The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--36. Simply Glorious in Monterey

Monterey Docks, Steve Brown 2022 

              The first time I’d ever been as far south along the coast as Big Sur, I was shocked to find groves of redwoods.  I knew they were there.  Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve been a student of maps.  I’d seen the groves marked on various road atlases.  But there is a difference between knowing something abstractly and having real knowledge that something is true.

              The redwoods aren’t hard to conceive in northern California.  Everything is so wet and verdant, life springing up everywhere, even under the harsh winds blowing off the coast— ferns, moss, wildflowers, big sweeping strokes of black trees on high bluffs leaning inward—giant trees a few miles inland seem inevitable.   As awed as one is by the enormous, spongy hush one feels walking along a trail along the Avenue of the Giants, one isn’t necessarily surprised to see those magnificent trees.

              However, the coast south of San Francisco is different.  Though by no means a desert, things dry out quite a bit.  Hills are windswept, and outside the rainy season, pale green to golden yellow.  Oaks have replaced most confers.  Mist, though present, comes in short waves, broken by periods of intense sunlight.  Wildflowers, other than the California poppies that seasonally blanket the hillsides, are more scattered.  The landscape simply does not look like it would support trees the size of skyscrapers.  And along the coast, it doesn’t.

              But then the road will curve in, and tucked in behind a big, round sloping ridge, sheltered from the wind, will be a grove of magnificent redwoods along a clear creek.  It’s so surprising, so breathtaking.

              These scattered groves of giants around Big Sur were perhaps my favorite part of our honeymoon trip in September 1997.  It was the thing I looked forward to most on our return trip.  I’d planned on stopping to eat at this restaurant we’d had breakfast at on our honeymoon.  It had a back patio that overlooked a sparkling river and a grove of redwoods beyond that.  We watched birds and took in the sunshine.  It was glorious.

              However, this time, the flat tire changed everything.  It was getting late in the afternoon, and we were riding on a donut spare.  Monterey would be about the maximum recommended travel distance on it.  We needed to get to a tire shop before it closed.

              So, all those stops—that amazing lunch—had to be scrapped.  All that I would see of the redwood groves of Big Sur were the ones I could see out my window as we quickly drove by.  And some of those had burned.  It was still pretty, of course.  It just didn't match my expectations.

              Another day, another trip, I would probably let that sour my mood.  But because I had been diagnosed with kidney disease and was told it could be serious, I was mentally prepared for this to perhaps be our last road trip together.  So, nothing was going to infringe on that sacred time--especially not my mood.

              Perhaps this is why something as simple as standing together outside a tire shop near the docks of Monterey in a cold wind is so imbedded in my memory.  It was a few blocks of small, industrial buildings, rusted chain-link fences, stacks of tires, cinderblocks, and long metal poles.  Yet, in that afternoon sun, next to my woman and the finite time I imagined we had left together, we might as well have been eating on the back patio of a fine restaurant overlooking a river in the redwoods.  It was simply a profoundly stunning experience.

              That didn’t change afterwords when we drove down to the Monterey Docks and walked along the choppy bay in a bitter wind to Old Fisherman's Warf, the big, beautiful purple-blue flowering heads of Pride of Madeira contrasting against the white sailboats and deep blue sky.

              All was glorious, simply glorious.

    

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--35. This Moment

Stopping to Enjoy One Moment on the Way to Work, Steve Brown 2024

This morning, I woke up from a beautiful dream.   I thought I was in a rut, working in a small restaurant, going nowhere, living in a house with a leaky roof that I didn't have the money to fix.

I am at work--the details from the dream here aren't clear--and I get this call from a Mexican restaurant owner in the area.  He's speaking in Spanish, and I can't really understand him.  I had Spanish in collage but barely passed the class, and that was years ago.  It's frustrating, but I know this guy.  He is a tall, slender, older gentleman with warm, brown eyes lined with soft wrinkles.  His food is amazing.  I can tell from his voice he's feeling pretty desperate in the moment.  I stay on the line, ask him to repeat things over and over, and then I give back what I think he's saying and have him say, "si" or "no," whether I've got it right or not.  We do this for quite some time.  Turns out his one stove-burner died, and he has a big pot of beans to heat.    Not just any beans.  He uses white beans and cooks them with lots of garlic, onions, and who knows what.  They are heaven to the mouth.  He's wondering if I can come get them and heat them on our stove.  I say yes.  To me it's like if Paul McCartney has called up and asked, "Hey, I'm trying to work out some lyrics on this song; would you mind coming over and giving me a hand?"  This guy, though not famous, is to food what Paul McCartney is to music.  And it doesn't matter whether the world knows it or not. I do.

So, I let my boss know the situation, and I head out.  Our place, a small, a locally owned Denny's-like joint, is at the end of a long block with an alley that starts next to it running down the length of the block.  The Mexican restaurant is near the other end, and the quickest way is down the middle.

It's late afternoon, and I'm headed down this concrete alley that slopes down in the middle for drainage.  It rained all night, and I woke up to a wet living room and the feeling of slow moldy doom--a life spent working to get nowhere.  But now, the late afternoon sunlight is igniting the various brick rear facades of the businesses gloriously.   That is reflected in the long puddle.

Halfway down the alley a large electrical pole, golden orange, is reflected in the puddle.   Something so pedestrian yet so beautiful!  

Wow!  High, on one of those gray metal electrical cylinders, a bald eagle, his head intensely yellowed by the sun, his eyes glittering!

This is it.  I don't know about others, but for me, this is enough.  This is why I'm here.  Not to accomplish anything in particular.   Simply to be.   

And I all of the sudden I have this sensation from deep inside that in some preexistence I'd chosen this moment and all that came before, including waking up to a soggy living room, in order to be here and witness that eagle and serve the owner of the Mexican restaurant on this day, and that as long as I am fully invested now, whatever that might be, with love and service, I am doing exactly what I'm meant to do, and what that is doesn't really matter.  I know in that instant life isn't about what you accomplish but rather who you become.   If we enter each moment intently, openly, unguarded, willing to serve others, there is absolutely no way of getting life wrong.  

And then I woke up.

I had such a moment last fall, writing and looking out the sliding glass door behind my desk at a single sunflower illuminated by the last direct sunlight of the day.

I don't always remember it.  I have moments when I feel lost, frustrated and question the meaning of life.  But all of those times are spent in my head in negative inner dialogue that either attempts to puff up my ego and justify my actions or beliefs, or just as often, wallows in self-doubt and pity.  As soon as I realize it and refocus again on now and tune my eye into some detail of the world around me there is absolutely no question about why I'm here: to live.  It's that simple.  Life is its own meaning.  Because long ago we chose it.  You might not be able to intellectually grasp that. I'm not sure I can--it's so different for everybody, but at the same time, all the same. Yet, I'm pretty sure everyone can feel it--but only when you get out of the could-have's and should-have's and enter this moment completely.

I think life is going to get very difficult in the near future.  We will reap the consequences of our collective choices.  Smoke filled skies.  Mind-boggling winds and great floods.  These will become more and more common.  As will political strife.

But there is no moment that cannot be either narrowed or widened to perfection through an eye focused on learning the lessen that moment exists to teach.

All life can be glorious--even death and destruction--when the soul is open, and the eye is focused.  Similarly, the most naturally glorious moments can jog by unnoticed because we are stuck in our mind, stuck on our devices, or stuck in our addictions.

But this moment is our entry into eternity.  Always.  It's just deciding what we want now--to be distracted or to be focused.

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--34. Here and There, Then and Now, Writing Highway 1 from 780 Miles and Two Years Away

Mailboxes, California 1, Steve Brown 2022

1.  Getting There

It's getting more difficult to get back there again.  Highway 1 is slowly slipping away.  Unfortunately, it's doing that literally--sliding off into the ocean at an ever-increasing rate due to landslides driven by wildfire-deforestation and high-precipitation storms, one more dream being devastated by climate change.  Yet here, I simply mean it's slipping away from me.  If remotely practical, I would hop in my car today and be on my way.  Instead, all I have at this moment is the sunlight on the oaks outside my living room window and Juniper-blobbed ridge behind still deep in shadow, an intensely bright lemon-white sky behind that.  It's stunning, but it isn't where I need my mind to go now.

I can access the events that day, just not the particulars.  Writing lives or dies in the details--and real or imagined, those details have to be experienced deeply by the writer while the words hit the page.  Otherwise, the narrative feels deeply contrived and sickly sentimental--a string of adjectives and overly written metaphors.  

I want to write sunlight on whitecaps below where the mountains suddenly climb down into the sea as real as if it were so for me now at this moment.  That is the only way for it to be that real for the reader also.  It isn't what words are on the page.  It is what is between the words on the page--an energy that is transferred from the writer to the reader--the description on the page intensified dramatically by what the writer leaves out because he's there so intensely he can get it right with just a few words.  That involves an honesty that can't be faked--a frozen daydream.  All great books are frozen daydreams--the churnings of the mind snap-shotted for the reader again and again until a narrative emerges from all of the intensely colored dots placed next to each other.

You have to be there before those rusty, colored mailboxes just off the highway--oh so close to the hillside dramatically dropping out of sight, jeweled whitecaps rushing in to where the waves break but cannot be seen.  You have to be there, in your head, snapping that picture, thinking, "Damn, can you believe, someone has to stop here each day to get their mail before heading up the gravel lane on the opposite side of the highway to a house somewhere on a hillside even higher, to look out always on that--on that!--where an entire continent crashes into the ocean with thundering majesty."

You have to be there in your head as you write it.  Or it's just sticky works on a page.

2.  There, Perhaps (After Going to and Returning Home from Church)

Once you know what it is you long for, you can usually get back.  I long to stand in that sodium light and look out at whitecaps almost as far as the eye can see--that magical line where ocean meets sky.  I long to feel the weight of the deep, to know unfathomable depths from the hard, choppy surface, that from up here, certainly appears to be stone.  True, if I fell, although it may kill me upon impact, the water would certainly give way before my body did, but from up here that seems almost impossible, so solid the sea seems, and yet also, at the same time, it tells of depths fully comprehensible only to God, stories as old as time that somehow radiate out in all those thousands and thousands of glints of light.

3.  There.  

I am there.  I have just fixed a tire after we drove through an intense downpour that brought down thousands of sharp rocks from the hillside, one of which must have caught my tire just right and split it open grandly.  Had such an event occurred six months ago, I would have sworn and fretted and cursed my God, and Marci would have sat in the car terrified by how unhinged I am.  But today is different.  My kidney disease, not yet fully diagnosed as to what particular type yet, has made it clear I might possibly have a limited time left on earth.  Now everything matters.  Even how well I keep my temper under control.  In my mind, this very well could be the last trip Marci and I ever take together.  With that knowledge, I am able to do what I've never been able to do before--sit in an unpleasant moment and see the glory in it.  I work on changing the tire fully satisfied to just be alive.  I listen to the swoosh of wet tires going by.  

And when I'm done, I cross the highway to where a bunch of rusted, colorful mailboxes stand before the glittering sea, and for now, that is all I need.

Then, 780 Miles and Two Years Away.

And now, 4:42, a.m., August 8, 2024.

Here.

Sometimes it's difficult to sit in a moment and be real.  The way we feel crushed by unrealized dreams or distracted by endless to-do lists.   Yet, the moments worth living are always the moments grounded in now, even if now is just doing dishes.  

I forget it, and yet I know it so well.  We are meant to exist fully in this moment--open, aware, not holding back from the simple awe of existence.

When I remember that, I am steady, and life is good.  When I don't, I quickly slide towards a deep ocean of fears and regrets, could-have's and should-have's--things that I have absolutely no control over now, and even if I did, I would simply have a different list of could-have's and should-have's because dissatisfaction has absolutely nothing to do with what you have or haven't accomplished over your life and everything to do with how removed you are from living now.

Dissatisfaction occurs when you're not fully there with your spouse watching TV, when you're not fully there with your kid playing Legos, when you're not fully there paying those monthly bills, when you're not fully there writing that book that you know needs to be written, and instead there you sit watching beach volleyball on the Olympics because you fear you can't get back to California Highway 1 the way you need to, and your deepest fear at this moment is that you've spent years working on a book that's going absolutely nowhere.

As if that mattered.  And it doesn't.  But that's how the mind keeps us from doing the hard work of living now.  Everything becomes important except this sacred movement where I'm totally free to choose my focus for the eternities.

I choose sunshine and spiderwebs.  Rainstorms and water dancing off the lake surface.  Waffles smothered in blueberries and whip cream.  When prompted by my God, I choose stopping for the hitchhiker to ease someone else's sucky day, knowing full well there is risk in that.  But also knowing the risk to the soul is even greater by ignoring the call to the soul now.