Where Possibility Lives

The trip across town early this morning for my swim workout was dark, of course, as the swimming begins predawn.  Street lights were still bright at that hour, and the air was cold.  Later when the sky faded from indigo to pale blue, it was evident that the day would be clear and promising.

I made a second trip later back to the college, where the farmer's market is located.  The sky, ocean and everything in between was glistening as if it had just been scrubbed and polished.  The workout had been good, and I was hungry afterwards.  Even a bowl of oatmeal and some fruit did not keep the hunger down for long.  The market, I hoped, would fill my shopping bag with more satisfying fare.  

The market, as it is in the "off months," was peaceful and calm, and vendors spent time in conversation with each other and passersby, and many basked in the sun as they wiled away the time between 10 and 2.  If you'd have heard a loudspeaker playing a gentle melody, it would have fit between the conversations and rounded them to a point of ripeness.

A covey of four-year-olds arrived, guided by patient teachers who had brought them on a field trip to see the market .  They gathered around the Zena Foods booth, eyes dancing, looking for free samples of what might be offered.  They had been coached to keep their hands off of things, but the table top was only four inches below their noses, far too tempting for anyone that age.  Ahmed, attentive and enthusiastic, kept busy giving small triangles of pita bread to the small extended hands.  He spotted us and exclaimed that "Egypt's president is finally going away."  Mubarak was leaving his office, he said, much to our surprise.  We had not heard the update of the news, so we talked about it for a few minutes.

The children, never still for a moment, lost interest in the food and began to drift away.  They all waved good-bye and moved away in a wriggling cluster of energy, and the market gradually quieted again.  They had been a surge of controlled chaos with no intention except to move into the future where they might change it simply by arriving en masse and knocking the usualness of the past aside.

"This is a very good day.  Very good for Egypt.  Good that the people have made their voices and can make their own minds."  He shook our hands and said "We will talk again next week, eh?"  

In the middle of the day when the sun was at its highest point over the southern hills bordering our bay, we met a dear friend in Carmel and were again dazzled by the sparkling splendor of the day.  This is no winter; it is something particularly fine.  Heaven perhaps or the place where possibility dwells.  She had not been to Dametra Cafe, she said, when we suggested it.  Nor had we for some time now, so it became our destination.  Faisal's brother (just as hospitable and about 6 inches taller) was host and the servers were our warm-hearted friends in a matter of just less than a minute.  They dispense hospitality as if it were on sale.

As we had hoped, the oud was pulled down from the wall and the cook pulled from the kitchen to sing a romantic and poignant song to everyone, which he loves to do.  The tall and swarthy host, a man from the Middle East with a warm and charming smile, played the instrument that looks so much like a large brother to a mandolin and walked slowly between the tables.  Everyone was prompted to sing and clap in time to the chorus, which we did with gusto.

On television this evening I saw that Egyptians were washing and cleaning the streets of Cairo, proud of their city, the city they claim as their very own, wrested from the hands of an authoritarian ruler.  Egypt, said one young Egyptian, has lived through a wrenching change that was the will of the citizens, and it will be felt for fifty years now.  The light in his eyes was a reflection of the city lights around him, which shone in the night air while voices sang in the distance.

People Watching at Pebble

I was unable to post yesterday due to technical difficulties which have been surmounted, so here I am once more, intrepid blogger that I am.

In the middle of this week, we will begin play on the AT&T Pro-Am Golf Tournament over in Pebble Beach as well as two other courses.  Locals call the whole kaboodle Pebble Beach, so you may as well do the same.  Everything within the confines of the smartly guarded gates of Del Monte Forest is referred to as Pebble Beach, including Spanish Bay, Monterey Peninsula Country Club course, Spyglass Hill, Cypress Point, Poppy Hills and of course Pebble Beach itself.  Just like every country in Africa is called Africa by Americans.  We are just so odd that way.  Just lump it all into one and call it Pebble Beach, and you're good.

So, back to Pebble Beach.  The pros have been doing practice rounds to get used to the various courses and adjust to wind, sun, lack of snow and deer wandering around on the greens.  Up until today the weather has been summer-like and stunningly perfect.  Just to put a scare into the hearts of organizers, the weather is changing; it's blustery and much cooler outside.  Whitecaps are dancing across the waters of the bay like charging herds of sheep.  Or maybe like dolphins.  Dolphins are fast, but sheep are white, so I'm going with sheep.  Fast sheep.  There is a gusting wind from the northwest that is spanking flags out to horizontal on their posts, which should make tee shots be rather unpredictable at times for the golfers.

It is said that Bill Murray is in fine form this year and ready to play ball.  Always a fan favorite, galleries lean in close to overhear his quips and try for autographs.  Local boy and one of Pebble's august owners, Clint Eastwood may show his face here or there.  He and his friends are usually busy with guests and duties, but he may make some official appearances if he's in town.  Other fairly recognizable celebrities are signed up to start play on Thursday.  Most take the game very seriously, even clowns like Mr. Murray, and do their best to put on a sporting show for the galleries.  Fans often try to spot Mr. Eastwood at The Hogs Breath Inn in Carmel, but they'd have better luck in the evening down at Old Mission Ranch in the lounge where jazz musicians gather after hours.  Mr. Eastwood is a long-time fan of jazz and tasteful tunes, and he is more often seen there (he owns the Inn, by the way) than anywhere else.

Have fun exploring the Peninsula if you're here for the tournament - or any other time for that matter.  Carmel will be dense with fans once the rounds are done for the day, but relaxing, eye-catching beauty is rampant here this time of year, so almost anywhere you go will feel like a really great idea.  Just watch your hat.  That wind is tricky.

The Color of Life

Since November when I wandered off to Hawaii and back again, I have noticed Christmas colors gradually seep into the vistas and fine details of Honolulu and Hanalei and back again to San Juan Bautista, Monterey and Carmel.  Reflections of ochre and forest greens shine in window panes, wet streets, and metallic fabrics everywhere I turn.  The colors have been a curious mix of subtly dark earthen hues and then quick flashes of hammered gold and pounded silver.  The dashes of brilliance have been small, compressed, and vibrant, as if they were fire itself.  The season is pulsing with a tempered organic vitality, a dampened but hardly suppressed vigor that wants to spring free and grow.  There is possibility, a kinetic potential of poised energy awaiting its moment..  A dancer feels it as the moment just before the first downbeat of the music.

It has been a visual feast of a season but a quiet one, one in which delicate sounds have been more noticeable than powerful ones.  That very thing, though, emphasizes the feeling of coiled energy, as if the world has hushed to a whisper and rustle as it realizes the dancer is ready to begin.

I spent a good part of the day with friends in Carmel with Christmas glittering and shining in bits and pieces as we walked to town, and flowing before me on the beach at sunset.  

Carmel is a very small city surrounded on three sides by scenery so beautiful it makes your eyes blur with tears sometimes.  On the fourth side is a highway busy with traffic and human industry.  In the middle of it all is a peculiar and unique collection of people, their homes and their dogs.  Because it is all so unique and peculiar, it is odd.  Beauty and oddity is eccentric and that is really what Carmelites delight in.  Even if they don't delight in it, their peculiarities persist and they remain eccentric.  They insist on doing so many fussy and unusual things, collectively, that it gets to a point that if they did not have their own little city to live in, they might not really be able to survive anywhere else.  They, and their dogs, are rare breeds who require excessive amounts of attention and deference.  But, they are good people nonetheless and care deeply.

All that being said, I still love Carmel.  I don't spend much time in town even though it's very pretty.  Instead, I get to points south of Carmel where I have more breathing room and can feast my eyes on the exact thing that has brought all those peculiar people to Carmel:  The ocean and the land that meets it there.

At the end of the day my friends and I went to Carmel River State Beach.  There, we breathed deeply and stood still.  Christmas faded away from my mind and so did the rest of the universe.  In every direction there was natural splendor, and I was a squeak, a twinkle, a dot.  Then the forces of life and nature get on with their show, dancing with bright banners and pennants, flinging plumes and leaping spray, a booming shorebreak and hissing foam.

There's this thing about sunsets at that particular beach that I saw today:  It is emblematic of change and transition.  Far out in the western sky the blazing sun descends through layers of shifting cirrus clouds, sinking inexorably to the horizon.  To the south, surf pounds and leaps against stalwart cliffs that gradually crumble.  The flying surf atomizes into a drifting haze of mist that drifts inland.  Nearby, the Carmel River flows sinuously but quietly across the sloping beach to meet the thumping waves.  One form of water flows into another and then becomes cloud again, shifting and eddying, lifting and falling.  Gulls and pelicans stitch between breakers and sky, all through time.  None of it needs us to see it; it is fine on its own.

Millions and millions of people have come and gone from Carmel, admired its man-made beauty and determination to be different, but it would not be worth a red cent if it did not have that incredible ocean moving restlessly at its flank.  I saw scarlet, crimson, gold and silver shining in the windows of Carmel, windows decorated with lights and expensive trinkets and goods.  But the colors of life itself spread themselves in shimmering perfection at sunset.  Life is kinetic energy represented in the colors of Christmas that I've been seeing this winter.  Life is waiting, biding its time, signaling its presence in the colors of a golden sunset and every wet reflection and glistening drop of water.

Carmel-by-the-Sea: One Piece of the Peninsula's Pie

Carmel is the most densely built city on the Monterey Peninsula.  Multi-million dollar homes stand nearly touching, and yet each one is uniquely quaint or charming or grand or spectacular in some definitive way.  Because there is so much attention paid to the esthetic appeal of homes by their owners, there are more tradesmen and workingmen's trucks parked along streets than in any other city on the Peninsula.  Everyone is busy, up to their ears in the effort to maintain the now elite but formerly bohemian community that was started by artists escaping conformity and restriction.  Whereas artists once felt unable to abide building codes imposed by cities where they'd come from, now Carmel has become ultra elite in its effort to maintain its status as perfect and precious.

If you live in the city proper's 93921 zip code area, you don't have a street address like 142 Lincoln Street;  you have a description of where your home is generally found.  For instance:  Lincoln, between 3rd and 4th, third house on the right.  Your home has a name like Eiderdown or Peek-A-Boo or Sea Breeze.  Your home was designed by an architect, possibly a nationally prominent one, and it somehow distinguishes itself by virtue of expensive features and elements that sometimes defy description or categorization.  Certainly, real estate asking prices are not for the financially faint of heart.  

If you are a Carmelite, as you call yourself, you probably have vehement discussions about the trees overhanging your yard, the fence lines of your property, the color of your house and the amount of space your cars may or may not be taking up on the street.  There are no sidewalks and there is no post office delivery so you pick up your mail at the post office in town, but you make it a social event and spend time chatting about your dog or your massage therapist or your psychiatrist while you sip a latte or chai tea drink.  You most likely have at least one pedigreed dog for which you have probably paid over $1,000, and if you don't, you are planning to. You drive a BMW or Mercedes or maybe a Prius. You know where your neighbors and friends went to college and where their children attended college and you mention the names of the colleges as if they are equivalent to a pedigree.  You are a little bit fussy, a little bit eccentric and you expect things to get done when you want them to be done and expect attention to be paid to you when you are not feeling well or happy.  

Outside of Carmel-by-the-Sea is the rest of the Peninsula.  Then there's Pebble Beach, which is a gated community that is not a city at all.  It is as unique as Carmel, shall we say, but mostly because there are a zillion golf courses and golf balls zinging in every direction.  Homes and residences range from enormous McMansions built to impress passers-by, or truly grand well-designed and nicely situated compounds, all the way to surprisingly modest and ordinary ranch-style homes and post adobes.  Clint Eastwood, Peter Ueberroth and Arnold Palmer joined financial forces a few years ago, along with a number of other partners and shelled out $840 million dollars to buy Del Monte Properties, and they are now keeping it running somehow or another, the poor slobs.

On the north side of Pebble Beach is Pacific Grove where we have our own proud homes - many too expensive for the vast majority of Americans to own, but PG has a small, old-fashioned looking downtown, so it seems more within reach.  It's slow and quiet and peaceful most of the time.  There is one golf course - the city's municipal course - that costs a tenth that of green fees at Pebble Beach.  There are dogs here, too.  Most of them are rescue dogs grateful to have anything at all, much less a pedigree.  We have wind that makes us a little crazy every day, and deer that chomp our flowers as soon as we plant them.  And we have termites chewing happily on all the old historic wooden Victorian houses. We are working or retired and we shrug when a few things go wrong, but if anyone messes with our butterfly trees (where the monarch butterflies winter over), we become incensed and raise cain about it.

We think folks in Carmel are silly and they think we're boring and having nothing to do here, and we are both right.  We're all pieces in the same pie, but we find differences between ourselves for some reason.  Most of the time though, everyone is outside admiring the ocean and renewing their sense of awe at the grandeur of nature and their lucky stars for living here, however that might have happened.  Very few Groovers take it for granted.  In that one way, we are exactly like nearly everyone in every other part of the Peninsula - grateful every day to be alive, right where we are.