I Want to Stop and Live at Gig Harbor

Going from one place to another, I decided this morning that I’d had enough of going and turned off at Gig Harbor. Didn’t know anyone, or what was there. Never heard of it before, but the road led down a hill to what I guess is a pocket of Puget Sound,

and a sleepy waterfront street with an overhanging, blinking red light and no traffic except a lady walking her dog. A shop awning says “GALLERY ROW,” and there are only two galleries. The café has no wifi. Ah, and I walked with a background of noble taciturn pines on a cloudy, drizzly morning until I came to blackberries, a whole block of them along the sidewalk! Reaching out my hand, (fattest ones out of reach, as always) it was as if that same hand

on another cloudy day forty years ago in western Massachusetts. I remember how my body felt exceptionally lithe then, anchored in itself after three weeks of Vipassana,

there in the small town of Barre, where I’d snuck out of the retreat for breakfast in town one morning only to find the four retreat teachers all sitting at a table at the same diner, going about their business as if they didn’t know I was there. There was room in that world to take slow steps, look around after each one and decide where you wanted the next one to take you. At some point, though, I got shunted to a 40-year tunnel where things went very fast. Don’t get me wrong: lots of good, even great things. But as I breathed this morning walking here in Gig Harbor, and tasted those blackberries I wanted, I wanted to live in a city with a Gallery Row of two galleries, and no one at the intersection except a lady walking her dog.