“Water Lilies”

Tucson painting by Felix Pasilis
6:18 AM, Monday, May 5, 2008
“Water Lilies”

Sky has those cotton ball white clouds in it. It is early morning. I don’t think sun has risen above mountains yet, because no sunlight is splashing into my backyard. It is still the cool greeny cold of early morning. Nothing is lit up and golden yet. A cool shaded garden back there, with calls of birds everywhere, and lots of twittering. I guess baby birds are still in their nests. It is blue sky to the west, but milky sky to northeast. Yesterday was one of those beautiful days, flawless deep deep blue sky, where the perfect beauty of the previous 5 days simply sailed into another dimension. It is always like that. It will be beauty upon beauty upon beauty for days on end, until it becomes exponential, and you know you have never seen beauty like this before. It takes your breath away all day long. And then next morning when you wake up, it is cotton ball sky. Some cycle has begun all over again. But it’s fine with me if it is cool cloudy Monday. Once you have had a Sunday like yesterday, you are surfeited. You have had beauty galore.

My first year in Tucson I had coffee date with a writer girl from New York City. She came every year in winter to teach writing classes at the university here. I don’t think she wanted to be here, it was how she earned her living, how she supported herself. My impression is every year she had gotten a writing job at a university somewhere, she could do that because she was semi-famous and had written many books. And apparently one of the times she had come to Tucson to teach, a faculty member who adored her was made dean for two minutes. But during those two minutes she made Vivian an associate professor, or something, made her job permanent and with much higher pay. So the result is Vivian comes to Tucson now every winter for the spring semester. She arrives at start of January and leaves in mid-May when spring semester ends, and returns to her apartment in Greenwich Village. Some people might call that an ideal life, and in fact many people do that on their own when they get freedom, when they no longer have to go year-round to their job where they live. They do winter in Tucson and then return to their homes in the Adirondacks, or Michigan, or Chicago or North Dakota. But Vivian hated being wrenched out of her New York City life and being trapped in Tucson till May 8th when she was allowed to go home. It is now 16 years later, and I have a hunch Vivian is no longer doing that. She is allowed to stay in her apartment in New York City year-round now, and vacation in summer with her friends if she wants to.

But what made coffee date with Vivian memorable-- I had never met her in New York. I had called her here in Tucson and said “I just moved here from New York City” and mentioned all the friends we had in common. And so she told me to meet her at Rincon Market for coffee. And I took the bus and did. I had never heard of Rincon Market then. I had never heard of anything. I was just in Tucson for one year then, and did not know anything. Rincon Market is in the university area. I guess it was originally an old grocery store with a lot of specialty items. But when I went there with Vivian, it was a little New York. All the professors and students and artists who live in that area were there to have coffee and pastries or their lunch, there were tables all around. Altho you could still grocery shop there at same time. It’s funny I have never been back. I guess my life in Tucson turned out to be totally suburban. There was a period in the mid ‘90s when I did have friends in Tucson, and did go for coffee dates with them. But we just went to the family restaurants in my neighborhood and sat in the cushioned booths. There wasn’t that hip college atmosphere of NYU, there weren’t professors carrying the New York Times. It was mainly children eating there with their parents. I remember being in my booth with my friend, maybe Margot, and little girl was having lunch with daddy in the next booth, and I guess she ordered jell-o for dessert. Because I heard her exclaim to her daddy “they make good jell-o here.”

And you could say my world in Tucson is the jell-o world. Altho of course appearances are always deceiving. Nothing could look and feel and seem more suburban, more jell-o like, than my neighborhood in Tucson, the part of town where I live. But in fact Fred, who still lives in the house where he grew up a mile from us, and who is a good friend of mine, does recreational drugs on the week-ends, Fred loves drugs.

And to my unbelievable surprise, Erik, one of the swimmers at the Fort Lowell pool, who Bill is friends with, when Bill told Erik how much he enjoyed the Rolling Stones movie at the dollar movie theater the day before, Eric said he is a big fan of the Rolling Stones, and then mentioned how he had lived in the East Village from 1966 to 1969. I almost fell over when Bill told me as he drove the car into the parking lot at the pool yesterday. I looked around and said “Erik is not here.” On week days he arrives on his motorcycle, but on weekends he comes in red truck with his wife Deborah, who is a science and math teacher at local high school. Erik is an artist like Bill. Even Bill was not in the East Village during the '60s, he was back in San Diego or in Haight Ashbury, he didn’t arrive till 1970. The only one I know who was in the East Village back then was Kenny, the boyfriend I lived with in 1966 on Avenue B and 12th Street. I'll have to ask Erik where he lived. I had no idea he shared that experience with me. And last night I remembered I briefly dated a guy named Erik then, a hippy in the East Village like me. But I realized it could not be the same Erik because the one I dated was introverted and Erik in the pool is very extraverted. But it is odd to think about all the hippies I knew back then, who I would meet on the street and date if they were boys, or be friends with if they were girls, who lived in all those 40 dollar a month apartments. And realized you could meet them in the public pool in Tucson now, and you would think they had never been out of Tucson in their whole life.

“So do you like Tucson?” I asked Vivian when I first arrived and sat down. And she said “well every day is a fucking beautiful day.” Which is maybe how New Yorkers talk or New York writers. I don’t think they talk like this in Tucson. I had the advantage on Vivian because I had happened to read a book she wrote a year before I left New York. I had taken it out of the Ottendorfer Library, my local library in the East Village. Where Vivian had written about growing up in the Bronx, and how she and her mom would always take long walks, and how she still takes long walks, it is her favorite thing to do. The book may have been called “Walking all over the city,” and was about walking all over New York, except it was all about her life. I think she may even have gone to City College like I did. City College is very high up in Manhattan, so it would be close to the Bronx, she could live at home and commute there. I think Vivian may have mentioned during that coffee date that she had been married 3 times, because I remember writing to my own writer friend back in New York, Susie, how I had coffee with Vivian and she was married 3 times. And the letter I got back from Susie referred to “the much married Vivian.” I only saw Vivian once after that, altho we talked on phone a few times when she returned for her annual stay in Tucson. But after a few years I stopped calling her when January rolled around, I was starting to dig into Tucson life. But I always think of her as “the much married Vivian,” and how she said Tucson is “every day is a fucking beautiful day.”

There was brief period my second year here when I discovered a store on the corner near me sold beautiful French clothes at very reasonable prices. So when I called Vivian that second year, instead of going for coffee, she picked me up and we went there. “I’ll help you pick out something pretty” I said. But what Vivian chose for herself were dark brown pants, she said she needed pants. And that was the second and last time I saw Vivian. I didn’t know why someone would go to a store filled with beautiful French clothes and choose dark brown pants. But I was glad she made a purchase she was happy with. Of course I shop differently now myself. If I were going to have a shopping date with Vivian now, I would take her right to the clearance section at department store at mall. That is where the real bargains are and you can get lovely clothes.

But I still had a New York mind during my first years in Tucson. I don’t know when my mind switched over to Tucson, I'll have to ask Helen, because she must be having a parallel experience in Maui. She moved from the Bronx to Maui after being a New Yorker her whole life, altho she had lived in the Bay Area for several years in her twenties. But she did move from the Bronx to Maui about 8 years after I moved to Tucson. I guess Helen has now been in Maui 9 years, her mind must have switched to Maui now. It may have switched faster than mine did, because she arrived with her 10 year old son, and he would have had to immerse himself in Maui life, be in school there, make friends there, live the Maui life. Which would have pulled Helen into it much faster.

I don’t know what my Tucson life would have been like if I wasn’t also becoming New Age at the same time. I mean for me two moves took place at the same time. I moved from New York City to Tucson, but I was also making the move from inside the world to outside the world. I mean I was changing locales in my mind too. And I guess the new life you build for yourself, would reflect the new life you are living in your mind. I think that is why there was so much drastic relocation at the same time I did, or shortly after, or after me. Just like me, many people had started to enter this new place in their mind. And once that happens, lickety-split you are moved to a completely new physical location. You start a brand new life somewhere else.

LOL it is done very efficiently by Heaven or our souls or whoever is in charge of these things. Your life where you had been living simply collapses, so you have to leave. And then you are guided to the new place for you to go. It is a huge uprooting from where you have been, there were deep roots there. But maybe the life in those roots had come to an end, else the move could not have happened so fast and so easily. And when you arrive you assume you will put down your new roots in the new place, and it will be the same here as it was there. But that is not how it works, because of the “thing” of having moved to new place in your mind, the new life has to reflect that. So the roots are more like water lily roots. I imagine water lilies must have roots which go into the mud of the lake. But water lilies float lazily and happily on the surface of the lake, they move, there is not that heavy anchoring.

And that is really the story of how we all became water lilies when we left New York....

Post script, the clouds dissipated, the sun is shining, the sky is blue, Vivian is right “it’s a fucking beautiful day”…