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“How about that,” I said to myself, walking into the basement, about any number of things, after the lazybones amble four-times-around Wilshire Park, after the rare visit to the Freddie’s gas pumps way up on Halsey, after the senior (high-dose) flu shot and the come-and-get-it latest Covid booster, both making their appearance in my lanky left arm, simply as a walk-in at my Medicare peeps palace.

And ambling around Wilshire part of a song slides into my head and I YouTube as a stealth detective and it’s “Young Love” by Sonny James, released in 1956, so yesterday when Bruce and Butchie and Royal were urging me to come out and goof around I could so very well have been under the covers, blankets like a cloak of invisibility, with a hidden radio delighting to that very tune.

Little seven-year old me.

“lazybones, lazybones,” and I don’t know if it’s Bruce Sylvia or Butchie Davidson or Royal Davis yelling come out to play, it’s maybe a dream, long-ago hometown stuff, someone with a football, someone with a flashlight…

why oh why wasn’t it three months of school and nine for summer vacation? why are things sometimes so tough?

and yet, silly goose,

even the copper beech is turning, as it enacts its autumn face.

I have never experienced as many chestnuts as I have this fall. The chestnut trees unobtrusive amidst Douglas Firs, majestic pines, tulip trees, magnolias, Japanese maples. Yet their evidence smatters sidewalks and reclining edges of northeast streets. We travel together, I bet more indistinguishable with passing days. Sometimes kitties off porches discuss this plethora of nuts with me, their willingness to love and be loved,

Yesterday, lazybones through Oaks Bottom, I saw a doe and her fawn through the trees at rest on the sun-warmed ground. I was fondling a ride-along chestnut in one hand, then the other.

Then again, it’s like an immediate knowing that there’s no difference, no separation, between a favorite Ch’an koan – say, ‘The Buddha holds up a flower’ – and yesterday afternoon’s walk. And then there’s Steely Dan singing, “Only a fool would say that.”

The terrible thing I experienced a few weeks back has blasted me almost entirely out of everyday existence. And I keep remembering the afternoon I spent in Arcata, California on a lonely road when dozens of cows came by a fence to greet me, and wonder why I can’t live there today.

I took down my art from the Starbucks wall after that yesterday walk – September slipping away – now there’s seven dangling wires. I told the barista, “Thanks, it was fun.”

(So maybe there’s a different post and me and Karen C dance in quiet another time. Just a crap of this, this, this.)

It begins as a poem – Green sequoia, blue sky, slight breeze; playing…Flying off the orange zafu like a dragonfly, vast gratitude, a life by two oceans. Even when Charlie don’t surf.

Yesterday I kept coming upon little libraries and resisted, there’s book piles 100-feet high in the basement. As a kid I knew them as cellars.

My teacher and I talk about a life in the wilderness. Luck in the lottery would help. My car’s nearly as old as me.

Perhaps using italics as a mysterious preface. I’ll feel better when I fasten on the headphones and listen to Wilson Pickett’s ‘land of 1000 dances.’ All this after slipping out of bed for the day at 2:40 a while ago.

From Gary Snyder’s “The Practice of the Wild,” the essay ‘Blue Mountains Constantly Walking.’ – “We learn a place and how to visualize spatial relationships, as children, on foot and with imagination….The Chinese spoke of the ‘four dignities’ – Standing, Lying, Sitting, and Walking. They are ‘dignities’ in that they are ways of being fully ourselves, in our bodies, in their fundamental modes….”

He continues, “I think many of us would consider it quite marvelous if we could set out on foot again, with a little inn or a clean camp available every ten or so miles and no threat of traffic, to travel across a large landscape – all of China, all of Europe. That’s the way to see the world. In our own bodies.” 

Henry David Thoreau said, “I have traveled widely in Concord.” As do I, here, walking through Portland’s forested neighborhoods.

I have no interest in talking, for a while, unless you have feathers, or four paws and a tail; you sway in the strong breeze in a leafy dance I can only dream about – imagine such freedom up there. Kissing the sky. Just talking to a couple of friends the other day was exhausting. Teary. After so aggressively leaving people be. Likely not a person on the street gives a rat’s butt about my headphone world, and I note that – to all of us – like I note a paper from the frozen credit agency, or no table inside the coffee shop. 

I have accepted this isolation the way I accepted the flowing water in San Luis Obispo Creek. A leaf floating in the current along the trail, a leaf floating down the city street, my dawdle partners. There’s no difference. 

I don’t know enough to know how to behave. On a path – it’s not forgetting, it’s not remembering. It’s just close the window before the rain comes. And do I need another blanket? I look in the mirror and a mountain goat looks back. So it’s no wonder. No wonder. No wonder.

A few words and sleepy looks calling forth a wildness, right here. Very quiet.

Monday morning I had scrambled eggs, peanut butter, and yogurt for breakfast. It was just supposed to be scrambled eggs and peanut butter – the eggs swapping out for the yogurt, like an even swap on the food pyramid – and I was proud of myself for backing off my almost every single day breakfast of peanut butter and yogurt, because I eat too much of both – every single day – and already by eight or eight-thirty in the morning I am kicked out of keto, meaning none of the brain-brilliant-metabolism mechanisms for which keto is famous – plus I’d be trim and a handful of corpuscles healthier. So, I was proud early Monday morning.

But my DNA addict how could I ever go a day without yogurt and peanut butter won out easily – sometimes it’s shocking how easy changing my food mind is – so my breakfast became scrambled eggs, peanut butter, AND yogurt, three bowls to wash, and extra blocks to walk on my way up to coffee and on my way back, which, other than the taste of yogurt and peanut butter combined – which I LOVE – the good news out of my junkie behavior is I got to walk a lot longer in my ambling, carefree, lazybones dawdle that is a blessing and makes me happy and I could probably trademark at this point.

At least I’m mature enough to own my own. Ain’t no love like my brekkie love.

Conversations with my son Spenser are rather otherworldly. Fun and trying, breathlessly fluid and bumpety bump. I learn and I un-learn, all the while hopping along on something akin to the Goonie’s treasure map. Me and One-Eyed Willie, chattin’ it up with the young man they’ve called “The Real Deal.”

Last Sunday night we had one of those conversations, and I was transported all about the place, sitting still, there in the recliner, off and on laughing out loud. Scattershot, rhyme-less, reason-less. Just a joy. Remedy – so righteous a remedy – for a difficult time and a little less trust in the world.

Yes. Otherworldly. Filled with the grace of love, love, love. Feelings way out past words. Truth – A Goonie’s map – Second star to the right and straight on until morning.

Sorry to say my heart isn’t all-the-way in this space now, not like, say, three weeks ago. It just isn’t.

If something shows up feeling worthy of your time, or at least silly enough, I’ll share it. Otherwise, I’ll offer a somewhere quote which has fascinated me.

There’s a lot of quiet lately.

This is ‘from a mountain bench’s’ 300th post.