The New Place

Artist: James S. Copeland [www.artnsanity.com/Nudes.htm]

Things are very good. Life gets like this sometime: everything I want comes to me.

I live in the Bywater neighborhood now, where I've wanted to live for a long time. For a few days, I fought anxiety about no grocery store in proximity...and strained financial resources...and running out of time to finish plans for the workshop I'm leading next month in New England.

But four new piano students have appeared in the first two weeks and a music store is opening about 4 blocks from my front porch. A friend introduced me to a great little warehouse market in easy biking distance.

Last weekend I got a call from a musician I met months ago at the old Spotted Cat (I can never remember the new name....I'm pouting....too much has changed). The night we met, he was playing this crazy, energetic, 20s-era stuff. Really exciting and fun.

At the break, he bummed a cigarette and we talked about duets and piano music generally and I gave him my number. He came over Tuesday morning. An amazingly talented young man. I hope I see him again.

Artist: Undine CG

It's that New Orleans "lazy fair" thing again: to thrive in this place you have to get out of the house, and open your heart and soften your gaze.

A growing sense of imminence wafts through my life now. Like Summer of '77 in Bloomington, IN.

...a friend and I walked through a night falling so gently on Dunn Meadow; it looked like a velvet commons where fairies might appear at any moment. The sky was dark blue enamel flecked with diamond chips. With no soundtrack playing, the world was breaking my heart with its beauty that night.

And I knew something was up. Could feel it. Like I was walking through the set in a holographic dictionary for the word "imminent." I told my friend I'd never felt so saturated with possibility.

A day or two later I discovered I was pregnant.

Pregnancy is not the promise this time but the shimmery quality of the last few weeks is like fairies giggling from their hiding places along my life route. What's up?