Family Detour

Eugene, Oregon

Portland to Eugene. Sitting right next to the bulbous silver turboprops straight out of Hollywood, unwinding with deafening noise as the propeller spins within arms' reach just the other side of the window. Its smoky shadow in the insubstantial air ploughs boldly into thick clouds, tumultuous as being on a motorcycle. Below velvet fields marked by tufty trees, black rock mountains, the overlapping profiles of blue and gray Oregon ranges. Placid broad rivers enrich the land.

The flight attendant stops to talk to me, her bright smile more real than I expect. She soon tells me that she too writes morning pages--aha! I left my notebook in Portland! (That has been gnawing at me, leaving behind those insignificant yet highly personal pages.) Could she pick them up for me? Alas, she's off to to San Gimignano! Another coincidence, a place I have loved in Tuscany. Too many coincidences leave us both uneasy, and she writes out her email address.

Eugene

Short visit with my 90-year old father. We watch the movie of the Freedom Riders. My father had been, at the time of my birth ten years earlier, employed in Montgomery as a consultant, to devise a scheme to equalize the black one-room schoolhouse, and the big modern white high school. The same man had been governor those ten years earlier. We feel a moving connection with the courage of those young people. But my father's 90-year old wife is uneasy with the cruelty of the Southern crackers and wants to go to bed so I'm left watching alone. Not before my father talks about the dust storm in Texas, during which one sister was born, and the call girl next door who babysat me while Mother went to the hospital. Or the snowstorm in Wisconsin, when another sister was born, so severe that a police car took Mother to the hospital. But my father's wife doesn't like to hear about these memories.

Next day, the Eugene airport. The plane is delayed 5 1/2 hours. Ah well. The space, the soothing mountain ranges through panoramic windows, and the space to practice tai chi, in that gentle airport. The mists of passage in the nurturing air of Eugene. It all fits, flows, falls in place, it is fine. My big elf ears listen for the rhythms of the empty space. And finally we board.

View from the terrace, SF

Green celtic sworls of land are soon lost in opaque whiteness, the obscurity that has kept the plane from its appointed rounds. Beneath the shearing clouds emerge green bristling valleys, and huge cloud faces, fabulous noses. Snow is trapped on piney mountains that sometimes curve into the backbones of ancient volcanoes. Mountains have long skirts of white snow, or are topped with powder. So much snow. Till the clouds part for San Francisco.

Meanwhile, Jacques is in London, accompanying his anxious daughter through her exams, and I miss his spine-stiffening presence. But now I can float a little longer each day. I can walk all over this sparkling city of San Francisco. The chill Alaska wind kept me from arriving, and still rips at the terrace of the apartment where I'm staying, but now the light of the sun intensifies, showing the blue hills of Marin over the gray bay. In the morning the parrots rise in screaming flocks. In the evening, a thin little dove perches near me in the fierce sun and wind. She watches me and settles in, until the sun's departure leaves her in chill and she rises into the air.

Nearby Coit Tower