1. All alone in San Francisco. In the early morning, the line for the cable cars is much shorter. A family from Ohio sits next to me on the wooden step. I don't take pictures. I look. At each intersection, the cable car stops for a moment, hovering there on the side of a hill, and you see down a long avenue, past buildings and cars and streets and people. At the end of the street, there's the bay, and the bridge arcing gracefully between buildings, and little puffy clouds scooting across the sky.


2. After wandering through Chinatown I return to my hotel room for a nap and wake up at midnight. The cool moist air of the city surrounds me. I roll over and go back to sleep.


3. In Petaluma we stay at a Sheraton at the edge of a marsh. I walk the path that skirts the dense, low vegetation and the mudflats. Highway 101 roars nearby and the marsh is ringed with litter and office buildings. It's a long, long walk, and my muscles, complaining after three days of San Francisco hills, soften and then tighten again. At the farthest point, I see three egrets and two herons. This is one of the last wetlands on the California coast.


4. The Cathedral Grove at Muir Woods has been designated a "quiet zone." The redwoods stretch up forever, a thousand, two thousand years old. Determined to make it to the grove, I push on ahead of the rest of my family. My six-year-old niece walks with me, and she is so very good about remaining silent in this silent, sacred place. Other tourists blather on, take photos. She shushes them. In spite of the chatter here and there, I can hear and feel the silence, the weight of these old, old beings, here long before the cars and chips and subdivisions.


5. On the way to Petaluma, we stopped and took in the perfect view of the bay, the city, Oakland, the hills, and the graceful orange curves of the Golden Gate. On the way back, fog envelops the bridge, the thick suspension cables fading into the mist.


6. The eucalyptus trees, heavy and shaggy and fragrant. Lining the highway, brought here by missionaries one hundred and fifty years ago.


7. My brother's house is an Eickler. The facade is a blank wall, softened by native plants artfully placed. Inside, glass walls and the high, sloped ceiling, draw in the greenery of the atrium and the back garden. It's like being inside a work of art.


8. At night in Santa Cruz I cross the boardwalk with my family, then leave them behind and greet the ocean. In the dark, seals bark to each other and the sea practices her endless rush. On the boardwalk, roller coasters and ferris wheels sparkle in the darkness, and people scream on the rides. I walk the strand between the two worlds.


9. The next afternoon I hike from the boardwalk to West Cliff. Signs remind me to keep right. From time to time I stop and listen to the pounding of the surf, a whump I've never heard from the Atlantic. Surfers lay atop their boards, and from time to time one pops up and rides the curving white head of a wave to the edge of the rocks.


10. At the beach below the Surfer's Museum, I sit on the sand and watch four teenagers talk about their summer jobs. From the cadence of their speech I can tell they are from Northern California. The sun, the blue oceans, the waves, lull me. I roll over on my side. My niece calls to me across the sand. I sit up and she runs to me. I pick her up and swing her around. Her father and my mother trail behind. Her father, my brother, has lived on this coast for 20 years. He's a different man now than the boy I grew up with on the opposite side of the continent. And still my brother. Still family.
    

What the Dead Don't Need

No need for shoes, of course, or closets full of empty
dresses. No need for the shade of trees or the approval
of parents and friends. They don't care about the objects
of this world: a new computer, a house overlooking
the sea. The place they occupy may or may not contain
a window to all they've left behind. We, the living, think
of them without knowing who or what they have become.
Ghosts? Dust? Butterflies? Wind? Other mysteries--
puberty, sex, childbirth--are the business of life, and
anyone can tell their story. On the matter of death: only
a closed box and the silence of earth or ashes. When my
daughter was small, my disappearances behind a blanket
or a curtain seemed permanent. How could I exist if
I was not visible? When I returned, she was grateful:
laughter and kisses, her hand on the roots of my hair.

- Faith Shearin

Permanent Lesson
by Eric Anderson

Never mind the mistakes Mother and Father made;
the first of them may have been the decision
to make you, to bring out of Eternity's
                            Waiting Room
that thing you've been calling your soul,
plucked like some arcade prize in the Big
Claw Game of their love.
                 Oh, how they dressed you in miniature
clothes, fed you human food,
brushed your hair, mussed it up, held you
in their hands like a bright souvenir.

                           And during those moments
of raw anger -- when they channeled their lousy
childhoods through you and railed against
all the things they'd never had -- they cursed you

with their wish for better lives, and you could
answer their inconsolable wanting only
with your tears, until at last
                  they spoke with tenderness,
                                   or something like it,
and maybe didn't completely regret
                  the few lustful thrusts
                  that launched you into your body.

                                   Or so you thought

until the teenage years, when you
examined every incomprehensible gift
under the sterile spotlight of what you felt you deserved
and discovered not only did
                         they not know you,
but you could never know them, and so you left

as soon as possible, for a bus station, a campus, minimum
wage, the first available spouse, and it's only now, after
some time spent before the blank stares of your own
                                 little ungratefuls,

that you remember your mother and father and
          how no one else ever stood on the front porch
                          and called your name into the dark.

1. Mom, while visiting me (paraphrased): "When you came into my life, it was like the sun rising inside of me. I was so depressed, and then there was little sun growing in my belly, and it came out and it was you, bringing this joy into my life."


2. The doctor who's been treating my chronic illness since the turn of the century: "I just feel that you're going to do well. I'll put my money on you."

mellowtron

1. The dating saga continues. I met a very nice guy on OKCupid (shout outs to la_directora's friend who reminded me about this aweseome site) and am a little silly about him right now. He's the polar opposite of Axis of Evil guy, big and cuddly and sweet. The danger with him lies not in wasting my time and efforts on someone who won't appreciate it, but on falling into a little fantasy world where only the two of us exist. I also had plans to hang out with a really neat lady I met on Craigslist today, but had to cancel due to...
   
2. My being sickies. The body reminds me that it needs a little bit more downtime than I have been giving it by first letting the candidiasis come back with a vengeance and then coming down with your garden-variety viral infection. Lung-hacking ensues.
   
3. The doctor said I could still go to the beach trip the Women's Circle has been planning since last September. I'm so glad I did. We had a tremendous turnout of new members last October during our open circle and it's a lovely thing to see how we've all gelled into a true sisterhood. I've had mixed feelings about my membership in the circle -- and in First Parish -- this year. The feelings were partly because of my breakup with technogoddesss, who first dragged me there back in 2004 (I'd known about it, been invited to it, but had never been able to get myself to go on a Friday night or a Saturday morning), and partly because of the more active leadership roles I'd been taking with the church. Religious organizations are a strange hybrid: we come to them for the purpose of beloved community and to deepen our connection to God/Goddess/The Universe/foo. But we're still human beings with all of our flaws and pimples. So a church is both beloved community and extremely irritating, just like any other family. When my chronic illness got really bad in December and January, I was touched and even a little surprised at the outpouring of love and support I received from members of First Parish. I really shouldn't have been, though, since it's not the first time that community has saved my life.
   
   In news unrelated to either my viral infection or my chronic illness, my doctors and I discovered some precancerous lesions and have been watching them since January. I may end up having to have the damn things removed with surgery but am hoping that they'll "spontaneously resolve" (i.e. "go away on their own"). Everyone around me seems to be having issues with cancer or tumors these days. In fact, another member of the women's circle has just been diagnosed with endometrial cancer and is grieving the fact that they're going to have to remove basically all of her internal girl parts. She'll go into menopause immediately after surgery since hormones can bring the cancer back. This is an absolutely gorgeous, curvy, feminine woman only a few years older than me. We did some healing work for her in the circle, and then they did some on me. It was powerful and humbling to be both part of the healing work and the recipient of same.
   
   Our minister of religious education, a lesbian whom I respect and admire and whose daughter I mentored in this year's Coming of Age program, also just had a tumor removed from her chest. This surgery coincides with her rather sudden departure from the parish to a position with the UUA that opens up about once every 20 years. UU tradition precludes ministers and former parishioners from contacting one another for two years after they leave a position. More sad, although I am happy for her and this new opportunity.
   
4. I am officially on vacation. It's my first full week of paid vacation since going back to work for The Man, and my first paid vacation since 2002. I'm psyched. The brother and niece are arriving at the Boston airport the morning of July 4. Fiona's probably going to be tired and cranky after a red-eye flight. Mom is coming up tomorrow evening; it'll be great to have the Donovan clan together again. Later in the week we're all heading to NYC to join sister-in-law. There's a wedding or something. And I get to see la_directora! And Romeo and Juliet in the Park! And meet sofiztikated Newww Yooork City director-lady friends of la_directora's. Squeeing will ensue.
   
5. The fifth act has been canceled due to budgetary constraints.
   

1. My grandmother died. She drove me crazy but I will miss her. When I was 12 years old, I yelled at her in a parking lot "Don't you call my mother filthy!" We were probably buying some fancy clothes for me at the time, and on the way to a restaurant where she would light a cigarette and wave the smoke away from me with her soft little hands. That is really all you need to know about our relationship right there in a nutshell.
   
   
   
2. The DJ behind Monkey Radio (still not as cool and rockin' as Radio Paradise, although definitely sexier) is the lead architect for WinAmp 3.0. It is factoids like this that make me want to move to San Fan-freakin-cisco. So that I can be ignored by arty computer geeks like him instead of, say, arty genetic-science geeks like the ones who go to MIT.
   
   

You will have to leave her.