Live in the Moment

Right now, the sun sparkles on the drops of rain drying on the leaves of the plum and the sumac in my garden. Grass, cool and wet on my feet.

Inside, the treadmill waiting for its hour, a prescription for continuing this life.

This life that I could believe was easily all imagination, the Berkshire hills arrayed before the sky, framed by the maple that grows near my desk, the bids singing in the tree, the hot afternoon that will lengthen into a cool breezy evening.

Last weekend, we were in New York and visited the studio of a photographer too famous for me to name here, or anywhere on social media. We drove through the Hudson Valley on the way home, bypassing Storm King, glancing by DIA Beacon.

The New Yorker arrived today, and inside is a review of a play that was staged ten minutes from my front door. A review of a restaurant I know, discussions of politics that effect my life.

It’s a time machine, it’s a reminder, it’s an anchor to the days when all of this was fantasy. Days when the New Yorker was a secret treat, a stash of inscrutable magazines I found in a used bookstore and read in private, ten cents each. Everything in the magazine was fiction of course. It was all make believe, my version of fairy tales read by myself, to myself on rainy nights over the long, drab west coast winters. All of it conjured for the page, pure and simple, and none of this described would have anything to do with any part of my life, ever.

Every day I wonder if I have finally washed up on the shore of a world that is completely fictitious. If perhaps I am in a coma, or a strait jacket, or just buried somewhere, dreaming, and making up the world that spins around me just as though it were completely plain and ordinary.

It makes me stop and watch the birds in the garden, feel the grass under my feet, observe the milkweed, the pumpkins and the beans, like I’m sketching it all to keep it somewhere, because of course, I was never here.