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There’s a mellow up-and-downness on the hiking through the Johnson Ranch. The topography of the land takes and gives. The strong breeze cools, from around one bench, through the stand of oaks. I feel as if every one of the buzzards gliding on the currents above are my sisters. Saturday there must have been eight of them. The hardpack beneath my feet, step by step by step, appears to hold as sticky my badly worn orange shoes. I see and nearly taste the way the ground maintains me – keep on little traveler.

For me the day offers trades, though Saturday was mostly receiving. It’s longer periods than that, I think – four months; four years; the first fly ball I ever snagged while falling in a Little League’s right field.Taffy, my childhood companion, traded in for cats on the small streets in this trailer park. Some rub my leg, others a friendly distance. I wonder what they think about all the surrounding hills? Those mountains? Look Felix, Cloe, fun Cheshire – I climbed that one. To the very top.

I’m glad I’m not as social as those eight hawks circling in some funky rhythm above me, Saturday walk, walk, walk. Maybe if I was a bird it’d be different. ‘It’ as me. I might be different. I think I hope not.

I do love the land here on California’s central coast, and I swear it’s forever welcoming me with all its arms wide open.

I’d join the buzzards’ chorus if I knew the tune. If they gave me the sheet music.

I told on myself yesterday. It was at work, a few minutes after a conversation with the young woman who’s my boss – a conversation in which she checked my input on the computer and said it was right and correct and good job, because you (me) didn’t offer a free pass when this was a case when there was no chance of a new membership. Why we give out free passes, to people seeming sincere about becoming a member.

So, yeah, I’m cool and hip and minimally computer savvy. And, um, I did give the guy a free pass. It was after I couldn’t get the $15 fee for a day pass to show up, and it was dragging on and on. Turns out this guy handed me a $20 and said to bring him a five if I ever could fix the problem – and like they say, even a blind squirrel will find a nut once in a while – I did figure what was missing and fixed it. There was the charge and I brought him a five. And I had given him a free pass, and told him he could use it tomorrow – which is today as you read this.

Back in the day I would keep secret these little secrets. Some sense of self-protection, ongoing rationalization. And it took a long while in sobriety to start to get it – that those things always eat me. Every time.

So – Happy ending!! – I called Julia back to the front desk and said, “I did give that guy a free pass.” And she smiled and said that was okay; that was cool.

It felt better, telling on myself. The gray-haired canine in me, forever learning new tricks. Owning my own.

Some of you seeing this know that I write “Morning Pages” every morning. A practice I began June 2011 and have continued every day since – three pages in a (wide-ruled) notebook. Again today, hanging with my brother Chuck Berry, “No particular place to go.” Julia Cameron in her book “The Artist Way” with this one one law – Just fill up three pages.

The material, the filler, had ebbed and flowed, changing through the decades the way my physical and emotional, perhaps, even, my spiritual self has changed. These last few years I believe it’s something of a ratatuoille of broken heartedness and a forever more spacious Zen practice. Moving here and there, and money, and out from retirement, and books I’ve read and now read – perhaps its the seeing with my feet, hearing with my eyes. The air that I breath. The air I breath through my one hand.

For whatever reason and plethora of factors, I come to my Pages these days, usually around five in the morning, all ears. A kind of sitting down giddyness, alert to what arrives out from the tip of the pen. Am I hosting? Am I the guest? Anyway, it’s often like this, from 25 minutes ago:

“The experience of being entirely alone on the walk through the luscious Johnson Ranch, and never alone – the golden grass, the green oaks, gatherings of tall, yellow flowers, the warmth of the sun, shirtless body. Aretha singing, ‘Who’s zoomin’ who?’”

“

Last Wednesday I found my way into the Pacific Shores Dermatology and Skin Cancer Institute down the highway in Arroyo Grande. Following a full-body, amazingly detailed inspection, my PA informed me I had all sorts of of “scaly, angry” bubbles and growths, years of no sunscreen thank you very much sun damage, mostly around the edges of my face, on my nose, and left ear, and she proceeded to use her light saber (the liquid nitrogen model) to freeze them away.

When I walked out the door 20 minutes later it felt like I’d stuck my head in a nest of hornets, and forgot to take it out. Now, after seven days, the spots of battle she said might appear “shiny” have become significant spots of brown. Like, sprayed by a paint gun loaded with burnt sienna.

A new and in-your(my)-face reason I’m guessing my days of dating have fallen out from the rearview mirror, and likely why any girls I figure to get close with have udders, tails, and black luminous eyes.

Older, with damaged skin. I’m still here. Older than yesterday. And yet – thank goodness – still one of Peter’s ‘Lost Boys’ at heart.

“All trees wither and die in time, But the cypress in Zhaozhou’s yard flourishes forever. Not only does it defy the frost, keeping its integrity; It virtually sings with a clear voice to the light of the moon.” — Zen Master Huanglong Nan

Older age. It’s a thing for me. Like the Red Sox, cows, aloneness, and newly-found mountain energy are things. I’m filled with gratitude that I continue to operate – climb those mountains, head out on long walks and pilgrimage looking for something – with original knees and hips. Some of my parts don’t work so well. Most have kept on keeping on. Yeah, my brain mysteriously clicks off every six months or so, but not so much that I can’t figure the basic stuff on the Y’s “Welcome in” computers. Usually.

When I was married to Susan in Portland, 2018, I wrote a poem titled “Older.” Here’s some of it – “We’re older, my wife and me, and don’t remember things. Not like before. Not like last week. We take turns in our forgetting, though I see, I hear it, more in her. Did she forget these very things only last spring? Spring with all its promises and anticipations and evidences of renewal. Or not? I fear our forgetting makes us less. We shrink and inch away in our now long life to some other place. Some place smaller – I am frightened…Will I forget to check the rearview?…I’ve forgotten twice in just the last week…..”

And yet, here I am, dragging my weary butt up mountains, motorvating down and back up the 101, catching five-mile walks on the Bob Jones Trail, clocking in at my job. Even with the aloneness, my life feels somehow larger. My 76-year-old brain can explain none of it. Like the cypress tree there in Zhaozhou’s yard – it just is.

(Happily, Susan seems to be fine up there in the Rose City.)

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.

A month or so before I moved from San Diego to San Luis Obispo I went to the post office and completed a ‘change of address’ form. Additionally, I verified it on-line, as directed. I also went back to the post office and had it confirmed that I’d crossed T’s and dotted I’s and things were set.

That was three and a half months ago and I have yet to receive a forwarded piece of mail from back there on W. Upas Street. I mean, I know I don’t get a lot of mail, being a loner, gypsy, wandering, bedouin kind of person. But not one piece? And I recently repeated following the directions on the post office box, in my move from Broad to S Higuera streets here in SLO. Ditto – no mail.

Now, hop into the time machine and it’s September 1982 and I am crashing in a back room in Nicky and Heather’s graduate student housing at the University of California Irvine. Drinking Hamm’s and Olympia, stealing and smoking their pot, paying no rent. I’ve had nothing forwarded from anywhere, cause why would I? And one afternoon the telephone rings and I’m the only one there and I pick it up to take a message for one of them, and on the line is the State of Massachusetts asking for me, because there’s this issue of unpaid student loans they’d like to talk about.

People can find you. The post office can find me, especially since I’ve gone out of my way to tell them where I am. I guess maybe some – and quite possibly most – of the time, I don’t get it. Forwarded mail – or understanding.

Though it’s always my intention not to, every once in a while in the blog I stray into my Zen practice, using that particular language, being all yakety yak about it. When I see I’ve done so, my initial response is a feeling I ought to apologize – to you, to me.

Which is interesting. Because I experience that like I’d be apologizing for being right-handed. Or green-eyed. Or having parents named Irene and Win. How can these things not be? How can I not be my practice?

So – he writes – I’m sitting in a coffee shop, writing about my life at the Y, and life in the trailer park, and on the side of a mountain. And all of a sudden Dongshan ( 807 – 869 ) is sitting at the next table over. Maybe looking at me. And here’s the thing, which I sense as amazing and baffling and cool – he’s never not there.

“That’s the way it’s gotta be. Living in a fantasy. It’s you for you and me for me. From now on.” – Supertramp

“I am what I eat.”

I haven’t yet discussed here in ‘from a mountain bench’ the special gratitude and bigger heart I feel and have for somehow creating a new space in which I can appear Mondays through Fridays as my often goofy and brakeless self. How I experience the simple act of sitting here at this keyboard and with my two 76-year-old index fingers spin something like tales of wonder and joy.

My heart was already broken when I arrived in San Luis Obispo Easter Sunday, a car impossibly loaded, a five-and-a-half hour boogie from pre-dawn San Diego, stopping only in Oxnard for a coffe, bacon and egg bites, and two restroom visits. But just two weeks into this new life, and pecking away on my laptop – my faithful desktop in parts in two bags in a closet – my blog broke. Couch Surfing at 70, just an infant way back in August of 2018, about to be pronounced sayonara so soon after arriving here. My heart breaking all over again.

Then after two months of difficult living and lucking into this room in this trailer in this park, my landlord/housemate helped me pick up a $15 thrift shop desk and my computer came out of the closet. I paid for new hosting and the new ‘mountain bench’ domain, and 30 of you have shown up to travel this path with me again.

Something about invited home. It’s very cool. I am very, very grateful.

Long ago, when “couch surfing at 70” was still a thing, I offered a post about how grateful I was to live in a world that included Stevie Wonder. Yesterday I heard The Beach Boys cover of “I Was Made to Love Her,” and was instantly filled with all those big, grateful, joyful feelings again.

Stevie’s mom, Lula Mae Hardaway, was one of the writers of ‘Made to Love Her.’ How totally cool is that! I had a flash of sitting at the kitchen table back in Wareham, MA with my mom, Irene, both of us with typewriters, banging out words and music filled with back-then soul, maybe to be recorded by Martha and The Vandellas. Or The Pet Shop Boys. Like, totally, oh my head!!

‘Made to Love Her’ flew all the way to number two on the Billboard charts – which I’d rather be reading a lot more than the DSM-IV any day. The number one song blocking its path? – “Light My Fire” by The Doors. All of this when I was in high school.

I’ll tell you, my memories can be so far out. Even the ones that never happened.