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.

The day began as promising prospect.

i awoke, did some work on organizing, had yet another wonderful breakfast courtesy of Maureen while sitting at my Great Aunt Ida’s – what a wonderful term for a relative – oak breakfast room table while reading the newspaper and watching a few hummingbirds feed off the sage in front of our window. i gathered myself and headed to Salt Creek, a wonderful golf course with terribly bad bunkers, for a round with my friends.

When i arrived, one of my golf partners informed me one of our foursome had suffered a heart attack. i will not name the golfer because knowing him, he would like to keep this as quiet as possible, but suffice it to say he is one of my closer friends in the Southwest corner. As i write, it appears he has missed the fated scythe, and will be going home in a couple of days.

i called another friend to inform him of our mutual buddy’s situation. He was shocked and then informed me his sister, a huge success and a wonderful, caring woman, was diagnosed with breast cancer, the extent of which has yet to be determined. She, i’m guessing, would also not care to have this published, so she too will remain anonymous.

i take this all in stride on the surface and look for ways to help, either by doing something or staying the hell out of their business. But inside, i broil.

In the late afternoon and with more information about my two friends, i walked out into the “work area” of my garage, which in the new world terminology is my “man cave.” i do not like the term, but it is probably accurate in this case.

i sat on the love seat i had purchased with my ex-wife for almost nothing in an auction outside of Watertown, New York  damned near forty years ago. I had kept it through five moves, most cross-country relocations, refinished it and repaired the broken leg, and done my first upholstery job including springs for the seat shortly after my divorce. In the subsequent moves, it was mostly kept in storage, and when Maureen saw the fabric i had chosen for the covering, it was apparent it would never be part of our interior decor. i had taken it down from the garage’s makeshift attic with the intent of a new upholstery and possibly getting into our house. By the way, that is not going to happen.

But i sat there rather than getting to about one thousand well-intentioned tasks on that old frayed, cat-attacked, upholstery across the rug my parents had in their back entry from my father-in-law’s work bench i had rescued from his garage in the house in Lemon Grove where his family lived for forty years.

It all seemed surreal. i sat there just not thinking.

My world continues to change. It was meant to be that way, but quite frankly, i’m not handling this kind of shit very well. My parents lived into their late nineties. They watched nearly all of their generation of family and friends go before them. They handled it with grace and understanding, and even though they had us and many other family and friends, they were eventually alone.

The alone i can stand. Dealing with those close to me hurting from the invariable infirmities and  disease of aging and losing those who don’t make it through such problems sucks, quite frankly.

So i sat there in the silence of a garage on an old love seat by myself. i asked why. There was, and will probably never be an adequate answer, unless it is by someone convinced they know more than me for themselves, for themselves.

My parents in their last years wondered why they were still around. We kept telling them they were a joy for their children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, and hordes of friends in a lovely small town where they lived for all of their lives.

They didn’t buy it.

My answer is to keep on living well, doing what i think is right, treating everyone – and i mean everyone – as a valuable human being for as long as i can. My parents did that without thinking about it.

But man, this is one hell of a long, not very enjoyable  trip through time.

It actually started Thursday when Regina Gonzalez, our next door neighbor, invited us to dinner tonight with Luis, her husband.

Then yesterday, when i confirmed and asked if we could bring anything, Luis invited me to kayak this morning.

It was a beautiful morning

Just before seven, i helped Luis load up the instrument of torture on top of Luis’ car, and we drove a little less than fifteen minutes to Otay Lake. The lake was formed as a reservoir by damming the Otay River in 1897. In 1916, a rainmaker supposedly was too successful, and the ensuing downpour washed away the dam creating a wall of water between twenty and one hundred feet high, which killed fourteen people and washed away many farms and homes.

The dam was rebuilt and the reservoir is pretty much the same as it was then, but now it is a lake, a recreational area, and the past home of an Olympic training center. The Olympic rowing teams still train there. Their lane floats run almost the entire length of the race.

We unloaded and Luis installed the soft seats into the shell. Two of his friends and fellow kayakers pulled into the unloading area with their, surf ski’s, Starfighter versions of a kayak. Luis told them we would go ahead as the monster we had was slow but stable.

We loaded and pushed off the shoreline for our trek. The last time we did this was the first in the orange burden of workout because i had proven incapable of balance on Luis  surf ski. We had rowed for about a half hour on that junket. But this time, we were going for it.

This morning, there were no Olympic teams, about a dozen folks fished the shore, there were even less fishing boats, including the inner tube variety. There was just this really good kayaker (Luis) and the neophyte who for some strange reason, could not help but slide down in his seat. It meant more work with my arms and upper body, but less with my abs. Still, we covered about five miles in somewhere around an hour and a half.

As we started, there was some discussion about me trying one of the star fighters after our trip. But as we neared the shore, i realized i was too tired and trying the less stable boats would be a catastrophe, i begged off.

So the four of us sat on the decaying picnic table. Luis prepared breakfast. His bunsen burner hot plate was filled with tortillas, which in turn were filled with  a wonderful mushroom concoction topped with a delicious Mexican cheese. Luis served them with a spicy hot green salsa

and limes. We told jokes and got to know each other. To be honest, i was a bit ashamed as always as all three spoke passable, if not good English, and my Spanish remains non-existent although i keep trying to get better. Still, we had a good time.

i will do it again, thanks to Luis.

When i arrived home, i had planned to repair stucco on various places, primarily on the fence that borders our two property lines. I had kept finding excuses to not take this on for several reasons: i had not done any stucco for twenty-five years and was concerned i might not do it right; more immediate priorities kept popping up like naps and golf; there were bougainvillea around the areas needing repair, and i did not want to harm them or the other plants; and at the top of the list, although i would never tell Maureen, it was hard work.

So i took a nap. When waking, i decided it would be more prudent to just do one of the areas with the most damage, where i could see through the exposed chicken wire into the black of the interior.

Not wishing to upset Maureen, i dressed as she requested and even slathered myself with sunscreen. The job took about forty-five minutes. i was immensely proud of getting started and proving to myself  i could do it. i assessed the process and decided i could repair all the damages on the fence and a few around the house in about two full days. That meant it would have to wait until we get back from our Independence Day trip to Sonoma to celebrate with Alan and Maren Hicks for the third straight year, a mini-tradition.

i showed Maureen and although she was positive, i think she was a bit disappointed i had not done more. We went inside and i attempted a conversation about something serious (or at least as serious as i can get). But she looked at me, giggled that timid giggle she has when i have done something stupid, and said, “I can’t have a serious discussion with anyone dressed like that.”

i was crestfallen. Over half of what i had on, i had done for her, to keep her from worrying about me getting blinded by stucco (what?), bitten by some ground monster hiding beneath the fence, losing my hand to a stucco float, frying my head in the sun.

i showered and dressed in something else. The serious discussion never occurred and we went next door to a wonderful lobster dinner with Luis and Regina, followed by espresso and a game of Petanc (Luis and Maureen beat Regina and me in a close match).

When we got home, i  went through email and Facebook posts. i was tired.

i slept well.