New Mexico/Texas

I know, I Just get to IL, then turn around and go back south. It's like that. These are some notes from the trip. If saw you, and there's something you think I neglected to include, oh please, lemme-no. Click &c.

Nov 14

Thought: I think I’ll send Speaker in Waiting Pelosi a riding crop. G-Dub should know at least something about that.

Friday
There have been a million little signs that I’m on the right track. I need to remember the superhuman confidence ‘scope. Jobs in NY from H. The prop for the book. Mothy. And getting back to my Buddha journal. This year, I want a whole transformation.

Mary’s life here is so HER, so lively, and gentle, and kind. It’s beautiful to see. My place like this, where ever it is, is waiting for me to notice it.

Today, we’re driving for pictures and then getting ready for the pot luck. Tomorrow, I can hang out and think while Mary works. Poke around downtown.

Gary is solid as stone.

Thursday
Tonight, we drove to Pinos Altos, no joke 7000’, to eat at Buckhorn Saloon and Opera House – built in 1865 and 1965 respectively. OLD. And the Opera House was well made to match the era of the saloon. It could double as a dance hall. Heat from fires and stoves. On the way home, I noticed the Milky Way, which we so rarely see now, and which at 7000 feet is a-whole-nother matter. It’s about two inches wide, and splotchy, and there are so many stars that I felt completely companioned in the universe. I had stuck my head out the window like a dog to gaze, and Gary said, Want to stop? You bet. So we did. He’s been with Mary long enough to know how to be nice to artists. And he and I have settled in with each other. Which is very nice, because he’s smart and sweet and knows how to play well with others. But those stars, my stars!, how could we build a world that denies us that.

Up here, at 6200 feet, you know that you are IN the sky. It seems to wrap around you, and not just hang way up there looking down on you.

Tomorrow’s the pot luck. Gary likes to have pot lucks, he’s very social.

Mary is, like many capable women, a little tired of being expected to be capable on everyone eles's behalf. Her solution: hats. Upon return from the sabbatical, she plans to wear lots of hats. A good starting place from which she can ratchet up the eccentric performance as far as need be. Lucia once threatened to start bringing some kind of yippy little dog to campus and talking to it during lecture…. Interesting thing about being capable, competent: if you're a woman (esp'ly) don't let too many people know about it. This was Mary's advice. Reserve your competency, ability, facility with making things go as much for yourself as possible.


Dateline 11.6.2006
Far Outer Reaches of New Mexico

Not really. Just Silver City, but far and outer from many places nonetheless. Alt. 6100’ Imperial Standard, give or take, and nestled in small desert mountains in which Mary and I will be hiking in short order.

I once said, in gratitude, that I know all the best people. I have been proven wrong, many times since, and this weekend was another of my humiliations. At the wedding of two who should marry (you know, the weddings you really enjoy because the two are so right, so two together – for instance, his spontaneous extra vow was to help her cross things off the list, and hers was to not squash his inner anarchist, oh yes indeedy!), I met a cadre of the friends of Groom and Bride. I like Groom and Bride themselves and together, and their cadres of friends are simply marvelous. We all, Groom and Bride as well, met for breakfast this morning and came to the unanimous conclusion that G and B should have an anniversary party just so we can all be sure and see each other again. Bright, kind, open, present, completely without fakery of any degree. What a joy these people are.

Now, I have flown, and driven gently uphill a considerable bit of road, to arrive in Silver City with Mary and Gary, who live happily in sin, and just had the most perfect bath. In a tub properly designed for reclining. Hear that bathtub designers of the world? RE-CLIN-ING. The voluntary rendering of the human body recumbent, prone, as it were, for the purposes of relaxation, soaking of bones, sexy play, and possibly ablution. Key aspect of the bath taking experience, the recline. During which submersion, I listened to Mary practice a Handel sonata for piano and flute, resonating right through the wall into my tub with me. I recommend this experience. You know, when the world conspires to kick you into a meditative state, not too deep, but definitely not the buzz of discursive thought? Well, that happened. Always a treat!

Mary, I am delighted to report, is still precisely Mary. Present, curious, gracious, enthused, and one of my tribe. Simply ridiculous we live an easy thousand miles from each other. I still plan to grow up to be her.

We have an itinerary for this visit. There are people I am to meet. There are canyons I am to hike. A stallion, Maddy, to meet. Museums. The campus. Town gossips to avoid –all of them male, let it be said. There is a pot luck dinner with Handel performance, and tea with everyone Mary really loves here. This, in short, will be a busy honor. Just what I want: to see the life of my friend more or less as she lives it. The abstractions of distance are not my favorite.

Warmly excited. Ready. This feeling keeps getting reinforced. Clearly, my job is to follow it around. So, I will.

11.7.2006

Ti-Mommy flashbacks. Mary has a piano now, after decades, and plays every night. She’s playing now, and working on a Delibes piece from “Naïla”, a ballet no one remembers. It’s got me in mind of Ti-Mommy playing for us when we visited, flawless Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, name your composer – but ne-ver the Moderns, no Satie, none such. I can’t get under this piano, being an up-right, but I remember being under that one, with the music all right inside my cells. There are patters, deep patterns, in our lives that recur in new forms, lovely iterations that pull us back into the current of the past and reminds us that there is a current from the future, for this different music played by other hands, so that current is wide open, undecided, waiting to give us something we have inklings of in our moments of best imagination.

Karen too is very on my mind. I found a card for her today, a Zen circle with kanji translated: “You already have everything in your own pure quality – if you understand this ultimate fact, there is no fear.” I want her at her bravest, and she has had to be so brave before in this life, that she can carve her new life. I have ridiculous luck, and can swim in the current more easily than she, but she must use her will so much more. I want to remind her that her will, and what she wills, is very right, aligned, and fecund.

Smorzando – extinguishing, fading out of existence
Perdendozi – losing itself, gradually dying

Musical terms Mary just looked up, and they are what I want so many parts of me to do, there’s so much that I have to make room for. Being here, in this truly ramshackle, elegant, vibrant little town, with Mary (with her poetry, and her novel, and her quilts, and her beading, and her piano, and her sense of unimpeachable justification in the world), reminds me that I am on a mission to make more myself.

Doris, with whom we had tea today, is 84, and in her spirit not a day over 30. She teaches tai chi and paints and was telling us all the stories of her family with her albums today, at Mary’s insistence. It was a kind of bliss.

In those stories she told that it was her mother-in-laws insistence that there be a hoopla wedding, and Mary pointed out that it was having that strong mother, that lion-like family, that made Pete the right man for her, able to honor her strength and way of being. Which he did. In every single picture of them, he is delighted and cherishing, without looking as if he’s lost himself, but as if he was just pleased as punch that she was over there being her. – Which made me remember that’s what I want, and that Mothy has a strong, if terribly difficult mother, and lion-like siblings, and that maybe, just maybe, if I can remember that as Dwayne said “he’s just busy” I might get the chance to make that too. Patience, grasshopper.

There is nothing here that is wrong.

When I get home, I have to stop wanting to live around my parents, and live parallel to them. I have to stop wanting to make up for taking up space in their house, feeling like and imposition, and just strike off in my own directions, and strike off hard. There is a danger there of falling into just being helpful to them and losing track of what I’m really about here with the writing and revision of my life, not just my writing. Toph did it right. He just insisted on living in his way in his space, and I have to do that too. I have to not really worry too much about creating some uncertainty for Mom about “how many for dinner” or where I am. I just have to go when I get back and let them adapt too. That is one of the tests of this year – the establishing of my own way of being while being with other people.

It’s to be cherished that Mary and I always just click back together. And that she made the best chocolate cake in the history of earth yesterday. It’s close to fudge. I totally ganked the recipe.