Our Life in California

Near San Ardo the grasses tremble 

and oak trees bend to the south against a constant wind. 

Here our faith is tested 

by the air that passes us ceaselessly 

and takes each lost breath as we stumble through the hills. 

The monotony of breathing, like our heartbeat, 

is not the reassuring monotony 

of the hills stacked row upon row 

beyond our bearing and our ken. 

The sun moves with the wind and will be gone, 

but there is another light 

coming from below, casting trees from the shadows. 

There is a shadow beneath me 

which moves as I move, 

and the tracks I leave in the fragile grass 

know more than I know of my duty here, 

my worth and my chance.

~ Gary Young

Someday, I’ll have the second half of that tattooed on me. Starting with the “The sun moves with the wind” line. I chose that as my quotation in my senior yearbook in high school (because I, in high school, was Into Poetry, Like, a Lot). I kept forgetting the title of the poem at the time, but I knew I loved that last half. 

It strikes me as vaguely funny now. Odds are really good that it wasn’t foreshadowing, and I still consider myself a vociferously loyal Minnesotan who happens to live in California, but still: kind of funny, to see wee li’l me at the age of seventeen so drawn to a poem called “Our Life in California” and then, ten years later, to see her building a life with someone in California.* I never once thought I’d end up here.

Now, at this juncture, I’d like to acknowledge that 1) the whole “I liked a poem with the word ‘California’ in the title, and now I live in California, you guys! Maybe that’s a thing!” business is some self-indulgent navel-gazing bullshit if I ever heard some and I (as I said) acknowledge that, and/or 2) in retrospect, everything is prologue, isn’t it? 

Of course it is, and nostalgiacs love that. That’s the thread that never fails to run continuously through our lives (us nostalgiacs, I mean): the desire to experience experiences, and then, later, to experience how and what we feel, and how and what we see, when we look back. We’re in love with looking back—not pining for whatever or whomever it is on which we’re looking back, but just the looking back, in and of itself.

Tumblrers: favorite poem/quotation/word thing? Ask a question and, thereby, share it with me?

*As an aside, with regard to the building of a life with another: five years on Wednesday. That’s—well, that’s most certainly a thing. You find home in the craziest places sometimes. 

And by “the craziest places,” I mean, “with someone wonderful, in California, which is crazy. Endearing, in ways, but crazy.”

Much like many of us, I suppose. ;)

Armories. Both San Francisco and Minneapolis have their armory buildings still standing. This makes me happy, on account of I like old buildings, and history, and such.

One was built on a Public Works Administration grant. Both were added to the National Register of Historic Places within the same decade. Both have served as film sets. Both cities struggled to find them a purpose once their original stores-of-armaments purposes were retired.

And as of today, one is currently used as a parking garage, while the other is currently used as the set and headquarters of a rather well-established BDSM porn company. Care to guess which is which? 

And all that aside, would either/both of them be good locations in which to wait out a zombiepocalypse? Discuss.

As of tomorrow, I will have lived in San Francisco for precisely one year and seven months.

In a city in which it seems people are constantly moving—to new apartments in the city; to the East Bay; to Portland; to New York and then back to San Francisco when they realize that yes, in fact, there is someplace in the country more expensive than San Francisco, and that place is NYC—this apartment is the place that’s been my sole home for the longest consecutive period of time since I was about nine years old. For most of my life I had multiple homes at once and went back and forth: from Mom’s house to Dad’s house, or from dorms to Mom’s house to Dad’s house, or from Minneapolis to San Francisco. But for one year and seven months as of tomorrow, I have had just one single address, at which I live and keep my things and eat and sleep and spend time, from which I go out and to which I return. And for the first time since high school, I have no pending plans to move anywhere else. 

Kind of weird to think about, in a way.