Music in the Park

The last First Friday Music in the Park for the summer, and the last before I leave for Burbank. 

The gazebo, waiting for the bank - Swing Gitane - to arrive.

The crowd is settling in and lining up to get dinner. $8 for a fabulous chicken, salad, special bread and a cookie from Alchemy, one of our favorite restaurants. You can see in the foreground the back of our favorite bench - right in front!

The lead singer, Susie Easley, just behind the kayak that was raffled off tonight. The kayak was donated by SNAC - Sierra Nevada Adventure Company, our local outdoor outfitters. Susie has a voice that comes up from her toes, and as she lets it out, she shapes it in a hundred different forms.

My dear friend Colleen (in the green dress) dancing with a friend. She was about the best and most beautiful dancer there. By the time the dance floor (asphalt) was crowded, it was too dark to take pictures. I am sorry that I didn't capture a little girl, Liliana, who attached herself to Colleen and her group of friends, and danced with them or alone for the rest of the evening. One couple brought their own dance floor! They explained to us that the last time they'd danced on the asphalt their legs were very sorry. They danced from the first note to the last.

Memories and moving

I sit here now while the piano movers take my piano away. It's not sad, it's freeing. There was a time when I was studying music, singing and piano, three or four years ago, when I got the piano, and it was one of a most eager and hopeful. Then things changed, and music became very difficult, emotionally and physically - too much stimulus, I think. I never did learn to play very well. Sloth (procrastination in one syllable) kept me from practicing, and then my life changed.

But music is back. If I want to play, I'm sure there's a piano I can use at the Burbank Artists Colony, or I can use my son-in-law's. I do plan on checking out the chorus at the Colony, and I'll see if that's a fit. I did sing - I might have mentioned it - in the reunion Memorial Choir, and was delighted, not so much with my voice, but with my ability to read and sing. I have put a lot into that skill, and it would be wonderful to exercise it.

Tomorrow night is the last Music in the Park, and my friends and I are going to be there. It's Swing Gitane, a group that performed earlier this summer and we loved them. You can check them out and listen to some of their songs on their new album, at swinggitane.com and think of me. I have lived in an amazing place, with some amazing events.

Moving date is set - Sunday the 16th of this month. I've got butterflies!

Murphys Creek Park

Memories to cherish.

 This is Murphys Creek Park. The first picture include the little waterfall (about a foot tall, maybe 18 inches) and has the gazebo and bandstand in the back. The second picture is the creek with its bridge, taken from the steps of the library (below). At the top of the steps is one of many Celebrated Jumping Frogs of Calaveras County.

In the summer the creek is full of children, wading, inner tubing, splashing. It's deep enough to be a lot of fun, and shallow enough to accommodate young children with their parents. It's also shallow enough to warm the water, which starts out as snow melt a few thousand feet up the hill. School started this week, and now the creek is empty.

There will be one more First Friday Concert in the Park next week. Different restaurants, stores, caterers prepare an $8 picnic meal, and we all sit on benches, lawn chairs, quilts, and listen to great local music, and some of us dance. That sounds like I'm one of the dancers, but I'm not. It is lovely to see couples who have been dancing together for decades, teenagers, young children, all out on the open dance space. 

Last trip to Stockton

My afternoon started with an iced espresso from Gold Country Roasters as I took off for an appointment with my psychiatrist in Stockton, California. Stockton is the nearest city to Murphys, and between Stockton and Modesto, both Central Valley towns, that's where we in the mountains go for big city supplies. Stockton also recently declared bankruptcy. Today there was Peet's coffee, Trader Joe's, and the shoe repair. It's a big deal, going to Stockton; about an hour's drive through the foothills into the valley itself, on narrow, two-lane winding roads. They've just straightened out the twistiest part of the twisties on Route 4, but many challenges are left. Can I drive at all without putting on my brakes? That means anticipating all sharp and often badly canted curves, and using downgearing. Do you want new brakes or a new transmission? It's a tossup. Oh, and tire wear.

My Birkenstocks had been at the shoe repair since June 1. I tried to pick them up twice, but landed on their holiday or vacation both times. They didn't charge me shoe rent, because I'd paid in advance. Whew. Another bullet dodged. Life in the wild west. Trader Joe's is the mecca for all Californians to shop for inexpensive Trader Joe's special brand of groceries. As I thought about how close I will be to TJ's in Burbank (five minutes), my usual stocking-up TJ's shopping came down to a bag of Oh my! Omega trail mix, two kale edamame bistro salads, and five chocolate bars. It would have been foolish to drive over an hour for those items. A stop at Safeway for cheap gas - $3.999 a gallon. Just two weeks ago gas was $3.749 locally and now it's 4.099. How far does one drive sanely for cheap gas?  I've never done the math. Last stop Peet's coffee, for a great cup of iced decaf espresso and a new glass water bottle to hydrate my new Southern California life.

The first time I was ever in Stockton was almost exactly 20 years ago. I was in my third day of sobriety and my daughter had started college in Northridge, Los Angeles County. She had driven down on the Wednesday, and her step-father and I drove the balance of her stuff on the Saturday, and drove back on Sunday. I was not driving, nor was I firing on all cylinders on Sunday, and didn't notice that we had missed the right-hand turn for the left-hand freeway I-5, and were barreling up 99. The freeways diverge, going north, just before LA. This in the days before GPS. They diverge widely, and when 99 gets to Stockton, they are about an hour apart. A u-turn and several foggy hours later, we made it home. 

Today will probably be my last trip to Stockton.

p.s. Back to Look to the Mountain, my sister and I decided that Coruway is probably a variant on Chocorua that was in use in the mid 1700's. Oddly, last night I was musing on the Indian spirits in the mountains, and their anonymity causing the name change, and a few pages later in the book, the main male character was also musing on the Indian spirits of the Mount Chocorua! Eerie.

Gold Country Roasters

I mentioned in an earlier note that I had spent a morning knitting and drinking coffee with my friend Barbaranne in a new incarnation of a Murphys coffee shop. And I mentioned that I'd forgotten to take a picture of it. Today, I went again to have coffee at the Gold Country Roastery, and today I thought of using my cell phone to take a picture of the big, brass roasting machine. They have put it in a room by itself with windows for observation. It looks like a small antique steam engine in a train museum. They told me that I'd missed the morning roasting.  Today there were five friends stopping in for coffee in the early afternoon. I had a orange-tangerine fruit smoothie, and then a decaf double espresso over ice to take with me for my mid-afternoon appointment.

This is one of many photographs of Murphys that I will take before I leave. 

A small town summer evening

This is Main Street in Murphys CA, population 2,000. It usually doesn't look like this, because normally, there are cars lining the street. They must have cleared it for the photographer! Often it's this empty at midnight!
Murphys has a park, and on the first Friday of every summer month, there is Music in the Park. Although you can't see it in the picture, just beyond the picnic table is a stream, cold from snow melt, but shallow enough to warm up in the summer, shallow enough for little kids to splash and swim, deep enough for tubing. There's a bridge from the park to the town library. Tonight was Music in the Park night, with the three-piece band named Plan B. The drummer is a local insurance broker - I don't know the other two. They played '60's and '70's music mostly, but they didn't just copy the Beatles or the Stones, they played their music, so the sounds were different, fresh. Most of the park is lawn, but the area just in front of the gazebo is gravely black top, and on a night like tonight, filled with dancers from babies in arms to toddlers, to oldsters who danced as if they'd never stopped. The eight dollar dinner is always provided by a local purveyor, and tonight's was by the local Sierra Market, and was the best I've ever had at the park, chicken, tri-tip, deli salads, watermelon, cookies. I was with friends, of course, and the music was too loud for conversation, but the warmth of sitting with best friends - as well as the warmth of the evening - was a balm to my heart, so I could listen to words of love and not cry. "They're writing songs of love, but not for me," kept going through my head. Music is still piercingly poignant.


This is the Murphys that I will be sad to say goodbye to.

Wherever You Go, There You Are

Two of my readers have asked where this phrase comes from and what it means. (I have readers?!)

It is claimed that the saying goes back to Confucius.

Wherever You Go etc. is also the title of a book by Jon Kabat-Zinn, with a subtitle of Mindfulness Meditations In Everyday Life. I've learned something of mindfulness meditation and it is the path my meditation usually takes. Jon Kabat-Zinn also wrote Full Catastrophe Living, which I haven't read, but probably am ready for, now that the catastrophe lives not so much in the present. Two other books come to mind: Be Here Now by Ram Dass, and Eckhart Tolle's Power of Now. They all teach the same lesson. Ram Dass' book was written in 1971, and is followed, after Ram Dass' full catastrophic stroke, by Still Here. 

That lesson finally came home to roost last night. I'd been the day before to look at a place to live in Burbank, near to my daughter. There are many good reasons for that move, my therapist, psychiatrist, and son all think it's a great idea for me. Of course there are pros and cons, as there are for everything, but weighing those didn't solve my dilemma. Confucius did. The truth is that I came away from viewing the truly wonderful apartment opportunity with only one thought screaming - "Give me a lot of chocolate, now!" That was the first clue that my mind  - my soul? - was trying to tell me something that had nothing to do with pros and cons. That thought grew through the next 24 hours, and became fully-grown and intelligible: Mostly I want to move because I think I am uncomfortable Where I Am. I am uncomfortable, period. There is good reason for this (see Full Catastrophe!) but the solution is not to take myself elsewhere, but to go inward and become comfortable there. I am Here Now. Where I live will be an easy transition in space, not an arduous dilemma; a smooth flow, not a rocky terrain to clamber through. I am reminded to be more diligent in meditation.

Let's check back in a year - in five years. 

For today, I took the 134 to the 170 to the 5, off the freeway in Merced, and then backroads to Murphys. I am Here Now.

Dilemma

I've been in Burbank for five days now, and just went to see the Burbank Senior Artists Colony, which I stumbled across one day on line. Alwyn, Daniel, and I went to have a tour, and saw a very affordable apartment, plus the many beautiful amenities of the apartment building. I have until 9:30 tomorrow morning to make a deposit for a lease starting September 1. And I find myself immobilized. Do I want to stay in Murphys? Will I have to move from where I am. Should I make this big of a move at all? (Northern to Southern California is a BIG change). Where do I belong anyway? There are so many questioning squirrels running around in circles in my head, and no answer gives me THE answer. I am so unsettled that I can hardly write. I was going to write about music - a much more interesting subject than my dilemma, but I'm afraid that this is what you get today.


I remember "When in doubt, don't."

Murphys

There's a new coffee shop in Murphys, and no, it's not Starbucks. It's a reincarnation of an older one, The Gold Country Roastery, that has been here longer than I have. It really is a roastery, and the smell of the roasting beans used to fill the east (I think it's east) corner of Main Street every Monday morning. The big, beautiful, copper roaster, in its old location was in the center of the room, like a behemoth of a pot belly stove. Now, in place a block away, the roaster sits in state behind a huge window of glass and looks like something in a museum. But it is still roasting our coffee - very good Italian dark. The space used to be a photography studio, and its walls are painted a color we were told was purple chocolate. (There I was again, without my camera, but I can go back seven days a week, and there will be another chance.) Barbaranne and I sat at a little table in the window, looking out on Scott Street. While we were drinking our coffee, we were each knitting spa washcloths for sale at the October Independence Hall Quilters Faire boutique. I've never used the technique before of knitting from both ends of the ball of yarn before, and spent much of my time untangling. I'll get the idea before I finish my eighth washcloth, I am sure.


Reading: The Women's Room is quite confusing and maybe the reason I don't remember any of it is because I didn't finish it. There's a first person, an "I," who appears from time to time, and this person just this moment owned up to the snarls of time. The book was written in 1977, and so far takes place mostly in 1955 to '59. Mostly, I say, because there are small sections which seem to be 1967. The women are about a half a generation ahead of me, so all is familiar and nothing is familiar.