A Morning with Gilkey Creek

There's something I've been wanting to write about, something that's nudging at me, a bone in my throat, an agitation in my craw. (What is a craw, anyway? Note to self: Google "craw.")*

I begin with little winding Gilkey Creek, a feeder into the Flint River. It has been part of my life for about 25 years -- since my first husband, Danny, and I moved into our house on Seventh Street. Back then I started walking and jogging along the creek and over its three little foot bridges as part of a route through the neighborhood that has continued to this day.

Here's the thing: sometimes I am in denial about the huge chunk of my life that I've spent in Flint -- I don't know why, exactly, except that as I've said before in many other contexts, I never thought I'd stay this long, and sometimes it simply doesn't feel like "my kind of place" -- or the kind of place I thought I'd end up. Going there in my thinking dangerously leads to "it wasn't supposed to be like this," or, "I could have done better..." And thus to a tunnel of self-doubt if not outright self-recrimination, and nothing good comes of that.

But then, there's this little creek that I've been pausing to look at on its many curves and byways when it's crusted with ice in February and gushing with green life in early May; there are sometimes ducks noodling around under the bridge on Brookside. I've noted the way October leaves dapple the water in red and gold; I've delighted in the little rippling rapids at the footbridge by Kensington. This little creek has meandered its way into my daily life, and I've come to count on it. Maybe it's like an arranged marriage, where after years of just living one day after the other, you suddenly realize you've grown fond of the mate conjoined to you by fate.

There's passive aggression in keeping my feelings at bay about a place I've lived in much longer than the whole of my childhood, much longer than anyplace else I've ever lived, for that matter. It strikes me suddenly that one can take out one's individual resentment and disappointment on the land -- by withholding commitment, by ignoring its needs and travails. By simply refusing or failing to notice.

This dolorous line of reflection from individual circumstance leads me deeper: sometimes individual difficulties, unresolved baggage about ourselves, can become something bigger, taking a toll on Mother Earth. If we're not taking proper care of ourselves and unearthing (ohh...untentional but lucky slip...to "unearth" like digging potatoes out of the dirt, a gift, a consequence of our husbandry) thus, unearthing the meaning of our lives, perhaps we also stop paying attention to the natural world that sustains us.

So this is partly an argument for taking care of ourselves -- not just at the superficial "yes, I exercised today," but at the spiritual level -- "yes, I am finding a path to forgiveness, moving on from the griefs and disappointments of the past."

I woke up Saturday, in short, and decided to get up and go to Gilkey Creek, where good-hearted folks not as ambivalent or reclusive as me had organized a Flint River cleanup, including my little tributary. This new, uncharacteristic decisiveness, not without resistance or misanthropy, overall felt refreshing. I thoroughly enjoyed the morning, getting muddy on the banks while tugging out drenched plastic bags ("Toys 'r Us" being the predominant logo in my assigned stretch of creek), shards of styrofoam, candy wrappers -- the usual detritus of thoughtless humanity.

Hmm...that casual little reference just jarred me into insight -- "my little tributary" -- it IS my little creek, as it is all of ours. As I was arguing myself out of bed, dreading having to interact with "people" in my current not-quite-completed rehabilitative state, I thought "you don't have to make nice with the people. But you could care about the creek." That little creek in all its imperfections has given me many moments of pleasure. It's part of the land that was here before us and now, as always, is deserving of our love.

*Craw: a pouch in many birds and some lower animals that resembles a stomach for storage and preliminary maceration of food (wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn)

Art Walking Flint

Walking into St. Paul's Episcopal Church tonight, I felt like Flint was a real town for once. It was the monthly art walk, and like last night, this was a blessed, lovely May evening. At the church's big door, a friendly guy hailed people in, eager to show off the church's Tiffany stained glass window, which is indeed breathtaking. The gentleman gave everybody a little handout, delightful reading, with words that vibrate my childhood memories: narthex, transept, reredos, font...I love that sanctuary sensually without regard to dogma because of its colors and shape and art, including floor tiles in the chancel made by Albert Champion at Flint Faience Tiles in the 1880s -- the same company, artistically spun off using the same materials as spark plugs, that made the tiles in my own bathrooms.

It was my friend, the multi-talented Grayce, who got me to step away from lingering reclusiveness again tonight (two nights in a row...this is big), and I wanted to go because she was showing her porcelain fish in St. Paul's parlor. ( I like the idea of art in church parlors, too -- better than in my day, when the evangelicals of my childhood objected to decoration in a sanctuary as if the spectrum itself was somehow ungodly. Who were these people, so frightened of pleasure?? ) Grayce in her red sweater greeted visitors with the verve of a woman 30 years younger -- maybe it's art and poetry that keep her vibrant -- that and her Ohio pedigree.

Out on Saginaw Street there actually were people: a blend of young and old, many children, even music in front of Flint City T-Shirts, where I bought two shirts, one a muscle shirt that amusingly claims "Flint: The toughest town around since 1855" and another one, old postcard style, that says "Greetings from Flint Michigan!" Art students from Davison High School were showing their work at the T-Shirt shop, and a couple of kids sang and plunked on a keyboard and electric, um, ukelele, I think? It was sweet to see all the kids, hanging out in their bohemian garb, lounging on benches, having a little downtown adventure. Down the block, a couple kissed and nuzzled between venues: he in a beret, she in black hair with bangs. Is this Paris, for gawd's sake? Before I knew it I caught myself stopping to stare and smile, wanting to congratulate them, and then I realized I knew them. So glad to know the cosmo couple kissing on the street.

As I say, just like a real town. It felt good.

Jazz and a Full Moon over Flint

Last night at the Flint Institute of Music's warmly intimate MacArthur Recital Hall, nerdy-looking and distinctly middle-aged guitarist Lawrence Newman sat inconspicuously in the background for the first eight pieces while a wonderful collection of jazz musicians -- from the Flint Institute of Music faculty and the Limonest Conservatory in France -- performed a free concert. Then, on the ninth number, the flutes, trumpets and a trombone came out onstage to join the guitars, saxophones, vibes, piano and bass and the whole crowd played three numbers announced as Larry Newman compositions: "Aisle Land," "Voices," -- my favorite of the three -- and the buoyant "Stride" which ended the two-hour show. Throughout the three fabulous performances, Newman stood up and wandered toward the spotlight, but mainly hunched over his guitar or kept a sidelong glance on the other musicians, smiling as they played out his work. As we used to say in Ohio, "Who'd a thunk?" It was terrific entertainment and one of those nights -- a prototypical Flint kind of thing, psychologically speaking -- when one goes in with an open mind expecting nothing in particular and then comes out happily surprised and satisfied into the moonlight.

Invariably, I found myself thinking typical Flint thoughts about the FIM musicians and wondering -- hell, they live here? Where? How do they feel about plying their trade in this old town? Do they wonder how they ended up in Flint when they wake up at 4 a.m.? Where do they hang out? Does a night like last night make it all worthwhile? Do they say to skeptical colleagues from more glamorous ports, "you know, it's not a bad life after all?"

It's true the Midwest has its moments -- of stubborn resilience and serendipity. Sometimes Flint is like the Susan Boyle of cities.

Anyway, I loved the curly-haired, intellectual-looking Jeff Price, an FIM faculty member and saxophonist, gently introducing the show by describing an afternoon in a bar in Lyon, France, wishing his musician friends could play in Flint. Something that starts in a bar in Lyon, France and ends up in the MacArthur Recital Hall pleasing all the rest of us on a balmy May night isn't all bad, and I thank Price for making it happen. The money came from rich people, of course -- the small cadre (and smaller and smaller, one worries--let's hope there are no Madoff victims among them) who keep some of the finest things in Flint going -- in this case, the Patricia Cumings Dort Fund and the David T. Dort Fund.

About halfway through the show, I leaned over to my neighbor and friend John, who's about 20 years my junior, and said the music was making me thirsty for a glass of vin rose and a dark little French cigarette. Back in my day you could still hear jazz from time to time in smoky cafes if you knew where to look -- even in Ohio. John, on the other hand, said he'd never heard jazz anyplace else than in a concert hall. Too bad! We reflected on where it all started -- certainly not in a hall where everybody there looked, uh, well-educated and maybe dressed up a little for the occasion. Does it make it all too astringent, I wondered, like seeing some arcane little piece of a water jar in the Kelsey Museum in A-squared?

So yeah, full moon. John and I walked from our increasingly leafy street to the FIM, and then back, in richly silver light of the moon over the Flint Institute of Art and then Mott Community College and then over our own houses in something like a painting by Rene Magritte.

Lilac Day and Joey the Cat Sings Led Zeppelin

This is the first day of lilacs in Flint. The distinct perfume, wafting over the familiar curved sidewalk at Pierce Elementary School. First, my nostrils, as they say, flaring in recognition, alert -- before my mind said, "lilacs." This confirms my long-standing argument with a long-standing friend on the subject "which comes first, thought or language?" First my nose knows, and then my voice whispers "lilacs." Need I say more?

Do you think the children still in school noticed that today was the first lilac day, garrisoned in their late-spring cages?

On another subject, Adam is singing "Whole Lotta Love" on American Idol and my cat is wailing along with him. Either Joey Two the Golden Feline is a true rocker or Adam's Led Zeppelin rendition is hurting poor Joey's ears. Well, Simon says "nobody can top that now." He should have heard my cat Joey.

"The Pleasure of Doing" -- from The Elegance of the Hedgehog

I'm enjoying Alison Anderson's translation from the French of Muriel Barbery's charming bestseller The Elegance of the Hedgehog. In Chapter 18, the book's cranky yet vulnerable main character, a widowed concierge, is remembering a scene in Anna Karenina when an aged Levin is scything, at first awkwardly and then, as he works up a sweat and moves through his exhaustion, "his painful gestures become more fluid." Here's the lovely passage that follows:

A welcome breeze suddenly caresses his back. A summer rain. Gradually, his movements are freed from the shackles of his will, and he goes into a light trance which gives his gestures the perfection of conscious, automatic motion without thought or calculation, and the scythe seems to move of its own accord. Levin delights in the forgetfulness that movement brings, where the pleasure of doing is marvelously foreign to the striving of the will.

This is eminently true of many happy moments in life. Freed from the demands of decision and intention, adrift on some inner sea, we observe our various movements as if they belonged to someone else, and yet we admire their involuntary excellence. What other reason might I have for writing this -- ridiculous journal of an aging concierge -- if the writing did not have something of the art of scything about it? The lines gradually become their own demiurges and, like some witless yet miraculous participant, I witness the birth on paper of sentences that have eluded my will and appear in spite of me on the sheet, teaching me something that I neither knew nor thought I might want to know. This painless birth, like an unsolicited proof, gives me untold pleasure, and with neither toil nor certainty but the joy of frank astonishment I follow the pen that is guiding and supporting me.

Here's to scything and writing -- the pleasure of doing.

Today's Flint Walk: "My Lizard Likes Them"

In bright sunshine, I met Helen, a woman I'd seen walking from time to time. (It felt soothingly Old World that we shook hands; she looked like she might be in her 80s but has a fine strong handshake. I will mourn the loss of shaking hands if the flu epidemic forces us all away from simple physical gestures.) Helen was walking her dog Maggie, who Helen said is 17. We stopped to chat on the sidewalk east of Pierce School, looking at the caved-in spot where the big old ash tree used to be until a December ice storm got it.

We started talking about dandelions, which are just busting out all over the yard around Pierce's playground. Helen confessed she actually likes them and feels no need to root them out. The other day on her walk, she said, she ran into a woman with a handful of picked dandelions. "Oh! So you like dandelions, too!" Helen exclaimed. "No, I feed them to my lizard," the woman replied. "My lizard likes them." We smiled broadly at each other. What a great neighborhood!

I recalled how in Ohio's early springs my mom used to pick dandelion greens and cook them up in a cast iron frying pan with a vinaigrette dressing -- it was fabulous. But as I told Helen, I never have enough nerve to pick the greens from my own yard to try this dish, which was one of my favorites as a kid. I keep thinking about the parade of dogs on the street and the raccoons that obviously explore my back yard at night. When I was six and we moved from the country to the city, one of the things my mother mourned was the ready supply of "clean" dandelion greens in April.

I still might try it, though. Helen reminded me I could just wash them carefully. Next week probably will be too late -- the greens have to be young and tender.

Wisdom from Rumi and Martin Seligman

Krista Tippett's "Speaking of Faith" this morning on NPR was a reprise of a 2007 show about the Persian Poet Rumi -- Muhammad Jalal al-Din al-Balkhi al-Rumi, born in 1207 in what is now Afghanistan.

His words -- often offered in the declarative couplet structure called the ghazal -- are startling relevant and refreshing. For instance, "Water the fruit trees and don't water the thorns."

That makes me think about psychology super-star Martin Seligman's notion of "Learned Happiness" -- the bracing follow-up of his earlier, gloomier but pathbreaking conceptualization of "Learned Helplessness." Seligman postulates, with scientific evidence in support, that it is possible to teach oneself to be happier, even in the face of life's challenges, disappointments, chaos, troubles. Seligman, a self-professed pessimist, doesn't offer his ideas in saccharine "don't worry be happy" naivete, but in a sober analysis that we can affect even our brain chemistry by actively choosing what we think and do.

Part of it is simply moving. Rumi was a dervish, who whirled while reciting poetry as, it has been suggested, a way of centering around the meditation. As Persian-American Rumi scholar Fatemeh Keshavarz said, paraphrasing Rumi's ideas, "If you don’t plow the earth, it’s going to get so hard nothing grows in it. You just plow the earth of yourself. You just get moving. And even don’t ask exactly what’s going to happen. You allow yourself to move around, and then you will see the benefit."

When I see my neighbors gardening in these past glorious spring days -- all of us out there raking, planting, pruning -- and when we're all getting re-acquainted with each other's dogs on our daily walks -- I'm thinking we're moving resolutely, sweetly and gently toward happiness, resilient and intrepid even in the face of a scary and depressing year.

How I got to happiness tonight

Let's say I was 13, still living at home in Ohio with my parents, and imagining a life I might like. Suppose somebody told me that when I grew up, one night I'd be sitting in a spacious home with soft hardwood floors -- my home -- in a LazYBoy with two cats snuggled up together on my lap. Suppose somebody told me I'd be a writing teacher and that I'd just gotten back from having an hour-long massage that I can afford even in troubled times because I just sold a poem to of all places, the Educational Testing Service. Suppose somebody told me I'd have a husband who loved me and that I would fly across the country to my other home in LA several times a year. Suppose somebody had told me that I'd write a monthly column that people peruse while having breakfast at the Farmer's Market and sometimes I stealthily watch them read it and see them smile. Suppose I'd known that I'd turn out to be a grown-up woman who loves silver maples and drives a red car.

I would have said, "Wow, that sounds like paradise."

Coming Down

What's the best way to celebrate the end of the semester?

Veg out with take out from Olive Garden and watch American Idol. No need to think, judge, ruminate, cogitate, obfuscate. Just masticate and vegetate.

Thanks to Katie Alvord

...for her generous blog entry today about my novel, Night Blind, and my visit last week to Finlandia University in Hancock, MI. Here's the link to what she wrote: Alvord on Night Blind. Alvord is the energetic and prescient author of the still good-selling 2000 book Divorce Your Car: Ending the Love Affair with the Automobile, Katie's book. I met her in the chapel of Hancock's tiny Lutheran college (it used to be Suomi) on Maunday Thursday...an auspicious day and place for making new literary friends. It's so encouraging to be reassured that my 2006 book, forged out of decades of turmoil and rejection, still has legs with new readers. Thank you, Katie!

A Perspective on Healing

" .....it is only by being willing to face, consciously experience, and go through our wound that we receive its blessing. To go through our wounds is to embrace, assent, and say "yes" to the mysteriously painful new place in ourselves where the wound is leading us. Going through our wound, we can allow ourselves to be re-created by the wound. Our wound is not a static entity, but rather a continually unfolding dynamic process that manifests, reveals, and incarnates itself through us, which is to say that our wound is teaching us something about ourselves. Going through our wound means realizing we will never again be the same when we get to the other side of this initiatory process. Going through our wound is a genuine death experience, as our old self "dies" in the process, while a new, more expansive and empowered part of ourselves is potentially born."

Paul Levy's "The Wounded Healer" in Pinchbeck, Daniel {ed.}
Toward 2012: Perspectives on the New Age, 2009 pg. 37.

Imperial Blues Soothe Blue Flint

Lil Ed Williams strode onstage at the UM - Flint theater with little fanfare tonight, and with his three side men, the Blues Imperials, played nonstop, exquisitely craftsmanlike riffs for an hour and forty minutes. His signature red fez bobbing, with a merry "Ya'll doing okay so far?" after every second song or so, Lil Ed worked his way through a classic delicatessen of tasty guitar plaints and satisfyingly familiar narratives about screwing up, losing women, hopping trains and desperately picking up odd jobs.

(Blues lyrics can slide into the ludicrous, of course --the most hilarious, well, the worst -- metaphor on tonight's playbill being "I gotta check my woman's fluids; somebody else is sticking a dipstick in her oil pan..." concluding, in wounded pride, "a good dipstick is hard to find." Oh lordy -- though maybe the auto theme was handpicked for Buick City) Myself, I prefer the simple, articulate, desolate "my woman left me and it's nobody's fault but my own..." which was how the best song of the night played out.

But Lil Ed didn't mess around, barely talking between songs, just calling out a key before launching into each musical entree. The most flamboyant he got was toe-walking on his red Converse sneakers and a mercifully brief foray down the aisles near the end of the show. What the enthusiastic, almost all-white, almost all late middle-aged, almost-full house crowd got was damn good music, a gift at the end of one of the best spring days of the year after one of the worst winters of the 21st Century. Flint isn't the only place that can benefit from the blues cure these days, but it sure is one of the places that needs it most.

Adult Domestic

This may sound odd, but...I'm trying to grow up. The events of the past six months of my life plunged me into a strange new life cycle, in which in fear and panic I regressed and almost collapsed, the architecture of my self seriously compromised. The near loss of one's self is an extreme and frightening thing. If one makes it out of the tunnel alive, as I did, much is changed.

I was just standing out on the back porch in the last light of this gorgeous spring day and thinking something like, "I'm experiencing this differently." The air smelled good. I heard the robin doing that bubbly melody in the mulberry tree. The sky, deep blue overhead and lighter, cerulean behind the western line of roofs and budded-out maple trees, filled me with gratitude. I've seen it all before, but somehow I'm different now; a certain doubt-filled anachronistic naivete and denial has leached away. The words to describe it aren't coming out right; there are poems to be written about this eventually.

Another, similar moment. Today I was out in the front yard, raking. Since we bought this house I've hesitated to bond with it fully for some reason, and that means I've almost never treated its yards, front or back, with the proper care, leaving the mowing and snow removal to a GM retiree who'll do everything that needs to be done for $25 a pop here and there. But today I was raking it myself, systematically and serenely making little piles of dead grass and sticks, leaves left from October. Putting them into the big brown lawn bag, bending, breathing, raking. It felt like an adult thing to do: taking care of my own piece of earth, doing what needs to be done. Most of my life I have not felt like an adult, for whatever reason, as if I didn't have what it takes, couldn't make a convincing case that I met the criteria. But today, raking quietly in the April sun, my life re-arranged by crisis and recovery, I felt peacefully, tentatively whole. Quietly, unsensationally grown up.

900 Pages to a Cowardly Ending

Disappointing Doggies
I even bought the large-print edition of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle so that my aged eyes could stay with all its 900 pages. David Wroblewski is a graduate of Warren Wilson College, also my MFA alma mater, and he's currently our biggest celebrity, his book about the mute son of dog breeders an Oprah selection and still on the best sellers' list. I wanted to celebrate it, and him.

And I was making progress conquering my insomnia and the last dregs of a hard winter of recalcitrant anxiety and withdrawal from a nasty drug named Klonopin, so it seemed delightful if I woke up in the middle of the night not to stress out, but simply to breathe deeply, reach for the fat novel at my bedside, snuggle up to a pile of my favorite pillows, and escape into the life of dogs.

So, for the first few hundred pages it worked -- I thoroughly enjoyed the boy's relationship to his dad and the kennel full of soulful canines, one of whom, the charming Almondine, gets her own point-of-view chapters from time to time.

But then hell on wheels, the thing turned dark, darker, darkest -- and though I kept with it right to Page 899, the ending drove me to the brink of derangement. Yes, there was at least one moment, staring at 4:03 a.m. on the night stand, that I considered maybe just a teenie half of a Klonopin. Wroblewski, if I'd fallen off the wagon I'd have blamed your hopeless ass. My saner side, the kind that knows how to separate myself from a disappointing piece of writing (oh students, you've trained me so well) won out and I'm still K-free. But PUHLEEZE! I want a little hope after 900 pages. I want good to triumph and evil to at LEAST be found out.

Oops, Wrong Dogs
A question: has the Quentin Tarantino approach overtaken our best writers? Did Reservoir Dogs somehow get mixed up with the Sawtelle Dogs?

And another question: does my wish for a different ending make me rub-ish and unsophisticated? Are the Warren Wilson alums supposed to prove our mettle with unrelentingly bleak assessments of the human condition?

I say no and no. I'm too old to seriously convince myself that being jaded and cynical is the route to cool. I want relief from reflex pessimism, which does no good. I want suggestions that all this pain and travail means something: I want acknowledgement of life's complexities and rich exploration of how something matters. And while our ultimate fate is dust, along the way we struggle for justice and truth and, dammit, hope. It's hard enough to find all that in actual daily life: I was very disappointed to find not even a little in Wroblewski's final pages.

I'm still here

Resurrected, in bright sun at Big Mac

It's about time I check back in and clarify that I am still here and still alive and, on this eve of Easter, I'm feeling somewhat resurrected myself after a long, hard winter. I'm 25 pounds lighter, emotionally re-adjusted and physically purged. And apparently back to almost full health.

And just got back from a sweet writing gig at Finlandia University in Hancock, in the UP. I'm writing this from a motel room on the strip in St. Ignace -- where it's blessedly quiet in this off-season weekend. My hosts at Finlandia were wonderful; the audience in the chapel for my Thursday talk and reading was attentive and literate. Thanks to Suzanne for arranging everything and to Lauri Anderson for the picnic ham, beans and pecan pie around the kitchen table.

They put us up in a quirky little guest house on the campus where we pushed two metal single beds together in the hot top floor bedroom for one of the best night's sleeps we've had in ages. The next day Suzanne took us for a drive to McLain Park, where we stepped over piles of late ice in the sand and soaked in the brilliant sun -- a bright liquid light that is different than Flint. Then on to Calumet, where we paid tribute to the arch of the Italian Hall, all that remains of the Christmas Eve tragedy when 73 were killed, trampled and suffocated on the staircase after somebody criminally yelled "Fire." I love the architecture in the old mining towns -- that orange sandstone that doesn't crumble.

I feel like I reclaimed a bit of my writing mojo in the UP -- a fine place to do it -- and I'm very grateful.

The Opera House in Calumet
The Arch of the Italian Hall, Calumet
Ice on the Beach at McLain Park, Hancock

Metamorphosing in My San Pedro

Yes, we are. How can I not be at least a little bit in love with a place that advertises itself this way? This is at the grandly named "Galerie d'Arte" near the foot of Gaffey Street, across from the Korean Bell. it makes me smile.

And the sign suits the flavor of this visit, during which I've attempted to seal the deal with my recovery, taking long daily walks, getting lots of work done, eating right, breathing the therapeutic sea air, preparing for the next set of adventures, whatever they are.

Today, I sent out a packet of poems -- the first time I've done that in ages -- to a magazine that still won't accept electronic submissions. There was something nostalgic and comforting about printing off the poems, enclosing a simple little cover letter, and enclosing an SASE. Just like the old days. It's nice to retreat to something that hasn't changed: the mechanism for sharing an old, enduring devotion...an act of hope.

Here, then, is a salute to the restorative effects of my spring break in San Pedro and, for all of us, a life of robust and creative transformation.

Latitude Loyalty and my Grandma In Compton, 1960

Up in the middle of the night, even by Michigan time, I check the Flint weather on CNN.com and see that it is 7 degrees there and "feels like 7 degrees," a distinction that escapes me, except that it's damn cold. Looking ahead to the seven-day forecast, including the day I'll be back in Michigan, things don't get much better: partly cloudy most days, the temps in the twenties and low thirties. I wonder: why do any of us live there, under that continual winter carapace of gloom? it is a hard life in Flint in winter in 2009. I look at the accompanying map, staring at the dot marked "Flint" and wonder -- if I ever walk away from this town that has dug itself into my body and psyche for the past 28 years, would I miss it?

Today -- well, yesterday -- I walked to the Korean Bell and sat soaking in the "energy of the Pacific rim" as one of my friends calls it, calmly receiving the Vitamin D infusion and breathing in the therapeutic salt air. After ten or fifteen minutes of gazing serenely out at the ocean -- a vista that still never fails to awe, even when I'm tempted to slip into worry about it (are we ruining even that?) -- I walked slowly home, snuggling up in my Interlochen sweatshirt in a slightly cool, 68-degree breeze. Back in the apartment I felt relaxed and sleepy, stretching out for a luxurious mid-day spring break nap in the Lazyboy, a predictable burble of CNN on in the background.

I've often been stubbornly geographically loyal, needing it seems to keep my feet down solidly someplace...I have kept myself planted in Flint, that surprising lovely and often infuriating town, longer than anyplace else in my life, driven to stay put by early life experiences that are not worth repeating. My world view is an artifact of the lives of people who are long dead: my father's grief for his childhood Indiana farm, taken away in Depression trauma -- my loyalty to one spot that I won't give up informed by not just my own experiences, but by the trauma of "my people" who suffered way before I was born: their myths of loss have power over me even now. It's astonishing how trauma can be passed along from grandmother to father to daughter, and continue to carry clout deep into that woman's life. But these days I sometimes wonder: is it possible to be too loyal to a place? Is it possible to say, "enough," even in these fraught and chaotic times, and begin again?

My grandmother -- the selfsame woman who almost died of TB in her fifties and then, apparently galvanized by her survival, lived to be almost 90, up and moved from Beach City, Indiana to a trailer in LA when she was 80. Startling to think of now: the town she moved to was the notorious Compton -- where was that trailer, that we saw photos of so many times, my grandmother blinking in the foreign sun, pink flowers -- I think they might have been hydrangeas -- blooming up around her in the little patch of rectangular dirt? Compton now is not exactly a place for Indiana grandmas, but then, apparently it was. That she did it floors me. And now here I am, making my own deals with California twenty years younger than she when she made her big leap west. How did she manage that? Other than those photos, Grandma with her long white hair braided and twined like a tidy clay bowl on her head, squinting into that sun, I remember only one other detail: she wrote to my father, discouraged, that she "didn't think her prayers were getting through." I was in junior high at the time and the failure of this devout and distant woman's faith deeply struck me and worried me. She should have been happy, I told myself -- she was in California. In all the photos, she was smiling.

I have not made spiritual peace with California, either, resisting its claustrophobic excesses -- the too-muchness of everything. But in the quiet on the hilltop yesterday, the wide vista of sea and cliff and harbor surrounding me, I wondered if I could make this my late-life home. My Midwest blood pulses strongly -- the rhythms and smells of seasons and struggle are deeply embedded. But peace of mind, it occurs to me now, in this harbor night, when I pick up the whiff of a skunk somewhere out in the concrete hillside, might not be particularly tied to latitude. It's funny that the skunk decided to spray its pungent message, making my nose water in the middle of the night in LA, just as I was getting around to my possible epiphany. So it goes.

Okay, back to the sun. Sigh...

Yes, we made it back, and yes, coming into the yellow California light and 68 degrees and the sun setting big and orange over the water as we watched along Paseo del Mar -- it's all a huge relief. I am emotional in these comings and goings, especially this one, which is the first return since my recent illnesses, and I see as one big agenda a reprogramming of my expectations -- this is a benign and lovely place, and this time I will not be sick.

Had the geezer dinner (the special that ends at 6 p.m.) at Chicago Ribs and talked about giving up dreams. I know that sounds gloomy indeed, but it's a reality of my age, a new element to how I look at life. How will the rest of my life be? What do I want to do? What do I have to do? This is the first year that my denial about aging cracked a little, when a certain weariness and impatience with professional commitments requiring the adrenalin of ambition kicked in. We held hands across the table and reaffirmed our love. Whoever we are, looking at each other -- that's who we love. There is liberation in these gentle evolutions.

And now back in time to snuggle into the loveseat with my favorite blanket in the San Pedro living room, Ted in his LazYBoy, to watch Lehrer News Hour and peacefully contemplate the quiet pleasures of the next 10 days. Maybe it was the reassuring sunset on a familiar stretch of Paseo del Mar that did it -- I feel a little salute, a hug from the world. Reason for hope is not absurd. There is reason to hope.

Bicoastal Blues

What does it mean, really, to have the kind of life that shuttles me back and forth with regularity from one latitude -- the one with not enough sun, Vit. D or youth, the one just a few miles south of the halfway point between the equator and the n. pole -- and another -- the one with sea and cliff and rainbows of color and too damn many people and cars and overstimulation?

Here I go again, embedded in the airport part of my life, competing in the NWA World Club for one of the chairs near a three-pronged plug, the chairs with black faux marble ovals that can be pulled out to support the computer. We all make a beeline (interesting metaphor -- will it become archaic if the bees die off, or, if the bees die off will we too, making it a moot metaphor?-- for these chairs which work very well, something like the desks with pull out armrests in college classrooms. Only for grownups who need and want extra padding for our derrieres. People graze the ever diminishing choices of snacks up here in the "club" you have to pay for, where the frosted glass doors swing open at your approach and you have to show a card and drivers' license. It's a luxury to be up here, maybe shameful in these times, but I don't feel apologetic. I paid for my membership and Ted's with the honest work of my "pen," my cursor, my Puritanical drive. Didn't charge it. Didn't get a bailout from the U.S. Government for it. Don't fly my private jet anyplace for any reason.

And we upgraded, using precious miles accumulated from our air peripatetic life, to first class. Another luxury I crave and want and want and want -- more space, more privacy, select access to the tiny bathroom (only 20 people or so use the lst class loo) and a flight attendant for only us..."would you like the croissant or the pasta?" "Would you like some more hot tea?" Sometimes they call you by name, from their little lst class chart. "Ms. Worth, would you like a blanket?"

We arrange these comforts, at some cost to ourselves and with the more-than-a-twinge of moral upbraiding that accompanies our mutually guilt-freighted upbringings -- Ted's Catholic childhood in Brunswick, Maine, my Protestant rectitudes of mid-Ohio -- out of a kind of desperate need for safety, space -- the distances we have to traverse to sustain our chosen unusual life large and long. It is sometimes confusing but we do it out of love and commitment -- and a dogged primal drive to protect ourselves and cosset ourselves in the unnatural realm of planes and flying at 38,000 feet -- for love.

5 a.m. is getting better

A dear friend with expertise about sleeping explained to me lately that there's such a thing -- natural for people my age, and in winter -- called "second sleep." The idea is that you sleep deeply for a few hours of the night, then naturally wake up, get up and do some chores, and then go back to sleep when you're sleepy and enjoy a few more hours. Lately this seems to be working for me as I slowly recuperate from my long fall and winter when my body's immune system got so discombobulated and off balance. I am training myself in new habits, among them reframing the nature of my sleep routines.

There's a trick to it -- the creepiness of lying awake in some of the darkest hours, listening to the inventory of ghastly news on the BBC, and wondering endlessly "why I can't sleep" is replaced by something pleasant and, one could say, "normal." When I get up at 4 or 4:30 or 5 I microwave a glass of soy milk and sip it slowly, enjoying its calming warmth. I listen to the furnace. I sometimes check my email. I've written poems (perhaps this is how my friend Greg Rappleye came to call his wonderful blog "Sonnets at 4 a.m.") and worked away in little leisurely bursts at various projects.

And I've returned to bed when I'm ready, grateful for Ted's warm body. I'm lucky that my schedule allows me to sleep until 8:30 or so in the morning, so it's quite possible to get several solid hours of "second sleep."

I like this new routine, which takes the fear and angst out of not being able to sleep. Perhaps, in other words, there is a natural rhythm to it, and not simply an endless cycle of angst and despair. Looked at this way, 5 a.m. is not so bad. In fact, I am beginning to look forward to these quiet hours. Why should 5 a.m. have such a bad reputation?