Roomin' House Blues

I have been many things in my life: schoolboy, water puddle breaker, drifting on boards in the red marsh, revolutionary and reformer, fallen sinner, convert to grace and wanna be saint.  I have been gainfully employed, unemployed and hippie. Journalist and poet. The guy reading a book next to you on the bus, and the guy running two bus stops for the bus. Today, thumbing a book I remembered something else I was, a hermit. Wang Wei, Chinese poet of the T'ang dynasty wrote, of sitting  alone under bamboo,  playing a lute: "This deep grove's unknown to other men. Bright moon, when it comes: we shine together." Years ago, around 1970, I lived for a while in a plastic covered geodesic dome on a dirt road in the Santa Cruz Mountains, off Old San Jose Road. The dirt road I lived next too used to be the original path of the Old San Jose Road, running across a creek, down by an abandoned station stop in the middle of the creek and up the hill next to the...