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Gently With Love

This morning, January 6, 2025, after a stint of writing and a bowl of granola and a bit of piano playing, I set off for town in our little red Prius to shop at Corners of the Mouth, a small yet splendiferous worker-owned grocery store occupying an old two-story former church in downtown Mendocino.

We live a mile from town. When I used to write for a regional publication with a much larger readership than my blog, I referred to Mendocino as “a village” on a few occasions and several readers took umbrage with my use of the noun village. They complained that Mendocino was not a village, but a town. Nor, they said, was Mendocino a hamlet. My use of the word village, they opined, was proof of both my ignorance and my annoying (to them) tendency to needlessly romanticize life.

*

Now this mile we live from town goes downhill on two-lane Little Lake Road all the way to the village and therefore climbs uphill all the way home. I drive this mile at about thirty-miles-per-hour on the downhill, except in the school zone wherein I go twenty-five. By local standards this is quite slow, though the road passes close by many houses and I feel it is courteous and safer to drive at non-freeway speeds here.

Alas, the fellow who got behind me this morning on my way to town felt my notions of safety and courtesy were bollocks, and he let me know this all the way to the village.

I don’t know who the fellow was. I didn’t actually see him because the windshield of his enormous pickup truck was tinted gray verging on black. This monstrous vehicle, easily five times bigger than our little Prius, was black and had a rumbling engine that got (I’m guessing) seven-miles-per-gallon on a good day. The impatient fellow (I assumed the driver was a fellow, though I suppose he/she/they might have been a woman or a trans person) got right on my bumper and revved his/her/their humongous engine at me all the way down the hill, with the occasional loud beep thrown in to startle me, thus rendering the one-minute trip to the coast highway most stressful for little old me.

Normally when I am accosted automotively by such misguided persons, I pull over and let the bullies pass. But this morning the usual pull-over places were occupied.

So. After those sixty arduous seconds of downhill racing, I reached the stoplight at Highway One (the only stoplight in Mendocino) and the light was red. So I stopped, as is the custom, with the huge black demon breathing down my neck, and when the light changed in my favor I started across the intersection only to have the behemoth close to within inches of my rear bumper with horn bellowing, as if the driver expected me to pull off into a ditch or crash into the brambles rather than hold him up for another second.

Finally, he/she/they turned left before we reached the diminutive commercial district of our hamlet, and I breathed a sigh of relief to be done with the unhappy soul.

However, the unhappy soul wasn’t done with me. He/she/they had only turned off Little Lake Road in order to race down narrow side streets in hope of beating me to the one and only main intersection in our berg. But I got there first, turned right, and the giant truck shot through the intersection and nearly plowed into my rear before he/she/they swerved into the bank parking lot and left me alone to go another hundred feet where I parked in my customary spot across the street from Corners.

*

Unnerved by my encounter with the dangerous dolt, I walked to the post office, mailed a letter, got our mail, and returned to the Prius where I left the mail, grabbed my two baskets, and crossed the street to Corners — the village peaceful and calm in the absence of the legions of visitors who descend upon the village most days of the year now.

In Corners, I found the shelves overflowing and the worker-owners their usual friendly delightful beautiful selves. I was about to bring my brimming baskets to the counter when I noticed the man behind me was only buying two items – an avocado and a little container of quinoa salad – and I suggested he go ahead of me.

He acted as if I had just given him the gift of eternal life and happiness, so profuse was his thanks. Moved by his gratitude, I mentioned there were both ripe sale Avocados and not-so-ripe regular-priced avocados and he said, “I know. Thank you.”

Then as he was being rung up, he turned to me and said proudly, “I grew up surrounded by avocado trees.”

“In Santa Barbara?” I guessed.

“No further south,” he said, his pride seeming to grow. “My great grandparents planted the very first Haas avocado trees in southern California. So I know my avocados.”

“Wow,” I said. “How wonderful. In my opinion there is nothing so good as a perfectly ripe Haas avocado.”

He nodded knowingly. “But I’ll tell you. In Harvest (our hamlet’s BIG grocery store) many of the avocados have deep thumb prints in them from idiots testing them for ripeness and ruining them.”

“I would never do that,” I said, horrified by the thought of such behavior. “I heft them gently, but never press on them.”

The man lowered his voice and confided, “My grandfather used to say, ‘You want to touch an avocado as you would a woman’s breast. Gently and with love.’”

“Got that right,” said the checker, grinning at me.

And I thought, Is this the greatest grocery store in the world, or what?

*

Driving home, no one behind me, I cruised along at a delightful fifteen-miles-per-hour and arrived home in a marvelous mood, eager to make a big bowl of guacamole.

fin

Sometimes It Seems from Todd’s CD Lounge Act In Heaven

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Reality

Our friend Jeff said to me the other day, “I don’t believe in reality.”

I wish I could remember what I said to him right before he said that, but I can’t.

The moment Jeff said, “I don’t believe in reality,” my awareness of reality shifted. Not that I stopped believing in reality, but I began to see the world differently. How so? Hard to say.

You will recall the scene in the prophetic movie The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy and the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodsman and the Lion are standing before the big screen on which is projected the frightening head and face of the supposed Wizard of Oz and they are quaking in fear of him and he is telling them he can’t help them, when Toto, Dorothy’s dog, possibly the sharpest member of the cast, discovers an old man standing in a booth adjacent to the screen, and the booth turns out to be the projection room, the image on the screen an illusion.

“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” says the Wizard of Oz on the screen as voiced by the old man in the projection room.

He might have said, “Don’t believe in reality! Believe instead in the nonsense on the screen intended to entrance you and entrap you and empower me at your expense.”

*

Yesterday I was on my way into Corners of the Mouth, the worker-owned food cooperative in Mendocino where I shop twice a week, and there were two people, a man and a woman, standing in front of the store gazing into their smart phones. The man said, “Mixed reviews.” The woman replied, “Seems more like a bulk foods place.”

As I passed them I said, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”

“Excuse me?” said the man, frowning at me.

“It’s a great store. Full of wonders,” I said, smiling at him. “I’ve been shopping here multiple times a week for seventeen years. Every time I go in I discover something new. The produce is grandiloquent, the employees spectacular, their selection of chocolate bars inspiring.”

The man looked at his phone. “Says the layout is confusing.”

The woman blinked at me and said, “That was from The Wizard of Oz. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”

“Right you are,” I said, entering the store and inhaling of the magnificence.

Which is to say, reality seems to be largely what we make of things. Descartes said, “I think therefore I am.” To which I will add, “If you think what is projected on your screen is reality, so it shall be.”

*

My mother was essentially mistrustful of reality whenever things were going well. In other words, she was always expecting something bad to happen. It was almost as if she wanted something bad to happen. I don’t think she did, but her expectation was so strong it might as well have been the desire for disaster.

I inherited this mistrust of happiness from her, which created in me a lifelong propensity for self-sabotage. I am ever amazed at how this manifests on both the physical and emotional planes in my life, and I’m not kidding when I say I really don’t know how I made it to seventy-three.

*

My mother said the thing she disliked most about getting old was all her friends were dying. She did not say that what she disliked most about getting old was all her friends were falling and breaking various bones and hitting their heads, but for me that seems to be the era we have entered vis-à-vis our friends, along with some of them dying, too.

As one who has fallen many times throughout my life, though not recently knock-on-wood, I can tell you that in my reality every time I fell I was either needlessly hurrying or not paying close attention to what I was doing, and probably both those things. My most recent injury resulting from needlessly hurrying and not paying attention was to smash my bare toes on a rock protruding from the path I was on, the result of which was a broken toe, an infected toe, a wonky way of walking for some weeks, aches and pains from lopsided posture due to compensating for foot pain, and so forth ongoing.

Why was I hurrying and not paying attention after a delightful barefooted walk on the beach? The short answer is: I’m an idiot.

*

Why do we needlessly hurry and not pay attention to what we are doing? We might say the answer is different for each of us. We might also say the answer is the same for all of us. For one reason or another we are not content to fully inhabit the present moment. We are entrained to move forward, to keep going, to stay busy, to keep ourselves entertained, our brains stimulated, even if by junk. We don’t know very well how to saunter and to pay close attention to what we’re doing and to what’s going on around us.

Marcia and I take a walk on the headlands south of Mendocino every few weeks, and after a two-mile jaunt we come to the end of the trail overlooking a rock outcropping just offshore on which harbor seals like to roost for several hours a day. Sometimes there are a dozen or more seals on those rocks, sometimes just a few, and sometimes there are none. The seals are light gray and dark gray and various shades of brown, their colors very close to the colors of the outcropping.

Now here’s an interesting thing to me about this outcropping and those seals. We have arrived at the point overlooking the outcropping a hundred or so times in my life, and the first thing I do when we arrive there is to count the seals. And many of those times, my first count misses at least one and sometimes more of the seals. My second count usually includes all the seals, but sometimes it takes a third careful scanning before I clearly see all the seals.

fin

Conception Vessel Seventeen piano/cello duet from Through the Fire