So as I continue my struggle to find out where I belong, if one is supposed to belong in one place, I attended my Quaker meeting this morning and that certainly ain't it. First, there is the reality of Memory, which, though I was given a Still There by the Memory doctor, is better when there is someone else nearby who remembers, is best in another place, spiritually anyway. The Quaker Meeting in New York is absent of soul, but may be intensified by the truth that I can hear almost nothing. There are many rows of built-in bench, and a small number of people who also appear built in, none of their backs particularly inspiring, and I leave hungering for my little Meeting in Santa Monica. So along with my growing affection for my Grandboys, I have a hunger for connection with my West Coast spiritual buddies. Also I found out after leaving that meeting that the woman there who seemed smartest and most intense had gone to Bryn Mawr, so am hoping that pinky touch of No Kidding! can be re-established. And the colder it grows, the older I realize I am, the most happily spoiled by weather all these years I didn't have much to cling to, if you can be said to cling to air.
Then I stopped in a food place on 57th street and enjoyed myself as I rarely do, or at least haven't done since I used to go south towards San Diego of a Sunday. Eating all kinds of thing I wouldn't dare usually, imagining the place had just opened, only to discover on departure that it had been there for 18 years. None of this is particularly exciting except as an alert that my spirit has been slumbering, if that's how I can describe it, assuming or probably more accurately hoping it hasn't died. If I stayed here I would probably chub up, as fooding is the most sociable---it seems-- activity I have found, since the Y hasn't spoken to my soul, if I still have one. A soul, that is, since we can be sure there is a Y.
Oh please, God, tap me on the mind. Let me know I am still here, and there is a reason to be. It is quietly dazzling to discover you are still here when you thought you were gone. And there is even a song, the other side of this, even after you have less than delighted in Brigadoon, though were happy to have seen it, City Center being so close, even though your own center seemed so far away. You can remember a friendship with the tossed away Mrs. Alan Jay Lerner, the lovely Nancy Olsen, who was told by him that he couldn't live without Micheline, then seeing her on a side street in the south of France a few years later, withered. The universe does seem to mete out Justice.
