Lost World

In the days after the retreat, Lucy and I took a boat ride halfway around Manhattan and back, and we saw Ain’t Too Proud. We had dinner with her husband, Ricky, at the Westway Diner one evening, and at a deli near the theater district the next. I discovered that La Bergamote has fantastic croissants. I walked around and revisited many of the sites from the street retreat. I went to meditate one noontime at the Village Zendo, which was really lovely.

Several nice votes of confidence turned up early in October, when I was invited to interview for the first-ever paid chaplain position at County Hospital around the same time that I got a note from one of my former Clinical Pastoral Education supervisors saying I might be hearing from someone about another chaplain job here in San Francisco and that she had sung my praises. I was also contacted about co-facilitating a new Buddhist meditation group started by an organization that has volunteers walking around all night every night, in the worst neighborhoods in the city, to offer emotional and spiritual care, along with referrals. They offer phone counseling during the same hours. The Faithful Fools is hosting the new meditation group at its place in the Tenderloin. There are four of us helping to lead it. Each week one of us is the facilitator, and another is the door person.

The interview at County Hospital was a pleasure, because it was with Clementine and Helen. I didn’t get the job. It was a huge honor just to get to interview for it; it rightly went to the person who has been doing it on a volunteer basis for several years. I probably would not have been able to accept it if I had been offered it, anyway, because it wasn’t enough hours to replace my current job, but too many to do in addition to my current job. I am perfectly happy with my current job, so it all came out fine. I also talked to the person in regard to the other job, and it fell into the same category.

In mid-October (almost caught up!), I got an email from my father about “renovations” to my childhood house. The house was bought by friends of people who own the house next door. The latter have put such a huge addition onto their formerly charming home that you can probably see it from outer space. Alas, that is probably what is now going to happen to the house where I lived from ages seven to seventeen. Three sides of it have been torn off, and the stucco peeled off the front. The last time I saw it, when I was visiting for Thanksgiving and drove past, my mother’s white curtains still hung in the study.

Anyway, the day after I got that initial email about the renovations, the first word I heard when I turned on the radio the next day was “house.” Ann Patchett was on Forum talking about her new book, The Dutch House, saying that we all have a special house that we remember. Talk about felicitous timing. I called in and got to share on air my sorrow about my house. Ann Patchett kindly said something like, “You’ve called the right person!” She went on to say that life gives us continual practice in letting go, because it is one loss after the other.

Pictures taken recently of pictures taken long ago of my childhood backyard.

Lately The New York Times website has been making me log in every time I visit, a new thing after quite some time of being a digital subscriber. Someone in tech support there said to try using Chrome. Fairly often, The New York Times runs an article about how to protect one’s digital privacy. One way to do this is not to use Google for searching, but instead to use DuckDuckGo. Funny that I would have to use Google’s browser, Chrome, in order to  access The New York Times online so I can read their advice to avoid Google! Needless to say, I will not use Chrome. If their website absolutely won’t work with Firefox, then I will consider ceasing to subscribe. What will probably actually happen is that I’ll just have to log in again every single day, and be disgruntled. I can do that.

At work one Saturday near Halloween, I saw a whole bunch of little kids in the lobby wearing Halloween costumes. It was the annual NICU graduation party! These were all children who had been in the NICU at some point. Many were just babies. It would have been adorable enough just to see all the little faces, but to think that every single child had been gravely ill …

I have acquired a T-Fal pressure cooker, which I love very much. How amazing to have garbanzo beans cook to perfection while I’m having breakfast, and without having them boil over onto the stovetop.

Another thing lost, though not recently, is my great-grandmother. Here she is decades ago on Daytona Beach.

(Click photos to enlarge.)