Tangible Things and A Certain Kind of Light

Maybe everyone else is engaged in creative, constructive, contributory  action, but these days I'm mostly just thinking, wandering the hours without any particular agenda or destination.Earlier in the week I had occasion to go into Santa Barbara where I walked on streets instead of dirt, and although let's face it Santa Barbara doesn't much look like Brooklyn, I was reminded somehow of walks I used to take with my mother through the residential neighborhoods of that borough when I was a little girl. On a deserted street lined with over-arching trees, the sunlight filtered through branches and leaves in just a certain way, and for a moment the windows of an old house seemed to shine from within and without, and a traffic light winked into green as I reached its corner and the concrete sidewalk fleetingly felt like my native ground and time slowed down and circled me dreamily, and I marveled at how everything that has happened keeps happening in your head.

There's a danger in forever reimagining people, replaying random isolated moments, forgetting who they were in their entirety and complexity. But maybe that's what we are all destined to become: a  collection of misremembered moments in the heads of those knew us, until they too vacate the scene and we vanish into starlight.In the meantime, here is a sumptuous present. I enjoy the tangibles and the light. I'm enchanted by concrete nouns, by what poet Dan Gerber calls "the illusory solidity of the world". I even discovered a consignment store in the course of this walk in town, an extravagant bazaar of material goods, some of them enticing. I bought myself a red silk robe, and boots I didn't need, one size too big for me, but they're made in Italy and beautiful, and I intend to wear them.

Back home in the evening, just before dusk, the hills glowed. They literally glowed. Then the day was over and I had accomplished nothing. But here are some nouns and adjectives.