I went to Franklin Canyon today—a local park off of Coldwater Canyon Drive, a few miles from my home. You forget you’re in L.A. when you’re walking there among the sycamore and redwood trees, the sky a brilliant blue and the winding trails that lead steeply upward or circle the small pond with mallards and wood ducks vying for position in case you have bread to give them. My friend and I walked and talked—about our work, our families, travels we’ve had, or were going to take, what was to come and what had been. It was a simple walk, not profound in any way, not life-changing, but calm and sweet, gentle in a way that was like drinking a glass of cold water on a warm day or taking a nap in the afternoon, a kind of reverie that nourishes body, mind and soul.

Toward the end of our walk we met a couple who said they had been coming to the park every day for twenty years. They were probably in their seventies. He was tall and bearded and held the leash of their Airedale dog. She walked with a cane and wore a fur trimmed, knit cap that she popped off just long enough to reveal the brilliant white color of her hair, just growing back after undergoing chemo. She laughed about how it had a slight curl to it now, which was not there before. The husband knew much about the trees in the park, showing us the tiny pine cones at the tips of the towering redwoods, the drooping branches of the deodar cedar and told us how the water that flowed into the small reservoir there was not pumped, but siphoned from the source. The wife was Finnish and spoke with a soft voice about when she was a child in school and had learned all the trees and plants in her home region, had made a notebook of samples of each one and had labeled each with their common and Latin names. We strolled with them for awhile until it was time for my friend and I to turn off and return to our car and drive back into the city.

When I was visiting my mother a couple of weeks ago she and I were sitting in her living room one evening and she started talking about the neighborhood where she grew up in Portland, near the railroad tracks on 20th Street—how there was every nationality represented: Italian, Asian, African, Russian, Irish and Mexican. She talked about living as a young child during the Depression, her first job as a secretary and working six days a week for $5 and splitting that with her mother 50/50 to help cover expenses. She talked about the scandals in the neighborhood: divorces, beatings and even murder. There were the decent people and the rotten ones, and it didn’t matter the color of their skin or how long ago they’d stepped off the boat—it was how they treated their neighbors, how they watched out for each other that mattered. I vowed, after hearing her talk, to get these stories down on paper—for our family, for the generations.

Perhaps I’m getting sentimental, seeing the earth spinning so fast that it wrenches my stomach these days and I want to hold onto something that is solid, like the center post in the merry-go-round, where life is not a blur. but more like a leaf-strewn path, meandering through time and space, where precious, precious souls leave their footprints, their stories. Maybe, it’s because I’m a writer of poems, one who fingers the scales of what was, what is and what could be. It seems that poetry is about honoring and preserving what is absolutely unique in each of us—of all that has ever existed and will exist—burrowing into what is so different and finding, there, in the center that still place where we are gloriously at one. The thousand-year old redwood, the wood duck and its mate, the Finnish couple walking in the park, my mother and her long-ago neighbors and the stories they have to tell—all we have to do is listen, just listen.

May your 2008 spin a little less and meander a little more.