Six-thirty A.M. at the San Francisco airport

. . . where an older woman ahead of me in the security line says to her husband, “I don’t want that x-rayed. I don’t want to change its molecular structure.”

So, as I contemplated how many times my molecular structure has been altered over the years (I even remember when they had x-ray machines in shoe stores), I snaked through the line to be cleared for takeoff.

Two hours later

. . . here I am in Phoenix, waiting to board a plane that will take me to Dallas so I can get on a plane that will fly me to Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

First time I visited Phoenix, I expected desert. Or to be precise, I expected desert as I knew it from Saudi Arabia. First time we flew into Arabia (on a prop plane – commercial jets weren’t around yet), I looked down and asked my Dad why we were flying over the ocean. “Those are sand dunes, honey,” he said, then told me about having spent some time in this area known as the Empty Quarter – the Rub ’al Khali.

That was Lawrence-of-Arabia-don’t-get-left-behind desert. Nothing but sand and a sun that baked it.

That’s what I thought Arizona would be like. Then I saw the soares cacti along the road to my friend’s house.

Oh, my.

The redwood forest of Arizona — a tribe of wise beings, grounded in place. Some had two arms, some three or four, and others none at all. If only I had the language to understand their stories.

Alas, the bus that transported me from one terminal to another moved too quickly. I didn’t have time to photograph any of the cacti along the road.

Because I had flown into Phoenix on United, but will take an American Airlines flight to Dallas, I had to check in all over again: figure out how the American Airlines self-check machine worked. Then go through security all over again.

Take my laptop out, put it in a bin. Take my shoes off, put it in a bin – wait, no the guard wanted me to run those through out of a bin. Take out my liquids and gels, put them in a white bowl. I knew to take off my watch – put it in a bin with my purse, which I had to lay on its side and then put my jacket in a separate bin.

My earrings set off the alarm when I walked through the metal detector (they hadn’t in San Francisco). On one earring is Kokopelli, on the other earring the vortex. Hmmmm.

Took those off, put them in a white bowl.

It’s all so very complicated. Lurking in the back of my mind is that someone will find that tag I tore off the mattress when I was eight and the gig will be up. I’ll be handcuffed and taken away in front of lines of people who will be annoyed with me for holding up the process.

But, once again, my long-ago crime goes undetected.

As for the status of the molecular structure of my belongings . . .

Two and a half hours later

. . . at the Dallas Fort Worth Airport

On the flight from Phoenix, my seatmate was a lovely Pakistani American man who had just recently turned 27. Right out of college he’d been hired and then, within two years been promoted to management at the Phoenix newspaper (can’t remember the name of the paper). The paper is doing well because there are so many babyboomers in Phoenix. And babyboomers appreciate journalism.

A success story in the middle of the recession and a paper that is thriving. And my generation is keeping journalism alive. High five.

My Pakistani-American companion was flying to his hometown in Indiana, where there is a decent sized Pakistani-American community. Who knew.

His big mission going home is to tell his family that he doesn’t want to agree to an arranged marriage. Yikes!

I told him not to marry anyone just to please someone else. We agreed that he could tell his parents that a woman who had been to Pakistan told him it wasn’t a good idea.

Apparently, anything that has Pakistan in it holds some sway with his folks.

It’s such an American story. Child of immigrants lives in two worlds: the displaced past of his parents who came here to give him opportunities that take him away from their past. Tough position.

Got interrupted for a conversation with a man who came to Texas via Louisiana. His accent has traces of a languid afternoon on the porch. He’s heading to Cleveland to pick up his nephew who will spend the summer with him and his wife. Nieces and nephews – their version of grandchildren.

Texas is never what you think it’s going to be. Doesn’t seem to have affected my molecular structure at all.

Starting to board the plane. More when I get to Iowa City.

Next morning in Iowa City.

. . . apparently my molecular structure was pretty fragmented by the time I got here last night.

On the plane to Cedar Rapids, I sat next to a man wearing his Air Force blues. It was only the fourth time he had ever flown, was totally enamored by the drops of rain that ran sideways across the window. Showed me the Air Force coin he was going to give to his high school friend to encourage him to lose weight so he could join the Air Force.

He was so guileless that I kept thinking that if this were a 1950s movie about World War II he would definitely be the one who wouldn’t come home. Innocence never survives a war.

He talked about his family and how he was going home for the first time since basic and how he would go to the River Festival where he might see friends from high school and why he had joined the Air Force — his parents didn’t want him joining the Army or Marine Corps because that meant he would be more likely to be in harms’ way.

He also talked about his high security-level clearance (hmmmm…would they give one to an innocent who talked in such a steady, random stream?) and how proud his parents were of him and how he had been asked to sit with the veterans at a VFW dinner even though he was just heading for basic and how he knew he was going to cry when he saw his parents so he would wear his sunglasses to hide the tears.

Because he was traveling in uniform, the steward said his drinks and snacks were complementary. He had just turned twenty-one and had never touched a drop of liquor, but thought it would be cool if he got one of those little bottles for his mother. So, I helped him select a bottle of red wine. He opened it, took less than a sip and said he didn’t think he ever needed to drink another drop of liquor.

“They say home is where your heart is,” he said as we descended through the rain clouds. “Well, my heart is definitely here. Iowa will always be home to me.”

I expected his parents would look like they were out of a 1950s movie. But they looked more as if they were roadies from the late 60s.

Go figure.

I thought about the first time I came to Iowa for the Writing Festival in 2005. As we started our descent, the flight attendant announced, “We have started our descent into Cedar Rapids.”

A little girl at the front of the plane shouted, “We’re going to see da’ rabbits!”

And here’s the thing. Throughout the next week, tiny-eared rabbits hopped across my path — ten or more a day.

Thunderstorms.
 
Such a rare occurrence in this part of California.
 
My poor dog Tessa would rather they be nonexistent.
 
While visiting my niece in Texas once, lightning hit the restaurant as we munched our burritos. It is a strange experience. My hair did not stand up. But I definitely know that something had just happened.
 
Rain clears the air. But I think there’s something about thunder and lightning that clears it more. A defining before and after. The last time I came back from Iowa, I flew over thunderclouds – bolts of lightning contained within the clouds. I felt like I was witnessing the birth of a new world.
 
Perhaps thunder and lightning help me see myself in perspective. A part of a greater whole.
 
Nicholas Kristoff wrote this morning about the 1989 uprising on Tiananmen Square that turned the Avenue of Eternal Peace into a river of blood. Soldiers fired indiscriminately into the crowd of students. Whoever happened to be in the path of a bullet was killed or wounded.

 
The soldiers then shot at the ambulances that went in to tend to the wounded, so others kept their distance. The crowd got the message. You are all expendable in this war for absolute control. People, paralyzed with fear, watched helplessly as the wounded writhed in pain.
 
Except for the rickshaw drivers – the men who pedaled their bicycle-drawn rickshaws to deliver people and cargo around town. They pedaled in, loaded the wounded on their rickshaws and carted them to hospitals. Kristoff said that as one drove by, he saw the tears running down his face, his expression seeming to plead that Kristoff photograph it so the world could bear witness to what had happened.
 
I remember riding in a rickshaw when my family traveled through the Far East in the late fifties – faceless,nameless beasts of burden carting us through the streets.
 
It was those beasts who were the heroes of Tienamenn Square. The ones who stood up to meanness. Who, for whatever reason, put fear aside and responded to the sound of suffering.
 
I suspect that it wasn’t a political act for the drivers. I suspect it was a simple decision to defy the threat that someone holds the power of life and death over you. What was it about their act that made the faceless, nameless soldiers decide, each one, not to shoot the rickshaw drivers?
 
I don’t really understand why someone would want to have the power of life and death over another. They only have it if, at that particular moment, the person’s fear of not surviving has more power over him or her than does the love of life.
 
Everyone has those moments. To reduce someone to that moment is to humiliate.

Kristoff says today that the government of China is no less oppressive, but it has made the lives of citizen better by creating a powerful economy – at the expense of the environment – thus creating a comfort level that takes one out of the day-to-day struggle for survival.
 
Complacency has been the price for this rise in comfort level.
 
Complacency is a dangerous place to be. Change is the enemy when we are complacent. And life is nothing if not full of change. So the enemy becomes life itself in our desire to maintain comfort. Comfort level becomes the gauge for survival.
 
I’m not advocating for the nobleness of poverty here. I don’t think there is anything noble about people going hungry, which is one form of poverty.
 
I guess I am beginning to believe that poverty comes in many forms. Perhaps it’s an impoverishment of spirit that leads one to want to have the power of life and death over another. The desire to manage and manipulate life. An illusion as well as a delusion.
 
I’m not sure where I’m going with this. Or what it has to do with thunder and lightning. I think Tessa fears it because she can’t find its source, doesn’t know what it asks of her. Whatever, she certainly knows that it is a force much bigger than herself.
 
To those who twenty years ago who stood up to the tanks, and to the rickshaw drivers who pedaled in to save the wounded, today I bow in honor and gratitude. They understood that the tanks and guns of the government were not a force bigger than themselves. They honored life in their willingness to risk their own.
 
They were not impoverished.
 
To paraphrase Walt Whitman, they dismissed that which insulted their souls.
 
I like thunderstorms. They put me in my place. It is not a place of complacency.

I went to San Francisco yesterday for a job interview.

San Fancisco is my city. I moved there in 1967 to go to San Francisco State and stayed for 15 years. I love San Francisco.

I finished the interview at noon and had four hours to kill before meeting my friend. I had just read the day before that SFMOMA had an exhibit that features Ansel Adams and Georgia O’Keefe.

It was first Tuesday – and first Tuesdays of the month are fee entry days into the museum. I did not know this when I decided to go there. The cost for the exhibit was five dollars. For another six I got the audio guide.

Earphones in place, I wandered (and wondered) through the exhibit of photos by Steiglitz, Weston, and Adams, and paintings by O’Keefe. All what I would call landscapes.

In one photo, Adams captures a lone dead tree in Owens Valley, a valley that had become desloate because water had been diverted from it to water the lawns of Los Angeles. In another, he captures sunrise over the Sierra Nevadas with the snow-capped peaks in brilliant sun, the foothills in dark, and a lone horse grazing in the meadow, a ray of sun illuminating that one spot. Apparently he waited patiently for the horse to turn so he could capture his profile instead of his rear end.

Patience pays off.

Stieglitz apparently saw Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings, exhibited them in New York without her permission, and when she came to protest, their chemistry transcended the 32-year difference in their ages. Thirty years ago I got a book of Stieglitz’s photos of O’Keefe. Theirs was definitely a union of artistic souls.

Displayed side-by-side are Adam’s photograph of a New Mexico church and O’Keefe’s painting of the same church – a church that looks as if it rose from the earth as a rock formation.

Color, O’Keefe says on the audio tour, is how she expressed feeling. You can understand why New Mexico, rather than New York, became her landscape, much to Stieglitz’s dismay. California is clearly Adams’s landscape.

A part of what distinguishes the artists displayed in this exhibit is that they didn’t go to Europe to study art. They stayed home and let the landscape educate them. In the very best sense of the word, this exhibit is an American landscape.

The audio tour also talked about how O’Keefe and her New Mexico home became a place where artists of all expression would come to – well, come to just be with each other. Poets, photographers, painters.

After I left the exhibit, I spent some time in the café, where a woman in perhaps her 70s or 80s wore a Seargent Pepper like costume with a crown-like hat. Shortly, her companion appeared – a man of a similar age in a red-silk shirt, a colorful vest and leather hat. His long grey hair was in a single, neat braid.

I took the N-Judah to Cole Street, met my friend, and reminisced about the stores, restaurants and cafes that had been a part of the Cole Street landscape over the forty years she has lived in the neighborhood. I had lived there thirty years ago. It is one of my landscapes – my neighborhood.

At the corner of Cole and Parnassus, the bakery where you could buy a birthday cake changed to the Tassajara bakery shortly after I moved there in 1976. I would on my way to work at UCSF for coffee and a croissant every morning. Sometime later it became a Just Desserts café. I don’t know when it became the French bakery and café it is now.

Cole Hardware is still there – a neighborhood hardware store that survives in this Home Depot and Loew’s Hardware era.

My friend and I used to eat dinner at Bambino’s before our Hospice Volunteer support group meetings. Wonderful garlic-rich pasta meals before an evening of intimate discussions about our experiences witnessing life coming to its end.

Last night we talked about the third friend who used to join us for the meals and intimate discussions, and how strange it is that we are now witnessing his life as it is coming to its end.

After way too much food, I got on the N-Judah, where a tiny young man, sitting next to a more robust young man who wore an Oliver Hardy-like bowler hat, played the ukele and sang songs. They were, the ukele-playing young man told us as we traveled along, members of a circus performing group.

Across from them was a woman who resembled someone I know from Livermore, the town I now live in. Finally I asked, “Are you from Livermore?”

She was indeed the woman I had seen in Livermore. We rode the rest of the way home together, while she told me her story of having a stroke six years ago and that she couldn’t be sorry. The stoke had almost taken her life, but he first day she walked out of the hospital she looked about and felt the beauty of the day.

She feels that way every day since. What the stroke took from her, it also gave her.

I drove her to her home in the countryside outside Livermore. We both said we used to think that the sueded brown hills looked desolate in summer, but had come to see their beauty. The sun was beginning to set and rain spattered the windshield. Few clouds were scattered across the sky so it seemed to come from out of the blue. Sunset-red and -orange haloed around the clouds as we drove, and she, an artist who will need to learn anew how to practice her craft, marveled over and over about the beauty of the landscape.

Her landscape. And mine.

Serendipity. Free entry into the museum where landscapes by artists of profound vision were exhibited and a ride on the N-Judah and Bart that helped me discover my landscape.

I don’t think I will ever again say that I have time to kill. I will know, instead, that I have time for life.

And now some of my landscape from Mendocino (Livermore landscapes will follow in the near future).

Three weeks from today I will be in Iowa City. I’ve been going there for the past five years for the Writing Festival. My friend Selene came with me one year; a friend asked her, “Are you going to Iowa on purpose?”

So she wrote a poem titled “Iowa on Purpose.”

I’m a California girl through and through. Born here, lived here most of my life. Northern California, of course. Though I hear that Southern California has its charms.

What I like about California is its diversity of topography. Within four hours I can be in the mountains or Mendocino. Within five I can be at a dormant volcano or Hollywood.

It’s an interesting place California.

But I go to Iowa on purpose. It has something that California doesn’t: summer thunderstorms, lightning bugs, and cicadas that sing as day changes into dusk. They have waited ten years to emerge and sing their songs.

Talk about patience.

I might be learning patience; trusting that life unfolds as it should, if I pay attention to nuance. Nuance must be what a ciccada pays attention to – waits for the moment when it’s called to emerge and join the chorus. Talk about a miraculous moment.

Maybe I’ll try and record their music this year.

Last night, after dinner with friends, we talked about transformation. One friend, who takes the role of devil’s advocate, questioned whether we could ever really transform; took the position that we can never escape our birth language.

It was a difficult and interesting conversation for me, because I had to articulate what I meant about transformation, without having to be right and win the argument – an argument I didn’t know I was having.

I tried using the term paradigm shift, but he got irritated with the word, “shift.”

I asked him why it irritated him, because that was not my intent. He never answered that question. I think it was an important question, but he did not.

In the end he was satisfied that I wasn’t talking woo-woo nonsense, though I’m not sure he’s convinced, in the way I am, that we can transform.

So here’s what I’m thinking might be the metaphor for what I mean by transform.

Catepillars.

I sometimes think that catepillars are the most courageous creatures on the planet. They crawl along and at some point heed the call that tells them to cocoon. While they are in the cocoon, their matter turns gelatinous, they no longer look anything like they did when they crawled along the ground. In fact, they have no discernable form.

But then their gelatinous stuff forms itself into a butterfly. Their DNA changes.

They struggle to emerge, then have to wait for their wings to dry so they can fly, for what a day or so?

I mean what an experience: go to sleep, knowing a world that you only perceive crawling on the ground, then wake up with the ability to fly – to look down on the world you used to inhabit.

Maybe that’s what astronauts experience when they look back down on earth from space.

So maybe we can be caterpillars or cicadas. Trust that when a crisis gives us the opportunity to make a fundamental change in our belief systems – there isn’t enough for everyone, for example – that it is life calling us take our next step – which could be to take wing and fly or sing our unique song.

Dick Cheney challenges my ability to be compassionate. Why, oh, why does he and his family want us to be afraid – be very afraid. Perhaps his mechanical heart has too many shorts in it.

When matter doesn’t matter anymore, it changes into energy.

I first wrote that some fifteen years ago in an essay about Sally a friend of mine who had taken her life. She had planned on it for at least the three years I knew her; told me that she didn’t want to live past 70.

“The women in my family don’t do well after 70,” she said.

That’s when the vagueries of aging seemed to get them. Being a gambling woman, she wanted to fold her hand while she was still ahead.

Sally had an antic sense of things. She took the pills a day or two before her seventieth birthday, just before mailing out (snail mail – email was still in its infancy 15 years ago) a farewell letter to her friends. An afficianado of eros, her letter concluded,

“And those of you familiar with my birthdate will recognize that the timing of my exit allows me to claim as my epitaph:

Toujours soixante-neuf!”

Always 69.

I neither approve nor disapprove of what Sally did. I had decided when she first told me of her plans that I would do neither. I knew it would be of no use trying to talk her out of it and I wanted to keep the lines of communication open. Instead I would say to her that if she got to 70 and decided she wanted to give herself a bit more time, that would be fine with me.

About a week before Sally’s birthday, we had dinner with our mutual friend Jeanette who was slowly but surely declining into Parkinsons. I knew the deadline was approaching so I asked Sally as we headed our separate ways into the San Francisco night, “So, is this goodbye?”

“You can’t get rid of me that easily,” she said, and smiled her Sally smile.

I thought perhaps she had decided to give it more time. But, she stuck to her plan. I got her letter a few days later: the salutation: “To those I love –“; the closing, “Love and goodbye, Sally”.

I did not really understand what Sally meant – about having to live with the debilitation that can come with aging until I watched my mother’s struggle with emphysema. She went very quickly from being physically vital, to struggling for each breath she took.

She had her idea of when to fold them as well. For her, it came when she had to face the prospect of recovering in a nursing home from a broken hip, her health already so compromised that whatever life was left to her would most likely never happen outside an institution. So, since death was inevitable, she eschewed the antibiotics and welcomed pneumonia as the friend who would save her from what was to her a humiliating end.

Both women took matters into their own hands. Took control of their final destinies. Determined the difference for them between what was living their life and merely surviving it, and acted on it.

It was difficult for me to watch my mother’s struggle, for I knew that somewhere in the back of her mind was the question, “Well, when is enough, enough?”

For Sally, I don’t believe that was a question she wanted to ponder. I think she was afraid that once she went down that path, she would hold on too long; that she would not do well in the dance between fear of dying and fear of living. So, she took action before she had to dance that dance.

Sally appeared to me in a dream shortly after she died. She was laughing at the paramedics who were trying to revive her. She had no regrets about her choice. I wondered if she, as an atheist, was a bit annoyed that there was some kind of “life” after life. She wouldn’t say.

About a month after my mother died, while sitting on the patio of a local restaurant, a truck lumbered by towing a speedboat with the name Betty Jean – my mother’s name – painted on its side. It’s not exactly that I think she got reincarnated as a speedboat, but heading out of town for a good time on the delta was not out of sync with who my mother was.

Here is what I concluded with Sally many years ago: She asked that her ashes be added to a friend’s compost pile. Very much in keeping with Sally’s antic let’s-get-real sense of things (Did I mention that she took her vibrator to Mr. Fix It in Mill Valley when it stopped working?), so I assume they were.

My final image then is of life feeding life, even after it’s gone.

When matter doesn’t matter anymore, it changes into energy.