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For months and months and months I have had coffee every other Sunday morning with Jorge. Last Sunday, after an hour and a half of that lovely and most wonderful magic, I had tears in my eyes hugging and saying goodbye in the parking lot. Jorge’s been my only true friend here in San Luis Obispo.

I first met him in a mandatory first aid/cpr training on a Saturday morning maybe two weeks into my Channel Island YMCA career. We were sitting next to each other and so, whimsically you could say, became partners. I think Jorge would agree we’ve come a long way since 15 compressions and two lifey breaths.

We worked a bunch of Saturday mornings together, and at some point I said something like, “We should get a coffee sometime,” and maybe a couple of weeks later, Jorge showing up to relieve me on a Tuesday shift, he said, “You want to get a coffee this Sunday?” And I said , “Yes.”

It’s been something like five-and-a-half months of every other Sunday, and I honestly cannot imagine my life here without those times. Cows on hillsides, trails through the woods, and all these coffees with Jorge.

The world came to fetch us even before we knew it.

2819 SE Cesar Chavez Blvd – Portland, OR 97202

This is my new address. Please feel free to mail cards, letters, checks of varying amounts, notes advising get it together. And scribbles, doodles, smiley faces, poetry you just wrote. Did I mention love letters?

Winston or Buddy – both seem to find me where I’ve gone off to.

I’m listening to The Doors “Strange Days” while I type this, but “Toys In the Attic” would do just as well.

Subscriber note — Tomorrow’s post may/could be the last one in a while. And I’m so grateful to share it.

I would like to offer this song up as a few moments of great encouragement. Of certainty. It has encouraged me a very long time, perhaps all the way back to 1971, if I discovered it in all its freshness then. Maybe further down the road. Don’t remember.

The posts here in ‘from a mountain bench’ – like those in first cousin ‘couch surfing at 70’ – mostly offer no opinion or comment on the world of big systems and big leaders and life in the big city. I’d like to think each and every post here points to one road sign only. This one — “straight on to little kid goofiness.”

“They can’t take it away” may lean towards the other big stuff. I suppose it’s how you hear it. For me, I adore the thought of music as my dancing partner always, voices and dancing and big, big joy. A ladies choice with my dream girl.

It feels right to post another of my poems found in the book “my startled heart.” This one’s titled, “ode to a neighborhood creek.” It’s a Portland thing. Again, paragraphs taking the place of verse:

“The green heron swoops down under the bridge on which I stand and watch. Is it winter or summer? I’m there often. Ducks in the creek on either side, Disneyland rush of a ride by the falls here. Meditative meander slow, slower than a slow drift in small circles there.

How our view changes with the seasons – the clarity of winter exposition in the diminished landscape, our view carries on. So far. We see less in the blossoming spring through green tea leaves of hope. The fresh green of possibility, it tunnels, shrinks our long view. Either way can satisfy.

The creek flows. Flows on. In all seasons. The green heron sings its Jurassic song. And one afternoon I watched a beaver doing laps.

The creek survives to meander – a lesson for us all – and miles away cutthroat trout and a painted salmon hold their place at the great Oregon river. Like bouncers at your favorite club.

I’ve dreamed – often – of finding the lightest rowboat and giving myself over to the endless current. All the tree-lined bends and turns, the high golden grass of summer, at one with the dizzy pastel leaves of late September. Dropped down on the water like me. Just like me.

I’d like to think I remain in the season of my childhood. Where prehistoric birds and rainbowed fish tag along. Where they just might think, ‘We’ve got a live one here.’

Here at the creek.”

In last Monday’s post – the one about leaving California and all the times I’ve lived here and likely won’t again – I made reference to “Making memories,” a line I borrowed from one of the twins in the Lindsey Lohan ‘Parent Trap’ remake. Walking and hiking the trails I’ve been walking and hiking nearly a year. Gazing down at the San Luis Obispo Creek. Strolling out onto the Avila Beach pier. This Trader Joe’s. This very Starbucks. Today, if I’m lucky, Cayucos.

And now a most wonderful thing has happened. For one, I remember distinctly of talking out loud about “making memories” before leaving Portland, nearly five years ago. I’d lived there more than 12 times as long as I’ve lived here, and believe I was at least 12 times as devoted making those memories. Additionally, and way cooler, those memories I did make back there and then have begun flowing back to me. Vividly, in living color. Sensually.

This is mostly the result of a relentless search to find a place 900 plus miles north to call home. Response after response after response to Craigslist postings and Facebook postings and the rare reply to my CL posting. And with each of those I have looked at the map of Portland, checked the address specifics of the home/room posted. And almost inevitably there has been some sense of familiarity and maybe a smidge of memory. And quite often the address, the streets, that neighborhood has been more like a “blast from the past.” And I know that. I can feel that trail, that wetland. I know those ups and downs in Laurelhurst. I know the all-ness of how it feels to sit on that bench. I was once one of the regulars at that very Starbucks on Burnside and 28th.

I have made Portland memories and they have come back to greet me. To take my hand. “Yay,” I hear them whisper. “He’s coming back. Yay.

“Kid,” they say, “How about this one?”

The other afternoon, confined to my room again by the falling rain, I picked up a copy of my book “Astoria Strange” from a pile on the floor and read through the ‘Introduction.’ Enchantment.

While reading and remembering, the thought came to me that the writing and publishing of “Astoria” was and is one of the great accomplishments of my life. I said it out loud. A legacy. Something I will have left to the planet.

I have worked a long career in human services – it’s still happening – and I have been offered one chance after another after another to be of some kind of help. It matters, the invitation is a grace. A few awards along the way, some tears when I left one place for another. Twice in a couple of weeks hearing from different folks, “You have no idea what you mean to people.” And I don’t think I do.

I do, though, know how it feels to hold the thickness of “Astoria Strange” in my hands, To pick it up once in a while, spur of the moment decision to read “Art Theft,’ or “Elsbeth’s Story,” or “Turnaround Place,” maybe for the 15th time each. I wrote that book. I’m getting to leave it as some part of me. To the planet.

That’s pretty cool.

Monday night I attended a Zen (Zoom) Koan gathering hosted by the teacher Jon Joseph Roshi. I saw my friend Jon T from Queens, New York there. It made me happy.

The Koan with which we gathered was this — “The wooden man begins to sing, the stone woman gets up to dance.”

At the end of meditation and teaching and conversation Joseph Roshi played this song, which I had never heard:

Singing and dancing….

Following is my poem ‘dangling’ which can be found on page 12 in my wildly successful (😘)book, “my startled heart.” It tapped me on the shoulder the other day, there’s usually a reason. It will be transcribed here in prose form, a WordPress decision (the form), not mine. I’ll make do with a number of paragrapahs.

“I wrote a poem five years back, when I was older, about teachers, in their public school suits and party dresses, that not one had left his or her mark. On young me. Not one.

But – wait……Total duh. I forgot to remember trees. Trees as my teachers.

In the side yard, at my parent’s two-story house, there was an unusual tree. It remembered to flower every spring. Big, delicate, substantial, pale white flowers. Each one, I was betting, on time just for me. “Here’s a lesson for ya, kid,” they may have said, the laughing flowers. “Just keep on keeping on. Nothing to it.”

There were long string-bean-like add-ons, too, adding to the conversation of the white flowers. And those beans dangled in the light of a little-kid day. Dangle, dangle, dangle. The tree saying, I dangle, therefore I am. The flowers simply for show, cheese in a mouse trap, attention getters to lure and capture 12-year-old eyes.

For some two decades I never knew that tree’s name. I couldn’t tell you, here tonight. But I knew dangling. Like a secret pot of gold, right there in the side yard, right there next to the paint-peeling barn, shading me and my dog. Just dangling.

If someone had stopped me when I was 30-40-50-60 and demanded I tell them what I’d learned, me stiff, full of myself, like a fool, breathing in and out – oxygen and carbon – in other words forever partnering with that tree’s carbon in, oxygen out, maybe I’d of have predicted, exxplained, warned, yawned, offered all my self-centered expertise.

How sad.

It was just three weeks ago I remembered. I remembered how it was to jump out of bed with my morning eyes wide, big, hungry, all the way open. With my tail-wagging dog. With the petals of a pale white flower for a summer hat. Living completely in a string-bean day.

I was dangling then. Just dangling. And somehow, I forgot. I forgot I was just dangling.”

Sunday morning I was out strolling through the trailer park, the sun was slipping through clouds and the air was warm. I was thinking about the forecast for an especially powerful rain storm approaching the central coast from the west. While walking, this song from 1972 oozed into my mind – “It Never Rains in Southern California.” Written and sung by one Albert Hammond.

If you’re of my era, or even close enough to know the pop of those times, you likely know that the song’s chorus begins with that line and ends with, “but girl don’t they warn ya, it pours, man it pours.”

As noted here yesterday, I’ve been a CA resident through enough winters that when the rain truly ramps up here, there’s an end-of-the-world quality. Ain’t no gentle Portland rain storm.

But, you know what? The chorus isn’t the part of the song that came to pay a visit. It was the bridge: “Out of work, I’m out of my head
Out of self respect, I’m out of bread
I’m underloved, I’m underfed
I wanna go home.”

Yeah, that’s the part that has me humming.

Saturday morning, early, I drove over to the Bob Jones Trail and walked the out-and-back all of it, about five miles. It was cloud-covered along the way, and as a weekend day, a bit of a feel of Boston Common – walkers, hikers, moms and dads pushing strollers, joggers and runners, folks on old-fashioned pedal bikes and a few on their electric cousins. People in solitary and a bunch of large family and extended friendship groups.

I was making memories, as one of the twins said in, “The Parent Trap.” The forecast is for most of a week of rain, it’s raining now, and while it’s likely I’ll have one more chance to honor that place with my devoted presence, I was wide aware of maybe saying goodbye. I have walked the Bob Jones nearly every single week since I discovered it the beginning of May.

As I type this there are 12 days remaining of my time here in San Luis Obispo – and as a resident of California. That’s a thing. I have lived in California six months in 1977, 18 months in ’06 – ’07, three more the tail end of ’08, and now more than four and a half years from July ’21 before I’ll point north in my circus-like-packed Camry the last day of this month.

Venice Beach, Santa Monica, Berkeley, Oakland, Encinitas, San Diego, and San Luis Obispo – there’s been mail delivered to all those places, save VB, where I was briefly before SM. I’ve worked at a pizza place on the Venice boardwalk, for a youth program in downtown San Francisco, with a Down syndrome couple just over from Encinitas, and as a job coach for folks in Logan Heights, Hillcrest, and Ocean Beach boroughs in San Diego. And now as a most cheery welcomer at the YMCA here.

Already a whole bunch of California memories, and sqeezing in a final few.