time has come today

One of the things I have come to love about San Luis Obispo is the way time takes its time here.

I guess I notice it most often when I’m driving — I’m there and now I’m here, the digital watch in the Camry having rolled a new number six or seven, maybe eight times. From one side of the city to another.

At the invitation of the local artist Drew Davis, with whose work I am enchanted, I visited Art in the Park Sunday. When I left I took the quiet roads way over to my Starbucks at Broad and South. I think it took six minutes. When I’d drive to the YMCA from my former room, on Broad, it would take five minutes. From my new room here in Chumash Village on South Higuera — way farther away — it takes nine.

But these are just tangible exhibits. I haven’t mentioned the magic. I’ve discovered two mountains here and have climbed both, and on both discovered benches where I, as Jefferson Airplane once sang, “sit and think about you and me.” And you know I struggle to haul myself up to these benches, stopping every 10-15 feet in oxygen debt. Yet there have been times when my arrival there to sit and rejoice, time noted on the phone pulled out to take a picture of a friendly cow or the vast expanding terrain, is earlier than when I started out.

“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. . . .” The Red Queen, ‘Through the Looking Glass’

That’s the way time can, and does, work here in San Luis Obispo. At least for me. Truly.