Mental postcards from yourself

March 11, 2004

Dear Julie,

The tabletops in a restaurant I frequent actually are maps of Jamaica and other parts of the explored world. While waiting for your food, you can think about all the places you have or haven't been.

A table where I often sit has a map of California. The names of California cities are lyrical anyway, but many are the addresses on my mental postcards.

Traveling the lonely stretch of highway that leads to Soledad always gave me chills. The state prison there is a concrete reminder of the walls that separate so many of us from our dreams.

Arcata had you and more poets and artists than I had ever seen in one place, many of them hanging out at the Jambalaya.

Yosemite, the Pinnacles, Joshua Tree, the Panama Hotel in San Rafael, a bar in Seal Beach where Coco Montoya played the blues all are on the map of my California heart.

In San Francisco, an airplane dropped hundreds of thousands of blossoms on the 500,000 of us in Golden Gate Park for Bill Graham's memorial concert in 1991.

DC and I got married in Carmel Valley. She was so flustered she took a Valium or two. Fortunately, there were witnesses to her "I do."

At San Luis Obispo, I bought DC a pair of earrings on my way to begin our life together 10 years ago. When the saleswoman asked who they were for, I excitedly told her all about my new wife.

She seemed to glow. She wanted a love story of her own.

As newlyweds in Garberville, we were just beginning the endless quest to figure each other out.

Moving up and down the state on the map, different towns summon a memory. Huntington Beach: heartbroken; Laguna Beach: Dressed up as God and dancing to da cosmic funk of George Clinton at a wild Halloween party.

In the early morning, coming across feral goats in Muir Woods and late in the afternoon seeing the sky quivering with monarch butterflies in Pacific Grove.

Before DC, I went to Big Sur to find myself and found lots of people just like me. On cliffs high above the Pacific, each of us reminded the others of our own beauty.

I remember two things from the French class I took in college. One was the warm grace of the teacher, Helen Cleaver. The other is one of the themes of an otherwise forgotten book by Colette.

She believed that the experiences that become memories are the only ones that are truly meaningful to our lives. The question all of us must answer about the things we remember is, "Why?"

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is managing editor for the Southeast Missourian.