up, up, and up

Three out of the last four days on the hill to watch the sun set over the bay  - not too shabby, even if it did take me 'til this week to get up there. This afternoon there were all sorts of people out. A wild and gray-haired auntie talking adult with the not yet teenage girl who held onto the back of her shirt as they hiked. Two men and little matching black and white speckled dogs, one of which was scared of me. The golden retriever puppy ignored my outstretched hand and got reprimanded by his owner. "Luca, come back here and say hello to this girl!" he scolded. Later we passed again and he said, "Look Luca, it's the girl you ignored before!" The shirtless man who jogs in hiking pants and boots and long gray hair and beard greeted me when he passed. On Wednesday evening he was the tiny figure picking his way down into the jaws of the great gorge. The bigness of the trees and the hills, and the littleness of the man. The scene was a Chinese painting. On Friday I saw it again and Ryan said he could see it too.

This afternoon I came from around the hill and scrambled down and down near the big tree and down into the cover of the brush and then up just as the orange sun was being squashed into the city haze by the line of smog overtop. I hurried up the path past the blanket holding members of multiple small-kid-families. Past the guy set up with his camera and tripod on a boulder facing out over the city. I liked that he gestured meaningfully toward the horizon, concerned that I was just going to walk on by. I smiled and sat down to watch.

C.S. Lewis wrote we are kids who refuse a trip to the beach because we're content making our mudpies. He was thinking about sin, and grace, and GOD!!! I think. I'm just thinking about life, about every day that I wake up and the world's offering me these chances, but it's just that - an offer - and no one's gonna make me do anything at all. There've been a lot of those days recently. Sometimes I choose to go out and see. Sometimes I fail.

I realized recently though (with surprise) that I haven't done a single Sudoku since I left Harrisonburg. Nope, not true. None except for the one I found on the single sheet of newspaper on a street near Chinatown. It had been used for sitting and was dimpled all over with the sidewalk impression. I bought a $1.00 bottle of fake orange juice to sit in the little bakery and filled in the numbers easy while I tried to figure out what language they were speaking.

Chinatown, as expected, was significantly not-familiar, because everything there is Cantonese, or dialects a lot like it. I did buy a bag of fresh green beans for $.90 at a tiny little market-grocery. Smiled to myself at being pressed in the line for the counter with all the aiyi's.

Today I almost convinced myself it'd be just as good to sit in the little backyard soaking up the sunshine comes in just as hard. With Zantu on my lap, stretching into every caress. (I thought, "I want a husband who craves my touch like this cat.") Reading about biga, poolish, sourdough again. I could have stayed contented.

But I put on my Chacos and found Arden steps and climbed up and up and up, and then up the steepest, sharpest hill in the history of everything, I'm sure. Lots of other people climbed up there too, but that didn't stop me from feeling pretty great about it. When I stood at the top and breathed my weight down into my feet-roots, and up through my straight hard back, stretching, breathing, it wasn't even happiness like a surge but happiness like underwater don't move and feel the water quiet around your legs.

Is the first line of Regina's "Samson" not the most beautiful line in such a long time? It floated just under my breath the whole walk. The towering Eucalyptus dropping it's bark reminded me again how different this place feels. Different from the American landscape that I know.