Double Jeopardy

Four hours sleep. Four am arising. Meditated, then left the hotel in the darkness of 5.00 am to catch the bus (I’d done  a trial run in daylight the day before). Instant, albeit transient, intimacy with the bus driver: a big, cheerful, chatty black man whose shift was just about to end. No sleep for him: he was going to an event at his sixteen year old son’s school and had prepared his legendary pulled pork, per request of his son’s schoolmates. I suggested I might change my plans for the day and come with him, which elicited a belly laugh. The trip took ten minutes during which time we covered wills, families (he had four children, two boys, two girls, two left, two still at home). His wife was a legal secretary and they looked forward to paying off their mortgage in a few years, after which he’d love to retire to Costa Rica. I know his  grandmother was one of thirteen, who in her turn had eleven children. He knows I live in my husband’s grandmother’s home by the ocean. They had will problems. He knows I have two brothers and one of the enduring gifts of our life is that we did not have will problems! He was proud of himself for talking a friend out of becoming a cop, because “you know that George Floyd guy? [Oh, yes 😢] Well, it was not a great time to become a cop”. His friend had taken the advice and he was glad.  How vivid a few moments can be.

What I ate instead . . .

Le dejeuner sur l’herbe may appear simple enough, but hear me out. The first time I came to the States I was paralysed by the sheer range of product choices in the supermarket and at Subways. Made me long for the Soviet-style simplicity of the old Action supermarket in Hilton. And as my friend Jenny will testify, I lasted two nanoseconds in Walmart. I made it past the door greeter when something like an anti-capitalist forcefield propelled me backwards and (to quote Monty Python) I bravely turned my tail and fled. So fast forward to yesterday when our rather regimented tour guide was very particular about being on time. We were dropped at a supermarket with a strictly limited schedule and told to buy food for the day. (In fairness, it was good advice to avoid queuing in the Park.) It felt like some kind of vanilla “Hunger Games” as I grabbed a basket and bolted round the aisles. Organic greens, Kerry Gold butter, fresh berries and cottage cheese, a peach, tomatoes, non-earwax cheese, organic ginger Kombucha. A modest victory for Australian tastes. I’d like to think I made Maggie Beer proud.

Don’t go chasing waterfalls 

My rustic ​picnic was within sight and sound of Yosemite Falls … at 1000 m  the second tallest fall in the world. So the first of my double jeopardies was the repeated refrain on loop in my brain: don’t go chasing waterfalls. Given that it is perhaps the single most important reason people travel to Yosemite, I was always going to defy the interdict. Plus, I particularly owe it to my niece Janice to enjoy them on her behalf as well as my own (she is a dedicated waterfall-chaser).

As an environmentalist I am compelled by the stories of John Muir and the Buffalo Soldiers who were the precursors of today’s National Park rangers. But I cannot allow that story to erase other people’s history. https://www.intermountainhistories.org/items/show/339
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I’m almost inclined to do nothing…

Given the impossibly compromised nature of everything, I found myself feeling more and more mutinous as I was herded from one photo opportunity to the next. All day I was thinking of a poem I misremembered as being by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Turns out it was his fellow Beat poet, Gregory Corso. Although even as a starry-eyed undergraduate I would love to have possessed the power to permanently expunge the misogynistic final stanza of “Marriage”, I’ve always loved the rest of the poem, and the excerpt below captures in more exuberant tones my  growing desire to quietly defy what is expected of me.

​​“Niagara Falls! Hordes of us! Husbands! Wives! Flowers! Chocolates! 
All streaming into cozy hotels 
All going to do the same thing tonight 
The indifferent clerk he knowing what was going to happen 
The lobby zombies they knowing what 
The whistling elevator man he knowing 
The winking bellboy knowing 
Everybody knowing! I'd be almost inclined not to do anything! 
Stay up all night! Stare that hotel clerk in the eye! 
Screaming: I deny honeymoon! I deny honeymoon! 
running rampant into those almost climatic suites 
yelling Radio belly! Cat shovel! 
O I'd live in Niagara forever! in a dark cave beneath the Falls 
I'd sit there the Mad Honeymooner devising ways to break marriages, a scourge of bigamy a saint of divorce-

The question remains​…

So, in the city  of Beat poets, is it more punk to visit or refrain from visiting the City Light Bookstore?