Jill Pearlman

Imagine, at this age, to have brought beginner’s mind to California.  Where have I been?  In the land of the skeptic, in France.  But what luck to have had California before me.  Full-on sensory discovery.

Enthusiasm has a way of being boundless. (Forgive me for walking naively into known mythologies.)

Rocky cliffs and water that rolls with a steady rhythm that gathers, then completely releases with an assured swagger, somehow embarrassing the Atlantic. 

Painting after painting in a grand sfumato that no matter how many times you clean your glasses, is real and before you.

Sad lady of the lake and her plangent guitar at a hillside café.

Looking, looking, I became entranced by planes and screens.  Modern buildings of glass walls, the Pacific floating off the right and left screens.  The Bay Bridge with its cables marking, but not separating the rolling fog of the bay.  These planes evoked canvas of time: Because Rachel was turning 30, we were bathing in retrospection –images appearing, fresh, flush with color and scent.  Parts of the whole, reflected, refracted, overlapping. The past like a sliding door that crosses into the present.  Reflections of sunset ricochet with the same intensity as her baby face, the nurses suggesting I dress her in doll clothes (she was premature); bars of music we’d hear as we rounded the bend each day driving to maternelle. 

Even riding in the backseat of the car as the kids, now adults drove, I began to act up just like the children they were.

As poet Rick Barot wrote, “Or am I only who I am now, astounded at the transport of the body from one end of time to another.”

Be here now, and everything in between.