A Cafe by the Beach


Terry and Erv came by to visit. They are Linda's friends from the town in Arizona where I also live, and they came to San Francisco to get married. I remember when Linda, was very worried about Terry's coming out. He's a backhoe operator of unusual talent. Linda, as a company officer as well as a friend, was feeling really protective. How would the other men react?

As it turned out there was no problem at all. When it came time to vote for the best backhoe operator, he was elevated by his peers for his talents, just as he always has been. And his boyfriend, Erv, became familiar as his significant other. They became a married couple, just without the marriage, because they are not supposed to be quite that visible.

They sat down and we had a good conversation that covered Shakespeare, the patterns of the collective unconscious that are developed in the major plays, and we all agreed that Linda is an amazing woman, although I had a suspicion that we might not know the same woman.

It's funny that she's my wife, but sometimes I realize I'm still getting to know her. We spend a good deal of time apart, as well as together so that there is a part of her that does not intersect with me, a strangely familiar woman who has something of inestimable worth. But it is very hard to see because it does not call attention to itself by design. It is only seen by reflection, sometimes.

After we talked a bit, Erv asked about driving up to the wine country, but I could not remember much about it except that you turn and go out past Sears Point Raceway toward Napa and St. Helena. I couldn't remember the highway number anymore, it's been so long since I went there.

I was motivating myself to go to the computer and map it, when Terry had a kind of vague notion about Seal Rock, out by the ocean.

"That's the end of Geary Street. But you can get there on any street that goes West. I like Judah Street, right at the corner, where the streetcar runs. If you go down Judah, all the way to the end, you come to a little cafe called Java Beach." I wasn't sure why the cafe had come into my thoughts, but it was clearly the subject on the background canvass in my mind.

"That's where I want to go," Terry said, with sudden animation.

And then I consciously remembered Linda telling me that it was on the beach, at that spot, where she first came with him to San Francisco when he was coming out. He left her there and went off on his own into the city, for his first time as an openly gay man. That was a long time back. Now he has come back to San Francisco to get married to his companion.

And he is beginning to find a thread of destiny in this day. A glint of gold. He has come more alive as he knows that he is at the end of a journey, which is the beginning of a new journey. Now he is being directed back to where he left Linda at the beach that day long ago.

And now Terry has separated from the background of people Linda knows and with whom I am acquainted, into a much more real person. To be real a person needs a story. It is the container in which their personal adventure in the unknown is stored.

It's always good to see a story which pays attention to the significant detail of resolving the beginning and ending into one timeless place. This story will always begin, and end, at a cafe by the beach.

And I am left tonight with a picture of that cafe, and of Linda being the one who opens the cage and sets the bird free. Tonight she is down near the Mexican border, at an Initiation Conference with Dr. Brugh Joy.

Brugh is the human tuning fork. He is a genius with pattern level psychology and with transforming ritual work.

At some point there will be a ceremony and she will wear white. The dress she will wear is the same dress in which she was married. I think she has a bit of Holden Caulfield in her, trying to guard the cliff at the edge of the rye, and not let any children fall away to be lost forever. She also might be a voo doo queen from a distant planet disguised as a sensible Irish woman. You never really know another person, do you?

It is through the other people that I see her more clearly. Sometimes I feel the stillness of her in their background, as she in mine ... so constant she easily goes unnoticed ... like a favoring wind ...

Posted: Sat - March 6, 2004 at 11:07 AM