Places I might never go...

I don't think I'll ever see the great wall of China--and though less rich, I doubt my life will be any less complete for it. But I will miss not hearing the voices, seeing the eyes, touching the people who live there daily, cleaning, watering the plants, selling trinkets and just being local. Likewise, I think, I could do without the famous French intolerance for Americans, though I could easily pass for a foreigner--I do here all my life. But I would like a little coffee and a small, sweet pastry as I walk beneath, behind, around the tower or the museum.

They walk through the day, half-incorporeal, like the ghosts that night forgot behind; their eyes are blank, blind to anything but the spot they've convinced themselves is their destination even though their feet move with no greater urgency, energy or deliberation than their eyes might show.

Many a moon ago, I stood by the Dor0thy Chandler Pavillion looking at a playbill showing Raul Julia as Don Quixote, in Man of La Mancha. I remember being poor and adding in my head the money I had and subtracting all the obligations I still had to meet--and wondering why the latter were so much more than the former. Counting my pennies, I walked away. I missed the play. Within a year or so, he was dead, never again to sing of sacred basins and ghostly loves of things that might have been...

I want to stand on the sand at sunset--the sun won't rise over the Pacific--even if I can't hear the choir of angels. I wonder if the angels sing on the wuthering heights--though I would never hear them there.

Yesterday, I learned I can go home again. Understandably, this terrified me. I will have to think on this a while before doing anything about it.

In the meantime, I hope you all are well wherever you are, that you had a happy hannukah, and have a merry christmas, and that when the year ends it brings a bigger, better, more successful one, full of happiness and health, of good fortune and clear sailing days.

Be good.

Be well.