The clerk gave her a smile on automatic pilot and replaced the defective cookie, slipping them into a white sack and placing it on the counter. “A dollar-seventy-six please,” she told the old woman.

The old woman turned her back to me and began fumbling in her purse, which was the size of a small knitting bag. After much muttering she finally produced two dollar bills rolled together and neatly bound with a yellow rubber band. She addressed the clerk with a staunch formality: “Also I would like some peanut butter cookies. The little ones. Twenty-four cents of them.”

The clerk, with a look that pleaded God, I wish my period would start, scooped out three small peanut butter cookies and, without bothering to weigh them, slipped them in the bag with the others. The old woman rolled the yellow rubber band off the two bills and spread them out on the counter, pausing to smooth them flat before she secured the white sack in her knitting-bag purse, dropped in the yellow rubber band and the receipt, and left at a brisk shuffle. I lost sight of her in the flow of the crowd as I stepped forward to place my order.

About a half hour later, however, while I was sitting on a bench at the other end of the mall, still pondering the money and points as I polished off a last hot dog, the old woman appeared and, after considerable maneuvering, plopped herself down on the far end of the bench.

Without any acknowledgment of my presence, she opened the white bag from the Cookie Jar. At a bite each, with slow and luscious enjoyment, she ate the three small peanut butter cookies. When she’d finished, she peered into the bag to check the other three, the big ones, and then, as if to confirm their existence, their promise of delight, she named them one by one:

“Friday night.

Saturday night.

Sunday with tea.”

Things Thought Through

The path of water is not noticed by water,
but is realized by water. –DōGEN

Thinking things through.

Thinking through things.

Things through thinking.

Through thinking things.

On Balance

At fifteen,

the imagination

torments;

at fifty,

it consoles.

Another transformation

changing nothing.

Decomposition

I don’t know

and I don’t know

what to do about it.

I simply hit a point

where I lost heart for judgments

and was swept

into the voluptuous, harrowing

complexities composing a single breath.

Psycho Ecology

AN HOMAGE TO WALT WHITMAN

Reality is the work of imagination.

Imagination, the flume of emotion.

After all the tears and laughter,

emotion empties into spirit,

and spirit condenses on reality

like dew on a leaf of grass.

Life of the Spirit

A salmon leaps.

Transcend what?

Aweigh