Life List

A friend of mine keeps track of time’s passing with a list of everything he’s done. I’ve seen it. One folded piece of notebook paper holds 3 years. He writes small and without detail, just a continuous list. It’s not big things like “the horse I found wandering downtown with a lame leg won the Kentucky Derby today” or “bought a steam cart and began selling vegan tofu dogs in lower Manhattan” – his is not a list seen in hindsight. There is a calm peaceful feel to a list like that, eternally current, somehow “true” and far more manageable than an unruly narratives’ vain attempt to capture time in sentences and paragraphs. I wish I’d started one long ago. My father used to keep a notebook by the window and write down the weather every day. I like that too. Especially since memory’s random erasures insures that the life tapestry I am busily weaving is full of holes, dangling threads and pattern reversals. Here, at least, there will be a straightforward chronicle of the events that constitute my life on Planet Earth between October and December 2007

The last entry in our blog was October when we left Berkeley to drive to Chicago for Jon’s memorial service. Here’s a list of that drive.

Slept on the ground surrounded by the Mojave Desert, the low yellowpink rays of sun spreading out beyond our toes.
Sandy canyon bed in Cibola National Park, New Mexico
Picking grapes in Santa Fe to help a vintner whose mother had died suddenly
Sweet crying for Jon, for Jim, for the bittersweet pleasures and pains of life while soaking off grape stains in the hot tub
Bought 2 lbs of local organic quinoa in the shadow of the Sangre De Cristos Mts.
Sadness and despair catch up to us in Nebraska and the worst cup of coffee - ever
Made a quiet circle to honor Jon in the Hennepin Canal State Park in Illinois
Thunderstorm towers over Chicago as we drive in to Andy’s ancestral grounds
Honoring Jon again among friends and family with stories and songs

Here’s a list of October, November


Urban living in Magnolia in an overgrown lot in downtown Carrboro, NC
Magnolia as motor home! Thanksgiving in the Appalachian Mtns and Asheville, NC
Blue Ridge Parkway is the perfect road for Magnolia – sloooow and easy and no other vehicles.

Explored the mouth of the Little Manatee River with my step-mom.
Discovered Turkey Oaks along the Florida Trail (unlike most trees whose leaves arrange themselves for optimum light absorption, their leaves are perpendicular to the rays of the sun)


Psychic says I will have a new career by my next birthday (August… stay tuned!)

End of the year, December 2007
10 days of meditation in the gathering darkness in the Berkshire Mtns of western Mass.
Solstice in the Green Mountains on the shores of Lake Champlain
Zpora gets her monthly chemo infusion at Fletcher Allen hosp. Six more to go.
Catching up and touching down with friends and family
New Year’s Eve Paella and grapefruit, shrimp and avocado salad (OK, that’s planned!)
Conversations, arguments, silence, meditations, walks about next steps in our life/lives