Chapter 25 — Up the Coast
Rufus muses on what writers have in common with squirrels.
Followed by Chapter 25 —— Up the Coast, in which Sienna steps out into her new life.
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Hello Friends,
A funny thing about being an author is that it is a lot more like being a squirrel than a flashy showman.
My wife can spin fantastic yarns at the drop of a hat. She can even make up songs as she’s singing them, replete with meaningful rhymes. That art is not my forte, as my kids would assure you; asked for an impromptu bedtime story, I used to stare blankly back like the proverbial deer in the headlights. Imagination takes time for me and is very non-linear.
I am good at collecting things, though. On this score my wife would agree with great lamentation; I still have hundreds of hand-crafted squirrels from a project many years back, quite literally enough to fill a soccer stadium with. But I digress.
That cliche of the author wandering around with a notebook in her back pocket is a well founded one. Of course, today we all, almost always, have a digital notebook sitting in our pocket; and when struck with an idea, I regularly email myself notes. Email is wonderful because, though less physically tangible, those notes are more apt to make it into one of my stories; more impervious to a spilled cup of tea or being inadvertently used as fire kindling.
And even if most of my notes do simply end up on a spreadsheet of ideas, not dissimilar to the squirrels’ misplaced acorns that have been said to repopulate entire forests, the few that are harvested and later put to good use end up making my tales so much the richer for their presence. If memory serves me, this squirrels and acorns analogy might even make it into The Curve of Time (though I won’t swear to that, because, as I think I’ve mentioned before, my memory is more akin to that of a goldfish).
So how are these collected observations connected with writing? Well, for one thing, it never fails to surprise me how often apparently disparate little events in life can be reworked into a tapestry——woven together in delightfully idiosyncratic ways——and in so doing grow into something much bigger than the sum of their parts.
If you’ll permit me to mix metaphors: it’s related to the 10,000 hours of practice idea, but rather than learning to fish, you have collected a bag full of lures. Each splendidly colorful and unique. Taken together they have a coherence that you wouldn’t have expected when you first started amassing them.
What in today’s chapter made me think of this? Well, there was an evening late last year when I got a 3AM phone call from my eldest——never a good time to be getting a phone call; such calls almost always require accessing some hard won wisdom, or receiving more. Apparently, she’d had her pocket picked on the London underground. The “good news”: she was able to track her phone using her friend’s phone. The phone was only six miles away. The question my judgement was sought for was: “should I go confront them?” The conflict being that she had a mandatory lab practical she needed to attend. My response: “you’re asking me if you should skip your mandatory school lab work in order to travel across London before your phone tracker is turned off in order to confront an unsavory character who isn’t answering your calls and likely trying to fence your phone?” I guess sometimes life does present you with easy 3AM decisions. Anyway, somewhere in today’s chapter, you’ll hear echos of that incident.
Until next week, be kind to someone and keep an eye out for the ripples of joy you’ve seeded.
Cheerio
Rufus
PS. If you think of someone who might enjoy joining us on this experiment, please forward them this email. And if you are one of those someone’s and you’d like to read more
And now, without further ado, here’s chapter twenty five, in which we catch up with Sienna.
— 25 —
Up the Coast
After her flirting cafe companion had left to embark on her own day that morning, Sienna had scrolled through an images search for “Buddhist monk Berkeley”. It was a bit of a Hail Mary and she’d been surprised to find the monk she recalled from her one trip to Berkeley. At least, the photo she clicked on certainly shared a commonality with her memory, though she couldn’t rule out the possibility that that was her wishful thinking, and the suggestibility of her mind.
In any event, his website boasted a two day retreat in the hills behind Santa Cruz and Sienna rationalized that it had been so long ago, and such a small moment in her actual past that this thread had been totally reasonable to follow up on. Besides, the devil-may-care side of her, that she had just unleashed, dismissed any concerns that her sensible-self harbored.
The front doorbell app on her phone chimed. It served as a reminder that she would need to switch sim cards at some point, but she deliberately ignored it; that was another life.
When she thought about disappearing it occurred to Sienna that the only person who would miss her was her other self, and she, she believed, would have been relieved to send her off. There was Tomato too, but he still had Saskia. She recalled rubbing her furry feline friend under the chin before she left. He’d purred for her, as always, content in the moment he was living in. How simple it would be to be a cat. Always content in the now. At least always in the now.
∞
Sienna had been on the road less than a day. She had taken ten thousand dollars from their bank account. It was hardly a large sum, especially given their lottery windfall, and she figured that realistically she’d been entitled to far more, had she cared to take it. Weirdly, however, even though she’d felt uneasy about her lottery boon she still felt guilty about taking this much from Saskia’s account and had apologized in the note she left. She’d also promised to cut up her bank card.
She’d considered renting a car, but realized that she’d need her drivers license for that——of course she did have her drivers license; it had been in her wallet, which she’d had in her pocket when she went to the restroom at Cleo’s——but using it would have created a digital trail. And besides even with ten thousand dollars a rental would burn through money fast.
There was the possibility of hot-wiring a car, like any good fugitive on the run. She chuckled at the thought and immediately dismissed it. She wasn’t a fugitive and the opportunity she’d been afforded wasn’t contrived to lead to a life of crime.
So it was that she found herself peering out the window of the train, watching as the coastline breezed by. The train had been preferable to a bus, and of course a plane would have required that drivers license again. The second time she considered using it, she had cut it up and tossed the plastic confetti in the trash. It had been a rash move, ill-judged perhaps, but that was the new her: decisive and carefree.
Moving forward without identification gave her sympathy for, not just fugitives, but illegal migrants. Indeed, anyone who lacked a proper ID.
Out of curiosity she decided to see how big the unbanked population was. She would have been astounded to discover it represented almost five percent of households. One in twenty! There were so many things she took for granted in life that she now had a mirror held up to. Unfortunately, when she reached into her pocket her phone was missing.
She patted the other side of her jacket, and, with rising panic, riffled through her bag. Nothing. Her eyes flicked up and left as she scanned back over——that was it, her phone had been stolen. Pick-pocketed. She knew exactly where it had happened. Back at Union Station in LA. She’d been bumped into in an awkward way, but had just assumed it was a rude young punk. Some self absorbed kid. Only now did she realize she’d been robbed.
She gazed out the window again. She felt completely untethered. A couple of minutes ago the sight of the waves crashing into the shoreline had seemed romantic, as she raced away from her past. But now . . . now all that she could see, all that she felt, was the herdy gerdy of being pummeled in the surf. Gasping for air as the elements pounded her.
Then, she realized, she had recourse. Far from the whim and a prayer of a phone tracking app, which had no doubt already been disabled on the other end, Sienna could wind the clock backwards and intercede before the phone was stolen in the first place.
