canvas, reaching for my phone to doom-scroll, soon in the full throes of nausea and disbelief about the current reign of lunacy. As I watched morning come across the mountains in its veil of fog, I conjured up a mental to-do list, and hoped a cup of coffee might snap me back into a more constructive mode.

Hope is my religion, as I have often said, and I consistently advocate license to be happy now and then. So these nighttime squalls are fundamentally discordant. My usual state is amazement and gratitude for my own implausible and bountiful life, and I try my best to bear witness, document, find meaning, maybe even make things a little better if I can.

I guess you can say I try hard.

Try hard? What does that even mean?

About thirty years ago, confronted with a crisis at work, family problems, and the usual challenges of being forty-something years of age, in the middle of a busy life that galloped along in a blur sometimes, I went to a psychologist for counseling. He was in the habit of writing notes on lined yellow paper to hand me at the end of each session, sort of a summary of what we had discussed, and follow-up cues. I still have the last little note he handed me, and this is what it says:

1) Have time with Monte and Miranda

2) Be accessible

3) Experience life without a Biblical theme

4) Be happy—enjoy!

5) New job

6) Lessen your sense of responsibility. Lighten up!

Nowadays, it’s difficult to have time with Miranda, who lives in England with her husband and two children, but this belated suggestion is a good reminder to appreciate the dear ones in front of me in any given moment. Fortunately, Monte is still around, and by and large, he’s used to my quirks and foibles, but I know there are behaviors I can work on.

Number 5, “New job” referred to the teaching position I was about to begin at Dunn Middle School, which turned out to be a lovely chapter of my life.

But with regards to experiencing life without a Biblical theme, lessening my sense of responsibility, and lightening up…I may be a lost cause.  I think that brings us back to “trying hard”.

I am trying.

“Yes,” Monte would say, “You’re very trying.”       

I suppose I have survivor guilt, because people dear to me, long gone, were given so little, and I have never felt that I did enough to help them, and that haunts me. Meanwhile, it is impossible to ignore the terrible sufferings of others in the world today or the unprecedented threat to our own way of life.

And so, despite my therapist’s admonition to lessen my sense of responsibility and lighten up, I haul around a heavy heart, seeking to somehow reconcile the ceaseless dichotomy of wonder and grief. I do my best to navigate the inconsistencies and inequities without self-loathing, and I try to hush my noisy failures, for they cannot be undone.

And I look to this moment, in which I truly feel called upon to be fully present, bearing witness, giving voice and doing something, even if my contribution is miniscule.

I admit I am bewildered. But once again, a poet helps me. Now it is Wendell Berry who speaks:

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.

And the brilliant writer George Saunders advises:

“Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die.”

So maybe I am on the right path after all.

When I was a little girl, I saw the moon through the window of a neighbor’s house in Brooklyn. It was a house whose kitchen emanated unfamiliar smells, a house whose dog jumped up on me and nearly knocked me over, a house whose grown-ups were not fond of me—somehow, I could tell. But I glimpsed the benevolent moon, with its snowy face, and it winked at me through the window, like an accomplice.  

I’ve always been lucky like that. In the city of my childhood, glassy storefronts glared and gleamed in sunlight, and there were flecks of diamonds embedded in the sidewalk. There was a fancy boathouse in the park and I sat by the lake with my brother eating Cracker Jacks, and a burst of a breeze sent fragrant blossoms snowing, and I knew intuitively that magic was involved in the composition of the world.

Last week, I had the honor of speaking before a gathering in the sanctuary of a local church, and my friends performed music, and poetry, and theater. It was a celebration of community, an affirmation of decency and hope, and it was clear in the aftermath that people thirst for this. So even in our confusion, let us not make the mistake of thinking we have to go it alone.

Today, I see the mountains shining and the symphonic majesty of old oak trees, and I don’t know why I am so fortunate as to be here for the brief duration of my life, but I won’t let the storm take me away.

Today I found a letter my beloved father wrote to me many years ago, in which he said this: "It is possible to have both feet on the earth and still keep your head in the clouds. I believe in this."

I believe in this too. I am putting it in practice every day. Those clouds about my head are exceptionally beautiful today, and there are stars in my eyes, and I am holding on to thoughts of hope and love to keep me steady on the ground.

Oh, how I miss my father! I was twenty-seven when he died. Even after nearly fifty years, the ache of missing him is unabated. It’s just the regular background to everything else in my life. But somehow, paradoxically, so is his presence, so is his voice. And because he wrote letters, I can see these words he wrote upon the page, and hold them in my heart, and tell him, “Yes, Daddy. I believe in this also.”

What I don’t share as readily because it makes me so sad is the next line of that letter, in which he wrote: “Cyn, I am very tired and I don’t know how much sense this makes.”

He was so very tired. Sometimes he had doubts that all his efforts and aspirations meant anything. Sometimes he wondered if there was sense in what he said to me.

Nevertheless, he’d added, “I believe in this.” It was optional, that affirmation, but it was an aye, an amen. And in adding this, he turned the statement of what is possible into a kind of doctrine, and he gifted to me an intrepid hopefulness and a capacity for wonder.

Yes, it is tempered by the need for practicality and balance, that admonition to keep both feet on the earth, but somehow permission is granted, across the chasm of time and despite cataclysmic change, to dream myself sky-high and keep trying.

I am working hard to prepare for a community event next week. I keep reading the words that I plan to say, and I hope that they are not simply urgent but also light enough to beam through the current darkness. We’ll have music, which adds magic, and the comfort of friends and neighbors gathered in a beautiful space. And I hope it will be inspiring. We shall see.

In the meantime, and through it all, it is vital to bear witness to the miracles and delights, great and small, and accept the grace the world offers. These words from Mary Oliver say more succinctly than I ever could what I experience daily:

Every day

I see or hear

Something that more or less

Kills me

With delight,

That leaves me

Like a needle

In the haystack of light.   

This week has galloped by so swiftly I can barely process all the input. Sometimes the heaviness and sadness bow me down. And yet, in joyful contradiction, the miracles are lifting me. One day the chatter and laughter of the women made a kind of music when we hiked on a bluff above the sea. Yesterday I got back on my trusty bicycle and my legs remembered what to do. Someone I know is practicing a new song, bread is baking in the oven, and a white moon is perched in the branches of an oak. These hills, the shine of sea, a graceful hawk—it all feels like a prayer sometimes.

I am bearing witness as I near the edge, and my head is high, and I resolve to do my best because I must.

It is possible. I believe in this.

February 2nd is significant to me, for it was the day I rolled into California 44 years ago and began a new life here. (I’ve written about it before: the ’73 Buck with its broken gas gauge, my luggage of plastic trash bags, the desperado that was me at the wheel.) I’m sure I didn’t realize what a fitting date February 2nd was. It's Candlemas, which in Christian tradition commemorates the presentation of the baby Jesus into the temple of Jerusalem, and in secular folklore it's Groundhog Day, when the shadow (or its absence) of a certain marmot predicts the length of winter. And astronomically speaking, the date marks the midpoint between Yule (the Winter Solstice) and Spring (the Vernal Equinox).

Here where the seasons slide into each other almost imperceptibly and winter is a gentle old fool who ripens oranges and turns the landscape green, the significance of this turning point is muted. But still, it's a time to shift gears and look towards the lengthening days, a date imbued with hope and light and yearning, and I am forever reminded of my life’s great migration, that milestone in my personal history, a time when I was brave.

I could not have imagined it then, but the decades have now brought us to a time when courage and resilience are needed more than ever. I am moving through the days in that spirit. For this is a moment when we are called upon to remember who we are, what we aspire to, what struggles and migrations bequeathed to us the magnificent banquet of our lives. Everything feels unfiltered lately. There is a new intensity to the wonder and the grief, the flashes of surprise and delight and gratitude, the shocks and stabs of heartbreak and rage. We are called upon to rise, with love and resilience––and somehow we will do it, and prevail.

A few days ago, I stood at a volcanic ridge above the sea where Chumash people left their enigmatic art on the canvas of a smooth, glassy rock. This particular site was used for ceremonies and rituals and solar observation, and for contemplation, perhaps, of death and rebirth, and it was impossible not to feel a sense of its sacredness. The hot sun beat down upon us, and the ocean sparkled in the distance, and the red markings danced before our eyes, and I felt humbled and grateful to be standing there, bearing witness. Real people lived their lives here. I felt their presence.

And the following day, I participated in a local rally for democracy and decency, in solidarity with Minnesota and all who are targeted by ICE and the cruel administration which, in the words of one protester, is looting us, not governing us. Demonstrators lined both sides of the main street of this bucolic little town, and passing cars honked and cheered and gave thumbs up. I only saw one middle finger, and one of my friends was treated to an unintentionally ironic tirade about how the president is making America great again by getting rid of criminals. An old man in a wheelchair, himself a veteran, was distributing pages of historical information showing unequivocally that what we are seeing now is exactly like what the Nazis did to “make Germany great again” and he wanted to make sure we all recognize this and keep resisting. And a group of high school students were there holding up signs, shining so brightly in all their youthful radiance and hope, that my heart brimmed. “These kids are learning history, and about the rights democracy brings, and the responsibilities,” said their teacher. Thank you.

Meanwhile, a few friends and I are planning a community event to bolster spirits and raise money for the local food bank, and I’ll tell you more about that as it evolves. But last night, I went to the very church that will be our venue, and in its lovely and welcoming sanctuary, I heard a concert of hauntingly beautiful medieval music performed by the Folk Orchestra of Santa Barbara. As I said, everything seems unfiltered to me lately, and the music entered my soul with all the magic that music contains, emotions reaching across the centuries, universal and transcendent.

Afterwards, I walked with a friend beneath a full moon that cast a spell across the nighttime streets. We passed Jedlicka’s, the Western-wear and saddle store that was so dear to my daughter in her long-ago horse girl days. Through the window, we saw, in the surreal interior light, the brown horse statue that usually stands on the street, a pale mannequin boy in a big cowboy hat, racks of Western shirts and Breyer model horses (that my daughter once collected) on a shelf, stacks of cowboy hats, and a stuffed pair of blue jeans looking ready to climb on a horse. It made me feel nostalgic and whimsical, and I missed my daughter with all my heart, but I also missed my dog and the Ranch and the way life used to be, but the missing was quickly followed by gratitude and amazement at where my journey had led me.

And the journey continues. I had a phone conversation recently with another dear friend, an artist pondering loss and meaning in a very visceral way. “I used to think I was looking into an abyss,” she said. “Then I began to understand that what I thought was an abyss is in fact a portal.”

A portal, yes. Transition. Turning points. On this, my personal Candlemas, I am lighting every candle in the chapel of my soul and passing through portals.

We shall not be undone.

We traveled north through high desert, viewing the world through a rain blurred windshield. Scrappy shrubs and twisted trees held their ground as brown hills gradually morphed into snow dusted mountains. Abandoned wooden houses--their windows boarded, limbs snapped and haunches sagging into ruin--still held the residue of their disappointing stories. The occasional towns and settlements looked weary and away.

Nevertheless, there was a kind of beauty. Warm inside our car, we could see it. The low-angled sunlight briefly emboldened the colors of things and shoved away that familiar forlorn feeling that had begun to come over me, and as the altitude increased, so did the beauty of winter, given a chance to show off. We marveled at the magnificence of white mountains, etched with shadows, each a cinematic drama, and the pink-toned ripples of muted sunset above them.

We ascended until a sign declared that ice chains were required. Having none, we turned around, but even the detour was fascinating, and we are old enough to know that a sense of humor, a little flexibility, and a credit card would serve us well. We made our roundabout way to Reno. We were listening to a book called This is Happiness by Niall Williams, and it was a most suitable soundtrack, gentle and lyrical. the kind of book that makes you want to write down its wise and beautiful phrases. For example, “The likely is not in God’s lexicon.”

Now that sure rings true. I have long known that life is nothing if not implausible, and lately I see that God is fond of irony, but likely not even in the lexicon? It’s a delightfully alliterative insight to assimilate.

Just as Williams spoke of traveling where the fields were in love with the river, we traveled where fields were in love with mountains, and where curving roads led into modern ugly places but beckoned us beyond them, holding up the lantern of an orange moon, and there was a spot where branchy trees gathered above a glassy river that pooled there and meandered on its way. Two ducks dipped their heads in a kind of communion.

And none of it was likely.

We were on our way to Reno to pick up a gas generator…that’s the mundane reason behind this whole expedition, but we began to realize that old cliché: the journey is itself a destination. And to be seventy years old and able to journey with your partner and best friend is a blessing. Seventy for me is an age of gratitude and amazement.

Now Monte and I were walking on a river trail on the outskirts of Reno. A man and his son stood on a bridge that wobbled with our footsteps, dangling a line over the side into the water. “We’re magnet fishing,” said the man. “Catching metal things. Actually, we’re not catching much of anything, but it gives the wife some time to herself, and that’s a win.”

“Not to mention, it’s a beautiful day,” I said, in my trite and cheery way. Then we all wished each other happy holidays, and for a moment there was no pandemic, no differences between any of us, nothing but peace and good will. The man and the boy kept magnet fishing, and the bridge wobbled as we walked away.  

One of the thoughts that Williams posed as we listened to the book was this: “I sometimes think the worst thing a young person can feel is when you can find no answer to the question of what you are supposed to do with this life you’ve been given.”

Still walking along the river, I asked Monte if he’s found out yet what it is. “You must have learned something,” I said, echoing Williams. Or we feel that we must, having accumulated all these decades of experience. Into what lessons does it distill? Are we doing what we think we’re supposed to be doing?

“Living life and actually experiencing it are starting to come closer together,” was Monte’s reply. “When I was younger, I was always overthinking things, anticipating what comes next, weighing options, concerned about reactions, observing myself living. Now, I’m living. Period. I’m right inside this moment.”

Me too. Well, maybe not entirely. I am very inclined to overthink and over-talk and stand apart from my life. Maybe I’m doing that right now, just by writing about it. But maybe writing is an integral part of how I live.

And I can say for sure that my life sometimes stops me in my tracks and says be still, and the wonder fills me, the heartbreaking wonder of it all, and I am fully and entirely present.

Maybe I’m hosting the ghosts that make me sad, and maybe I’m in the midst of something mundane or tedious, or maybe I’m sharing the burden of procuring a generator for the pump that draws water from our well and it’s a big elaborate pain in the butt, but then there are those snowy mountains and the river and rainbows and the old-fashioned tableau of a man and his son sorta fishing.

And there’s my partner by my side, strong and curmudgeonly, figuring things out, loving me even when I am not at all appealing.

It’s crazy and unlikely and beautiful and epic, and it all becomes a story in the end, and I would be greedy to have ever wanted more.

I like the way Niall Williams puts it, and I cannot add another word: “It was a condensed explanation, but I came to understand him to mean you could stop at, not all, but most of the moments of your life, stop for one heartbeat and, no matter what the state of your head or heart, say This is happiness, because of the simple truth that you were alive to say it.”

I’m sitting in Irene’s car with three other women and we’re driving over the San Marcos Pass to participate in a protest in Santa Barbara, organized by Indivisible. We’re in our 70s and never imagined that we would be spending so much of our lives at this point going to rallies and calling Congressional offices and writing postcards to voters and listening in horror to daily updates. We realize we are privileged to be able to do this, and I’m grateful to be part of a network of wise, kind, and mutually supportive friends, but it can be exhausting and discouraging. Rebecca tells me that one of her oldest friends, an educated, Left-leaning thinker, dismisses such protests as useless and called her a Pollyanna. It stung a little.

I, too, have been called a Pollyanna, long ago and recently. But I’ve decided to own the term. It goes back to a 1913 novel by Eleanor H. Porter, made into a 1960 Disney film starring Hayley Mills, and draws upon orphan Pollyanna’s habit of playing the “glad game”, in which she seeks and finds the bright side of every situation. And of course it can be ridiculous, even offensive, when taken to the extreme, denying or diminishing adverse realities. I don’t think there is any gladness to be found in the abandonment of our Constitution, the intrusion of masked thugs into our cities, the murder of an innocent woman.

But as a Pollyanna, I am also noticing the positive fervor and solidarity in the response, a renewed devotion to our values, a reawakening.

“Trump doesn’t care how many people take to the streets in protest,” said Rebecca’s friend. But that isn’t the point at all. Representatives who want to remain in office take note of it. A theory in political science suggests that when 3.5% of the population of a country protest nonviolently against an authoritarian government, that government is likely to fall. And prompted by outrage and heartache, we are finding one another in community and rediscovering the power we possess.

It’s all too easy to mock Pollyanna. “Be cool like me,” says the cynic.“Do nothing.” But it turns out that being Pollyanna-ish can be a healthy coping mechanism and a viable strategy for making things better. Conversely, deciding that a situation is hopeless immediately precludes good outcomes, and silently acquiescing to injustice and brutality only empowers the authoritarians.  Despair is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and cynicism is a cheap poison lapped up by the lazy. We must avoid cynicism at all costs.

No one has written as eloquently about optimism and hope as Rebecca Solnit. Hope is not false optimism, she explains, but an active and fierce commitment to the future, to the possibility that we can make things better. Hope is based on the premise that we don’t know what will happen, and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty there is room to act and influence outcomes.

“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky,” she writes. “It is an axe to break down doors in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures, and the grinding down of the poor and marginal...To hope is to give yourself to the future…”

And so, in our little red car, we drove over the pass into Santa Barbara and joined about two thousand fellow protesters along northern State Street. Signs were blunt: ICE Domestic Terrorists; Same Shit. Different Hat; Our Care Is Greater Than Your Scare; When Power Goes Unchecked, People Die; IT WAS MURDER; Believe your eyes, not ICE lies.

A strand of a Woody Guthrie song wafted through the air from a portable speaker. This land is your land, this land is my land… There were chants of “This is what democracy looks like!” Passing vehicles honked their horns in support. (Well, all but one, in which the scraggly-bearded young driver of a U-Haul truck shouted, “Grow up!” and sped away. How sad it would be to grow up into that. Don’t worry. We won’t.)

A week earlier, I had driven to Nojoqui Park to walk to the waterfall. In the aftermath of constant rain, it was sure to be a spectacular destination, but I also just needed to get outside and clear my head. The trail was wet and muddy, thick with the mulch of damp decaying leaves and broken branches, slippery at times. I wished I had brought a walking stick but I stepped along gingerly, surprised by the number of people out there: parents carrying babies or holding the hands of their toddlers, Gen Z’s with tattoos and piercings, a conspicuously pregnant woman, a pair of Spanish-speaking aunties, a bearded old guy in a bike jersey…a motley procession of strangers all drawn by the same impulse, to behold something wondrous, and stand in awe. It was very like a pilgrimage, and it felt good to be a part of it. A woman saw me wobbling and handed me the branch she had been using as a walking stick. I gave it to someone else at the end of the trail. The Pollyanna in me was very pleased.

“We need a hero,” said a friend of mine. But I look around and see heroes everywhere. There is so much kindness, so much caring, so many voices speaking out. I see food being collected for hungry neighbors, and songs being written, and young people being tutored and coached and guided along bewildering paths. I see fledgling activists doing what they can, and diligent, decent people forgoing their Saturday morning leisure to protest the cruel and unconstitutional acts of the current administration.

I love this passage from Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring:

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo. "So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

This is our time, dear friends. I have been writing this blog for about twenty years, and I’ve covered some difficult topics in my musings, both personal and universal: the pandemic, the aftermath of my acoustic neuroma surgery, confusion and change, age and loss. But I have never been as snagged and dismayed as I am at this moment in the history of our country. If your heart is in shreds about this, as mine is, I feel you. But I have come to believe that democracy will be saved by everyday citizens who have decided to resist, stepping outside their comfort zones, honoring the struggles of their forebears, and wanting their grandchildren to grow up in a country that is free and kind. We need to hold things together, keep doing what we know is right, vote like our lives depend upon it, and draw in some of the millions who did not vote at all. Call me Pollyanna, but maybe we will emerge even better than we were, chastened by what we almost lost, ferocious in our love.

The headline in the Independent warned that the 101 would be closed for an “unknown duration” as flash floods threatened parts of Santa Barbara County. Rain has been drumming on the walkways here and seeping into the thick green soggy grass, and even through a blur of cloud, I can see the white of a vibrant waterfall in the mountains. All plans are on hold, and I want to lay low and stay cozy, but I’m also sick and angry about what we’re hearing in the news. (Please, let us stay fiercely determined in our resistance.)

Sometimes letters from friends are what keep me going, and I received a beautiful message from my dear friend Jeanne, a magnificent role model always. Jeanne and I used to walk the canyon together during the years when we were next door neighbors at the Ranch, sharing a journey that binds us always. As her first definitive action for 2026, she was planting two apple trees, old kinds that you can’t get anymore, “like us.”

“Next to chickens,’ she writes, “trees stand as hope in my heart.”

She planned to rip out excess vines and weeds by the roots, just as we will rip the losers out of office this year.

In a new world I do not recognize, that runs on bitcoins and fraud, masked men with armor, and crimes against humanity,  I will be that old lady with a bag of seeds, dropping them into the Earth to make a future I DO recognize. 

Thank you, Jeanne. I—and many others—will be with you. (I will never understand or forgive the complicity that has given such vast power to a lunatic criminal and his cohorts.)

Still inspired by my friend’s message the next day, I stepped out into the mist and rain and walked into town. (Yes, I can do that now.) The hills were greenly gleaming, and I happened to be listening to Barricades of Heaven, one of my favorite Jackson Browne songs—“all the world was shining from those hills”—and remembering what it felt like to be young, when “straight into the night our hearts were flung”.

I am carrying my own redemption, old and grateful as I am.

A week after my brother’s brief visit, the house still seems newly emptied of him, and a muffled kind of missing that I’d gotten used to over the years has been revived and exacerbated. What was simply the ordinary state of things is now another incompleteness. I guess it’s just my fate to be far away from many of the people I love most. But as Oralee once told me, near the end of her life and feeling quite alone: “Just be happy they are alive and well, somewhere in the world.” Wise words, among the many gifts she left to me via old-fashioned handwritten letters.

The rain came down hard as I walked. I climbed up the stairs to the local Thai restaurant, bought myself a container of soup, and carried it across the street to the grounds of the Mission. I sat on a bench next to a statue of a gentle, teacherly Jesus, sipping the hot soup in the rain.

It cleared a bit and misted, and the air was a veil of diamonds, and I was remembering my mother, who died on this day exactly eleven years earlier. In particular, I recalled her remarkable receptiveness to wonder. Even in the bleakest of times, she had a touching capacity for delight, enjoying an ice cream cone while I drove her around the neighborhood, pointing out a cat curled up in the sunlight on someone’s front steps, a shiny car in candy-apple red, a plump white cloud in the sky. She was like a tour guide to the tiny joys I might have overlooked. Suddenly I missed my mother terribly, but at the same time, I deeply felt her presence.

And later came the rainbows, a radiant array of rainbows.  

You would not have known it was Christmas in my house, but it was a special time to me because my brother and his daughter were visiting from Atlanta. Their flight came in on a windy, rainy night, the day before the airport was closed due to flooding. I am sixteen years older than this brother, and I had not seen him in well over a decade; I yearned to reconnect with him in a real way, and to get to know my niece, who was just a child when I last saw her.

They spent a night in a motel near the airport and arrived here in the morning. The rain continued, the wind howled, the green hills shimmered, clouds hid the mountains, and the windows were bejeweled with raindrops. But our house was warm and welcoming, even in its emptiness.

You have your story, whoever you are. No one escapes the weight of history, the complexities of family, the ongoing effort to forget or make sense of it. My brother and I talked about the strange dysfunctional household that shaped us. We summoned up memories that don’t feel real or possible, but were confirmed to one another, and we felt the remains of the pain, but we marveled at our own resilience, and how much crazier we could have become.

Among his other talents, my brother is a whiz at genealogical research, and he told me more about our sad-eyed Italians and Ashkenazi Jews and showed me a few photos he has unearthed. I felt the heaviness and the buoyancy of the tales we carry in our DNA, and I saw once again that my whole life is about trying to make some meaning from all the struggle and sorrow of those who came before us, which seems the best way to honor them, and to learn to accept joy when it appears, and to feel grateful instead of guilty.  

And the greatest gift of this particular Christmas was that my brother and I could know each other in our current lives, each of us meeting who the other has become.

I don’t know what my niece, Rose, thought of all this. She’s a quiet young woman, an only child like my daughter. It isn’t easy starting out in life, it never was, but especially so in this strange dystopian world. Rose is in graduate school, living in midtown Atlanta, but I soon discovered she has a 19th century soul. She reads books, and she keeps a journal, and she longs to find a sense of community, and to see new places, and she is beautiful without being vain.

It was still raining in the afternoon, but armed with umbrellas and waterproof jackets, we all set out for a brief walk in the neighborhood. There were new lake-sized puddles and rushing rivulets everywhere, and across the street a diligent young couple was siphoning water from a flooded area in front of their neighbor’s house. The water had come perilously close to entering the home, whose occupants were gone and unaware. It was gratifying to witness this kindness in action.

We walked further and stopped in front of the corner house where a lonely lady feeds the wild turkeys. (I have glimpsed her, in a lilac-colored raincoat, scattering feed, and I counted as many as two dozen ugly birds gathered round.) Now there was a cluster of turkeys strutting and foraging in her yard as the rain came down, their plumage dark and iridescent with wetness, homely and ridiculous, their snoods and wattles dangling pink and gray. The exterior of the turkey-lady’s house is a peculiar pale shade of mint green, and the light was strange, and there was my little brother, familiar and dear but so much older, and Rose under an umbrella, just trying to figure out how to navigate the world, and all of it seemed utterly surreal to me, that everything that ever happened would have led us here watching turkeys in the rain on Christmas day in front of a mint green house on the other side of the continent.

The next day they went on a father-daughter road trip to Tehachapi or some unlikely place and I went for a wander here in the local wonderland, thinking about things, but mostly listening to music, and now and then the sun broke through the clouds, and the world was luminous.

I still can’t get over the fact that I can walk amidst nature or walk into town, or some combination of both. I dropped off a sweater to be dry-cleaned and recognized the woman at the counter from years ago, when we used to bring Monte’s work shirts to be laundered, and we were all still young but didn’t realize it. This woman remembered us, and she told us that she had recently lost her husband, her mother, and a sibling, but she was still standing, even in her grief, and we hugged each other, and I thought how important the connections are with the people you meet in stores and businesses, just doing your mundane transactions, how real they are, and how we miss those human interactions when everything is online and abstract.

By now, I had a hankering for candy, so I detoured to the grocery store, and on my way in, I met my good friend Linette, and we talked and hugged and promised that we would meet up by intent very soon. Then, carrying a bag of sweets I had purchased from the bulk food section of the store, compulsively chomping on dried papaya slices and sugary fruit gummies and listening to Tu Vuò Fa' L'Americano, I went straight into the crowded center of Solvang, where everyone, post-Christmas, was still happily strolling and shopping, holding hands and taking pictures, rain or no rain. To get back home, I walked through the meadow behind the Mission, and I saw Kelley’s favorite oak tree and the shifting light on the mountains, and the emerald green grass of the golf course now punctuated with the silver bolts of shining new streams. And Monte reported via text that he had bought a new rake and an excellent broom and wait ‘til I see how nice the walkway looks.

I cannot stop thinking of this stanza from the poem “Encounter” by Czeslaw Milosz:

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

I too ask. I remember and I document, not in sorrow, but in wonder. Oh, the sorrow is there, but sometimes the light plays tricks with it—sometimes I believe it’s all a song that has not ended.

My brother and niece are still in Tehachapi or someplace like that, but coming back soon. Shreds of clouds are clinging to the branches of the olive grove, there are pears and persimmons in a bowl on the table, and a passing turkey pecks and preens. I was once a little girl on Coney Island Avenue, and everything that ever happened has led to this implausible now.

Thick fog here, a white-out, our own gentle California version of snow. I woke up in the middle of the night with a snippet of an aria from Handel’s Messiah in my head, and it has become my soundtrack, a kind of mantra, over and over: “Every valley shall be exalted…”

There are worse ear worms, and this one feels particularly fitting for the holiday season. Things are looking very festive here in Solvang. The entire month has been proclaimed as Julefest, and the town is awash in lights and sweets and celebratory silliness. Happy tourists crowd the streets holding hands and smiling, buying t-shirts, soap and pastries, taking selfies in front of the windmill. Who am I to scorn it? I’ve made it my mission not only to avoid cynicism, but to unabashedly embrace sentimentality. Uncomplicated happiness is preferable to anger and anxiety, and we all need a reprieve now and then.

One afternoon, I saw my friend Lynne in front of the building that houses Youth Empowered, a welcoming space she has created for a community of folks, young and old, who might not easily fit in elsewhere. There’s a gym, a corner for doing art or homework, tables and chairs for simply being and feeling at home. Lynne was standing outside in a red hooded sweatshirt having a pensive moment during a lull in activities, looking like a beacon of light and love. We reminisced for a few minutes about the days when we were colleagues at the middle school, the laughter that we shared, the good things we still hope to do. “This is who we are,” she said. Lynne taught me long ago about integrity. Seeing her always reminds me who we are and what we are not.

At the holiday potluck of our hiking group, silver-haired ladies (like me) came bearing cookies and casseroles, and I was charmed by the simple renditions of Christmas carols on a church piano, our hesitant voices singing along, somehow remembering the lyrics across the decades. It was fun and regressive. These were songs about jingle bells and decking the halls and chestnuts roasting, frivolous and catchy, nothing too serious. And I loved seeing women with whom I have walked on mountain trails dressed up a little, slightly sparkly, Lisa in a velvet dress. I spoke with the vivacious Barbara, at 90-something the elder of the tribe, who was with this group at its inception nearly fifty years ago. I told her she was a role model to all of us. “That’s a lot,” she said modestly.

And the soundtrack in my head continues. “Every valley shall be exalted…”

I am remembering a Christmas ten or twenty years ago. It had rained in the night, a series of intermittent showers, and there was a stunning full moon, but somehow I managed to sleep anyway, and I awoke feeling cheerful and ambitious. We were living at the Ranch, of course, and it was a chilly morning, so I donned a knit cap and fleece jacket to supplement my plaid flannel pajamas, and I was inspired to bake bread -- I had in mind some rustic, crusty whole wheat loaves. Miranda had by this point moved away, and it sometimes didn’t feel like Christmas without her, but while the yeast was proofing, I had a hankering for certain excerpts of the Messiah. Soon the kitchen was filled with the joyful noise of "Unto Us A Child" and the Hallelujah chorus, and sunlight poured in through the steamy window, and all was well.

And that’s the way it is with this oratorio. It meanders, but it ultimately lifts me. Baroque is for the broken, I suppose. In fact, I recently heard a discussion about Handel’s Messiah by a music scholar named Charles King, who has written a book called, oddly enough, Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah. King suggested that Baroque music was the Punk of its time, encompassing rebellion, raw emotion, and social and cultural developments that mirror much of what we are experiencing today. Maybe. It sort of resonates.

I was in the children's choir of St. Mark's Methodist Church in Brooklyn in the 1950s when I first encountered Handel’s Messiah. I didn't fully understand it, of course, especially some
of the slower passages, which even now seem heavily operatic and vaguely ominous to me, but we were to add our voices, angelic and perhaps off-key, to the full choir and congregation at the Easter Sunday service. And when it all came together, it became an expression of pure jubilation. I felt that I was a part of something beautifully transcendent and celebratory. I remember walking home afterwards; it was springtime in the city, and every street proclaimed new life. There were lacy chartreuse buds on trees, and yellow forsythias in bloom, and crocuses and daffodils, perhaps. Even the ladies’ hats were sprouting flowers.

Many years later, in the dark days of Syracuse, I went with my roommate Patty to one of those Messiah Sing-Alongs held in a stately old church downtown the week before Christmas. Patty was annoyed at me (and with good reason) when we entered that church, but somewhere in the midst of the singing and the organ music, all mundane resentments vanished. She reached over and took my hand, and I held hers back, and we were friends again. Afterwards, when we stepped outside into the cold winter night, we beheld a world transformed by snow and moonlight. It was a magical night, a diamond night, a hallelujah night.

As I have gotten older and perhaps wiser, I usually experience Handel’s Messiah as an expression of the universal yearning of humanity, not so much rejoicing as a sense of hope and longing. And I understand King’s assertion that it is a work of anguish as well as promise, of profound worry as well as joy. I don’t know enough about music or scripture to grasp how structurally radical it apparently is, but I feel the dissonance and unease of it. Handel’s librettist, Charles Jennens, drew upon text from the King James Bible to craft his own customized, nonlinear sequence, conveying an ominous sense of doubt and despair that only eventually, but ultimately, leads to triumph, and then it pairs nicely with the glory of the world.

I don’t need to tell you how dismayed and heartbroken I often feel these days, and if you read this blog or simply pay attention to what’s happening, you understand the reasons why and carry, as I do, that grief and disbelief. But hope is my religion, as I have often said, and I also know, as much as I believe anything, that cynicism is a poison imbibed and served by the lazy, and that when the universe offers grace, it is gracious to accept it and be grateful.

In recent years, my innate joy has become tainted with guilt, incongruously weighted with awareness of concurrent suffering everywhere. I’ve written of it often. Even the miracles of nature are infused with a sense of endings drawing near, and I have had to convince myself that partaking of the gifts fortifies the spirit and thus makes better outcomes more likely. This is when I practice my trick: I let myself be happy for a moment. It’s okay to bake a cake, go for a walk, return renewed and do your best. It works. The joy sustains us.

And the world is my church. I go there daily.

I walked up to the top of a mountain last week with a dozen other ladies, and we were whipped and nearly whisked away by the infamous Gaviota winds, which circled us with gale force, our hair and hats flying, nothing to hold onto. It was a Wizard of Oz kind of wind, and below us was the shining sea, and all around the rugged peaks and trails and foliage of the beloved backcountry, familiar and strange, and we were so insubstantial that we might as well be air, but we also felt like children again, and all we did was laugh.

Every valley shall be exalted.

The designer brings us photographs of furniture and an armful of fabric swatches that open like an accordion and fan out on the table. I enjoy the colors and the textures, and I marvel at the names, because there is never a simple word like blue. The tones we see are sky or indigo, sage or charcoal, sienna and rust and vibrant teal. A textile with a bumpy surface is called Oats and Barley; an assortment of soft square swatches are Sumptuous Velvet—a material described as “exquisitely understated.” I am completely out of my element, but I allow myself to imagine entering our living room and sinking into a luscious curved sofa covered in Vienna Velvet with a pile of plush pillows playfully heaped on top.

We sold our house with all its furnishings and now we dwell in a capacious, nearly empty space. Through every window there is beautiful light and views of mountains, trees, and sky, and in the month since we moved in, I have come to develop a deep appreciation for the place, even in its current state. There is more possibility, after all, in vacancy than clutter.  But our books and paintings are boxed in the garage, my clothes are heaped in a large plastic tub, and we eat at a borrowed card table. There’s a newlywed feeling to it, a sense of adventure, a liberating leap into something different that is yet to be defined. But there are days when this unsettlement feels awkward and uncomfortable, and I look forward to the time when we can relax with a sigh in a finished and furnished space.  

Meanwhile, I’ve discovered that Monte is more adept than I am at visualizing décor, and I’m fascinated by his fluency in decorator dialect and how readily he grasps the suggestions of the woman who is helping us. I’m bewildered by all their ideas, quite fond of the old Turkish rug we brought from the other house which apparently no longer “works”,  and I’m perhaps a little less appalled than others by the mammoth dark wood desk left over by the previous occupant of this house—it looks like it was taken from the office of an insurance executive in Syracuse, circa 1975, but it’s functional for now. I’m just more willing to make do, I guess, and when I look back upon the places I grew up in, I can see the source of my ease with the haphazard.

My childhood home, throughout the 1950s, was a railroad flat on Coney Island Avenue. Whatever furniture we had seems to have always been there—maybe it belonged to my father’s mother, who had lived in that very apartment before us or in a building nearby. My father, however, transformed the walls. “Artist and Decorative Painting” said his business card, and we looked up at walls adorned with flowers and leaf sprays, marble effect, and unexpected murals. I remember the large face of a clown next to a bookcase, and a peacock on the wall above the kitchen table.

In the early 1960s, we moved from the city to a small house on Long Island. It would mean a debilitating commute for my father, and my mother felt exiled and isolated—she was a city girl who never even learned to drive. But it was purchased for $12,000 with a Veterans’ thirty-year mortgage, and it represented the attainment of some version of the American dream. It was a good brick house adjacent to scrubby woods, and we moved in with touchingly earnest hopes, most of which soon crumbled. There was a backyard with potential for a garden we never grew, a fireplace we never once lit, two bedrooms and an attic that was turned into a third. My father’s decorative art was everywhere apparent, from the flowers on the kitchen ceiling to the faux marble veins along the attic stairway. A little purple bird on a blossomed branch was painted in mid-chirp in one of the bedrooms. Over time, some of the wooden dressers were brightly and thickly painted, an effect somehow both festive and poignant. Meanwhile, my mother’s hoarding propensity escalated and gradually took over. Everything was messy, and discord mounted. “He left me out here in the sticks,” she would say, and she too occasionally decorated the walls, but with angry messages written in charcoal. I later learned that the Long Island house burned to the ground in a suspicious fire a few years after my family sold it. I cried a little when I heard that. I don’t know why.

I had left that house as early as I could and moved into a Chicago basement apartment with my medical student husband. You entered by a door in an alley way, and the view from the front windows was of the sidewalk above and the feet of passing strangers hurrying to the nearby CTA station. There were pipes on the ceiling, and the furnishings were the salvaged remnants of an abandoned fraternity house, including a cracked vinyl couch that was supposed to look like leather, and a sea-green wooden bed onto which I affixed pretty decals of butterflies. One day, in a misguided attempt at cheer, I painted the bare floor of one room blue; this proved to be a comical mistake.

After leaving that marriage, I spent a lot of hours on Greyhound buses and on the mattresses of sympathetic friends, and then a series of bleak furnished rooms in upstate New York. There was a period when most of my belongings were in my car, bundled in black trash bags. I was a desperado, but I found my way to California.  I got a job in Orange County, met Monte, and the rest is history, a miraculous history. Together, Monte and I made the first home that ever truly felt like home to me.

It was at the Ranch, of course, and I’ve written about it  ad nauseam, but that was the house that taught me how to inhabit a space, and how the space in turn embraces, and how you learn the light of every given moment, and the feel of every room. There was a big soft sofa and a plump red armchair, both upholstered by our dear friend Jeanne, who curated lovely textiles. There was a platform bed that faced a window that brought us the sky and backcountry. There were bookcases everywhere, filled with books, and there were paintings, and pictures of people we loved. The floors were warm Douglas fir, covered here and there with patterned rugs, and there was nothing fancy or complicated, but memories in every room, and they were, honestly, mostly happy ones. A little girl grew up there, a sweet dog curled at my feet, and we grew old and tired, but we were in our space together, and it was good.

So, yes, I am feeling uprooted and out of my element, but also very grateful to be here with the person I love in an empty palace of possibility, a place where, already, my friend Jan sang a song at our writers’ group gathering and the acoustics were great, and friends eat pizza at the borrowed card table, and even the blankness says “I can be beautiful” and once again, as Seamus Heaney advised, I am walking on air despite my better judgement.

I think sumptuous velvet in Buffalo Mud sounds intriguing.

We went back for a visit to the Ranch last week, and it was garishly gorgeous. It wowed me. I felt almost dizzy. Everything lined up...the luminous green hills, the shimmer of sea...we even glimpsed the tell-tale white splash of a whale breaching.  We dared to detour and drive a short distance up our old canyon, where we saw my oak saplings, the macadamia trees that skirt the fence, pregnant cows as big as ships and a few playful calves...everything so dear and familiar.

We were young there once, and I can't believe I lived more than thirty years in that place and ever thought any of it was normal. (On second thought, I’m pretty sure I always recognized the wonder and implausibility of it. It could be challenging sometimes, but I must have lived in a continual state of enchantment.)

And we poured our hearts and souls into it on a daily basis for all those years, working hard to steward and protect it and foster a sense of community.

There was a spiritual component to it also, and that’s the part that's hard to talk about, but it was very real, and it still is. There are layers and levels to knowing a place. There are secrets and ghosts, and something that was always there, unnamed, but deeply felt.

Anyway, we went back to the Ranch for a visit, and like a tempestuous, passionate lover, it covered me with kisses, filled me up with sky, and confirmed that we still belong to one another.

I guess we always will. 

But for now I am the punchy free-wheeling paramour of the sky, spellbound and ridiculous. I’m enjoying these surprising new days of this new chapter in our lives; I feel exhilarated. We have dubbed our house The Last Base. It’s largely unfurnished, but we have views of the mountains, and we’re close to town and friends, and as long as we’re together, I have no complaints.

As Merwin said (and I’ve been reading a lot of his poems lately) “happiness has a shape made of air/it was never owned by anyone/it comes when it will in its own time”.

Happiness has been dropping in on me a lot lately, and I appreciate its random appearances more than I ever did.

One afternoon, I went for a walk near the Mission. I heard singing coming from the sanctuary and recognized an old familiar hymn, but it seemed to me the holiness was outside the doors: in the shifting hues of the mountains, the gnarled beseeching oak trees, the pastoral fields of green. I noticed a young woman walking on the dirt road just ahead of me…she was radiant and Rubenesque, wearing a white dress embroidered with bright flowers, her dark hair piled on her head in a thick braid, and she was simply being beautiful, enjoying her moment in the world. She smiled into the sunlight, becoming her own kind of beacon, and I thought, “Life goes by quickly. Why not be beautiful? Why not wear flowers? Why not be someone who shines a light?”

Lest you think I’ve turned into a shallow, good times girl, I should add that my friends and I are working to put together an event of music and spoken word early in 2026, similar to one we organized last May in support of Democracy Forward. And this too is a way of being beautiful. We will focus this time on the fact that there are people in our own neighborhoods who are hungry and afraid, and we’ll raise funds for the local food bank. But this gathering won’t be a litany of grievances; we will make room for light and joy, which fortify and sustain us. We want to inspire a sense of hope and community.

In planning our program, we were particularly touched by the words of human rights activist Cleve Jones:

We come to this place this afternoon from many separate journeys. Our ancestors travelled different paths. But all our parents and grandparents and great grandparents and those before them - set their feet upon long and often difficult roads that converge here today, at this critical moment in the history of our nation and humankind.

But we do not despair, he adds, and we will not surrender. Every one of us has a role to play, and we can each bring some special skill or contribution.

So the themes of our gathering will be community, kindness, knowing what is right and acting accordingly, recognizing the many paths that brought us here, and honoring the bravery and ideals of those who came before us. We will remind ourselves and one another that we are a powerful and resilient community—and what is our country, after all, but a vast collection of communities? Our actions may be local, but from our local deeds, there is a ripple effect. The small, good things we do are cumulative, and our defiant hopes are contagious.  

Let us walk in beauty and light, carrying flowers, if we wish. Let us notice the holiness in the little moments within the ragtag days. Let us savor the unexpected tenderness that now and then arises, and contemplate the astonishing and unlikely fact that we are here together.

There has been too much leaving in the last few months. Now it is about arriving.

“Would I love it this way if it could last?” asked Merwin. It doesn’t matter.  

It is Thanksgiving morning and we are standing at the window talking to Richard and Justine, who have called us from Colorado. There’s a bowl of tangerines at Monte’s elbow, the aroma of coffee, that good sense of a new day beginning. Outside, cows are grazing peaceably, and a robust coyote is strolling about. I see the steep muddy path leading to a grove of trees high on a hilltop, and I once again silently resolve to walk up there someday just to stand and look out.

“All our souls are connected,” Richard is saying. It’s the familiar voice of a dear friend: a raconteur, an inventor, a builder of bikes and airplanes and even a few comic strips, and a true disciple of wonder. It’s getting cold in Colorado, but instead of nostalgia for days gone by, we talk about heading east for a visit when the season is right, and Richard muses about showing us the lay of the land from above, in his airplane, a plan I am happy to leave in the realm of fantasy.

We tell them about the bald eagle we saw a few days ago high in a tree, and they tell us about Ricky, an orphaned baby quail they found and rescued, who is now a confident member of their family. Suddenly a sound clip comes in of Ricky’s varied and outrageous utterances, and we hear him chirping and cooing in our kitchen, and once again, I am charmed and dazzled by the implausibility of everything.

The day is still unfolding, blossoming, almost. I embark upon a solo stroll along the road that skirts the driving range. The green shimmers, and golf balls are flying wildly in all directions, and I hurry past with my head down. I detour to walk through the crunchy brown oak leaves that have accumulated along the curb, a tangible and auditory memory of East coast autumns.

Later in the day, we stop at the house of a nearby friend whose daughter is home for the holiday with her husband and new baby. Long ago, when I was a middle school teacher, this daughter was a student in my class. Now she shares a little anecdote that fills my heart with gratitude and love, most surprisingly because it is a memory with me in it. We were on the 6th grade camping trip, she says, and everything was new and strange, and she missed her parents and couldn’t sleep. I invited her to come outside with me, and we sat side-by-side on the cabin deck, and I pointed to the sky.

“See those stars?” I apparently said. “Those are the very same stars shining on your parents right now.”

“I was so comforted by that,” my former student says now, nearly twenty-five years later. “I’ve never forgotten it.”

She shared some other memories of our middle school days, and it was a bountiful Thanksgiving gift for me, because it was such an affirmation, a retrospective validation that I was a good teacher, and I am remembered fondly. The funny part is, she couldn’t recall specific factual things we learned in class, just the feelings and the experiences. We wrote a lot, of course, and this was the class with whom Donna and I launched the great Solar System project, a tale I will re-tell another time. But there was also silliness, and there were odd, touching moments.

“Like when George Harrison died,” she said. “Someone brought it up, and we talked about it, and you didn’t make it seem unimportant.” 

It was certainly as important as anything else.

“Or when we were in 8th grade, we stayed in Treebeard’s Lone Pine cabin and watched the movie, Tremors, and then he took us to the Alabama Hills at the base of the mountains, where it was filmed. How amazing was that?”

Well, that was Dunn Middle School. The Camelot years. I could tell you stories. And I will. But I digress. The point here is that I always felt like an imposter, inadequate somehow, and now I was thinking that maybe I was okay.

“I never knew how to be a teacher,” I once confided to a friend who was also a former teacher. “I was just being a person.”

“Exactly,” she replied.

And I’m still doing that, or exploring what it means, so perhaps in some inadvertent ways I’m still teaching, and I’m definitely still learning. In any case, it’s a true gift to be lovingly remembered by a long-ago student whose life you briefly touched.

So Monte and I were sort of making the rounds on this day of thanks and giving, and we went back to our neighborhood and joined the gathering hosted by Geoff and Joey, a lavish feast and a happy chaos of toddlers and dogs and family and friends.

When we got back home, I turned on my computer, and—voila!— it was a cornucopia of communication. There were emails and texts of the sort I love to get, messages with the feel of real letters, greetings and good wishes from people in our lives.

Someone sent W.S. Merwin’s magnificent poem of thanks, which concludes:

we are saying thank you faster and faster

with nobody listening we are saying thank you

thank you we are saying and waving

dark though it is

I love that poem, with all its pain and contradiction and sincere defiant gratitude.  I remember the rainy night when I heard Merwin reading in the auditorium at UCSB, how he channeled something ancient and luminous and absolutely necessary, and a kind of grace descended upon us.

Yes, I was there on that rainy night, enveloped by the spell that Merwin cast. Imagine that?

And once again, I thought how generous and extravagant my life has been, and how unlikely.

I carry the sadness, too, of course. That never goes away. But I still see the same stars my loved ones saw, and sometimes it seems that we are here together, looking up.

All our souls are connected. I know this for sure.

And I have begun to see that blessings come from unexpected sources, rolling towards me randomly, flying around like golf balls.

And I am saying thank you.

My friend Hilary came to visit. She talks softly, which makes me listen better, and she is slower and more deliberate in her motions these days, which shifts me down from my usual frenzy.  It’s been raining, and we drive to the edge of the mountains, which appear and disappear in the mist. We take each other’s pictures, looking wistful, maybe because we too are on the cusp of disappearing. We drift through the days, and rain blurs them together, and we venture out in the spaces between, with no agenda or goal, just being here together.

Hilary is a woodworker, and we visit a local friend, Tom, who’s a woodworker too, and although he is retired, he kindly shows us his shop, such as it is. There are a few tools and materials, a work bench and a table saw, pieces of lumber propped against a wall, and a long, smooth banister jutting across the table, awaiting its placement. He wears a cap, a soft corduroy jacket over a turtleneck shirt, still handsome nearing 80, and stands with his hands in his pockets, surveying his domain. On a desk beneath a window are family photos, a box of coins, a mug of pens, a calculator, and a book about the art of Rothko. There are letters and a butter knife to open them, and outside the window, a stand of cactus in silvery drizzle. I ask him if he still enjoys working with wood. “I still make some things,” he says, “but the romance is gone.”

I’m braced for the gone-ness of the romance when I embark upon my own projects and endeavors, but I still encounter its presence. I never had any tactile artisan skills, but I’m surprised by the satisfaction of playing with words on the page, and by the improvisational crafting of a day. Mostly, I’m surprised by the tenacity of wonder and by my incurable capacity to be surprised.

One afternoon, when the sky opens up into vivid post-storm blue and the clouds above the mountains are plump and majestic, my friend Kelley joins us and we walk through the streets of the neighborhood, marveling at the green of a golf course, and yellow leaves tossed by a wind, and a cocky hawk on a fence post who seems to be posing for us but flies off into a thicket of trees before I can get a picture. Rivers are rushing, white water roars over the rocks, a shaggy horse grazes in a muddy field. The light shifts to gold as dusk draws near, and there are many moments when we stand and hold our breath, astonished by the ferocious beauty of it all. We are passing through, aware of our own brevity, but grateful to bear witness.

On a different day, we stop for lunch at Highway Tacos, a roadside place selling Mexican food from an Airstream trailer. While we wait, we notice a grouping of small clay figurines in a classic Nativity scene set up on a metal table attached to the trailer. Kings and shepherds and a blue-shawled kneeling Mary with a missing hand are gathered around a manger that we notice with dismay is empty. Could someone have stolen baby Jesus? It’s hard to fathom.

“Jesus is missing!” we inform the owner, who takes it in stride—it’s just another mystery in this mysterious world. But it somehow seems like a metaphorical explanation for a lot of things that are going awry these days. So I have ordered a tiny Jesus that I found online, and I intend to go back and place that baby in the manger as soon as possible. I know it’s silly, but even at this trivial level, it’s so satisfying to close a loop, fill a gap, right a wrong, come full circle, finish a story. And in this case, maybe it’s a symbolic step toward repair and realignment on a greater scale.

The “news” continues to batter us. Exhausted and traumatized, we make our way forward, doing what we can. Updates from the Besties in our daily texts are peppered with tales of health concerns, older siblings in decline, the procession of anxieties in our heads at night as we try to fall asleep. We who were once so robust step carefully these days, fearing falls, accommodating weakness, aches, and stiffness, tiring more easily. I remember my friend Ralph, on his 88th birthday, saying, “I never believed I would get old, and now, look at me. I’m old.” 

I guess there is always an unexpectedness about it. We’re headed there, and conspicuously eroding, but it doesn’t seem real. In the meantime, we feel fragile, but we strive for grace and gratitude.

We brought Hilary to the train station in Santa Barbara; a classic old station built in 1905 with wooden benches and tile floors. The rains had passed, and it was a bright, rambunctious day, with cobalt blue sky and cinematic clouds above the palm trees and the mountains, ridiculously pretty. Our beautiful friend had come far to see us and has many miles of travel ahead. It takes some effort to stay connected, and I don’t know when we’ll maneuver this again, but it never isn’t worth it. Our time together was brief, but in its own way perfect.

Today I stood on a bridge and looked down at the river, and although present in the moment, I felt the weight of countless memories and stories. I could feel all the loss and all the love pressing upon me, and I was aware of my fragile current self, but at the same time, I keenly remembered how it felt to be a child. Life is lived in so many layers of time, all at once. So I stood there, heavy and weightless and in love with the light, keeping the romance alive.

Our time in England already feels long-ago, but we have been “home” for barely a week. I am still feeling unmoored and bewildered, and I realize I’ve been saying that a lot lately. But I am also filled with resolve to pivot, shove out the sadness, and focus on my community, good causes, and the beauty around us, right here . Yesterday we saw wild geese in v-formation flying over us, and a persimmon tree in the backyard is alight with orange fruit, and the mountains are beginning to feel like familiar friends.

As for the state of our nation, the words for this moment are betrayal and dismay, but I have discovered that the morning light in this new house fills the empty spaces in a way that feels comforting and gentle, and the prism in the window of the room I call my study is casting multitudes of rainbows on the wall. Outside, a white moon left over from the night before lingers above the branches of an oak tree.

I recently came upon a quote by the late English author J.A. Baker, in which he said, “Place is change. It is motion killed by the mind and preserved in the amber of memory.” I’ve been thinking about that a lot as I find my footing here. What is place, after all, if not an ever-shifting venue? I have begun to think that the only still point is inside of me, and there may be comfort in elements of the landscape I have loved, but there’s nothing out there to hold onto. So I am dusting off my inner compass, reaffirming the scaffolding of core character that holds me up, trying to stay steady while everything around me swirls.

But happiness happens. It comes in little bursts and blossoms. Dear friends came over for dinner a few nights ago, just the four of us at a borrowed card table, but first there was a walk at dusk, our favorite time of day. I went to a coffee shop on Sunday morning where talented locals were performing in a backyard open mic session—and people making music is very good news. A few days ago we were treated to an onscreen visit from the kids in England. Glimpses of our grandchildren, despite them being suddenly so far away again, brought a sense of joy that was almost three-dimensional.

It made me think of a little essay by Brian Doyle titled “God” in which a school bus carrying kindergarten children slows down for a stop, and yes, “God was six girls and one boy with a bright green and purple stegosaurus hat…”

This is something I completely understand. What better way to restore one’s faith in this “blistering perfect and terrible world” than to behold the light of seven smiling children, one of them in a celebratory hat? God is right there.

“I’m not kidding and this is not a metaphor,” Doyle writes. In fact, he asks, if you were the Imagination that dreamed up everything that ever was, wouldn’t you be sporting a fantastical hat? (Doyle died at the age of sixty in 2017 after a bout with brain cancer, and if you are looking for a playful, spirit-lifting book of faith and grace and wonder, I recommend his essay collection, One Long River of Song.)

An odd thing happened a few nights ago. Monte and I set out for an experimental bike ride as twilight approached. I have a hip problem now and this is hard for me, but I decided to give it a go. We hadn’t gone far when Monte noticed water trickling and puddling from someone’s yard, and he turned to see an elderly man lying on the ground near his house with a hose in his hand. Monte stopped his bike and called out: “Do you need some help?” The man answered, yes.

We walked over and the old guy was alert but shaky, scraped, and bleeding, his shoes off and his socks soaking wet. I turned off the hose while Monte lifted him onto a seat. He said his wife was inside and he’d been calling to her, but she didn’t hear him. He thought he had been on the ground for an hour.

So my job now was to enter their house calling her name. I wandered through the hallway and shouted into rooms and finally reached her in the rear of the dimly lit house. She was old in the tiny, dwindled way of being old, but she was clear and conversational. She leaned onto a wheeled walker and followed me around until I found the correct doorway to the place in the yard where Monte was tending to her husband.

It was all so serendipitous. Normally, we would never have been going by this house. Who knows how long the man would have been lying there as night came? And it was also like a peek into our own not-too-distant future. It is very easy to imagine being on the ground, unable to get up. (We think about this a lot lately; it’s one of the reasons we moved from the Ranch to this more convenient and manageable situation.)

In any case, it turned out that the elderly couple had a daughter nearby and we were able to summon her by phone and wait until she arrived to drive her father to the hospital. In the meantime, I watched Monte being the person I love, so competent and caring. He checked the man’s abrasions, cleaned him up a bit and helped him feel secure. He told him how he had once found his own father on the ground like that.

And I learned a little about these people, who had long histories in the community. They were lovely and gracious, and undoubtedly full of stories. We told them we live nearby and we’d check in on them and be their friends. I imagined bringing them cookies and casseroles and looking at their photos and helping them to feel less alone. It was sort of heartwarming, a mishap with a silver lining.

Then the daughter drove up and went into the house to retrieve her father’s walker. It was a sturdy, compact one that she could easily load into her car—his portable, “going-to-town” walker. And on the back, impossible to miss, was a bright, pasted-on bumper sticker that said TRUMP. My heart sank. I thought I had met the dearest old folks; it was dissonant to glimpse this proclamation of allegiance to the cult.

Would we have withheld our care and kindness had we known? Never. Absolutely not. As a local clergyman told me recently, “We are all God’s children. And this area is not red or blue. It’s purple.”

My fear is that there are toxic dyes and brazen lies bleeding into that purple, which may prove fatal to the body of our state. But I’m beginning to think that the most effective antidote is to stay unwaveringly true to what is right and decent, not preaching, but doing.

By now it was dark, and we were walking our bikes home. “They’re just old,” said Monte. “Probably lifelong Republicans. They don’t know what it really means.”

I suppose he’s right.

Coincidentally, I read an essay a few days later by Rebecca Solnit, called “How Big Should Your Tent Be?” which sort of talks about accepting imperfections and working with what we have, not what we wish was out there. People do come to new realizations and change their minds. “I can at least not be an unwelcoming committee when there’s a chance to shift the balance in our favor,” she writes.

She quotes Anand Gridharadas, who wrote a book about persuasion, in which he suggests that the lifeblood of free society is the ability to change other people’s minds in order to change things. “Americans increasingly write one another off instead of seeking to win one another over,” he warns.

It’s something I need to keep in mind, as shocked and heartbroken as I might be by some of what a bumper sticker represents. And I may not be quite ready yet to turn my anger into forgiveness, but I can see that it is not helpful to hold onto it. Maybe there’s a road to revelation, rather than revolution. Maybe finding worthy, constructive causes and diligently working is a way forward, leading by example. Filling the local food bank, for example, or tutoring kids, or playing what music is in us…

And I’m not sure yet what I have learned from this or how to navigate, but it seems to reflect something significant about this little town and our country in general, about the universals of getting old, about the ambiguities and shifting nature of place, and about knowing what is constant and steady within us, and not letting go of that light. It’s about dancing with contradictions and being worthy of the Imagination that dreamed up everything that ever was.  

The photograph above shows the first four Carbone siblings in Prospect Park in the 1950s: me, Ralph, Marlene, and on the far right, my brother Eddie. Eddie’s birthday is this month—he would have been 78 years old—and he lives inside my heart always, but I’ve been thinking about him more than usual lately, for many reasons. I wrote this post about him years ago, and I want to share it here again as a way of honoring his memory. I wish you could have known him.

We raise our hands in horror as the triceratops approaches, trying desperately to flee but stumbling in its path.  Meanwhile, a pterodactyl hovers ominously above the fire escapes and rooftops, its wings forming a skeletal arc against a plain gray sky -- it is a pursuit that never ends, a prolonged limbo, an always pending tale.

My brother Eddie took those snapshots in 1960 when he was thirteen years old and roaming the streets of Brooklyn with a plastic Brownie camera. Although I was one of his most frequent models, I had long forgotten about the photo shoots and was fascinated when I discovered the snapshots in a small cardboard box on its way to oblivion. I always wished I had more pictures of Eddie – over the years his image has fractured into its component elements: a pair of black-rimmed glasses, a cap of thick brown hair, a certain kind of smile that happened quickly and left you wondering why it seemed so sad. But the face as a whole is never in focus. My lens is blurred by time and loss.

So I was disappointed when I looked through this curious cache of photos, hoping for a new glimpse of the dearly loved companion of my childhood and finding instead brick walls and empty lots, the open pages of a monster magazine, the blankness of his own outstretched hand. I saw the familiar buildings of Coney Island Avenue, the gas station whose red Pegasus was the view from our front window, a stack of abandoned pots on a fire escape, and a clothesline whose mundane laundry that morning achieved a kind of immortality. I recognized the white steps of the boathouse by the lake at Prospect Park where we sat one summer day and sipped vanilla egg creams.

And then there were those dinosaur encounters, a series Eddie created by holding toy figures close to the camera and directing my oldest brother Ralph and me to pose in the distance. We were only too happy to oblige: our displays of terror are truly impressive, if a bit over the top. I guess you could say my brother invented special effects photography.

Although only three years older than me, Eddie was a magician and mentor, and I spent many hours under his spell. Armed with a toy gun and sometimes wearing the Davy Crockett hat that we jointly owned and cherished, Eddie scripted battles with imaginary Nazis, produced ingenious shadow shows cast upon a square of light on the wall, and transformed himself for my amusement into a repertoire of eccentric characters, each with his own funny voice and mannerisms. He was a talented artist who sketched intricate drawings in pencil and ink, created abstract melted crayon art (he called it radiator painting), and taught my best friend how to draw a nose -- "And not just in profile," she told me many years later, "but front on, the hard way!"

He taught me the names of all the dinosaurs and famous cinema monsters, how to fling clods of earth explosively into the street ("dirt bombs") and how to ride the red two-wheeler he had found by someone’s garbage can, rusty but salvageable. Most miraculously, he taught me how to read – with his help, random marks began to organize themselves into meaningful shapes, and my world suddenly opened.

Eddie loved to make my sister Marlene and me laugh. Sometimes he transformed himself into a character he called The Old Lady: he placed a white towel like a shawl upon his head and chided us in a tiny quivering voice. If we were sitting in the car watching people walk by, he talked for them as though they were puppets, giving them comical accents and personalities, concocting absurd little worries about which they would mutter and fret as they passed. I confess he sometimes created weather for pedestrians as well, with me as his gleeful accomplice, sprinkling water on befuddled passers-by from the window of our first-floor apartment.

I did not fully understand that Eddie was born with polycystic kidney disease, or all the ramifications of that fate. (I am humbled by how many things I didn't understand.) He was a sensitive boy, but he hid his tears, and he may have appeared odd to the outside world, but to me he was an ally and protector.

Eddie moved out of our turbulent household when he was still in his teens and tried a sort of grown up life in the city, off kilter and mostly solo, living in furnished rooms, working odd jobs, getting through college. Now and then he simply boarded a bus for distant and random destinations, hoping to solidify a plan along the way.

He was living in Atlanta and all set to start law school when his kidneys failed. A life on dialysis, far from home, would be difficult for anyone, but for Eddie, the world abruptly grew more frightening and obscure. At one point, in the midst of a crisis for which I was breathtakingly unprepared and ill-suited, I faced the responsibility of facilitating his admission to a psychiatric facility. I will never forget his look of betrayal and confusion when I left him there.

But my brother was brave. For years he drifted through various circumstances, intermittently hospitalized, trying to make sense of things, trying to live a life that mattered. He became an advocate for patients’ rights, writing letters and circulating petitions that only alienated those upon whom his care depended. He married someone wrong for him and it ended very badly. He was lonely and luckless but he never grew hard-hearted.

At the core of him always was the boy he was before he was so battered by the randomness of things. He loved five and dime stores and second-hand shops, stamps and coins and comics...and Mallowmars...remember those? He bought interesting old books and plastic toys, crammed them into manila envelopes, and shipped them to my toddler daughter, the niece he never met. He sent a paper lantern from Chinatown, wedding cake figurines, a small bag of miniature dinosaurs.

The last time I saw Eddie he was sitting in a slant of sunlight on the edge of a bed in San Francisco. His lips were cracked and chalky, and his whispered words circled us like aimless birds, disjointed and defeated. He was paranoid about his caregivers and certain that dialysis had become a plot to gradually kill him. I offered up my useless talk, toiletries, and pocket cash. I combed his matted hair and convinced myself that a walk outside would do him good. I held his arm, and with slow and painful steps we walked to the corner and back again. (Oh, what a monumental courage it can be just to wake up and get dressed!)

A few years later, he was back in New York. He had to have an operation for a defective heart valve, but he was debilitated already, and pneumonia set in. I have a letter he wrote me from his hospital bed. It hurts to read it, but I know what it says. He could see the lights of Manhattan from his window. He wanted to live. He promised he would approach everything differently if given the chance.

And so I hoped to find another image of my brother when I came upon that little box of photos, but there are no more pictures of him. I stared instead at inanimate objects -- solid, cryptic, and benign. Is it better to see what he saw than see him? His snapshots reveal a world one could invent and orchestrate. Fate could be kept at bay, pursuits were playful shams, and imagination ruled. My brother was creative and brilliant and funny and kind, but there was no place for him in what was real.

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The decades pass. I am forever trying to make sense of things, as Eddie so long ago tried, and to live a life that matters. I became a teacher after he died, more for him than anyone. I thought it was a good way to keep his memory alive.

I learned early that fate is inequitable and unfair, and I have been granted a lucky life, and if so blessed, my goal is not to squander it.

I learned too that some people do not let hardship make them mean. Some people, even in the midst of struggle, draw upon a wellspring of kindness and imagination. And the most generous among us are often those who were given the least.

You know what else? I was chased by dinosaurs in Brooklyn, New York. I sat on the boathouse steps with my brother once, sipping a vanilla egg cream, and everything else was irrelevant.

I can never shed the sadness I feel about my brother’s life, but he also left some kind of laughter in me that never went away.