Just after midnight January 1, 2009: Sitting on the couch at Karen's with a bottle of champagne. We had just gotten back from "up the hill" where we attended a party with some old friends, some new friends, and a few people new to us both. We left shortly before midnight intending to spend the strike of midnight together and alone.
A rather uneventful evening if you look at the surface elements.
But it's the river flowing underneath that image that reveals the most about where my life stands five years on from
that night of 03/04, alone in the living room of the little house on Dana, just a short 5 blocks from where Karen and I were standing with champagne under mistletoe at midnight.
The biggest difference is probably the smallest leap. I LIVE here now!
That simple reality is something that I never thought I would accept and/or admit to, but here I am living enthusiastically and more or less contentedly in my own little loft apartment (a long and wonderful story in and of itself) above a garage next to a beautiful garden with buddha statues and
a magnificent live oak tree. We live (myself, the tree, and my terrific landlords) at the corner of B and Fair, and that is becoming, as the former owner of the house - Petaluma's first woman mayor, Helen Putnam - used to say, "my motto."
My life has indeed become (and is becoming) fair, not in the sense of mediocre, but in the sense of soft and lovely and delightful.
I fell in love with my new residence the first time I walked into the garden, and I waited in homeless limbo (on friend's couches, at Karen's place, and in "The Little House") for several months for the apartment to become ready to live in (I am it's first actual resident). I moved in during the first week of April, just days before my DDD
got married in San Francisco, and between these two nearly simultaneous events, I experienced a deep and engaging sense of life beginning anew.
My growing collection of old and new friends threw me a
fabulous house warming party that was organized by Karen, who commiserated with Joe to fool me more completely than I had ever been fooled before.
I also began a lot of new work, much of it in the writing that I have worked hard for much of my adult life to turn into gainful employment. I engaged my new presence in Petaluma by volunteering to co-chair the city's renewed
Riverfest Celebration (and I have recently proven what a glutton for punishment I am by volunteering to chair the event for this year!), and by joining the unlikely amalgamation of people that make up
Moose Lodge #475. Almost daily, I continue seeking to find ways to involve myself on the ground, in the place where I live.
And then there was the election. This amazing year of challenge and struggle and ultimate triumph when we as a country and a people, individually and collectively, discovered that... truly...
WE are the ones we've been waiting for.
I also seem to have discovered that, I am the one I've been waiting for.
On top of it all... through the kindness, patience, insight, creativity and beauty of this surprising person who has come to share my life these days - in ups and downs and back and forths, with soft kisses and deep hugs, through lots of laughter and a few difficult arguments -
I found my way back to love.
Indeed...
There Is No Fifth Destination.
Last night I fired up the Safari on Nola.com and the iTunes to WWOZ and watched my favorite Mardi Gras parade... MUSES. I even pulled my Muses official high heel mardi gras beads down from the shelf and wrapped em around my neck.
The reality is that carnival began back at the end of Christmas but for me the celebration of "Mardi Gras Time" begins with the Muses parade. Now I'm here in my home/office struggling to track my way through a day of work (still recovering from the brain fog of a nearly weeklong cold), raise some money, pay some bills, and get some things done... but all I really want to do is be out wandering around on the streets this weekend, watching parades, listening to music, parading with the Indians and basically experiencing that thing that is Mardi Gras. 
I'm even tracking a whole collection of folks who are Twittering their Mardi Gras experiences.
