Thoughts When I Ought to Have Been Paying Attention in Class

Ultimately, when I reached the mesa I had sought so long; smooth as silk, a vibrant blue and yellow tablecloth; it was indisputably of my own accord. Many characters I have known and I have been helped by many. Many hands have steadied me and many pushed and shoved me, forward, backward, dipped me whimsically

Swayed me side to side, or touched me in ways not worth recalling which propelled me neither forward nor backward, or both, frenetically

as if shaking a Coke machine.

I see people sitting and laughing, walking and tasking, beneath redwoods, in shaded mossy corners and on drab olive benches in the sun. My eyes are wandering and awake as I scan the scenery for the bright flash of your yellow hair, hands idle in my lap, ever wishing I was husking corn. (Yellow and Blue patterned tablecloth, O spring sun!) Often bent over a paper coffee cup, often hanging ‘round your face as you light a cigarette alone. Generally on the drab green bench which sits generally in shade, a Cypress to its right which reaches over it, a sprawling vine with saucer-leaves behind it, and some wind-chime of a loose-leafed tree to its right, unidentifiable to me but enjoyed. A lovely

lovely view.

Congratulations for you are a walking semblance of the sun. Perhaps you were born on a sunny day. I’ve no idea if you are happy or not, happiness does not have anything to do with hair color, after all, look at Rapunzel.

But the higher and warmer the sun rises, the hungrier I grow. It would so glow in this light, damn it, your yellow silk hair. It would be such a vibrant sight, damn it all!

I cannot really remember the timbre of your voice, did we perhaps meet in a dream? It does not worry me (for I can well remember how it pleased me) but it does make me very hungry. Not the way one is hungry for mere sustenance. The way one is hungry for a cookie.

A Mexican wedding cookie. (But don’t overreact-- no elopement implied.)

A Mexican wedding cookie. (So simple in design, in taste so divine, in preparation I don’t know because I have not learned to bake them yet.)

In accumulation sporadic and sublime, suddenly there in front of my face on a dish for fifty cents each, calling to me, my favorite cookie, saying “Bet you didn’t know how fantastic this day is. Well, now you do, and isn’t it a pleasant surprise?”

A pleasant surprise! Your yellow hair beneath the loose-leafed tree on the green bench. Habit has me inclined to expect my heart will leap like a salmon and my fingers will shudder like reeds. I will not quite remember for a brief moment how to breathe, and then I will think ‘you’re such a fool’, (for I am a fool indeed) and it will be divine, how it will unsettle me. Oh it shall be lovely.

I must now take a moment to appreciate a Monumental Joy. I am today a Fool in the best way. I am today a Holy Fool, an Innocent Fool. And it feels so good. So bright bright yellow, blue, and good. The blue is not dark and disastrous but bright and vibrant to my eyes.

I am not being made a Fool of by any one, even myself! I am not a sadist’s fool, or a masochistic fool! I am filled with light! I am a divinely peaceful happy fool and I revel in my delightful Fool’s-lot.

Well, isn’t that something.

I was not wrong when months ago I said I could be satisfied.

Though it is quite ironic that of all the things that I named as capable of satisfying me, I now partake in few. Still then, I said “An honest face, an honest face can satisfy me,” which explains why I was so very dissatisfied then, and why now I exist in a state of bliss, a state of self-bliss. My own is an honest face, after all, after all those months. It truly is, and my crimes are small and silly and don’t add up to a mole-hole, and my grace is too huge and vast to be contained in my body, and it reaches through me from within all the way out to God in a gesture of thanks, confusion, gratitude, confounded acceptance and familial love.

God made me a writer, I don’t know that I chose. After all I think I had the heart of a writer long before I could write, for I felt every thing.

When one is a writer one cannot hide a thing from oneself, it forces its way out like a compulsive movement of the body. It says, put me on my paper. You’ll have to look at me, but it will be all right, because before you know it, I will be an entirely different thing. Even a thing of beauty which you may not have known was there in the beginning.