Alone in the Vastness
I have written these words many times since 1995, which was when I acquired my Rikelme painting of a lone tree standing on the Pampas of Patagonia. The painting is called Solo en la Imensidad (Alone in the. Vastness), and I have always admired the sentiment of the lone and solid tree standing by itself and giving life to a small ecosystem around it. There is nobility in that tree and there is quiet strength. I have always admired trees and this painting gave me the reason to make sense of that admiration. I had anthropomorphized this tree and made it represent something I wanted it to be rather that whatever it was. That’s OK, we all need symbolism in our lives at times and trees are as good and ubiquitous a symbol as exists.
I think whenever I talk about that Tree on the Pampas, people think I am either romanticizing nature or being self-pitying (wearing the hair shirt, as they say). While I am not above either of those, it’s more likely that I am simply doing what we do all of our lives, searching for meaning. When you are my size and you wake up in the middle of the night as often as I tend to (like right now at 1am), you don’t look at clouds from both sides now like Joni Mitchel, but you might well look at trees from all sides now. Like Joni and her clouds, I really don’t know trees at all. But I think I do know a thing or two about myself, and I was bound to like anything that declared itself to be alone in the vastness.
I am very fortunate, I am not alone and my vastness is more a figment of my imagination that any real void that I face. To begin with, I have Kim, and she is enough to fill any man’s life with all the joy and warmth that he might need. I thank my lucky stars every day that I have her in my life. She single-handedly defeats not only the alone part of life, but the vastness as well. There is no void in my life because if I choose to travel the world, she will be by my side, or if I prefer to stay home and keep my world very small and tight, she would be agreeable with that just as well.
We have some trips planned and I can take them or leave them just so long as Kim is happy with the choice. While she and I live our days with our own separate agendas, we are increasingly opting for joint activities rather than flying solo. We are Pickleballing together, we are Garden Clubbing together, and who knows what joint activity we will come up with next. Neither of us is dependent on the other for filling our days, we are just choosing to do so, and that certainly pleases me.
Kim has decided that she wants to make more friends out here, so she recently joined the local women’s group. Yesterday it was her turn to host 22-24 women for an evening of chit chat and wine. She put together a simple but nice Valentines Day gathering complete with a homemade heart-shaped cake. My brief was to source my own dinner and enjoy it in the Master Bedroom. I did just that, but I admitted to Kim that I did spy on the crowd like s little brother at a slumber party. I used my Ring cameras and their microphones to get a sense of what was going on out there. Kim and all the ladies seemed to be enjoying themselves and the banter was neither captivating from afar nor particularly revealing. That’s pretty much how my slumber party snooping went as well, but there were those Polaroids I once happened on compliments of sister Barb’s friends….
Kim must have felt guilty because she came in twice during the event to check on me. The first time she brought me a deviled egg, which I always love and which I happily ate. The second time it was a plate of assorted desserts, which she apparently gathered from the Hidden Meadows Ladies Club Viennese Table. It felt like when my mother would return from a work-related function from which I would undoubtedly be pouting, and so, she would bring me a napkin filled with desserts. It’s a real feel-good gesture that means far more than the caloric value of the pastry. It means that someone cares enough about your feelings to want to soothe your troubled soul, whether it has a right to demand salve or not.
I am very happy to see Kim finally (thank you COVID) spreading her wings here in San Diego. She is now a member of a local San Diego singing group called Encore (60 singers with Broadway experience or aspirations). She has joined the Ladies Auxiliary of Hidden Meadows…and the Hidden Meadows Garden Club (which is funny since I do all the gardening…so I will go along to cover her on the mulch detail). We are playing Pickleball as members of the Castle Creek Pickle Ball Club (CCPBC), which sounds like a Canadian pension fund I once knew. The point is that she, and therefore we, are getting engaged and imbedded into San Diego life at long last. I’m not really doing much in the outreach category since, as I’ve recently explained, my University of San Diego connection is a loose thread at best. But I do deserve credit for the Pickle Ball outreach and I do try and do my part by both joining when asked and hiding in the bedroom when asked.
Today we went to our first Garden Club event and I must say that even though there were probably 20 women and 4 men in attendance, I thought it was fun. It turns out I have a decent amount to riff about when it comes to gardening. I told the story of buying cheap mulch from Winston only to find that it had pig shit mixed into it and reminded Kim of her Uncle Hubert’s farm. Some of these people had seen my buffalo (mostly the women of the Ladies Auxiliary who were over here last night) and everyone seems intrigued by my yard art approach to gardening. One of the nice couples we knew from before was the Japanese woman and Persian man duo who live in our area. Yasuko and Faraj seem really into the garden club thing. They were both wearing Hidden Meadows Garden Club t-shirts and each had on a plastic faux-gold name tag, which made me feel like a rookie who hadn’t yet earned his wings in this club. That said, while everyone wandered around the host’s garden (quite a nice succulent garden) Yasuko, Faraj and I sat comfortably in the shade and swapped stories. It seems they are into my kind of gardening, which is big on the logo paraphernalia and light on the walking around part.
One of the people I met was a woman who moved into a newly built house near us this August. She told me her husband has a Harley, but doesn’t have anyone to ride with. I remedied that by driving right over to their house when we left (much to Kim’s chagrin in the passenger seat) and walked up to their door to tell him he was making too much noise with the Harley in the neighborhood. He almost set his German Sheppard on me, but then realized I was kidding. He is an ex-COO of a hotel group and wants to talk about anything other than the hospitality business. We have agreed to a riding date for next week, so maybe I will have to start a Hidden Meadows Men’s Motorcycle Club to meet while the Ladies Auxiliary meets. I guess my vastness is getting less vast and my aloneness less alone.