Last post San Diego

The road meanders with the shoreline, past sailing ships and a museum devoted to their history. I try to remember the difference between a sloop and a schooner; is it the number of masts? The slant of the sails? Sean's father used to remember with us when we were young, his days racing sloops on Lake Michigan with only sail power and the magical skills of docking a sailing ship without a motor.

This is the way I ride. Memories churn into my quadriceps, pumped into my blood, thoughts move from synapse to muscle twitch and the memories tied to a place, or smell or the feel of a cool breeze, or the rot of fish in the morning, seep into my consciousness.

A seagull and I think of reading my mother's copy of Jonathan Seagull for the first time when I was ten, the year Christopher crystalized into the essence of who he is now. 1974, the month of June, on the 18th, the year, month and day I first became aware of my mortality and all its ramifications. I suppose the seagull was a part of that, a questioning of 'going along' with the flow of time and expectations. I closed the door of  our room, my brother absent somewhere, and stared at the ceiling.

Why was it that time seemed sometimes to move fast and sometimes slow?

It wasn't linear after all. I thought about that. Then a fearful thought grabbed me: I was ten and I'd already lived a seventh of my life. What had I accomplished?  A seventh of an ice cream cone was a significant thing; my life was being consumed unconsciously, without intention or purpose. I was being wasteful!

What if I could slow down time and make my life last longer? I knew how it worked in Sr. Rhodilia's math class at St. Mathias; those 45 minutes lasted at least as long as an entire trip to my grandmother's on the west coast. For an hour I made time move slowly and then decided that a life like that might be indefinitely long but not actually worth living. At ten years of age, I decided the best thing to do was to remember how quickly time was passing and, with that awareness, decide to live as fully as possible.

What I knew then as a ten year old was that I was still needing to learn what living fully meant and those milestones came later and much later. Experiments with love and pain, commitment and betrayal, sin and goodness; each step in my life, each friend met along the way, further helped me develop the idea of what it meant to live fully in the few moments that we have.

These thoughts course through my veins and find their expression in the wheels turning. I feel them when I grip the handlebars with my hand and the exquisite pressure in my legs as I lean into the pedals and gain speed.

Harbor Drive South-San Diego

Everyone needs to get lost occasionally. This thought occurs to me as I've lost track of the west coast of the United States and have turned full tilt towards the Mexican border while intending to head north back to my hotel. I know I'm not terribly lost, but just pleasantly so. The clouded morning sky offers a sameness of light in all directions. Street names and numbers are generally unhelpful since each town seems to rejoice in naming their streets with the same names in different grids.

I've bounced from Boston to Lawrence to San Diego and, in a bit, to Miami. Waking up in various rooms offers a sense of disorder, chaos to the surface of my life, but talking to people I love offers a deeper sense of the logos lying just beneath.

Important stuff. My old friend said that was one thing she loved about me, my insistence on wondering about the things that deserve our time and consciousness. I laughed when she remembered me at sixteen talking like I do now at fifty. What are the important things that need to be spoken of now. Two pop to mind.

South of San Diego's convention area and the adjoining Gas Lamp district, is the Naval Yard. I ride down this road for the third time, now fully expecting the long stop light at each entrance to the base. Lines of cars from every direction and my bike and I weaving between the cars left with their butts in the intersection. The temperature says 66 degrees and I roll by, pushing down my arm warmers and breathing the ocean air. The tall gray bodies of naval warships rise from the fence line on my right.

I told another friend yesterday about a story I'd read many years ago, the Conversion of the Jews by Phillip Roth. In the story, a boy at a rabbinical school in New York asks the rabbi about his Catholic friend's belief that Mary had a virgin birth. When the rabbi said it was impossible, the boy ended up on the roof threatening to jump unless the rabbi said it was possible. God, the boy said, can do anything.

 

The buildings fall away and I'm on a bike path threading between bridges and short trees. Small bunches of grass cling to the side of the trail and occasionally a cyclist or runner is heading the other way and I interrupt my reveries with a smile.

When I hear the word 'faith' I first think of theology, dogma and that quickly degenerates into the bizarre sides of my Catholic upbringing. But this morning, rolling into the wind between sand and grass, I think of the other, more important faiths to be thought of: faith in oneself, in someone else, in love and hope, in the future. Even someone with a Spaghetti Monster emblem on the back of his car understands that this faith overshadows the peculiar faith that often separates us into groups of same-believing people.

After my coffee in the morning, I walked back to my hotel wondering why I'd mentioned that story, why had it bubbled into my head as something appropriate to talk about, important enough to take some precious time with someone I hadn't seen in a half of a year. The point clarifies; I wanted to her to understand that I am not defined by the narrowness of the words I say or write. There is something else that overshadows the mean definitions we create of ourselves and, when confronted with a tremendous awfulness, as it was with my friend's cancer, all of those words burn away and one is left with a singular prayer.

Forty five minutes in and it's time to curl around and head back. I leave the path and take a left, wait a few miles and then take another left, that is how to make a loop, I think. This is how one wanders to Mexico.

There is another faith that we seldom consider. Faith in our narratives. We create stories of our lives continuously. The narratives help us make sense of our experience, give meaning and help define who we are, or think we are. I continually make stories to absolve myself of wrongs, redefine my purpose, explain my feelings. Maybe the last is the most crucial as these narratives bridge the divide between our hearts and our heads.

I am lost. I have a gps on my bike and now that I actually look at it, it tells me I'm headed south instead of north. I pull over and start futzing. There's no rush, no imperative of time. A horn beeps. Ok, there are imperatives, just not mine. I roll forward and let the truck park where I was stopped.

The wind is behind me, when I make the turn onto Harbor Way, I can feel it passing me; there's a sudden coolness as the sweat is lifted by the breeze. I'm in a familiar place now. Aware now that I am writing a narrative and feeling much more in control of the story.