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[W r i t e r' s N o t e b o o k]

The writer loved his city of birth; memory recommended it: Wide walking avenues lined with a variety of trees and felicitous architecture that could only emerge from a community that believed in building things well and with spirit. The spirited place of his birth sang while building what they believed; like Whitman in his poem. They whistled everywhere and carried little kids on their heads through the morning traffic. The brilliant houses were like symbols of pride in a mandala created by an eccentric east Indian after being startled awake by a profound dream.

The professors and retired ambassadors gathered up in the hills. The working-class and poor lived in the flats and alternated between kindness and anger. There was always vitality around the broad middle filled with regular, student, working people and through them wound the transients, fringe, cultists, and all shades between. A good walk could circumvent the city in a day. A healthy walk took a person through the neighborhoods where jazz was played in garages and dogs barked and kites flew high over the sloping roofs of old houses painted over in garish colors with discolored political signs hanging in the windows.

The core of it was experimental and political. Youthful in other words. On the edge of a great ocean where everyone had an idea of how to sail across it. It's strong political views were a form of fundamentalism that captured the people at a particular time and never let them go. Many of them lived out social ideas they had read in books or passed to each other in the form of cultural osmosis. At first, they fervently believed, then as the years rolled onward they realized it was a poor joke and counted up a few victories, a few successes, a few new things that had come into the light of day, briefly, because they cared. Then they passed into old age and looked for good places to die in.

The writer's favorite pastime was walking around the streets and finding bundles of ad hoc, grass roots newspapers run off by a publising botique run by one or two people, declaring that a great age was just one step beyond the present moment. He had seen the computer and Internet revolutions talked about in these bundled papers years before they came into being. The future is a seed perceived one evening when least expected. It's seen at dusk when lights appear on the towers and lovers gather on the turnouts along the hill ridge.

The people were rooted to what is essential but, all in all, it would always be an experiment stage for the lack of practical resources. Its resources said, become spiritual, become political, save the world or a portion of it, save yourself through self-empowerment, fend off evil spirits with this potion and that belief, read this, read that, chant this, chant that. And, in the end, nothing but the carpenter who could write half-decent lines of poetry, the electronic genius who impressed middle-aged women about to come into large inheritances, the radical turned greying, fat lawyer defending people he now loathed. It didn't matter. The seed had taken some root. When the bloom was off new seeds would drop like manna from heaven.

The desires and idealizations fell back into the people and made them insular. It gave them a hard-edge and disillusioned them; carried now by the crazies, the spaced-out characters who mumbled and cursed and threw out obscene epithets to no one in particular.

Often, the writer felt that he was in a Viking trading center in the ninth century A.D. The historian would call it "a small, vital, bustling place," with many currents passing through it; of vanished races and trinkets, vanished war ships and their anonymous crews. The eternal shout, one evening, when the man discovers the woman is seeking the company of another man. Rather than physical violence it had the violence of ideas, even of personalities that clashed with each other in the streets.

There was something essentially American about it. Large cities provided more pure data but it was all contradicted by the pressures of huge, moving crowds and a sinister environment; the utter fury of obsolete ideas that demoralized anyone who had the gall to think.

"Between the megalopolis and the rustic town, thank god for the city of my birth," the writer thought to himself.