i have just had a wonderful six days, including celebrating our 240th Independence Day. As Maureen sleeps in our motel room before we complete our journey from home to Sonoma and back, i find myself sitting here with an innumerable number of things i would like to write about but probably never will. The sad thing is all of these things make me sad.

Without going into specifics, what makes me most sad is most of my friends and damn near all of the people in this world cannot treat other people with respect because they are so focused on themselves, they have been duped into believing stupid things, they refuse to think, and they are too lazy to think deeply.

Wake up, world. Your primary job is to live well and treat other people well. Start caring and quit hating.

i want to explain but it will not resolve anything more than my thoughts here will have any impact.

Our forefathers did not create the Declaration of Independence or write and adopt the Constitution for personal gain. They wished to establish a country of freedom and equality. Even if they weren’t aware of the long-term global significance of freedom for everyone, that was their intent. They and many others after them have died or suffered greatly defending that right to be free.

Dressing up in our country’s flag or some sad replica of our flag’s parts (mostly against our flag’s code), shooting fireworks, having parades, gorging on food, getting drunk, or all other sorts of odd behavior has a feel-good aspect because people are trying to celebrate our independence.

But the real celebration should be respecting everyone else’s independence. We, meaning all of us who live in this wonderful 240-year old country to which all, and i mean all of us immigrated at one time or another, need to practice that.

That, my friends, is the way we should celebrates our independence.

i have intended to post an annotated pictorial on yesterday’s parade in the Sonoma Plaza, but i am not sure if i will ever get to it. We hit the road this morning for  our drive back to the Southwest corner with a stop in Santa Barbara tonight and dinner with another close friend from Vanderbilt days.

But there was one photo of a parade moment that captured me. As the beautiful horses were doing their struts for a slew of Vaqueros, there was one near the rear who had checked out. His father, one could tell, was a caring man:

We are here.

In Sonoma.

Peace.

Tranquility.

We, or rather i chose to drive rather than fly this year. The trip for the Independence Day celebration in Sonoma Plaza, an impressive historic presence in itself, has become somewhat of a mini-tradition for us. i pushed for the drive because i like to drive. Even my power two-day drive to and from Austin in May was pleasant to me. i thought maybe this drive would be a good way to convince Maureen we could drive to places on a regular basis.

i’m not sure the latter will be accomplished.

Driving, in itself, was tougher, even though less than half the distance of the Texas trip. As i have written in my Democrat column for Tuesday, Los Angeles proved on this trip it remains the most awful place to drive over everywhere else i’ve driven (note: i did not drive in Italy, Korea, or Hong Kong). More surprising (although as an afterthought, i concluded it might have been the upcoming holiday weekend and should have been no surprise at all) was the traffic on Thursday. North of Los Angeles, it was not always heavy but always there. No cruise control. It was work, but the vistas along 101 were breathtaking (the photos here were taken from the Wikipedia and “flicker” websites: i was too busy driving to take pictures). In spots like the one to the right i thought of Marlon Brando and Karl Malden riding the hills in “One-Eyed Jacks.”

This area of our country always captures me with its history, its ocean, and its sweeping land.  Rolling into and past Ventura and Pismo Beach is like passing by a Brigadoon by the sea. Where’s Gidget? It is an incredible drive to get back to what used to be the real world. The lovers of Florida beaches and the farmers back home in Tennessee would gasp at the expansiveness.

It is a ride  to remember, to escape from the pressures of back home, for even the  retired (sic) have pressures the younger working folk will not understand.

The area outside of San Francisco is as equally magical, if not more so, than the city itself.

So we arrived in Sonoma, walked about a block to the Sebastiani reception area and sat on a rock wall while sharing a bottle of Viognier. Afterwards, we had a lovely dinner in the backyard, watched the stars and planets come out to populate the heavens almost to the degree they light up the sky at sea from a darkened ship.

i have told my daughters Sonoma is a magic place. It is. After all, we are just down the way from Jack London’s Valley of the Moon; we have driven into to Sausalito where John Steinbeck had his claim. It contains erudite folks and people of means; it is folks that earn minimum wage and have picnics rather than dine out, of farmers and workmen; it is artists, artisans, and laborers. It is a cut across the people of America.

This morning, i took my coffee back outside and sat in the cool of the morning haze next to the pear and apple trees, the Hicks’ garden boxes of squash and herbs. It was quiet and moist. i thought of an old gospel hymn. : “i walk in the garden alone / while the dew is still on the roses / and the voice i hear / falling on my ear / the son of god discloses.”

Tranquility.

Of course, i forgot to bring a pullover knowing its gets cool here in the evenings. Alan, being the gracious host, offered me one of his pullovers. It is a heavy cotton pullover from the Hong Kong Yacht Club. There is no doubt i am in a magic place.

i wrote this in another age with a beautiful woman long gone in mind. i think about how many things i did not know and how many things i did know and how it created me then and now. As Bob Seger sang in “Against the Wind,”  “i wish i didn’t know now what i didn’t know then.”

i think about New England in 1968 and 1969, especially Newport before the world made it and a whole bunch of other places vanilla and marketing new tech of old, old. Ahh, it was a lovely world for a fresh launched Naval officer in a land so different than the  small town South from whence he came and planets and ages apart from today, not better, not worse, but oh so different. But it was also beautiful. This poem was generated by that difference and that beauty on a solitary drive from Newport to Boston.

Late in Summer

palsied pink fingers: looming autumn clouds
gently tap
the horizon awake;
an infinite gray ribbon of highway
slashes through
green phosphorescent hills.

non-think
embraces the drive;
his mind wanders
to pines and someone
far away.

cool solitude,
impervious to the immediate objective
excites brute loneliness:
thoughts of someone
gather as a gray storm
tumbles like a cascading stream
in his mind.

palsied pink fingers
curl to a fist;
enlightening rain
spits on the windshield
while far away
sweltering rays silhouette the pines

i have seen those ghost riders rolling across the sky
chasing herds of herefords and long horns
through the gray, gray heavens flecked with white clouds.

“oh,” the folks say, “you are just an old man
“imagining, dreaming foolishly.”

and

they are right

but

they have never heard the hoofs pounding
the cattle braying
the steeds neighing
the riders screaming

in the bleak blackness of night.