Gadding About

Sunday/Monday I rented a duplex. It is being remodeled, not available until March 20th. It will be crisply new, rather small, have the guest room I've promised all my friends (heads up! the guest room in Paradise will shortly be receiving!) and a lowrent version of the quintessential P.A. dual view. It's only a couple of hundred feet up and four blocks back from the bluff so has no looking-down-across-the-harbor effect; electric wires and nearby buildings, too. But by golly the Olympic Mountains in one direction and the Strait in the other.

On Tuesday, left work early to head over to Port Townsend, to talk and lunch with someone from my Zen Center life, and someone he knew in days there earlier than mine. Twenty-five years at least since I saw J. Leaving work, explained to R. that I was going to rendezvous with someone I hadn't seen in 25 years. Since she is 26, she found this datum completely indigestible. 'Just wait,' I said. 'Eventually you'll be my age and it will happen to you.'

Talk, lunch at the food coop, bookstore hopping, coffee break, waiting for ferry for J. to head back to Bellingham. At the metaphysical bookstore I got a string of prayer flags for the deck of my new apartment. (Forgot to mention, it has a deck...) This was my first visit to Port Townsend and it's easy to see the charms. Arty, literary, old hippie.

Tomorrow I go to Seattle to spend the night with G. and his family. I have seen him in more recent years, for one thing visited on my first NW spy trip when I was deciding where to move to; but the era in my personal history that G. belongs to, communal spouses and karma yoga and intercommunal newsletters and like that, reaches back OMG more like close to 40 years.