There were times when I was a kid growing up in Massachusetts the winter temperature would drop to six degrees. And it wasn’t unusual, there in my first 50 years, to have two or three or four days in a row of the low twenties. It was just winter.
Now, when I go outside at 4am after meditation to look at the stars and it’s 45 and I can see my breath, I can barely imagine ever having been so cold.
It seems getting old had made me wussier. And yet, has it?
I can never remember being this brave.
While on the ride back from the Bob Jones Trail and the Avila Beach pier Wednesday afternoon, sunlight poured in through the rear window and lit up the dashboard. My eyes fell on the odometer, which read 153,637. Wednesday was November 19, 2025. I bought my 2002 Camry at an independent dealership in North Portland, Oregon May 10, 2019, and that late morning the odometer announced itself as 126,769. A random calculator came up with this math – I’ve driven 26,869 miles in a little more than six and a half years. Those miles request I share their stories. So…….
Further calculation, they want me to tell you, determines I have averaged driving 4,134 miles per year. When I was a kid I remember hearing that an average person drives an average of 25,000 miles annually. So – Yikes! – there must be stories there. Here’s one: On a Wednesday morning in the middle of an April day 2021 my lovely wife Susan asked me for a divorce. Something like 10 weeks later I pointed the Camry south on the 5, detoured briefly to Gavin’s in Oakland for a night, and landed in San Diego, some 1,082 miles later. And subtract those two days pointed south, the other 363 days that year I accumulated 3052 miles of me behind the wheel, and, totally being geeky, in the 363-day-year of 2021 I averaged driving a smidge less than eight and one half miles a day.
(July 2021, Encinitas living:)
Hmmm – Not much in the way of storytelling. So, (another So), I’ve just now decided these mileage tales will be a story ongoing, a to be continued. I’ll see you back here – odometer kid – next time.
Fun fact #11 – I am now 325 miles north from San Diego, back toward Oregon, here in San Luis Obispo. Another “I don’t want to do this anymore” tearful hearing hand turning the ignition.
Cows have entered the picture.
There’s a feral cat named Bobbie up on a thin fence, what looks like a magnificent act of balance, though for Bobbie it’s just hanging out.
Bobbie became my friend, this was back in San Diego where loneliness was farther away, me morning bright eager and enthusiastic with my hellos, Bobbie sphinx-like and cool. That kind of friendship.
The last time I saw Bobbie, after a year as friends, he padded over to the sidewalk gate and stuck his nose through to moisten my hand – a first and only time.
I guess a case can be made for patience. I won’t argue. But, if you ask me, it was just the both of us decorating our hearts.
Sometime before 5 a.m. Monday morning, more rain washing out of the sky than nearly imaginable, likely 10,000 tiny flash floods all through the city, college students warm and dry under winter blankets – no northern light show, no stars to count, no moon reflecting soft glow in the eyes of dreamers – I finished another book. There was no sense of accomplishment. Just – cool.
I’m guessing the rain, too, with no self-centered sense of accomplishment. I see my mind like a merry-go-round, spinning back and back again to right here now, after the book – these ancient sneakers like slippers, this rented chair, my so early Pages. Later there’s a dentist appointment, and later still an evening shift at work.
Maybe someone can tell me what Wednesday will look like.
I’ve been having these coffees with Jorge – think “My Dinner With Andre” – every other Sunday, 10 a.m., at Starbucks. They are so interesting. He’s my co-worker and technical role model wannabe at the front desk at the Y, and we could barely be more different. He’s 21 and I’m 76. He’s a soon-to-be-graduating student at Cal Poly with a degree in computer science and I’m in the zip code of helpless when it comes to the technology, seven years to earn a BS in screwing around. He’s a Mexican-American kid from Fresno, CA, a real family son and grandson, and I’m a Waspy goofball older guy from the outskirts of Cape Cod, MA. mostly a loner. He’s Dodger Blue, I’m Red Sox green.
There’s just something amazingly special about our conversations. I often end up talking about stuff I didn’t remember I’d remembered, never mind a gush of details. Things just fall out, and it’s a ditto for him too – though I’m the usual chatterbox – and we laugh out loud – I laugh way more than normal out in the world. And there are many, many touching moments. Genuine moments of this big, crazy, don’t-know-what’s-coming-next la vida loca.
Sunday, Jorge talked about just that – It’s always been school, summer vacay, school, vacay, school, vacay. Now school’s coming to its BSCS end, and Jorge – who’s gone to a school career fair and been sending out resumes and interviewing – doesn’t know what comes next. As for me, the not knowing is kind of where I thrive, and sitting there a couple days ago I thought about it and said there have been really big not knowing changes much of the last 20 years of my life. It feels like that now too. It’s interesting.
I’m incredibly grateful for these rendevous’s, and I let Jorge know that. Something like a tangible “space” opens up within those 60 to 120 minutes, and something like magic falls out. It warms my heart.
Which is sweet.
Everything is so wet, so green.
Yesterday I began poking around for a new place to live.
There is no more information than that to share today:
Wet, green, and what now?
So this is a rainy Thursday afternoon, after the job, after the Starbucks coffee, after time at the trough of peanut butter and cottage cheese, after about 15 minutes of what shall hereafter be referred to as “guitar practice.” My tummy is bursting, my ears are dancing with the music of splattering raindrops, and my heart-mind is wild with poetry and my practice and the awareness of being fetched over and over again. Please bear with me:
I’m quoting here from ‘Corsons Inlet’ by the poet A.R. Ammons – “I allow myself eddies of meaning: yield to a direction of significance running like a stream through the geography of my work: you can find in my sayings swerves of action like the inlet’s cutting edge: there are dunes of motion, organizations of grass, white sandy paths of rememberance in the overall wandering of mirroring mind: but Overall is beyond me; is the sum of these events I cannot draw, the ledger I cannot keep, the accounting beyond the account:”
Ammons poem is within David Hinton’s “Wilds of Poetry,” and I am enchanted and stunned and mesmerized and tantalized reading it. Not as writing more poetry, rather, being more poetry – the shiny quiet among and between all the chatter, all the to do’s, all these hoped-for hip posts. Childhood reflections – “white sandy paths of rememberance” and punk rock hollers – “the ledger I cannot keep.” Here, racing toward Thanksgiving: gifted guitar; theatrical job; the hours of just be still — mountainous form.
Maybe next week I’ll just write normal old stuff. Today I wondered where the vultures go when the rain comes pouring down.
I was sleep-walking under the light of the moon, 10am. Every other customer faster than me. Earlier, it’s so dark, there’s me, mountainous form, straight up on orange zafu, on old, green army blanket I’ve hauled across all these states, over and over and over. Sitting over and over and over. Staring into an empty space, sitting still doing nothing 30+ minutes and then the deep gratitude – here’s me vowing to be available to everyone else.
I’ve begun a second 30-minute sitting, Zoom, White Heron Sangha, five days a week, cause there’s the YMCA whispering the other two. Now in the thrift-shop chair, eyes lowered, cosmic mudra – it’s a finger-laid-on-finger-thing – Hewlett-Packard monitor silent as a mirror. Central Coast cats chat it up after, I quit math in the ninth grade. But see the kitty on that lady’s couch.
There’s a Koan – ‘A solitary boat without oars making its way in the moonlight.’ Like little Stevie Wonder shouting, “Everybody say ya!” Like the yowling bob-tailed tiger cat on my trailer park route, “meoh, MEoh, MEOW!!!” When the alone-me is with the alone-bob-tail, where’s all the alone? And all the us? Like they say, when there’s hot chocolate, the whole universe is hot chocolate.
Yeah, it’s a good bet you find me sleep-walking. And a good bet the moon’ll be watching up there somewhere. Making its way.
Out Sunday, Starbucks lot, cruise Broad – down, down, down – Pixies so loud I can’t hear the news. Eeee! Left on Pacific, the art shop’s closed, someone said, “This monkey’s gone to heaven,” and I’m all ears. Fresh pound of Italian Roast passenger seat, wild poetry and my old zines, back from seven years when I was you know where with you know who. Previous weekend I was all-in shining and straightening the Camry’s interior. This weekend the front seat’s a closet. Rolling thrift shop. Writing down the bones.
I’d prefer not to explain myself, and you feel free to have the mental health cats on speed dial. I know I wouldn’t.
Is it okay to forget some of the agreements I’ve made with myself? My fingers ache, my brain’s more than weary, my bed laughs as I’m crawling in – “Another quick visit, kid?”
Most everything is punk rock when you look from the corner of your eye.
Friday’s setting out on the four-day journey of cover-to-cover dance with David Hinton’s “The Wilds of Poetry.” Somewhere a guitar steps in, arriving as melody magic.
I walk the long Bob Jones Trail in the autumn sunlight, knowing there isn’t a single tree that cares what I’m thinking. What I think I know. Trees being trees; tree doing tree.
Often I stumble from the living room reading/writing chair to the bathroom in the dark, perhaps the organics of too little sleep and too much coffee. Like being drunk, the sway of back and forth, no allegiance whatsoever to good behavior. Up at 2:59am, copious coffee at 4:00. Who is there to care?
My heart aches, I believe, wishing to be like that, a return to my childhood when everything was “Wow!” — the scary basement space under the barn down the street; beating out a little league bunt; shooting stars; spin the bottle; lost in the woods with my friend and my dog; flying down Lincoln Hill on my three-speed bike; all that Christmas money from two paper routes.
It’s like going in against the “Out” arrow into the Starbucks parking lot, pointed into an empty space in the upper area. Rebel rebel.
All this, these youthful companions walking the Bob Jones Trail with me – as me. Each tree noticing something passing. Like a breeze off the nearby ocean. Like a blue jay’s visit. Hanging moss. White bark.
I’m 76.
from a mountain bench 