Not the way I dreamed it, of learning to sing the whole song so I could sing it all year while I was sixty-three. But here is my little slightly off key (or more than slightly??!) snippet of “When I’m 64” by the Beatles.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RJHdQhCgeNX0RoGtJys9UC2QCjl8rAoX/view?usp=sharing
I sit down on the Adirondack chair, on the little raised deck like a dais, my bottom sliding over the wood, surprising and smooth as if it had been polished. (Now I want a chair like this.) I am on a ridge at Descanso Gardens, looking north over La Cañada and the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains. I breathe, sigh, stretch my neck and shoulders, so tight these days. I try not to feel uncomfortable as people come into view and spot me sitting there. (I am so close to the intersecting paths.) I am glad when they all disappear again, and I remain. I rub my hands across the arms of the chair, soft against my palms. In the stillness of this almost-wilderness, I am the grateful, quiet queen of my domain.
My orchid plant
and tiny shoots of the cactus
I brought home from Ajijic in 2009
sit beside each other on top of
the toilet tank
in my bathroom here
in my mother’s house
(together with the little
green plastic dinosaur who came home with me
from the hostel in the Marin Headlands)
and every now and then
especially after I water them
I stop and really take them in
rescued from my trailer home
by my dear friends
and somehow dear friends
themselves now, too
and talismans or hope or
living proof my little home
still awaits us all.
And another haiku-ish thing
just to apologize
to you
my dear readers
for inundating you
in my (silly?) hope
of still posting
63 while I am 63.
(Yes, I am counting
this one, too.)
This cold, steady rain
so needed
sparks glee in me
back in bed
with my tea.
The mockingbird greets me for the second morning in a row. He is on a different electric pole today, one pole north of yesterday’s. He’s my first mockingbird for 2022. I worried when I was in Palm Springs last week because I didn’t hear one. (I am good at worrying. I even wondered if something was wrong. Two years ago there were so many there, more than I’d ever known. Could there be a dearth of them this year?) I stand in the driveway, head back, looking up at him. “Good morning,” I say, happy to see him, happy he is happy. I don’t remember to look at anything else, to check the top of the ridge for hawks, to take in the sky. I only notice I am dressed too warmly for the sun, and when I walk back in the gate, I feel the cool air of the shade on my face. My wishes to each of you. May it be a good day. And if there is grief or anger or terror in it, may there be an unexpected moment of love or kindness or joy.
I’ve never been good at this, but I’ve always wanted to be. So when I get the sense for the first time that she has a message for me, I try to be able to receive it. I am surprised to get words. “Dissolve and blossom,” she tells me. I know right away she means my habit of fear, the armature that’s lived inside me all my life. Days later, in an almost dream when I am curled up in bed crying, wanting to forgive myself for being unkind to my mother in the unlooked for hours of the early morning, I see chicken wire in my heart and throat. After my fall, for a moment I understand she meant more than my fear, that her message was more akin to the sense I’ve had that I am being asked to surrender completely, to let go of all resistance, maybe, or allow all my holding on to dissolve, to slip back into the earth to become good things. I know this is impossible. But more and more in small moments, quiet tears sometimes sliding down my face, I believe in it, the incremental, invisible little bits of it, one unexpected moment here or there, and then the next.
No Holds Barred 