A WOMAN GETS INTO A CAR

     I'm driving up the 5, coming back from a long day in Orange County. The late afternoon light is beginning to soften everything I see before me including, when I glance to the right, the Anaheim hills miles away. I'm listening to Joni Mitchell...she's my contemporary and, as always, her young voice makes me feel young and now it tips me into a surge of energy, plunges me into the world, makes me want to swoop down like a magpie on all that is glinting in the infinite sun...I want to wreck my stockings in some jukebox dive and have fun tonight...the sky is slowly turning into twilight, a baby blue with pink puffy clouds...I wish I had a river to skate away on...an intensity deepens in me, the keenest feeling, a giving myself over to connection to the whole world, to all of time. The Portuguese word, saudade - nostalgia for something I may never have had or never will. A state in which time and place and experience are blended into a single poignancy, the fullness of life...Carey, get out your key...The light in front of me is exquisite, I want to snort it up, take it in suddenly, all at once...sometimes all color makes me feel that way, I think ART and the time I was sixteen and at MOMA with a friend and her cousin and aunt. The cousin and aunt lived on Park Avenue, which made them part of a world I knew existed but was afraid I'd never enter, the aunt was some kind of textile artist and I had a mad crush on the cousin who seemed to vibrate with energy and who I was certain would never notice me. A man approached the aunt; he had met her casually before and after they'd talked a few minutes, she said to him, "May I know your name?" The phrasing, her intonation - it was the most elegant thing I'd ever heard and still may be, now with the added charm of how old-fashioned it sounds, how much part of a gracious world that feels gone forever...
   Now, it's getting to the magic hour. Car lights are coming on, billboards glow...I could drink a case of you and still be on my feet...that desire to take everything in and feel myself limitless, infinitely expanding...looking out, I think I could be satisfied forever with only the view beyond my windshield, with all the time in the world to take apart the nuances of its nuances...the Edward Hopper sketches he made from the front seat of his car, to take back to his easel in the studio, with careful notations of color and detail...a pencil drawing I found somewhere of a vase of flowers, the particular hunched backs of Cezanne's card players, the depth of brown and sienna...the irregular Ellsworth Kelly canvas, clear unbroken blue, his homage to the bay in all the Cezanne paintings I saw at the Philadelphia Museum of Art...
   Now it's Dylan...people are crazy and times are strange, I used to care but now I've changed...the cover of The Freewheeling Bob Dylan lying on a Persian rug in an apartment I haven't thought of in years, then the black raincoat I wore one whole winter with black boots with heels - was I beautiful with my long blonde hair... the way I was always looking out from behind my eyes to see if I was being judged and how much time, slow time, had to pass before I realized I no longer did that...traffic is inching along but that's all right, my mind is occupied, more than my mind, my being, and I feel the wheels turning inside me, carrying me forward and I think this intensity I feel, my connection to the world, is always behind whatever I get caught up in, I see the whisk broom that hung in my mother's kitchen, that's what this feeling is, it can always sweep away the foreground to put me in touch with what I know is the deepest part of me...
     I've had a lot of news lately of people who have died and it's made me aware of how, when any of us goes, a whole universe goes with him or her, the universe of memories and the infinite random connections and resonances we all carry within us, the "perchings" of conscious thought and the "flights" that connect them which we can't quite articulate. The times I've leaned over the sink to rinse the soap from my face and have thought, out of nowhere, with no reason I can understand, about the side of a train car that streamed past me twenty years ago...all of this, this universe, is what makes us us and when we die all of its detail and energy will be gone. I know its going is in the natural order of things...I saw a shooting star tonight and I thought about you...but I feel an urgency to get it all down, tell someone else about this universe inside me and my enchantment in it...even though I know it's impossible and no one else can possibly care or feel my urgency, which maybe is the main thing, that while the intensity inside me is private, solitary, unknowable by another, it tells me that the intensity is alive in all the passengers in the cars around me and I marvel that this core inside me brings me out into the world, makes me feel the living energy that surrounds me. 
     As I've been driving north, the sun has been sinking on my left. I pull my eyes from the road to glimpse it just as it goes fully below the horizon. Home with all its comforts and uncertainties and night are closer now. And it's all right...not dark yet, but getting there...