after words

 I am a day back from a 2-week journey and I took 2 days in returning instead of the usual 8 hard hours of driving.  I pulled off the 101 at Avila Beach or one of those beaches before San Luis Obispo and I sat on a bench in a park looking out toward the ocean.  I read a book, The Circus in Winter, by Cathy Day, and watched the water roll from far out.  The last bit of ocean before sky, or sky before ocean, is faded purple.  A quarter inch of faded purple, lined top and bottom with a fine stroke of eggplant.  

From that bench just south of SLO, I sometimes put down the novel by Day and made notes in a palm-sized notebook with a wide elasticized band to keep it shut, the kind of notebook that opened up over the top like a steno pad, the kind I discovered was called a “reporter” style journal from a reporter-style man named Jerry at the memoir workshop the weekend before.  And the notes I made were about the Pacific and where it met the sky and the sky and how bright it was and the sparse grass underfoot and the cluster of houses with perfect yards across the street to the north of where I sat.  It was nine in the morning and the day was fresh and the sun perfect.  This was when I decided to take the Highway 1 coastal route, to take turnouts as often as I chose, to read or watch for whales or draw poor sketches of poppies and telephone wires laden with small birds. 

I think it was Monday then.  I was one hour gone from kids and grandkids in Santa Barbara.  I was more like four hours distant from old friends in Huntington Beach and the great ache I knew they felt because a small shadow of that ache throbbed in me - me, so very far removed.  How difficult, how impossible, how sharp-edged and fragile and blank, so very blank at times they must each feel.  I feel as thin as a slip of Bible paper to even write these words.  It seems dead wrong to chronicle grief - or to try.  Perhaps it’s the habit; I’ve been trying for such a very long time to chronicle my own, now the habit spills over to descriptions of theirs.  But no, I don’t think that’s it at all.  While I hurt for my much loved friends, I feel the absence too and ache for my own sake the loss of a life not known.