An October Not Quite Over

fishing boat

Late in the day I rode my bicycle along the main road to the Hollister House, where Monte was at a meeting that would (supposedly) soon adjourn. The tide was low and the beach was empty,  and at Las Panoches, a cluster of polka-dot ballons had sprung from a post like a bouquet...turn here for a party, I guess.

Nearby a cow was grazing with a tiny new-to-the world black calf at her side. Several deer loitered beneath the eucalyptus trees where the road rises and briefly divides, and the hazy light turned gold.At the turn-off to the old Ranch house I rode through the orchard in the hopes of gathering some persimmons ripe enough to make pudding, but somebody had beat me to it. I saw a few high up in the branches, placed my bike on the grass, and tried to jump and grab them, but they were far out of reach. Kit came by and offered his advice and assistance. "Why don't you just climb up?" he asked.

But I've never climbed a tree, I said, and anyway, these don't look substantial enough for climbing, and he conceded the point. He managed to reach up high and pluck one that was ready to fall, and then we shook the branches with no success but found another on the ground, as soft as jam and half-consumed by other kinds of creatures. There would be no persimmon pudding.

Instead I stood beneath the yellow-orange leaves and swallowed a morsel of persimmon-sweetness, receiving communion, communing with fall. Through the windows of the house, I saw neighbors gathered at a table in the warm glow of interior light, a community discussion, local democracy in action...it was a good thing, but I preferred to stay outdoors. I sat on the porch steps next to someone's patient dog and gazed outward into the green and the shadows.

Robert Creeley was in my back pack. I read this poem:

Inside my head a common room,

a common place, a common tune,

a common wealth, a common doom

inside my head. I close my eyes.

The horses run. Vast are the skies,

and blue my passing thoughts’ surprise

inside my head. What is this space

here found to be, what is this place

if only me? Inside my head, whose face?

October has almost fled, I thought. A couple of weeks ago we were in New York, and the days were hot as summer, and now I am hearing that Northeastern storms are approaching, with perhaps an early snowfall.

On this very date forty years ago I was in Chicago getting married at the Cook County Courthouse on Clark Street. "Get under the flag," said the judge, and I couldn't shake the image of the flag as a blanket to crawl under, and I started to giggle because I was already hysterical, and the judge scolded me and said this wasn't a joke. The groom was a medical student who wore faded purple bell-bottoms, and I was a young girl with long dark hair in a very short beige dress, and we walked downtown and through Lincoln Park where trees were dropping yellow leaves, and at night the other medical students made us a spaghetti dinner celebration, and I went outside and sat on the steps and cried because I thought my life was over.

It most assuredly was not, though I suppose I'd placed it in suspension for awhile. And everything that happened or didn't happen has led me to here, I thought, where I am sitting on the porch of the Hollister House watching night enter a garden while behind me a handful of diligent citizens, my husband among them, are gathered at a table in the lamplight, constructively discussing or spinning their wheels, but affirmatively engaged in community and living.

Earlier in the day I'd had coffee in Santa Barbara with Laura, my Italian-teacher-who-became-my-friend. "I believe in people," she told me. But she prays anyway. She prays when she walks the dog, when she puts clothes on the line to dry, when she watches her grandson play with his trains.

"You pray too," she said, "even if you think you don't know how."

I do. I am.Inside my head, a common room.

When the meeting ended, Monte put my bike in the back of the car and we drove home together, but not before stopping to look at the crescent moon rising above the cove, and the light of a distant fishing boat.