This should, I suppose, be titled, “What I did on my summer vacation.” I was “Back in the USSA” August and half of September, and have been in Kenya now for two weeks. There is a fair amount of news here, but it seems right to catch up a little first. I’ll be brief, and you won’t have to wade through a slug of photos since my laptop where all of them were living was stolen (along with most of my other stuff) before I came back. The computer, however, through some fine, alert, above and beyond the call of duty, work of the citizenry has found its way back into the loving arms of Red Rhino.

So, here goes.

SF
I cleared customs just in time to see the long (Gabe) and the short (Ray) of it shred Ocean Beach. I found the dahlias misbehaving

and the house on the cliff lovely and the window again full of dolphins. I parked in the Mission, in the selfsame space up from the church, held in Incanto reserve, evidently, for me this long month. And walked the same flowered streets forty years later with my
compadre and his son, and saw the past and the bright future in the late afternoon golden present.

San Diego
I saw the Monte you know, played basketball, poorly, Wilco-ed in fine company under a full moon, and was scrubbed clean with showers of late-night familial hilarity and quiet love at Old Heather.

Atlanta
I sat and talked with my Bug where Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell and the soldiers of our own war now pass the non-time. Saw Barry launch one deep into the Georgia night; rode the elevator to the twenty-third floor and found my fully grown daughter keeping an eye on the world; lived in a cotton mill in the place where Martin Luther King slept and dreamt. And for one moment had all that mattered of the world in my right and left arms, happy in the Everybody Fields.

Sur
I prayed with the monks who live on the mountain above the sea, and in the canyon and at Sand Dollar Beach with my favorite writer, and with the Bishop and the hope for our future under the wings of the butterfly house.

Stockton, etc.
I made the Altamont just in time to help celebrate a great heart finding another decade, and found the familiar path to the Fruit Bowl with my birthday Boo, and helped my brave little man find his own steps to the dentist’s chair, and with each sat in the best seats of the best ballpark of the year’s worst team. I painted a shed roof with my youngest uncle in the place where I am most at home, and settled into the pure living room calm with my dearest aunt. I played pre-surgery pool at the Silver Peso, and saw Lake Tahoe and south fork of the American River with my blood, and ate red tomatoes and oil from the earth where the Red Rhino lives. I was healed again there at the lake chateau by my second family, my rock.

I sat at a royal table with the first string and drank full acceptance and two hundred year old love, and was joined by my firstborn, and her friends and her beautiful, strong, new life, and her mother’s heart, and I knew then everything I needed to know.

And that it was time for me to come back.

Talk to you tomorrow,

David

Posted on October 17th, 2007 by david
Filed under: David's Journal