Snow Day

For the first time in maybe ten years, there’s snow on our mountains, below the 3,000 foot level. It’s a lovely sight and if the forecast pans out snow might be visible for a day or two. We’ve experienced another drenching rainfall, and yet another of the Italian stone pines has toppled on Anapamu Street. Twenty years ago, the Italian pines formed a dense canopy nearly six blocks long. But as the drought went on and on the trees suffered and many have fallen. 

Not much desire to write of late. Cause unknown, but it occurs to me that I have nothing novel or intelligent to say about any of the outrages going on in the world, from Russia’s war on Ukraine, mass shootings in the US, Israel’s strangulation and erasure of Palestinians, climate disruption, crime, inflation, political malpractice, book banning, LGTBQ bashing, to how long it’s taking Donald Trump and his criminal associates to face some indictments. It all saddens and sickens my spirit, but I don’t have solutions. 

I worry and brood, drift far from the present, like an off-course sailboat.

In the past three weeks I’ve been reading mostly fiction. L.A. Weather by Maria Amparo Escandon, and The Sentence by Louise Erdrich. I felt like a break from heavy non-fiction and wanted to read some female authors. I liked both books. I’m going to review them for the other website I’m involved in, California Review of Books. 

I’m going to begin reading Victory City by Salman Rushdie. 

It’s raining again. A full Lake Cachuma is hard to fathom after years of drought conditions. Water always wins, always finds a course to follow. Drops accumulate, pool, puddle, determined to flow. No matter how much we have we can never afford to waste it. We can’t afford to contaminate it, but of course we do. I was thinking the other day about the idea of stewardship, and concluded that modern people are terrible stewards, and that unfettered capitalism is not a system that can co-exist with stewardship. But we have it drilled into our American heads that no other economic arrangement is possible because, well, tyranny! As if poverty itself isn’t tyrannical. We fear godless communism so we created a “prosperity” Jesus to make our Christianity more popular and easier to swallow. We’re also conditioned to accept the idea that the rich are more deserving than the poor and the lazy criminal underclass, which is full of Black and brown and Indigenous people, queers, lesbians, drag queens, and transgender folk. All Muslems are suspect on principle.

What is so alarming about tolerance? What is frightening about knowledge -- general knowledge, political and economic knowledge, religious knowledge? I imagine a white swath of Americans who are scared shitless of “others.” It’s fucking weird. Thirty percent or more of the American population is more scared of drag queens than gun violence or climate change. 

It is strange to be in your 60’s and still uncovering things you didn’t know about yourself? Asking for a friend. 

Lucky Boy

And yet indoctrination rarely takes place by allowing the free flow of ideas. Indoctrination instead rather takes place by banning ideas. Celebrating the banning of authors and concepts as “freedom from indoctrination” is as Orwellian as politics gets. Jason Stanley, The Guardian

The other day I took a four mile walk from my house, up Santa Barbara Street, past large stately homes with manicured yards, past the Old Mission, through the adjacent park with its carpet of green grasses and wildflowers, and up Alameda Padre Serra. I stopped to take a photograph of the remains of the adobe structure where the Spanish padres jailed misbehaved Chumash. I was thinking about the victims of the earthquakes in Northern Syria and Turkey, the incredible devastation and loss of life. When you live near a major fault line as I do, the possibility of a major earthquake is an ever-present danger. You appreciate strict building codes and zoning regulations, seismic retrofitting of public facilities. 

If any region was unprepared for a major quake it was that area of Turkey and Northern Syria, where three fault lines converge. Decades of civil war in Syria, massive destruction from bombardment, refugees and displaced people, scarcity of critical infrastructure and civil society, exacerbated everything. Turkey is run by an autocrat and the response by the government was predictably slow and haphazard; most autocracies are riddled with corruption and incompetence. Americans got a small glimpse of this with the Trump administration’s incoherent, bungled response to the Covid pandemic. A little taste of the human cost of governmental indifference and incompetence. 

It could happen here I thought as I walked. And what would we do if our little house suddenly became uninhabitable? No walls, roof, heat, food or water, all the easy comforts we take for granted. Where would we turn? And what if we turned and no help was available? I think this is what happened to many of the earthquake victims. 

The sun was shining, the day as pleasant as can be, and my family was safe, housed, fed, clothed. The accident of being born here, not there. Dumb luck. Born in Santa Barbara, on the California coast, surrounded by affluence. The mystery of life, brief, fleeting, and so much more precarious than we perceive. Impermanent. In time we will be forgotten, not even dust in the wind. 

What matters but compassion as we move from birth to death? A line from a song by the American singer/songwriter Greg Brown. Leave it to a poet to capture the tension between joy and sadness, exultation and despair. We need the arts to remind us of what’s important, real, as we navigate our way through life, through all the inexplicable things that happen to innocent people through no fault of their own. Like being born in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

Walking on, past one unique house after another, millions of dollars worth of real estate, yet not a soul in sight, still wrestling with the idea of blind luck, with images of collapsed buildings in my head, piles of rubble, slabs of concrete and twisted metal. I see the city below and beyond it the Pacific Ocean. Life is beautiful. Life is cruel. 

How long will my luck hold? 

Black Cows and Green Grass

 

The Gaviota coast is green and vibrant after last month’s record rainfall. Black cows graze on miles of emerald grass. It’s a lovely sight, and brightens my mood despite the task ahead. My wife is listening to a podcast. We’re meeting her sister and brother-in-law at the storage place in Santa Maria at 10. We’ll go through boxes, plastic crates, sort through documents, cards, letters, and other physical remains of my wife’s older sister, Nancy, who died last November after two years of heart and kidney problems. Some stuff will go to the dump, some donated at Goodwill, and a few items, inevitably, will come home. 

Black cows on grass as green as we’ve seen in years. Highway 101 North, past vineyards that snake up humped hillsides, and gnarled oaks that might now stand a chance of survival. In some places the deluge of rain carved clefts in the soil. Scattered clouds scuttle across the sky. 

Nancy and I were in the same high school graduating class. In a box we find her red graduation cap, red and blue tassel, graduation day program, senior activities card, and a copy of the school newspaper, the King’s Page. This stuff elicits little feeling in me, though it obviously meant a lot to Nancy. The things people keep reveal something about what matters to them. She enjoyed high school far more than I did. I scan the King’s Page, look at the photographs that accompany the stories, but only recognize a face or two. 

We find many photographs of our children and niece, Mia. Nancy was proud of them, loved to talk about them. A box of hardback books, Anne Rice and Stephen King, a book about the Beatles. A stack of concert ticket stubs, most for Rod Stewart performances, as Nancy saw the singer more than a hundred times. Rings and bracelets and necklaces. Wall sconces and crucifixes. A carton of record albums. A Mickey Mouse cap. The wedding dress from Nancy’s second wedding. A deflated soccer ball signed by Rod Stewart. An 1888 silver dollar coin.  

It feels weird to go through this stuff, all of which we packed when we emptied Nancy’s little house on Fesler Street two summers ago. My wife and sister-in-law keep it together when they find things that remind them of their childhood. With the passage of a few months, their loss still aches, but isn’t as raw. 

I can’t help thinking that one day my wife or children will be sorting through my stuff, considering what to keep and what to toss. What can we leave that makes a difference? Money is useful, but there won’t be much of that. A lot of books. Dozens of notebooks filled with my scribblings. My wife’s stuff will be more complicated. There’s more of it for one thing. Jewelry. Many boxes of photographs. 

The lesson of the day for me: Don’t be a burden, purge, cull, consolidate, shred and burn. 

Bye January

You run into dead ends
When you don't even try
You cut off your friends
When you get too high

Lucinda Williams, “Shadows and Doubts”

The month of January often feels long. I don’t know why, but I’m rarely bothered when the calendar flips to February. It was fine in SB today, sunshine and a warm 63 degrees, a day to be outside in the air. After a productive morning of review writing, and finishing the new collection of stories, Liberation Day, by George Saunders, I set up my yoga mat on the sunny side of the patio and did some dynamic stretching followed by routines with a 10 pound mace. 

Then I smoked some weed and headed up the hill, listening to the “Road Trip” playlist I created a couple of summer’s ago when I drove to Oregon to visit my brother. What’s on it? Eclectic is probably the correct description. Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Lucinda Williams, Springsteen, Patti Smith, Greg Brown, Gary Clark jr., Steely Dan, Fleetwood Mac, Elton John, Mark Knopfler, George Michael, Billy Idol. Lots of other stuff, some jazz, blues. Gil Scott-Heron. 

I took a different route and saw some pricey real estate, lots of wrought-iron railings and stone stairs, large windows. Neat. Tidy. I saw not a soul until I reached Dover Road, A couple in the lower park, sitting side-by-side. A wave as I passed. The view was crystal clear, blue, green, and orange in my line of sight. Everything’s blooming after the recent rains.

As I walked I wondered why I haven’t been moved to write anything about recent mass shootings or the senseless murder of Tyre Nichols. I wrote something for my Substack page about gun violence early in January. I obviously heard about the Nichols murder through social media. All I can say is that no human being should die like that, at the hands of agents of the state, agents of law enforcement. No person of any race, color, creed or gender identification. That Black officers committed the crime made it a more unusual case, but not less surprising. Police culture in many communities is haywire. 

But like guns, I don’t know what to do about it. Clearly, more stringent restrictions on firearms are necessary and in the public good. And just as clearly -- as clear as the view today from the hill to the islands -- we have to change how we recruit, screen, and hire police officers. If we desire different outcomes with law enforcement, we need a different brand of officer. There are too many individuals who are temperamentally unsuited for police work wearing badges and carrying guns. Too many racists. Too many sadists. Too many Christian Nationalist white supremacists. Too many people unqualified to wield the authority of the law, and weapons. And the protection of qualified immunity. And their unions. 

The view from the main park was stunning, as it always is. A tall eucalyptus tree had toppled over. Carved into its side were the initials of lovers, names and dates, little designs. Jenna and Gerry, 2001. 

And where are they now, Jenna and Gerry? Still together? Married? Children? Or are they now only memories to one another, of a high school romance or a June to August fling? The eucalyptus tree wasn’t talking. Did Jenna and Gerry make promises they couldn’t keep, not because they didn’t mean them in the moment, but because life usually makes a mockery of such promises.