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.