Posts from November 2013-November 2014 are part of The Manzanita Project, a joint effort of Kevin Wiseman and me. Each week, I write a post and he draws a sketch (unrelated). We're trying our hand at co-creation.
I have encountered very few magical places in my life. In fact, I can only count three. One was San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico and the nearby village of Moises Gandhi. One was an alleyway opening up to a small courtyard on a cobblestone street that ran alongside a church in Barcelona, Spain. One was Flagstaff, Arizona, USA.
I suspect that my feelings about all three of these places had more, in fact, to do with my place in life when I encountered them than any magic emitted from the places themselves. Then again, you never know...
I moved away from Arizona just weeks after graduating from high school in 1995. In doing so, I forfeited a scholarship offered by the state and found myself working two crappy jobs outside of Cleveland, Ohio. That got old pretty quickly, and in spring of the following year I was able to claim my scholarship after all, and I roomed with Nicole, who'd been there a semester by then and was able to show me the ropes. I stayed one semester and then returned to Ohio with every plan to come back again in the fall. By I got waylaid, sidetracked, and I guess--to sum it up--my then 17-year-old self was in need of a little more time in the nest.
Buuuuutttt, a single winter in Ohio was enough to turn all that around. And one day I just jumped on a plane and headed for LA, where I knew there was sunshine and family, both of which I was counting on to lift me out of the fog I'd meandered into.
No such luck. LA was not the place to get happy. And yet still, slowly, bit by bit, I DID get happier there. And when I'd shaken the gloom of Ohio completely, I got into my Nissan Pulsar and headed to Flagstaff, where Nicole still lived, now with our mutual friend Kelsi. And *that* was when I discovered the magic that little mountain town held.
I'd only been there a couple of months when--full of the promise of endless possibility and the faith in all encounters happening in just the right timing and with just the right people--we hatched the plan to head to Mexico to serve as human rights observers in Chiapas. The 6 months I spent in Flagstaff and Chiapas combined for one of the most formative experiences of my life, and I will be forever grateful to both places and to the wonderful women with whom I shared it.
This is how I'd thought of Flagstaff, when I did, in all the intervening years.
Unfortunately when I passed through Flagstaff most recently, a few years back, the experience was memorable for completely different reasons, none of which were pleasant. It's bothered me that my last memory of a town I'd so cherished and adored could have been so completely tainted. It doesn't seem like it should be possible--and perhaps I shouldn't have let it--but these things are easier said than done.
Even better than ignoring the troublesome memory anyway, was to have another go at it...another chance to take in the town of my dreams.
Today's New Activity: Memory Overwrite--Flagstaff, AZ
Of course I do recognize that memories cannot be overwritten like CDs or bad tattoos. And it's probably for the best. The sweet would not be so sweet if not for the sour interludes. But it was appealing to me to have the chance to replace my most recent, sad memories of Flagstaff with some more pleasant ones.
Mission accomplished. Monkey was so happy I could believe he'd somehow been there before. Maybe he visited it in a dream or somehow plugged into mine. He watched the hippies doing Jiu Jitsu and playing with hacky sacks. Then he ran around with Sureya and Maya on the campus of NAU on the grass across from our old dorm room at Cowden Hall. He looked as happy and free as I felt.
We also paid a visit to the Downtown Diner, a place that held some special memories for us, and Nicole and I both scored some cute wearables at the Animas Trading Company.
We weren't able to stay long, since we were due at Nika's Mama's house in Phoenix in the evening, but it was long enough for me to breathe the fresh, wonderful mountain air, and to remember that Flagstaff was still the magical place I held in my memory. And I hope it always will be now.
Don't trust your GPS. Don't. In fact, just go ahead a toss it out the window because it is probably making you dumber, navigationally speaking (I know this electronic dependence phenomenon as I work in a bank and see that, since the old bank was eaten by the new bank and they took the calculators out of the lobby, nobody can seem to add the figures on their deposit slips. Many don't even try), even as it is frustrating you and causing you to waste precious time.
Or maybe you have a good GPS, I don't know.
I don't have one because I've been fortunate enough to have a pretty decent sense of direction, and a kind of inner map that keeps me on course. I could try and describe how this looks in my mind, but it would make me a little crazy. I'm sure you all have your own versions of maps in your brains anyway, so you know what I mean by this. Anyhow, despite this inner map--which has worked out pretty well since I first took to the road 16 years ago now (has it been that long?!)--I have recently been relying on Google maps, via my phone, to do the road negotiating for me. Lame move. It sometimes lies, you know.
Today I was heading home across the Dumbarton Bridge, a route I take about 2 times per week. On a lark, I decided to wing it and do what ended up being
Today's New Activity: Take a New Route Home
The main reason I went a different way was that I kept suspecting the suggested route Google maps gave me was not the most efficient one (sometimes I simply cannot ignore the German in me, not that I'm trying). And so at the last minute I took an earlier exit and got to the bridge faster and without having to backtrack. Okay. Good. Better route.
But the MAIN reason I wanted to take a different way home was that I just can't bear to drive a lonely road. And the route Google maps had always suggested involved driving down an industrial street with the saddest looking establishments--mostly dumpy old liquor stores, and not a sentient being in sight.
I'm wondering if other people have similar aversions to lonely roads like this. There is evil lonely and good lonely. Evil lonely makes you feel sad and wonder if you're the last person on earth. Good lonely makes you feel peaceful and that you wouldn't mind if you were...the last person on earth, that is.
Driving over the bridge itself--the reward at the end of the sad approach road--is lonely done right, especially in the dark of night. In the rearview mirror I can see my son sleeping. Totally at peace. Over the guardrails to each side, I can see the lights across the bay, and the black and silent water a perfect, bottomless well of mystery. I think it's kind of eerie in the best possible way.
I love driving. It may not seem so, given my complaints about extra traffic a couple of days ago. But who likes driving in traffic?
I mean, of course, that I love driving on the long, open road.
A couple of years out of high school, I was living (whilst my soul was dying a little every day) just outside Cleveland, Ohio. I'd fallen into a deep depression, which I didn't realize at the time had at least something to do with the weather there. It was snow upon snow upon dirty, grungy snow for months on end. I'm a California girl through and through, it would seem.
Sometime in the spring (though the snows were still a-fallin' in Ohio), I flew out to L.A. to see my family. While there, I drove to La Mirada to visit my friend Renee, who was studying at Biola University. I remember sitting outside a coffee shop with her, the sun warming my skin and filling me with a happiness I hadn't felt in many months. I was not 3 days home from that trip when I'd decided to move back to California immediately. I took only what I could bring on the plane.
A few months later, I decided to go back for my car. Thus was born one of the greatest experiences of my life: an Ohio to California (by way of Illinois, Idaho, Washington) road trip with my brother and my best gal, Nicole.
Nicole learned once and for all to drive stick shift on the trip. We lounged lazily by a creek in Elkhart, Indiana waiting for a new radiator on that trip. I cut my hand on a paper towel dispenser at a rest stop in Minnesota on that trip...leaving a scar that brings me joy every time I see it.
And Nicole and I decided we were going to make money at this driving thing. We daydreamed of becoming team truckers--talking and listening to music to pass the endless miles...and getting PAID for it. We could scarcely imagine a better way of life.
Yeah, but that never happened. And it's probably for the best, since I don't like truck stop food and enjoy my trucker belly-free way of life, as it is.
Anyway, it took a good year living back in California for me to climb out of my funk. As I hadn't a friend to speak of when I moved there (aside from Renee, who was crazy busy with school and a good distance away), and I wasn't exactly the barrel of fun that might attract new friends, I spent a lot of time working, listening to music, or whiling away long hours into the early morning at Denny's, journaling and writing letters.
Then, one day, I felt a little bit better.
On that day, I got in my car (a little metallic light blue Nissan Pulsar with t-tops and bucket seats....man I loved that car) and headed for Flagstaff, AZ, where Nicole was going to school. I didn't tell her I was coming. I just went.
Driving over the elevated passes just north of Los Angeles, and transitioning into the long, flat, forever highway 40, I could feel the heaviness of my fog lifting further and a new sense of freedom taking hold.
The Grateful Dead tape in my cassette player helped.
Listening to that right now makes me want to cry. Good cry. Remembering the newness of that hope I felt then kind of cry. It's a feeling I'm experiencing all over again now.
A month after that visit to Nicole, I was packing up the Pulsar to move out to Flagstaff for good. I've known some magical places, but Flagstaff was among the most magical, and its arms reached out to rescue me with the perfect timing that only a magical place can know. It was the official end to my sadness, and the official birth of my *true* adventures with Kelsi and Nicole, with Chiapas, Mexico (long story), with men and other afflictions. ;)
Why do I bring all this up now?
It's because driving over that bridge tonight, I recalled that on-the-road sense of abandon and weightlessness I haven't experienced in years. And I feel the road calling to me again with its healing promise. Almost nothing I can think of right now sounds more appealing to me than loading monkey, music, and munchies into the car and hitting the open road.
Well tonight's first will be a first for anybody participating, seeing as this particular event hasn't happened for 372 years. But it would have been a first with me even without the special solstice event, as I've never seen *any* kind of eclipse before.
Today's New Activity: Witnessing the Winter Solstice Lunar Eclipse
Wow. As I write this, the moon is completely covered by the earth's shadow and it has taken on a gorgeous, reddish hue. It is truly one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen, and I feel lucky to have been witness to it.
I've been outside for about an hour and a half now, am nearly frozen and can hardly type, but sharing this experience with my parents has been singularly wonderful. We have talked about wishes and gratitude, and have grasped sometimes with futility for the right words to describe this show nature has given us.
Also, watching as thousands of previously unseeable stars emerged from the darkness reminded me of the months I spent living in Flagstaff, AZ with my girlfriends Kelsi and Nicole, over 10 years ago now. That was one of the happiest, most carefree and open-to-everything periods in my life, and it seems apropos to have it come to mind now.
What a magical night it has been...
And in totally unrelated news, except that it involves orbs that seem to be glowing but are really just reflecting light, I bought a lava lamp today. It's not new to me, as I've had a few before, but it was new to the baby, who loved it and stared and pointed at it with enthusiasm. Little hippie after my own heart! :)
