Focus Part 1

(**A 3-part entry written during the flight home on Friday July 16, 2010.)
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I headed for California that last week in June with an eager heart. I was positively brimming with tender love for my husband and children and friends, my mother, those I was leaving behind for the next eighteen days. The love I housed for my two younger brothers awaiting my arrival on fertile Western soil was more fierce and protective. All of it familiar but enhanced. The act of travel, of my physical self moving from one place to another, had sharpened my senses. As if the focus on a camera had suddenly shifted from a blurry image to a perfect view of lines, curves, and colors. The noisy background fell away, and a clear foreground revealed details previously naked to the human eye.

Thus, the petty concerns between man and wife, the weight of daily drudge and toil, lost their grip as the very bond which propels earnest married couples through these minutiae became visible. The countless moments of irritation and exasperation, of confusion and allusion, of yin chasing the tail of yang, ceased to incite my ire: maternal links merged together in perfect artful thirds – Ashley, Sarah, Zachary -- comprising a harmonious picture. The measured minutes of repetitive chores, the humble hours of cooking and exercise and garden and church and state, they transformed from solitary pixels to a cumulative cohesive image. I was able to step back and realize the panoramic shot which is the sum of my past, present, and future.

So, it is surprising -- and yet not, given the continuing revelations this life opens up to me like a new envelope of freshly developed photos -- that as this miraculous metal bird lifted up and over the sand and stone of the Nevada landscape, I would discover a brand new intensity of affection for my people, for people in general, for the beauty and pain I contemplate each and every day. Below me, the texture of earth shifted from drab, tan, and relatively flat, to layers of painted browns rising in craggy waves which resembled an enormous colony of oysters jutting from their metamorphic bed. Inside, it felt much the same. In an instant, I went from comprehending the level of love beneath my emotional surface, to reveling in the epiphany that it had magnified into something not instantly recognizable but immediately welcomed. It was invited in to stay. And it became me. Again. My comfortable, wide open, fully encompassing, messy-at-the-borders, Kodachrome, hold-the-phone, I-wanna-go-home, never-want-to-be-alone love.

If I can be so bold as to trace this heightened wellspring of feeling back to its origin of evolution, the moment when the lens caught the image and held it within the bowels of the camera, awaiting either a digital signal of interpretation or a tray of developing chemicals ready to convey negative results, I peg it at roughly 10:45 last night. I was holed up in room 226 of the Quality Inn & Suites in the California valley burg of Vacaville. Yes, you read right: cow town.

Girlfriend, my fantastically wonderful 3Gs iPhone, was performing her nightly duties, namely facilitating a call between me and Napa’s most colorful new citizen, my little brother, Gary. Her capacity for multi-tasking continued to impress me as I plowed my way through a virtual pile of downloaded e-mails on two accounts AND perused the endless walls and pages of that vast Internet social village also known as Facebook.

Our seventh and final visit had gone down earlier in the day. We filled our bellies with Mountain Jim’s combination pizza with extra cheese and loads of yellow banana pepper slices, and a freshly baked cherry pie, complete with decorative heart cutouts in the top crust, from Jantz’s Bakery and Restaurant in Merced. I evaded total domination by such foods with a decent Raley’s Grocery on-site prepared tray of sushi rolls -- a food item which grossed out my brother.  Gary’s request for a two-pack of Hostess chocolate cupcakes, a long-John cream-filled donut, along with my own addition of an apple-laden bear claw, rounded out the moderate gluttony. We ambled our way through another slow but enjoyable game of Scrabble: I won, though that does not contribute to the storyline in any way. My brother points out that spouting off that one has emerged triumphant in a competition over a mentally ill opponent is not altogether worthy of boasting. Yeah, says he on the losing end! Unless the patient exists in a lithium- or Seroquel-induced stupor, he or she is often heads-and-shoulders above the rest of us in the intelligence category. So, as I was modestly stating before Gary interrupted . . . I WON!

(Second Installment Tomorrow)