After a quick pitstop in the bay area to visit Mom (83 and unstoppable) and pick up my car, I drive south to LA at the crack of dawn....
The donut shops don't open til 6 in the burbs, so I have to stop by and pick up my apple fritter the day before (another bad habit, along with cheese puffs...apple fritters are only allowed on road trips just as cheese puffs are only allowed under the influence of cannabis...gotta cut yourself some slack somewhere...and come to think of it, the apple fritter is vegan!)
I always take the 101 to avoid the heartbreak of the 5....
Sera and Louise welcomed me back to the San Gabriel Valley...
A visit to Isaac - in his amazing garden: tomatoes, chiles, cannabis, squash...
...before I boomeranged back to LA to meet up with Christian and Kay
Christian...who is now living in a cottage studio behind Kay's house where I incidentally used to live....he's doing well, working at the Getty and dressing to kill (and coordinating with the furniture) as always....
I often housesit for Kay in her beautiful little home in Atwater Village while she traipses the globe to remote locales like Borneo, Madagascar and Antarctica
We three arrived at Skylight together for the reading with Tara Jepsen and Alvin Orloff....all of us readers are veterans of SF's spoken word heyday back in the '90s....
And the room began to fill....
A whole row of co-workers from my old job at LAANE, so I read about the immigrant kids...
A special treat was Manny Valenzuela and Margaret showing up.... Manny is the Western Regional Organizing Director of the Teamsters and he's a wonderful man...I've worked with him and become his friend over the years through LAANE, and I've even seen him and Margaret in Mexico City, where he used to take his 90+ year old Dad for the Raiders/49ers exhibition game each year. His Dad also passed this year.
Sorry for the bad photo...Manny's a ray of sunshine, and maybe the camera couldn't handle all his light!
...and Italian dinner with my dear friend and ex-boss, Stella!
Another poor photo, so here's one of the two of them at a LAANE fundraising dinner
Manny once told me a great story from back in his truck-driving days....."There was this guy in this bar in Chinatown I used to frequent. The guy sat there and drank all day and played the horses and always recommended betting on what turned out to be the winners. He was an ugly guy but always seemed to have beautiful women around him....years later, I was watching TV, and there's this guy's face on the 6 o'clock news......he'd just died and was some famous writer..."
It was Charles Bukowski.....
Probably L.A.'s most famous poet, and representative of a different L.A. than the usual stereotype....and indicative of why I respect L.A. and like it in a way...it's a capital city in that everything is here; the whole culture of a people can be experienced, and it's so big and varied that nothing predominates...NYC and LA have that...Mexico City, Buenos Aires....Montreal...I'm drawn to such cities and most comfortable in them....they are crossroads.....because if you're looking for something, and you're not quite sure what it is - and I never have been (or maybe I'm just looking for everything) - you have to go to where it all is...
Argentine empanadas with Lorenzo, my friend from Guanajuato...
...and then I'm on the road to Palm Springs for the grand finale of the tour at the Camelot Theater
Courtesy of Robby Sherwin and Dave Eckert, two wonderful new friends who I met a year ago at the memorial for the magical Angus Whyte - writer, harpsichordist, dear friend, and host of the SF Scott Street Salon, and creator of Art for Healing..... he'd just moved to Palm Springs a year before his passing
...when Robby learned that Angus and I had first met through my Saratago Springs Writing Workshop, he immediately wanted to host a writing workshop here at their very cool house way up at the top of Cathedral Canyon, the site of Angus's memorial...what's more, Robby wanted to put on a reading for me as a finale to my book tour, thus the Camelot Theater gig....such generosity and good energy....
Robby and Dave
Dave kindly offered to handle the book table, and since I was to be the first of a new speaker's series, I had to bring all of my books
Next day I was Robby's sous chef (bad vegan).....he thought I looked like Robert the doll...and who is Robert the doll you may ask?
....turns out Robert's a rather dark character ....
but Henry and Robert were soon fast friends...
Henry, who is all light... I'll need to limit their interactions....opposites attract?
Robby and Dave had 18 guests for Thanksgiving....here are a few.....Thom (Angus's partner), Darwin, Jack, Johnsie, Dave (Henry is there - see him? - speaking with Johnsie)
There were a lot of interesting cranberry variations - cranberry chutney, a cranberry salsa dip, the actual berries,. and of course the traditional canned version, which people fetishize for its tacky look
Below is one of the two tables....I actually ironed this table cloth...I have not ironed in probably a decade...
Ralph, Mike, Johnny, moi, Dave, Steve
In the blur of this busy, fun weekend, there was Mexican food with Darwin, Mike, Ralph, Robby and Dave...
And when I got up out of my seat, it turned out that I'd been held the whole time within the arms - or the fenders - of my Dad's '55 Chevy .....
So it's all sorts of full circles...and to bring it all together, Robby and I hiked up Cathedral Canyon, which is really beautiful and a place I've been thinking of during this whole journey because of what he told me about it last time I was here..... Robby had told me about the native people here who migrated between the mountains and the desert with the seasons. They would be coming down this canyon now to winter in the oases of the desert because migration is a normal, human thing...I do it myself in fact...am doing it right now...
... Anyway, I knew I wanted to do something in honor of the immigrant native people I've been working with in Mexico, and I knew this canyon was the perfect place at the end of the tour on Thanksgiving because of the awful way the U.S. Government treated them last year, and this one, at the border
...so I meditated on that in this canyon, in this mountain setting, which is my favorite setting of all which most of you know...
At the top of the canyon is a waterfall and the guardian palm...it's a sacred spot for the native people of this region, the Agua Caliente band of the Cahuilla people, and so it's the sought-after place to remember and send good wishes to their relations - all the Central American immigrants I've had the honor to meet....Lazaro, Christian, Abilardo, Rodrigo, Raul, Anderson, Jorge, Sofia, Isabel, Yessica, Daniela, Harlem, Victor, Sandra ... and on and on... too many names to recount... I think of all of them that I can and thank them for how they've connected me to my world and myself - their faces and smiles, scribbling madly with crayons, laughing, running around, kicking soccer balls - some in tears, others talking animatedly, asking for food, shoes, medicine, toothbrushes, soap, frightened or grinning ear to ear, the brash teenagers, razzing each other, barely masking the fear in their eyes, the fathers and mothers, the working men with their big hands and weathered skin, their baseball caps..... Such beautiful, flirtatious, hopeful, hardworking, sincere people ... I'll have a thanksgiving meal with whoever is there in January when I go back....there'll be 3 new babies, I'm sure of that :)
Above the guardian palm up in the canyon, there's a pond...it's not deep...just enough water to splash about in...and I think of all those kids...they could play here, and no one would bother them and none could drown as they sometimes do in the Rio Grande.... A little eden permitted...Often I am permitted to return to a meadow in the immortal words of Robert Duncan....here in this little moment I can feel grateful and newly energized and recharged to go back and do what I can
Hacemos lo que podemos
Hacemos lo que podemos
...and the phone pings, and it's a message from Brendan...a photo of he and Sergio, who made it to the museum film event.....and then another ping, and it's Anthony from the Lower Eastside with the news of the conviction of the anti-nuke protestors, and the hopes that they'll get a light sentence....
So much to do, so much getting done, slowly but surely.... people and work and community to be grateful for
So much to do, so much getting done, slowly but surely.... people and work and community to be grateful for
The clouds rush overhead above the canyon.....time moves on...nothing is permanent or forever...
and I think of part of a beautiful poem by Arseny Alexandrovitch Tarkovsky
I strapped my
fate fast to my saddle
I rise up in the
stirrups of the future as a boy
I am content with
my immortality
With my blood
coursing from century to century
I’d gladly give
up my life for a safe corner of warmth
If life’s swift
needle
Did not draw me
on
As if I were a
thread
And a song plays in my head that I sing whenever I return to the mountains....
...we head down the wash and Robby says let's go over to Whitewater Canyon tomorrow....
That night there's a snowstorm, and when we get to Whitewater, the snow and sleet begin to fall again as we walk along ... and I think how I got snowed on twice during this trip...in Minnesota and Palm Springs....
This place is a wonderful final gift of the tour, as are Robby's amazing photos of it....and driving back down the canyon, the hail pinging off the roof, we get to talking about the writing workshop...and we're gonna call it Whytewater ...because: this place, and Angus Whyte, and how we want the words to flow fast and powerful....and I'll let Jack Kerouac take it from here because I'm getting a little overwhelmed by all the good memories and connections of these past 6 weeks, 6 years, 6 eons....and it's emotional, and I like it like that, but I'm gonna get corny and maudlin if I'm not careful - take it, Jack...
"So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on
the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey
and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to
the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the
immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the
land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and
don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and
shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of
complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and
folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to
anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I
even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean
Moriarty."
And those children who cry are in Mexico now, waiting, and
in Texas and California in detention, and in Central America and Mexico being
born....and maybe I'm sitting on a rock out here in the desert, and God's not
Pooh Bear - he's Henry....but the stars are the same, and the rivers and
peaks, the night and the forlorn rags...and one more thing - here's to
the father that I did find....:)
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