Waiting For Life To Begin

I was alone.

You were just around the corner from me.

I am never going to know exactly which corner he is just around, but he is.

I texted back a dear heart who asked someone out on a date tonight how that was amazing and acknowledged, that yeah, it’s a lot harder than you’d think.

But.

Oh.

The freedom that I get when I get that shit out-of-the-way.

I’m free to notice the proliferation of flowers blooming in Golden Gate Park on my ride home from work.

On Wednesday’s I ride straight home and either meet with a lady at my place or take a shower and hit the spot up the street in my pajamas.

Yeah.

Like that.

I am not at all ashamed of the fact that I went up the street to 44th and Judah in my Hello Kitty night-shirt and yoga pants.

If Hello Kitty is good enough for Burning Man, she sure is good enough for the Outer Sunset.

It felt rather freeing.

No make up.

Hair down.

Flip flops.

Sweatshirt.

I’m in my hood, yo’ I can roll out like this.

It made me realize how grateful I am to be out here and also that I really am home.

“I like thinking out you out by the beach,” she said to me this Saturday at the celebration dinner in Oakland at the Lake Merrit Chalet House.

I like thinking of me out by the beach too.

And now that it’s Day light Savings time, I was able to catch the sunset on my ride home to the Sunset.

It was delirious.

And the flowers in the park were going off.

I even saw the buffalo in the paddock.

I don’t often see them as I usually am riding home in the dark.

There is so much to see when I allow myself the space to see it.

The gaggle of frisbee golf players tee’ing off as the dusk settles over the trees for one last round before night arrives.

A robin hopping in the soft dirt of a tree next to Spreckles Lake, the bright orange of his proud chest.

When I realized that I was moving on and pushing forward and making the next decisions on what I need to do now with graduate school, um, nothing, that I could in fact, uh, just you know, enjoy the show for a moment.

I believe I actually relaxed a little.

I mean I have plenty going on in my life, lots of wonderful ladies to hang out with, I’ll be heading to Berkeley this Saturday for a baby shower, spending the Saturday following going out to my inaugural visit to Alcatraz.

However, there is a tendency with me to be onto the next thing right away, that I must have something to shoot forward to.

That is me checking out of the here and now.

It’s not enjoying the song on the stereo, waiting for the next track, which will be better, and then the next after that.

I have been messaging back and forth with a gentleman on OkCupid and though he hasn’t asked me on a date yet, and I’m not concerned if he does or doesn’t, I think he will soon.

He’s French and the French do things slightly different.

There’s this lovely getting to know you period that I am enjoying.

And it doesn’t hurt that he says extraordinarily flattering things to me in French.

I don’t know which is better.

The things he is saying.

Or.

That I understand what he is saying, because my French is good enough to comprehend when a sexy French man is telling me he finds me ravishing.

Either way it feels a little like a courtship and that’s nice.

It’s also a slowing down.

He mentioned that in a message when expressed that although he really likes living in the United States, there’s two things that bother him.

The first is that we all seem to have a fear of each other.

Yup.

I can relate to that.

And that as a culture we are never quite happy with what we have, there is this constant striving for more.

Oh.

Yeah.

I know that too.

What was your favorite drug?

More.

I remember how my perspective shifted the first time I heard someone say, “if you don’t like what you have, why would more make it better?”

That gave me pause.

I love what I have.

My lovely little home by the sea.

My bicycle.

Even my Vespa.

Yeah, it’s not working and I’m not riding it, but I know how to get it fixed, and when I have the time to spare I will.

I have a great job with a family that loves me.

I got kisses galore from the boys today and snuggles and that was really nice, especially the reading time before nap time, oh the cuddles today were just smashing.

I am in great health.

My phone bill is paid.

I have money in savings for when my laptop goes kaput.

And I also realized after checking out the new MacBook Air on-line, that I now qualify for an educational discount through Apple.

Hell yes.

There is so much for me to be grateful for.

I have a purpose.

I have a point.

I am of service.

I have family and friends and love.

Oh love.

So much of that.

I don’t have to wait for my life to start, there’s nowhere I have to get to for it to be better.

It’s the best it’s ever been.

Even if I don’t have all the things I thought I would at this point in my life.

I have something far better.

Peace of mind.

Serenity.

Abundance.

Joy.

Prosperity.

Spiritual richness.

Oh gosh.

I guess that ‘hippy’ school I got into is indeed the right fit for me.

Who knew?

I still need to buy myself some flowers to celebrate that achievement, but I can feel myself being a lot happier about it and sharing it with my fellows has been really gratifying.

If I can do it.

So can you.

“You’re going to love school,” he said to me tonight.

And I will.

But I don’t have to wait for it to get here to enjoy right now.

Right now is pretty fabulous.

Me and Hello Kitty.

We’re just perfect.

Boom

We all scattered.

I have never quite moved so fast.

I scooped the boys, the shoes, the stuff, flung it in the stroller and hustled out of the park.

Yes.

I work in the overtly gentrified Mission, but folks, it’s still the fucking Mission.

It was too heavy a boom to be a gunshot, that sharp cracking sound that from afar sounds like “pop, pop, pop.”

No this sounded like a pipe bomb.

Not a muffler back firing.

What ever it was, it was enough to make almost all the nannies flee and a couple of the parents.

As I was on the phone to the dad a group of young teenage boys wheeled through the park.

That was enough for me, I didn’t need to know if it was a prank, a ball of firecrackers, or what, it was enough to motivate me to leave.

The Mission can be pretty and bucolic, but I have heard gunshots there, not so much of late, but they are there.

Plus, the whole guy going into the Mission police station and getting shot recently, I think the whole neighborhood has been just a tiny bit on edge.

I felt perhaps that I had over re-acted, but I am glad I reacted.

I err on the side of better safe than sorry.

I am a paid protector.

I am a nanny.

Hear me roar.

On occasion I roar at the other little beasties in the playground, because of the age range I am currently working with I have a bit more interaction with kids out of the toddler age and I see some bullies out there.

I won’t stand for it.

I keep myself to myself but if I see a kid push or hit or throw sand at my charges I intervene.

Yesterday there was a flock of poorly supervised kids and some of them were pushy with my boys and I bristled.

I admonished one group for flinging sand and retrieved some sand toys that had been misappropriated by the group.

I wanted to get all huffy and I had a moment of wonder at that.

Where were all the parents when I was playing?

I mean, I know where they were, they were doing what they do, but it sort of amazed me when I gave it a thought, I did not have the level of supervision the kids these days do.

I did not wear bicycle helmets, not that I do now, but every kid out there has a helmet on, for the bicycle, for the skateboard, for the scooter.

I don’t exactly disagree with these measures of safety, this is a far more urban landscape than the one I grew up in, but I am glad that I wasn’t so restricted in my movements when I was growing up.

There weren’t folks around telling us what to do or keeping an eye out.

There were not nannies where I grew up.

There were a few harried baby sitters in the neighborhood–I grew up in Section 8 housing on the North East side of Madison–and maybe a few teenage kids on the look out, but really not much supervision.

In fact, I was a baby sitter when I was in fifth grade.

I would not trust a child I dislike to a fifth grader.

Of course I was preternaturally inclined to be a care taker with my family dynamic being what it is, but still.

I also did  a lot of stuff that my mom might have had a heart attack if she had any idea.

Maybe that’s why I am a good nanny, I know the deal, I know what’s going down and I am hyper vigilant about the surroundings.

I realize that this means the majority of my life I have lived on high alert.

I don’t often relax.

I am a moving target.

It’s harder to hit a moving target you know.

As I get a bit older, somewhat wiser, and just a  little more honest with myself, I hope that I can let down that vigilance a notch.

Being newly coupled up I feel tender around this.

Like I may fuck things up by being myself.

Like I am that powerful, but that is where I go.

Better to over react by under reacting so that the bomb doesn’t explode in my face.

There is no bomb.

There is no shoe.

There is no spoon.

There is nothing there but the crazy making of an uncertain heart.

There are no problems.

Only opportunities to learn more about myself and be kind and gentle and forgiving and keep the focus on myself.

It doesn’t matter if it was a bomb.

I reacted like it was.

There’s a small town in my mind.

So I find myself opening up and inwards and outwards in moments like this, after I have tidied my place and set right the order and folded the laundry.

I reflect on the bicycle ride through the dark of the park and the sound of Lake Spreckles in my brain.

Doesn’t it sound like a great name for a root beer soda?

Spreckles Root beer.

And cherry cream soda and ginger brew.

Speckles Sparkles.

My brain rain ahead of me as the moon danced off the ripples of the lake, a bird rose up in the air, calling its heart out against the dark night and I was back on my bicycle instead of a soda shoppe on a date in the 1950s.

I breathed in the air and I could just catch the night-blooming magnolia on the other side of the water and my heart blew up.

There’s the bomb.

Know that true love exists,

the pain, the pain, the pain, of knowing that true love–

Exists.

It has nothing to do with whom I am with.

Or what job I do.

I love.

I got a lot of extra hugs from the boys tonight and I acknowledge that it was a rocky day, it was a scary moment and I needed those hugs and I needed that bike ride, and I need to remember that the memories of riding my bicycle by myself around the parking lot of the North Port Town Houses, are just as sweet through the patina of memory as the bicycle ride I take now.

I will always be riding by myself, although never really by myself.

On my bicycle.

Without a helmet on.

Because I can’t protect myself from life.

But I can stand still for the love bomb.

The shrapnel is not sharp.

It is just the kiss of air drifting on the buttery moon.

Over the frothy root beer foam of lake water at night.

Kiss kiss.

Bang bang.