Favorite Philosopher's Blog

Oh man.  This morning.  It was 6 a.m. and my friend and I were out walking our usual route which takes us around the neighborhood and gifts us with ocean views from several angles.  Each day the view is unique as the weather and light make up their minds as they go along, never the same from one nano-second to the next.

This morning I walked out and the “June Gloom” of the SoCal coastline was gloomier than usual, actually misting.  I love this, of course, tiring as I do of too much sunshine.  As Chris and I walked, we came around a bend and looked out to the sea.  It was an artist’s palette with but a single color – every possible color of gray.  Gray ocean, gray mist, gray sky, each linear swath containing its own value variations.

“Doesn’t that look cool, that one sailboat out there?” Chris asked.  Indeed it did.  I am going to have to start carrying a camera on those morning walks, along with my vitamin drink and kleenex and dog poop bag and the dog on the other end of a leash.

The boat was barely visible and appeared as a bit of mist itself, sail and boat melting into each other and into the water and sky surrounding it.  It didn’t seem to be moving from our vantage point.

My vivid imagination went into overdrive.  It was surely a ghost ship, not really there at all.  The more we watched the more it seemed to taunt us.  It was impossible to imagine that there were human beings sailing it.  I squinted to make it come into sharper view, but no. I can’t help think if I had taken a photograph…it wouldn’t have shown up at all.  It was that ghostly, that surreal.  Alas, I will never know…

I have a new acquaintance I met a few weeks back.  We have a grassy area across the street where people come to run their dogs.  I take Ed out on a LONG leash since I can’t trust him.  When there are other dogs he pretty much sticks with them, so then I move to the shorter leash.

Chris has been a godsend.  She grew up in San Clemente and is very friendly and very funny and is a walking talking yellow pages for the area.  She has two school aged daughters and a husband and of course, Hazel the dog.    Hazel is a rescue too and is kind of a terrier, much smaller than Ed.  They have a blast and have become quite…ahem…romantic of late.  Fortunately they have both been neutered.

Chris started a new job a week or so ago and so we decided to get up early – like 6 a.m. – for our 15 minutes of chatting and watching the dogs play.  She texts me that she’s on her way, I hop out of bed and walk across the street.  Yesterday was our first day of this new routine and as I was walking out of the garage with Ed on leash out of the corner of my eye I saw him – a gorgeous coyote prancing across the street about 300 feet away, headed straight for the canyon beyond the park.

He was moving fast, his head turning from side to side, scanning for who knows what.  He disappeared down the canyon and apparently hightailed it over to the next cross street a good block away, as Chris saw him coming out of her house. He was the most beautiful coyote I’ve ever seen.  Most of them that I’ve seen in Yosemite or anywhere out west are scrawny buggers, look like they haven’t had a meal in weeks.  This guy was obviously well fed and I don’t like to think on what.

Today I was sitting in the tv room and something else caught my eye on the  short wall in the back patio area.   Darned if it didn’t look like a roadrunner, but certainly not here near the ocean.  I didn’t get a chance to look it up on the computer until tonight, and when I did I searched “birds of Orange County, california.”  I was quite astonished when I discovered that it WAS a roadrunner!

Then I remembered the coyote.  But of course!  It all makes sense now…

 At a Toastmaster’s meeting recently one of our members, a woman over sixty, had just returned from Michigan where she had ice skated for the first time.  She said she decided she was going to learn to ice skate.  I told her I was very interested in having an ice skating buddy.  Having grown up on a northern Illinois lake I know how to ice skate and it really is like riding a bike, in that you don’t forget no matter how long it has been. We exchanged numbers but of course I lost it and she doesn’t make every meeting.  We’ll meet up again but in the meantime…

I guess I’m getting to that point in my life where I realize that I’m not getting any younger and that if not now, when?  After skiing in Colorado that weekend with Joe and Tina, I came home with a yearning to live in winter wonderland country.  I relished in the snowstorm that hit while we were skiing, and happily took the ski lift back up in a white-out just to experience that wonderful feeling of wrapping the scarf around your face and bracing through it as you turn into a human snowman in a matter of minutes.

Obviously I’m not moving to Canada or Colorado anytime soon.  I started thinking about the ice skating again.  I made a decision to buy ice skates, so that I wouldn’t be deterred from skating because of the lousy rental skates that pinch your feet in all the wrong place.  I went to the local “ice palace” and was delighted to find it an active place – hockey teams of all levels with local competition trophies and banners, skating lessons for all ages, including adults, and a pro shop that had the cutest ice skating competition costumes you ever saw in your life. The girlie girl in me was just tickled pink.   I was fitted with a pair of skates but unfortunately by the time they were sharpened the public session was about over.

I don’t think I have ever worn a pair of ice skates that were sharpened, so hopefully my assertion that “it’s like riding a bike” will not sound foolish by the end of the week.  While I was waiting for the skates to be sharpened, I got all the info on the adult classes.  No, I am not to old to learn how to skate backwards.  Yes, I can sign up for an eight week adult class on Wednesday nights that happens during public session.  Yes I can learn to do some fancy dancy things if I want to.  I’m not too old.

When I got home I did a google search: skating competitions for seniors.  I don’t really want to compete, but it exists, can you imagine?   I’ll be happy if I can skate backwards, but what if…I can do crossovers?  What if…I can do a little teeny jump?  What if…I could skate anything other than straight ahead?  What if…I could put on my iPod and glide around the ice and pretend…?

Tonight I happened upon Dancing with the Stars on TV.  I have seen this show in the past and don’t follow it, but it dawned on me during only this second week of the show, that these people – like Andy Dick for heaven’s sake – can learn to dance like this in a very intense but short period of time, then maybe I really can learn to skate backwards.

Back in Illinois, my friends and I would fake figure skate, always dreaming for more.   It really never occurred to me until recently that I can put on a pair of skates, take some lessons, and pick up those little girl dreams where I left off.

I’ll keep you posted, but right now I’m seriously thinking it might be prudent to do a google search for those protective hip pads they sell to older folks.

Here it was, so suddenly it seemed, almost impossible to believe a year has passed.  It is the first anniversary of Terri’s death.  Of course the deep grief has subsided.  I was blessed with a phone call from two of her other close friends who had also been present that night.  We have survived this difficult year.  I did not have to work today and just sort of meditated my way through it.

I remembered how when I left the hospital that night, there was a woman coming into the hospital in a wheelchair – about to give birth.  It gave me pause and I had that surreal feeling you get when you realize how very bizarre it is that we exist at all.

I could have spent much of today mourning.  I didn’t, and I think it is because I remembered that baby-about-to-be-born and realized that although today is the anniversary of Terri’s death, it was also someone’s birthday.

Terri would have liked that, I think.

When Al’s Mom passed away we inherited a nice wall clock from her.  It “bongs” and has weights and the pendulum tick-tocks and you wind it up with a pretty key.  A few years back it stopped working and I finally got around to fixing it, hauling it up to Napa to a good clock fixer.  He said the problem is the cables that hold the weights and turn the cogs are kind of old fashioned (i.e. they don’t use them much anymore) and the wires can get crossed when you are winding which brings time to a halt.  $200 later I took it home and carefully put it back on the wall.

I forgot to mention to everyone that you have to wind it very slowly and gently, rather than as if you are reeling in a very large fish.  Not that I’m blaming anyone but myself of course.  It stopped again.  I took it off the wall and tried to see in there where it might have gotten caught up and if I could fix it.  I called the guy and he gave me the name of a buddy who could stop in and fix it for me. For one reason or another it never happened.

Time continued to pass without the clock marking it off, and then we moved.  I packaged the heck out of it and figured once I got it on the wall in our final living space I would find another person to fix it for me, maybe even replace the weird wires completely.

Last night I unpacked it, and as I unwrapped all the bubble wrap and the paper and took off the tape that kept the wires from bouncing around too much, I wondered if maybe all that moving around might have jarred it back to its senses.  My cuckoo clock is kind of that way, if it gets off the cog the remedy is to turn it upside down.  I had actually even tried that with the wall clock, which was not an easy task as it weighs probably 25 pounds and is unwieldy.

I put it on the wall and was happy that my first choice was perfect. Did I mention I asked the previous owner to leave all the picture nails in the wall – I liked her decorating and since I’m lacking in that skill I knew it would help me put stuff up.  Case in point with the clock.

I went through the routine, hung the weights, manually  took the big hand around 12 hours so the chimes would get in sync, leveled the clock so that it was a steady tick/tock as opposed to tiiick/toctiiick/toc.

14 hours later it is still going.  I really can’t believe it and am a bit afraid to wind it when it needs it.  Until then I guess there is an antithesis to Murphy’s Law. Sometimes, when you’ve been following Murphy’s Law dutifully, finding that the handy over-the-door ironing board does not fit over the door, having to return the 25 ft garden hose because there is not a spigot within 25 ft of what you need to water, realizing that you already have two donation boxes full of stuff that you should have left back in the Bay Area…sometimes, Murphy’s Law is broken and if something can go right it will.

Now.  The dog is pacing and won’t stop looking at me.  It is twenty minutes past his feeding time.  I don’t need a clock at all, really.