Resting on A Rail
I Think I Know The Feeling
Sunflower For Shel
Yesterday two French tourists were taking pictures on the dock. They asked me if artists live here. I said, sure, many painters, sculptors, writers, and photographers live here, though it isn't a requirement. The idea of having to be a card carrying artist, as a requirement, did amuse me, however. But this place, this way of life, clearly attract artful people- like the women who asked the question while holding cameras, like Shel Silverstein - one of my favorites, who once lived in the balloon barge behind this sunflower . . . like the gardener who planted and nurtured the beautiful sunflower for all of us to enjoy.
Floating Self
Photo by Daralee
This photo of Ben and I (that's me on the left) floated up over Facebook from long long ago, from our old friend Dee. We were juniors at the University of Redlands studying in Salzburg and my world was changing in more ways than I ever imagined. Not yet 21, I was able to drink beer for the first time, and not just any beer but the world's best, in a bier keller 200 hundred years old, with my last name on the wall in a poem that I couldn't understand. I met my lovely wife-to-be Phyllis. Had a best friend, Kelly Cole, who ordered his dad's records everywhere we went so that Nat King Cole's work would always be in stock - and Kelly would be my first friend to die of AIDS just a few years later. Traveling through Europe, I began to notice the bigger picture outside my own small limited world. I tasted the adventure of travel, knew there was no going back to the way I was before . . . and now, through the wonder of the internet, as the old image of myself - in those glasses, with that hair (!) floats back to me, I see my younger self possibly looking into the future, and I say "Hey, buckle up. It'll be a bumpy thrill, but you're gonna love the ride, gonna love where we land." Ah yes ~ This life afloat ~
Underbelly
It’s easy for me to fall under the spell of high tide beauty when colors shimmer in the water and seals swim partially submerged looking for grub. Lately, I’ve begun to appreciate the beauty of low tide, too. Mud flats. Protruding chunks of wood. An old tire rearing its muddy self. Walking on the finger pier, I notice crabs and sea slugs. Low tide brings out the herons and egrets who fish with long beaks, bringing up wriggling morsels and kelpy salads as well. Paleo before it was hip. I like to gaze under the dock at all the pipes and lines that run from shore to the houseboats bringing in water & power, taking out discharge. Peering up from below the dock, the unsightly becomes visible. Such a contrast to the beautiful, eye catching houseboats that send our cameras clicking. Chekov said, include the compost piles in your stories. There’s beauty to be found in the underbelly view. A man from Japan I once knew described wabi sabi like this: everyone appreciates the beauty of a cherry tree in April; appreciating its beauty in December, that is wabi sabi. Beauty has many shades; subtle as well as dramatic, acquired as well as reflexive. Turns out that the beauty of low tide, and the strange appeal of hoses and lines below the planks where we walk, have their own strange spell over me.
Reflex Love
Best Dock Find Ever
Here Comes Karl
In San Francisco we know fog on a first name basis
Translated From the Original
Anytime you translate, a little part of you goes into someone else’s creation.
That’s just the way it is. It’s like seeing faces in a plank of wood. Your eye catches the eyes, the set of a mouth, shape of a head in a plank laid by an erstwhile carpenter.
Sometimes you wish you didn’t see these faces. You can’t help it.
It’s part of your shape too,
the way you look at the world,
and the way the world looks at you.
So even though you don’t speak Tungesa, and even your spellcheck wants to auto correct and turn it into something that trades more in its orbit, limited as it is . . . you find the Original Portable Tungesa Dictionary in an antique store on Main, one that’s never open, but happens to be today, though you are the only one inside, with a basket that says please leave a contribution, we’re trying out the honor system today .
And you think, it’ll be my honor.
You only have a twenty, and there is no change. Briefly you consider leaving nothing, or just a note expressing your thanks, knowing there was a time when you would have done just that, or worse . . . you would have walked out with the book, and whatever else you could carry, whether you needed it or not, especially if you needed it not. Because need wasn’t part of it. Well, maybe a small part. But need had little to do with the object you stole. Need ran deeper then, though then you didn’t budget for such thoughts.
Then was a long time ago. You were a person you barely remember now - like hearing an echo that you started way back when- finally come booming back
around, bouncing off the walls of a deep canyon in a voice you don’t understand,
or recognize.
But a face is there, sealed in your head as if from a picture, and so you leave the twenty and walk out with the Original Portable Tungesa Dictionary under your arm.
You return home, and study the poem of markings on a yellow page, and you open the dictionary to search for the meaning of each stroke.
And you discover it’s a poem written by a hunter who has given up the hunt, given up all weapons, given up even the desire to hunt, but not the desire to discover . . .
And at the bottom of the page in script faintly familiar, you recognize two letters.
Initials.
And they
are yours.
gb
drawing by Neil Thomson
The Dishes Can Wait
I walk into the kitchen after dropping my wife off at work and eye the dishes in the sink and the pan, with scrambled egg crust, on the stove. This is my routine. Up at 6:00, feed the cats, make the coffee, read the sports and horoscope, wake up my wife, take her coffee in bed. We sit downstairs on white chairs and watch the water, stroke the cats, and rise slowly into the morning like sunrise.
Sometimes color reflects off the houseboats across the channel and creates brilliant rippling reflections in the water. Then we go upstairs and look east at the sunrise over the masts of docked sailboats coming up across the bay.
I ask what she likes for breakfast - we settle on eggs or oatmeal or chicken sausage with fruit and toast and another cup. I ask what she wants for lunch, & when she needs us to leave to get her to work on time. Then she's off to shower and dress while I make her lunch and bag it, then I make breakfast and call her down, we eat - and then off we go, sometimes calling one of our children on speaker phone using her blue tooth in the blue prius.
Over the Golden Gate Bridge we drive, through the Eucalyptus forest in the presidio, past the mansions of Pacific Heights to Kaiser on Geary with its buses and taxis and people of all shapes crossing the street on their way to work, or to see my wife, their nurse.
And when I return home, I pour another cup, and wash the dishes and then my day begins.
But not today. Today I think about my friend who texted me yesterday, asking how one finds time to write: in the morning he has inspiration but no time, and in the evening he has time but no inspiration.
I text back: sometimes one must be a thief. And steal time.
I think about that as I look at the dishes and think about my life.
And so I decide this morning to change things up & write this down - for me, for him, and for you.
This morning, the dishes can wait. ~ gb
Butterfly Effect
Walking from the parking lot to the dock, I hear a buzzing sound and look up. The Bottle Brush tree is thrumming with bees. I look down and see a butterfly on a flower near a stick. Earlier that day, in the free pile near the mailboxes, someone left a book called, "The Meaning of Flowers". I thought, Really? I need a book for that?? What about "The Meaning of a Book"?? Or, "The Meaning of a Walk from the Parking Lot to the Dock"? Perhaps I'll just watch the butterfly, and listen to the bees ~