Sidewalk Talk (A walking meditation)

In getting out in the world in order to receive the messages, to lift the spirits by being a part of rather than insular, isolated, home-prisoned and it is with almost immediacy that I feel a connection. Swimming pool house as we called it when all those many years ago we had a paper route in order to make the last $99 that would be all of our discretionary income for the month and now it is Tony’s house, a Mexican student I taught at the middle school. His mother has painted it just as bright colors and they’ve a wood pile to rival any in town, split and stacked and this morning as I walk by I deeply breathe in the smells of first, fall-fire woods-smoke and fresh piles of folded laundry coming together on the flowered sofa, kitten at her feet in the sun.

Next, I am walking up the past halfway pitch and my favorite poet, part of the beat San Francisco scene is in his skin-colored (70’s Crayola crayon) Mercedes, heading his sunny heights long-way to the library. Now, I’ll have to show up at open mic next month to ask him again the title of that essayist of Jesus book he recommended. Still, I haven’t gone over to visit, he warned me of the grease prints he walked across an island of sand carpet while his wife was still alive and of all the stacks of writing’s that litter every table, fill every drawer are the trails the two of us recognize in one another.

Then, it was the Astoria School District President in his small, was it electric car? I see him look at me in my white sweatshirt enjoying the October sun and then as quickly look away and there is a sliver of light we both recognize in my not being hired for that social studies job in which all would be broken down to nose on the grind, the way I saw downed and water-logged trees in the woods yesterday that looked like those old pieces of chalk soaked in mouthwash the knowing mother would break in two on the Colgate, smile-large-as-all-the-rest commercials.

And, up past his house and the little boy card he’d left in my mailbox in this fifty countdown to my fifty upheaval or rebirth, whatever that might be, and all of the cars are gone, the new roommate, the Dutch roommate, the old man and his oxygen tank and he too, just oil drips where each man parks his car. I walk by without any kind of heart attack which speaks of my progress.

Then, it is the house I just bid on, Skyline splendor is a good description of the street and the house kind of a “need to,” and still I’m quite sure with the photo darkroom curtains that the old and forgotten man who lived there was agoraphobic and there might always be that greasy pallor of fear on all of the cupboards and knobs? I’d dreamt of creating an apartment in the basement and that perhaps I’d rent out to a Hispanic family. Why would I have had this thought? Who knows, but all the same I did and I liked the idea of it in this growing richer, whiter more gentrified town and especially there, up on the tippy-top of the hill.

So, when Romero waved so happily at me, his white truck pulled up to the front door, the windows open and a brand new window replacing the west facing, storm ripped glass that just days ago flapped in the wind, I walked over thinking in such a friendly manner he must have been one of my past students—me and my deteriorating eyesight, but he was not. He was fixing the house for someone he knew and said he was considering moving down cellar once they put in a fast kitchen (same plan as mine) and that although he didn’t like the idea of living in a basement this one wasn’t so bad with its two south-facing picture windows.

I let him know I’d bid on the house too and he asked where I lived and I pointed, told him two streets over and he was happy to make my acquaintance said he’d see me around. We shook hands, wide grins and knowing. My face and gait lifted high as I rounded onto Short Street and headed for home! So, now that was a loose end that made sense and a message that some of my idea’s/messages were correct, but that I didn’t need to be the one to buy and work on it for that to happen.

Off from Kensington onto Lexington, I saw a feather at my feet and almost didn’t pick it up because the ends were jagged, but so often when I am out and about and wondering about my being all alone a feather is given and I’ve always taken this to be a sign that my ancestors/angels/guides are with me. So, I did pick it up and added it to the collection of jars of feathers I have about the house and writing here highlights these, makes me stop and take notice of what sometimes becomes invisible, but is always there.

I passed the road closed sign easily on foot, the men in fluorescent orange waving at me, tipping hard hats just as I was thinking I’ve been a mother so many times, I guess some of this most recent angst comes from my realizing what I thought was something particular is really something else and that there is nothing wrong with that I just need to revise and accept, but there is this shadow, or longing part of me as my friend @sukhasanasister writes about, that no longer wants to be the mother of so many, eldest of ten, seven of whom were brothers (my sisters are at the end of the lineup and came only after I’d left the house), my own husbands, my three sons, all of the students and clients. That is what I am crooning about. Perhaps, I was a man in a past life that needs this training now?

Why am I so hooked psychologically on this Colgate commercial I’ve shared on Steemit before? It seems to be a story of thorough socialization and especially happening in the school with such young and impressionable students and a science project, an activity my younger parts want to engage in—dip the chalk, break it in two~

Photo is of one such gathering of I-Am-hear-with-You feather's I've been offered, one a red flicker, a crow, the swans that returned to Black Lake for just one season, a stellar jay and I'm not sure on the small white?

Video: c/o youtube:ClassicTvAds