License to Dance

A few nights ago I dreamed I had a room in a shabby old Victorian house, the kind of place I remember from long ago days in upstate New York or Madison, Wisconsin. It was a sunny room with magenta walls and pale blue window frames, and there was a faded Persian rug on the floor by my bed and a smell of curry coming from the kitchen downstairs. It was definitely a student pad, but in the dream I seemed no longer to possess any of the weirdness and insecurities I actually had in the days when I might have rented such a room, and I was comfortable there in a way I never was in real life. I woke up in the night with a sense of surprise, oddly at peace with my history.

Could it be I am actually sort of happy? I think sometimes it’s a matter of allowingyourself to be.

Yesterday I had occasion to be in Los Olivos in the morning and watch the town wake up,at least to the extent that it does. At Jedlicka’s Saddlery a lean blonde woman in jeans was pushing a life-size horse statue over the threshold to its regular position outside the front of the store, while another lady pushed a broom and swept the sidewalk. Both smiled and said good morning. I went into the post office to mail a parcel and had a pleasant chat with the postmaster, whose son, now a fire fighter, was in my class long ago. An old guy in cowboy boots nodded affably and ambled across the vacant street. The weather was unseasonably warm but the leaves of the sycamore trees along Alamo Pintado had the yellow hue of fall.

A little later I wandered into Solvang where I struck up a conversation with the proprietor of a ladies’ shop that was going out of business, or rather she struck up a conversation with me. I had her pegged as a Valley Republican but it turned out she was downright jubilant about the election of Obama, seething with anger about the Bush years, and particularly eager to vent her disdain for Sarah Palin. It was either a reminder not to make assumptions about people or confirmation that the world is changing, a good thing either way. Afterwards I poked around in a thrift store: I found a tiny satin purse for Rose, a $2 floral print blouse of the kind Monte says I have way too many, and earrings for my mother with purple stones and old-fashioned screw-on backs. Then I did the grocery shopping, making sure I remembered ice cream.

Back home at the Ranch there are tiny black calves now, each a miniature replica of its mother.I can hear them in the grassy hills all evening, a pastoral medley through open windows. We've been short on rain, but in this California world where winter is more like the springtimes I grew up with, there are bits of green appearing, and the cactus on the deck is suddenly adorned with yet another bright flower. Everywhere I turn, there is a sense of new beginning. I have decided to allow for the possibility that things might eventually work out all right.

I even gave myself license to dance. I rode my bike down to the bluff, and my iPod was playing Miriam Makeba singing Pata Pata, and there may have been a residue of post-election euphoria at work here, but mostly it had to do with the sunset and the sweetness of the air and the fact that there was absolutely no one else around.

Yeah, I danced by myself on the bluff.

And you know what? It felt good.