Equipped with a most portable new Surface Pro that has a decent battery life, I am sitting outside on my terrace as I write. It is breezy and still warm at 11:30 p.m. and I can count some fifteen brilliantly shining stars even here in the middle of Los Angeles. I think the one going out of sight soon, is Orion's Belt.
This little terrace, which in large part faces a wall, but in a part significant to me, also looks down onto our condominium's pool, and upwards toward very old palm trees that are currently swaying fairly wildly in the wind, is a piece of paradise to me.
I brought the tablet cum attachable keyboard out here when I thought of my morning's sojourn here, around 10 a.m., prior to a shower and the beginning of my daily activities. That was a heavenly hour or so. Sad though I was at the hazy cloud in the distance reminding me of the Glendora fire set by three callously negligent young men, leaving people's lives in ruin, I could not deny how much I love the weather here in Los Angeles. The sun was just creeping to a point where it would actually get too hot to sit here, but I had time to savor the moments before it would arrive. Bleu, my 18 pounder, pounced onto my lap. A crow perched on a frond extending from one of the palm trees, and it seemed to me that he was watching me, watching him and we both watched another crow on another tree ripping pieces of bark off his landing space.
I could hear birds, and occasionally catch one or two flitting from top palm branches. I thought it a good time to say the rosary, the Sorrowful Mysteries, and noted that the crow stayed for most of my distracted prayer, leaving only when I got a bit into the last decade. Then about ten of his fellow crows with a leader at point, flew by the tops of the palms and above them a jet, high in the sky and yet seeming to be part of the pack of birds.
Time stops on this terrace. I seem able to put in abeyance regrets, and even after two and a half years, spurts of anger, at having my career dispensed with by the mover and shaker du jour who did not give one whit about my time, emotional commitment and success in upholding the shifting sands of ethics rules for twenty five years despite assaults by cacophonous contradictory soul wrenching demands. I consider that God had and has a plan for me that as Newman says, I may never know in this life, but which is as surely set as the stars in the sky that fascinate me night after night. Here, it is easy to let go as it is in no other place, except perhaps in the amber filtered light of my churchbefore the Blessed Sacrament. There too, I realize, time stops and there is nothing I must do but be.
In these two places for certain, I breathe deep and secure. Silly, isn't it.
My neighbors are out on their terrace a ways down. I think they are in entertainment. Who isn't? When I came out here that was my goal too. Comedy writer. I was going to become a television comedy writer. I had even written a few scripts with my then partner. Twists and turns. I suppose nothing is too late. No thinking here. . . no more digression tonight. I like the sound of their low voices, slightly withholding toward the woman typing on her terrace. I like the smell of their cigarettes. It's real. Unfiltered. There's a double meaning. My Westminster chime clock has just gone off, striking twelve a.m.
The wind is increasing in intensity.
Bleu is back out here again on the other chair curled up. I love it.
I shall curl up on this chair, after a fashion, before going off to bed where thinking will overtake me till about 3 a.m. But in the morning, since I hear the weather will be fair again, I will be able to come out for another infusion of stillness.
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