Saturday Morning Beach Report/ Saturday Night Street Report

Curtain of fog drawn tight around the islands. In front: sunshine, surfers, sail boats, and sea birds. People who've lived here their whole lives say they never get tired of it.

As for the streets tonight, there's no one out there as far as I can tell. Please, someone, open a tattoo parlor, a coffee house, and a night club here. I'm not going out there into deadsville tonight. The man who loves me is not on the train, so I'm heading to the couch for a trip to the virtual streets of Albuquerque on a Breaking Bad binge-watching marathon.

In other news, I got my hair cut today and found the neighborhood where I might someday live. A post-industrial live-work set up with a nearby vista to the beach that literally took my breath away. And it's walking distance to the sand too. What I see: yoga and t'ai chi chih studio. Me living upstairs.

Come visit.

Everything's Coming up Rosy

The dream occurred just before I woke, or so it seemed. "She's having a seizure!" someone shouted as they stood over me. "Call 911." The light wherever it was that I lay on the ground seemed oddly bright and yellow. It's not a seizure, I said--or wanted to say. I could not speak. But later I was able to explain to someone that I'd been having a pain one of my feet (true in real life) and that I'd been trying to exercise my feet (also true in real life) by stretching and flexing them when a series of insane charley horses took over my body and rendered me speechless with the pain.

I may have had this dream because of what's been going on over HERE. If you're the one or two readers of this blog who aren't already reading Elizabeth's blog, I suggest you click away from the workings of my brain and visit hers.

If, however, you are still here, let me say that I've finally worked out my ACA insurance insanity. Yes, my rates have increased 96.6 per cent. Yes, my policy got cancelled and I got "offered" a new one for a huge new price. And when I went to the Covered California website (which works swell, by the way) I found that I could get the same Kaiser policy for 9 dollars more than if I bought it from Kaiser directly--and that there was no cheaper policy available for me. And no, I don't really understand why individual rates are so much higher than group rates. But this morning after the seizure dream, I made peace with all of this. The litany of people I know and love without decent insurance or any insurance at all seemed present this morning as a gorgeous sunrise turned the water in the marina pink. Yes, I have a house in Southern California on  a marina. I have enough room for my mother and my daughter to live here. I have enough money to pay the tuition for both of my daughters. This money is not going to  last, but for right now I'm going to pay my big fat insurance premium and shut the hell up. Everyone in this affluent country should have decent health care without the threat of being dropped or considered uninsurable because they are sick. You can read more about that over on Elizabeth's blog too.

Breathe. Lift Your Hearts.

My mom and I in 1968 or thereabouts--which means that she was in her mid-40s in this photo--almost two decades younger than I am right now. 

Breeeeeeathe. Lift your heart. This is what the yoga teacher said.

Breathing. Hearts lifted. Then backs arching for the dive back into the water. This is what the dolphins did as I walked on the beach after yoga.

There were dozens of dolphins in clusters of five or six or seven cavorting more recklessly than I've seen before unless I've been out on a boat. Completely out of the water, splashing, and diving, their dorsal fins appearing and disappearing as if an immense paddle wheel was out there in the blue-green deep.

October here in Margaritaville is more summer than summer. June gloom--which can stretch on and on--has been blown away by the dry winds, and we are left with an infinity of blue.

My mother is thrilled when it's warm and sunny. She likes to sit in the sun in her tank top. When it's gloomy and damp, she wears long underwear under her pants and a t-shirt and a sweater over the tank. "Sunny California!" she scoffs then. "Ha! Where's the sun?" The temperatures listed in the L.A. Times give her false hope. It's always a good ten degrees hotter there.

This afternoon she chatted with her sister on the phone as I sat upstairs in my room reading. I was engrossed in "The Feast of Love" by Charles Baxter. Transported by the novel's big proclamations about love, transported my my mother's voice--louder and stronger than I've heard it in years--I found that I was picturing her in our house in Iowa, stretching the long curling cord on the wall phone in our kitchen as she reached for her coffee cup or her pack of cigarettes. I was in my girlhood room lying across the old four-poster bed, reading--but also thinking I should be listening. This loud voice, this enthusiasm--what was she talking about? Wasn't there something I should be learning from these grown-up women? But I was reading.

There's something in the air here. We are breathing, opening our hearts to our past and future selves, diving in and out of the present.

the wind whipping the waves into weird shapes

The Santa Ana winds had already kicked up by the time I woke this morning. The water in the marina was blowing backwards, and I felt twitchy and weird. A couple of hours later, I had literally developed a twitch in my left eye. The twitch abated from time to time, but always returned. What am I not seeing, I asked myself. What don't I want to see?

Tonight after dinner, walking in the dark, the twitching lessened and almost stopped. Relief. And then two streetlights blinked out just as I passed them. Stopping, I turned around and watched as they flickered for a few seconds, then sputtered into black.

Is the left eye different from the right? I googled. Then I searched for eye twitching superstitions. Suffice it to say that there are many. All I've determined for sure is that my right eye is my dominant one.

courtyard at the Ventura County Museum on Sunday afternoon

The winds have mostly died down, but the twitching is back. A half-hearted gust rattles the dried palm fronds from time to time. They clatter like bones as if perhaps a few dead souls have forgotten to return to their world and are still walking about in ours.

a detail of one of the altars at the Dia De Los Muertos exhibit at the Ventura County Museum--the "sugar" skulls are actually eggs

At dinner on Sunday night, the man who loves me, M, and I told my mother about the Day of the Dead. The skeletons are happy, I told her. There are parties and food and drinks in the cemeteries. She said that sounded marvelous. But tonight I feel as if there are ghosts lurking just beyond the edges of my peripheral vision, and when I try to spot them they disappear.