Life in the Country

 

I settled into the bench on the porch of a most lovely house in the charming town of Bolinas. Cypress trees surrounding me, the distant hills inviting me to come up and walk, the beckoning beach around the corner. I had driven up Route 1 in Marin Country dazzled by the beauty of the day, the views of the sparkling ocean to my left and open farmlands to my right, driving up the winding road serenaded by Keith Jarrett playing an exquisite jazz ballad. I thought of all the unknown people who worked to preserve the exquisite beauty of this place, saved it from developers and chain stores and high-rises and thanked them in my heart. 

 

It’s our annual Men’s Group retreat, though we actually haven’t done one since 2019 and it was in this very house. Eight men, two declining because of challenging health issues, with bodies quite different from our 1990 versions when we started, but character and spirits mostly the same. We all had come together two days earlier for the No Kings Rally and that felt good— our like-minded values regarding social justice matched with our willingness to take to the streets. 

 

On the way in to Bolinas, I stopped at the Bolinas-Stinson school and taught a jazz class to 22 8^thgraders. This was no spontaneous drive-by-teaching— I had set it up with an Orff teacher who had studied with me in the Levels Course in Carmel Valley, the Jazz Course in San Francisco and Orff Afrique in Ghana. No surprise, I loved working with the kids who were willing to be playfully silly, hard-working when they couldn’t master a musical part right away and surprising others and themselves with some inspired improvisations. I’m loving my Johnny Appleseed life of sowing musical and humanistic seeds wherever I go, whenever I can. 

 

On to lunch and some post-lunch “free time” before we agreed to walk on the beach. That’s when I settled on the bench with my journal and pen, ready to absorb the peace of life in the country. And that’s when the chain saw started whining and howling, the generator for the taco truck kicked in, the trucks came roaring by on the road below. Sitting on Broadway in New York would have been more peaceful! Certainly sitting on my deck in San Francisco is much quieter. I actually recorded the din and if I could play it for you on the Blog, I think you’d be astounded. But if you live in the “country” or even the suburbs, with leaf-blowers blowing, chain saws screeching, food-trucks droning, you wouldn’t be surprised.

 

Once again, my current read This Is Happiness has something to say on the matter. People are gathered together listening to a man try to sell them the marvels of machines that electricity brought to the village will bring. Now keep in mind that I appreciate my washer and dryer (though also okay hanging clothes on the line), am grateful for how quickly I can process thought, store it and share it on this computer (though I wrote my first books on a manual typewriter), am happy to preserve food in my refrigerator. But I do believe that no labor-saving device ever saved anyone labor— up to a point. The fact is that hunter-gatherer societies and even today people living simple lives have much more leisure than the harried modern person enslaved by our devices and rushing here and there from one meeting to another. At any rate, here’s the passage. (Moylan is the salesman making his pitch):

 

Moylan said the first law of engineering was to make the world a better place. (He didn’t state the second law, that without exception everything that was engineered would one day break down, that sometimes and usually one day after each machine had become indispensable to  living, the machine would abnegate all responsibility and not turn on; you’d press its red button and it would just sit there looking at you, and you’d press the button a second time as thought excusting it that one time it had forgotten its job and forgotten that its whole purpose was to serve this one simple function, and you’d press the red button again and an absolute nothing would happen, a less-than-nothing, a minus action because it would seem you were in a worse-off place than nothing happening because now not only had you forgotten how you lived before but you had to find a service man… and oh, there might be one coming next week, definitely the week after that, or the following and meanwhile, you kept pressing the red button because maybe today after the bit of a rest you never know it might turn on and when it didn’t, when you’d tried the pressing combined with a small shove, with a more serious shove, with a shake, descending through the whole sorry declension until you’d arrived at a kick, when the stubbornness of the stupid machine seemed so defiant as to not only lower the flag on the flagpole of manhood but take the flagpole too, sundering marriages by the blank white stare of an unwashing washing machine, any number of men, and some women, would choose to have a go at it, going with the crude iron tools of an earlier time and a zero knowledge, the guts of the machine spilled on the floor and the red button somewhere over there by the time the service man came in the door with his sponsored smile. “Is she giving you a bit of trouble?” taking a good gander at the Homemade devastation before nodding slowly and telling you the third law: “Afraid this is going to cost you a fair bit.” The fourth soon after:” I haven’t the part with me.”

 

Well, there you go. Then there’s the 5^th law: “They don’t make that part anymore. Afraid you’ll have to buy a new one.” Then the 6^th one: “Want to have a peaceful sit on your country house’s porch? Listen to the birds and the rustle of the leaves in the breeze and the lapping of the waves? You can, but only in the 5 seconds before the next round of the chainsaw, re-booting the generator, hoping no trucks will pass by. 

 

Can’t wait to get home to the peace of city life.