See It Coming
Tuesday. Awake this morning at six-thirty. What was I thinking? Back to sleep (finally), up again at eight, dressed and downtown for a haircut at ten. Head feeling funky, but with a haircut and a cup of coffee in the system I took the bus back to my morning café and had breakfast feeling pretty good. The walk home no problem, none of the symptoms that worried me before I reduced the blood pressure medicines, the funky head now feeling as if I were at the tail end of a head cold, the day overcast at the moment, but with periods of sun.
I'm tempted to drive over to Telegraph near the University and take pictures of the Code Pink people who are picketing the Marine Corps recruitment center to mark the fifth anniversary of the war. I may. Who knows? Either Pink or the guy who's living up in one of the campus trees protesting the loss of trees required by a proposed building expansion the University is currently promoting.
In my days we didn't protest anything until the Vietnam war came along; there seem to be more opportunities recently. Always something, it seems, if not here in Oakland, then nearby in Berkeley or San Francisco. Photography opportunities are less prevalent in the surrounding suburbs, but that's true, I suspect, of suburbs everywhere. One of many reasons I fled the suburbs to the city some forty years ago.
Forty years?
Forty next year. Just like that. I still know people from those times, still maintain tenuous contact, but our lives have gone through other quite different chapters since and those setting out into a new world memories are, after all, just memories. Probably not good to remember them too well, too accurately: blinds you to what lies ahead, makes it too easy to avoid a necessary turn because the necessary turn is blurred and not understood because the earlier person we once were wouldn't have done them. Who am I, Mr. Natural? I suspect “blithering idiot” would be part of the reply.
Do you believe any of that?
I don't know, it just sort of came out. Is the past a lead weight? Yeah, probably, but what the hell? We're lucky we're still afloat.
You've lost it. Maybe you really should drive over to Berkeley and see what's up.
Well, we're having dinner with Ms. S and her husband at their place here in Oakland, so maybe I'll skip Berkeley. Haven't seen Ms. S in a while as she's now living in Redding. Redding. The summers would kill me, but Ms. S is tougher than I am. I've known many women in my life who are both tougher and smarter than I am. Doesn't seem to make them any less desirable company, though. But this line of thought rapidly leads me to places in the pool that are over my head. Don't want to get in over my head when I can see it coming.
|
