Stepping Out and Moving Forward

It was Friday night in Santa Barbara and the sky was still blushing slightly while a crescent moon rose above the palm trees, and despite October’s hint of crispness in the air, the flip-flop girls were out and about, and the ones in little skirts and summer dresses. Couples sat over wine at outdoor tables and ordered hors d’ouevres in chic cafés and the aroma of wood chip barbecue drifted towards us along with the sounds of Latin music. Business was downright brisk and spirits bright and financial hard times had clearly not yet trickled down to State Street. “Wait ‘til this time next year,” said my companion ominously. Then we walked beneath an arch covered with bougainvillea, paused at the crosswalk, and watched the signal until that little man appeared with his purposeful stride and faintly lavender light.

I’d never reallylooked at that funny little fellow. It was our friend Jill, visiting from England last month, who pointed him out in the way an outsider helps you see anew the ordinary things you take for granted. She was charmed at the way healerted pedestrians that it was time to step off the curb, and even modeled in his stance the proper way to do it. She noted, too, the hint of color in the light of him. Now I smiled and stood poised and I mimicked his approach when he appeared. I pushed forward with resolve and decided I was feeling a little better.

It had been a wearisome week for all of us, but I'd found comfort that very morning in a workshop with teachers and writers, the kind of place where poetry matters and thought is valued and people encourage each other. We were still weirded out by the previous night’s debate, wondering why so many assessments of Palin’s mélange of incoherent word salad, hollow colloquialisms, misinformation and aggressive lies had been so generous. I suppose the bar had already been set so low she would have had to stagger on drunk, expose a boob, and puke on Biden’s shoe for her performance to be deemed anything but a success. But it was nice to hear intelligent and compassionate people confirming the reality and discussing issues and making plans and finding hope.

One of the presenters, Lois Klein, shared these familiar lines from William Carlos Williams:

It is difficult

to get the news from poetry

yet men die miserably

every day

for lack

of what is found there.

There was no lack of it in this room.

Now I was headed to the Arlington Theater to see Jackson Browne in concert. It’s no secret among my friends that I have a special fondness for Jackson Browne, but even the Arlington itself is a treat. Built in the 1930’s in a Mission revival style, the interior is designed to give the audience the sense of being outdoors under the night sky in the piazza of an old Spanish colonial town. The facades of stucco houses jut out from the walls, the white lights of little stars adorn the great domed ceiling, and one almost expects to see a señorita with mantilla and fan step out onto a balcony to be serenaded by her lover.

The crowd was mostly middle-aged, but what would you expect? A friendly stranger next to us looked around and said, “So this is what we look like now.”

And so we do, and come to think of it, ‘middle-age’ is a rather generous term.

Jackson, though, despite the title of his new album, was unconquered by time, and he was on. It was a generous show filled with dearly loved classics and fabulous new songs, enriched by the extraordinary gospel voices of Alethea Mills and Chavonne Morris, and it just kept getting better and better, until finally, with the entire audience on its feet, it became as hared acknowledgement of our profound desire for justice and peace and a transcendent call for change.

Back out on the street I again strode forward with the stalwart earnestness of the little lavender man in the signal. And maybe that's silly, but he seemed a kind of metaphor for something, and I'm calling it determination.

We are in the limbo window at this moment, that small eternity before the next step, when anything is still possible. We may just do it right this time.