Living in Starbucks.

I've been living in this real neighborhood of Ocean Park for a year and 11 months. Ocean Park being about as real a neighborhood as you can find in Los Angeles, our cars always luring us to move out from where we are at home.

DVDs were due at the Library this morning before 8. They were really due Saturday but tell me "as long as they're back before 8 on Monday morning" and, guaranteed, I'll push it to the limit. So on this, my birthday morning, I'm out early to keep my name good at the Santa Monica Public Library, Fairview branch. On foot.

I go around the park once. And finally, finally after almost two years living here, amble into Starbucks unencumbered by makeup, cell phone, notebook, laptop, purse, keys, and the need to find a place to park my Subaru. Bare. Vulnerable. With only my gold Starbucks card in tow.

"Tall decaf," I say. And ask for a piece of blank paper and a pen.

Wonder of wonders, there's a booth open which there never is when I've got enough stuff with me to look like I'm moving in. I slide the table to just the right distance from my writing hand and begin to fill a blank strip of cash register tape with a Bic ballpoint. I'd planned to sit, sip my coffee, and muse without writing. But just in case I think, just in case.

In case what? That some brilliant thought will come that demands to be preserved?

With paper and pen so readily available, I can't resist. And begin to write to -- to what? Why do I write?

I write to stay conscious. Writing helps me know what I'm thinking, feeling, wondering about, contemplating, worrying to death. Writing keeps me aware that I'm aware.

Without writing, or sensing (but I'm still more alone when I'm sensing than when I have my old friends -- paper and pen -- with me), Living devolves (love that word!) into plain-old-cardboard-at-the-back-of-a- yellow-legal-pad Life. "Love is a verb," Rabbi David Cooper said. And it's kind of like that for me, life as good as death unless I'm fully there for it.

Saturday night, Leonia and Dinah and I went to a Southwest Chamber Music concert. .John Cage's music cum silence brings awareness. Was going to say forces, encourages it. But even brings it is too material.

John Cage's music invites awareness.

A percussionist strikes a cymbal, then dips it in water. A mallet meets the side of a gong. Fingers tap a thin sheet of hanging metal, creating thunder -- the sheet was once under a car to keep a garage floor from oil stains. The ringing of a Tibetan bell. A wooden stick is hit against another wooden stick. One wooden stick hits the rim of a snare drum.

In between them all,                                                   silence.

In the pauses between the made sounds, the music of living itself. Cells deep down in the dark inside me, reverberating. In my left lower jaw, a sensation of waiting for what's next. Oh, breathing! A cough that doesn't belong to me. The whoosh of fabric on fabric as a man a few rows down uncrosses and recrosses his legs. The creaking of a seat. Creaking of the more-than-I-can-count joints of my neck. Totally taken with this, I gesture yes and no to hear this internal music again and again (Ah, so....I'm not really alone when sensing). On one of my more dramatic yeses, I'm awed by the beauty of the gracefully domed ceiling of this downtown LA concert hall (not Disney, but diagonally across, the Colburn School), held in place by thin, dirty blonde colored, curving wooden beams.

And then....the moment when I realize that when the next sound comes from the musicians, I no longer start in surprise. Instead, an internal readiness for the next surprise, an internal readiness for life-as-it-happens.

When I am ready for life as it happens, that's what I would call living.

On this morning of my 71st birthday I am grateful to be able to say I AM living.

Here, where a barista clangs metal on metal. Where a tot with a mop of brown curls eeks each time her daddy taps the top of her head. Where a refrigerator door clunks shut. Where a woman speaks the word latte as if she's singing it. Where high heels tap on tile. Where someone clears her throat and I realize it's me, this my own contribution to the early morning music in my neighborhood Starbucks. Where what must be a large truck drones by along Ocean Park Boulevard. Where two Asian girls talk Valley talk: "I was going to wear theowse.....with sheows."

All this as sun and shadow play out their continuing drama on the floor and in the plate glass window and the cast of human characters comes and goes.

What I want you to know about me.

Oooh! DO I want you to know about me? Well, why else would you create a blog, Sara? Don't make such a big deal of it. Sure, you've joked about people on twitter who find it necessary to tell you that they've just taken a walk or a shit, and now you're going to tell people what you're doing. You even named your blog Really Here and Really Now. Added that Really!

Okay, enough prelude or preface or introduction or premonition or whatever the hell it's called.

I'm sitting on a pillow which makes me a little more ergonomic. BORING!

Okay, I'll tell you about the salad I made for Laura who is here helping me set up this blog. (Yay! I have a blog after talking about it for years.) Lettuce, those organic hearts of Romaine from TJs. Chunks of red pepper. Chunks of daikon radish. Snap peas. Great colors, huh? I know I'm leaving something out. I don't think I had any carrots left, I used them in my tuna salad. It was my last can of tuna, so I asked Laura if she'd be willing to try Silken Tofu. She didn't think she needed protein, but since I know everything, I knew she did need protein so she humored me (sometimes I'm hard to say no to) and said yes to the tofu. Slices of Japanese white sweet potatoes. She was impressed they were already cooked and just waiting to be used. Oh that Laura is so brave, she said she'd try the Wasabi Mayonnaise, which is also from TJs.

Which reminds me of how old I am and that Deana, a mutual friend of ours -- pronounced Deahhhhna --told me not to pull that age stuff on her. I remember when there were only TWO Trader Joe's and my husband Matt and I used to shop there, the one on Burbank Blvd and White Oak in the Valley. And somebody who reads this -- can it be that somebody is actually going to read this? -- is probably going to tell me I'm wrong, that that wasn't the second TJs, that there were a whole bunch by then (this is the 70s I'm talking about, the 1970s) but, as I said, I know everything even when I don't. And speaking of brave, I'm brave. Rather than getting off this train of thought that wants to tell you about having shopped in the second TJs ever, I stay on it. Anything that'll keep me writing. Anything not to let the fear of being wrong be what gets in the way today.

And somehow this reminds me of Laura's adorable husband -- where was it I ran into them one evening, Barnes & Noble, Trader Joe's? -- his name is Matthew and my husband's name was Matt. Well he WAS my husband which doesn't mean his name isn't still Matt. And Matt is married to Alice. And I'm not married to anybody. But I did meet a pretty cute man Wednesday night and who knows what might come of that. Now that's something I don't know and I'm not even going to speculate about.