Anniversaries

It was just about this time of year almost 30 years ago that I arrived in California. At first I was still traveling up and down the state, visiting grad schools and living in campgrounds; the one thing I remember in particular is the smell of the air at night. It was quite different from the place I had just come from; there, while the smells were sometimes intoxicating, here they seemed more radically real and bracing—as if I had finally come awake in a dream. From the North down to the South and back, the night air always seemed full of whispered secrets and life.

No matter what else changes – and everything else has – when later October rolls around and the air takes on this mood again, time collapses around me. Breathing in, I stand lonely and aloof in my oratory, looking out over all the different Sues as they stumble and curse their way along the path. Breathing out, I speak for all of them in speaking the name of love, in saying the journey is still worth the costs. Then I hurry to reassure my cats that I love them just as much as I do California.

Many years ago, I traveled to a martial arts get together up in the pine-clad mountains. A few of us were housed for the night at a teacher's house in the woods. Over coffee in the morning, as we admired the pine trees outside the windows, one of my training partners said, "You know that feeling, how sometimes if you see a pine tree, it's like you're seeing all the other pine trees you've ever seen or all the other pine trees that ever existed and they're all in the same place at once and you can get from where you are to any of those other places when that happens?"

"No," I answered. I had certainly never had that experience, and I was someone with extensive knowledge of conifers and even many deciduous trees. Also, my training partner was entirely the wrong person to be making that kind of observation in the first place. As far as I knew, her priorities were chasing girls and her career as an journeyman electrician; she had never evinced a single mystical bone in her body.

Being the remorselessly rationalizing creature I am, I attempted to pin her down about exactly what she meant regarding this aspect of conifers that I was completely unfamiliar with. I was genuinely curious about what she meant.  However, the coffee had not yet kicked in, and maybe it could never kick in enough for someone like me. My companion refused to elaborate. She said something like, "Well, if you don't know it, you don't know it" and refused to talk more about it. I tucked the experience into my anomaly box, where it sat until I finally saw one of my own personal pine trees. It turns out they do exist.

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I've had place and time collapse in on me to expand infinitely more than once since first hearing that peculiar story about the universal pine tree - or, perhaps more accurately, I have been more cognizant of it. The late October, California air flowing in through my window is one of these transport devices for me.The zafu (a species of plump flying carpet) is another and the Sonoran desert with all its denizens, seen and unseen, calling out to me is a third. They apparently do exist, but heaven only knows what yours might be.