Magic Carpet Ride

 

It was ten years ago that I arrived back in marvy Marin County. Then it was after a three-year, two-month and eighteen-day internment in the Midwest. Actually, it was Chicago and Park Ridge, so it was far more palatable and instructive than I might have found, say, Tulsa or Fargo. The Windy City, after all, features wonderful architecture, delicious food, and some salt-‘o-the-earth people.

A decade later, most of the last six years of which I spent in Redding -- very conservative, opposed to change on principle, and managed by entrenched interests -- I am escaped again to Marin. With honest appreciation for all that I gained in Redding, I am beginning to feel a deepening sense of release. It helps that I am nestled among Mill Valley redwoods, and but minutes away from my treasured walk through Tennessee Valley.

The thinking here is very different. Some of it is frou-frou, some just plain flabby, but at least there’s deliberate brain activity and a sharing of ideas. Some of that sort of thing went on in the rural wilds of the North State no doubt, as in parts of the Midwest, but it wasn’t encouraged, and mostly occurred uncelebrated, in private, behind closed doors.

Having lived in New York, Chicago and Redding, and spent considerable time in Washington, D.C. and The deeper South, I gotta say the Northern California coast is my favorite spot -- for the climate, the Pacific, and a passel of new thinking. But while I have a definite choice for where I would call home, I am very aware that each of these very different social environments contributes importantly to who we are as a nation.

So I’ve begun a month of puppy/house-sitting at two different abodes on either side of one of the finger ridges that comes down from Mount Tamalpais into Mill Valley. I’ve already found a place to root, through a friend walking dogs with a friend two days after I’d arrived, and now it be time for the next phase of my life. Though I’m occasionally showered with cold waves of unknowing, I see the skies clearing and feel the sun breaking through the clouds to warm the soul.

There’s a Chinese cookie fortune stuck above my screen which offers: All your hard work will soon pay off. So I’m thinking it’s finally time to gather the significant threads that have woven this tapestry I fondly refer to as my life -- from the television news producer covering Watergate to the college instructor in Monterey, from directing a Congressional campaign in Illinois to earning a pilot’s license in Redding, plus all the personal stuff -- and make this carpet fly.

And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.

 

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