Send Me A Letter

Come down here and be my house monk. Course you can’t do that. Kids and all. And I am so much older than I used to be. I no longer look or feel very foxy, although god knows of course that I am a good-looking woman. Some things never change. I was watching Otis Redding at Monterey Pop, a time seemed to last forever, then. I don’t think I could bear to watch it if I didn’t, in some far corner of my dreams, think it could all happen again. Or never ended. Right, and Otis is not dead. He was twenty-five at the time of those incredible recordings. Twenty-five and bursting with a talent it’s hard to account for, with soul and good looks. Good moves. What if someone like that had lived?

Paul McCartney said, a while back, “I always feel as if the Sixties are just about to happen.” I wonder if he feels that way now. Of course, he seems healthy, he gets around. Hell, I’d perk up, were I to dash off to the Caribbean at the least sign of stress, and with a lover. Fucking is healthy. Though I don’t expect to indulge in that again. The men my age in Berkeley and surroundings are, how can I put this, pathetic losers? Obsessive old farts? That male rigidity of mind long since ossified. Were I to stumble across a good man just far enough out of a relationship and not taken yet … but for that, I’d have to leave house, wouldn’t I? And I don’t. Some days cannot, some just don’t want to. It’s just so bloody nice here, for one thing. I look out upon the brightest, shiniest golden light as it moves through the afternoon, french doors wide open to the air.

Now the breeze comes up, the redwoods slowly sway. The crows begin to call; soon they will all fly home somewhere to the west—not here, thank god, they chatter all night like a tree full of monkeys. Brown-shingle houses, flowers everywhere; this is an especially verdant year. It’s a lovely place to live and die, to be sofa-bound for months on end. Months that stream into years, so that Monterey ’67 seems a close and reachable part of the stream, an island towards which I might swim again—I still swim, still have my little pool—just as easily as the river will carry me away one day, floating my sofa, to that point on the horizon beyond all that we can see from here. I think about that, when I am especially in pain, especially useless. Floating, floating. It’s time that carries us in its arms. I don’t remember the last time anyone held me like that. I give in. It’s time which is my friend.

Take good care,
Zo