I have no memory of this flower. My telephone backs up photos to the cloud and my desktop, where I am now typing, grabs them and keeps them ready for viewing. I discovered this quite by accident not long ago, though it was a major selling point for the cloud. Here was a magnificent flower between two pedestrian photographs with nothing to tell me about where I was. Is it possible I simply responded to the color and kept walking? Is it an old flower? A dying flower? Or is it simply rough around the edges? It seems to be holding on to life with a very firm grip. Or am I just imagining that? This, I believe, is my favorite flower picture. One that I found this morning. It has so many questions and so very few answers.

The part we normally don't look at. Or if looked at, hardly see. Much of the world we live in becomes invisible to us. We look through the wires to see the dying light, but fail almost entirely to see the poles and and all the paraphernalia that go with them. We adjust the world to give our senses what they want, what they look for, what they need — a world without uglines and distraction. And the longer we look, the less we see. Was there ever a time when such wires pleased our senses? Was the manufactured skyline ever as beautiful as the one we see? "Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind," said Shakespeare through Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream. But the following line tells us something crucial that is almost never considered. "And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind." We blind ourselves to ugliness, so the mind can see what it wants to see, what we want to see. In this case, the last beautiful light of evening.

Flower specialists could probably tell me more than I need to know about this flower, but it seems like a total miracle to me. One of the many things that have caught my eye walking past the Yoga Center. It was there and gone, as ephemeral as starlight in the rosiness of dawn. Were it not for the camera in my phone, it would be nothing but a vague memory. Even so, I think I walked past it several times without noticing. Do flowers really come in such colors, or do Yoga Centers create certain spectacles unexpected elsewhere?

I would like to share the scientific name of this flower, but I have no idea what it is. It crept through a ramshackle fence at the Yoga Center on the corner. Someone there has a taste for the unusual. It continued to grow until it could no longer support its weight, and now the fence is merely a fence again. Though an interesting fence. I think it expresses something about meditation, or meditative exercise. It lived behind the fence for the longest time, until it figured things out and burst forth. I suppose all flowers are like that. This one, however, found a space toward the sun, toward the sidewalk, toward passers by, and refused to be held back. Namaste.

How do you not stop to admire something like this in the midst of absolutely nothing? My daily walk may be short, but is filled to the brim with surprises.

In the past few months I’ve found myself stopping to take flower pictures on my daily walk. When I got here it was difficult to walk across the street, so I push myself every day up the hill to the store and back. I now take the same walk that used to be on and off patches of sidewalk all the way to the store on continuous sidewalk. They’ve been working on it for the last few weeks and it’s almost finished. We’re starting to be what some complain looks a lot like a middle class neighborhood. One of the houses had an enormous display of California poppies growing between an old patch of sidewalk and the fence. And then there was nothing. My heart sank. The owner of the house was just cleaning up as I passed. He saw the shock on my face. “I do this every year,” he said. “First I knock all the seeds on the sidewalk and sweep them up. Then I cut down the old poppy plants, amend the soil, and sprinkle back all the seeds.” Someone taught him to do that years ago, and now it’s like giving the yard a haircut.

Poppies, of course, are weeds. But some of the most beautiful weeds in California. They’ll be back.

Well, I was wrong about the Catholic Church and wrong also, I suspect, about Martin Luther. The Thanksgiving dinner was not at the church, but across the street from the church at the Community Center. When I left, with an hour still to go, they had already fed 265, plus more than 100 take out meals. I’m not sure if the delivered meals were counted in that figure. The lady handing out tickets figured they would serve at least 100 more meals before they quit. It was a very loud and festive group.

I sat with a man 89 years of age whom I’m helping with a website and a blog. He says he’s a wordsmith, but what he really means is that he wrote for local newspapers and magazines for a good portion of his life. There was a band playing. The band was extremely loud, and no one could hear anything that was not yelled directly into their ear. The lead singer wore a fully sequined dress that seemed, perhaps, it’s possible I just don’t understand fashion, more at home in a barroom than a Thanksgiving hall. As luck would have it, the man I was eating with is hard of hearing and was therefore unbothered by the sound. He continued to talk, though I have no idea what he was saying. But he responded to smiles and nods, and seemed to enjoy his meal. He was getting ready to have Thanksgiving dinner with his daughter in a few hours. When the band stopped for a moment I told him he hadn’t changed his latest post. I wrote to him about the final words. They contradicted the premise of the post. It wasn’t a stylistic error, it was a mistake. He said, “If I get any complaints I’ll change it next year.” Complaints. I complained two days ago in a very nice email. I think what he meant to say was that if anyone important complains he’ll change it in next year’s text. So, it wasn’t just a post, it was an annual post.

There were two serving lines. The man across from me at the table went through just ahead of me on the right side, and then snuck through the left side for another meal. He ate two full turkey dinners with all the trimmings in less time than it took me to eat one, and planned to sit there for a while before attempting one final dessert. He had three cups of coffee, three or four cups of water and an apple juice all brought to him by a troupe of obedient Eagle Scouts. What good sports they were. I suspect they earned Thanksgiving Badges.

My neighbor, with whom I am growing a garden in the patio, decided not to go to the community dinner because someone gave him a turkey. He decided he would barbecue the turkey and we could have a second turkey dinner Thanksgiving night. I suggested that we wait until Saturday. But no, Thanksgiving was Thanksgiving. He promised to pick me up for a pre-Thanksgiving dinner Monday. He was really excited about that. But he never showed. He also did not seem aware that he had forgotten anything. I folded his laundry because someone complained that he couldn’t do laundry for two days. Two days in the washer, two days in the drier, and then automatically folded. It makes one wonder. But today, as I left for the Community Center, he said he’d been thinking about what I said and thought Saturday might be better. Last night on the way home from town (which means on the way back from San Luis Obispo) I carried a heavy bag, left-hand/right-hand, home with everything for a turkey dinner except the turkey.

I wonder if chicken and cranberry sauce go together. I could always buy a precooked chicken and have post-Thanksgiving dinner alone Saturday night, something I could count on, maybe with an iTunes movie, when he forgets to barbecue the turkey and locks the door and turns out the lights. Until then, I think I'll just be thankful in private and take a very long and completely restful nap.

I heard yesterday that St. Timothy's Catholic Church up the road is having a Thanksgiving dinner this year. I had spaghetti in their hall about six months ago and had a wonderful time. My neighbor attends St. Timothy's. When I was told, I asked what day the dinner would be and was informed that Thanksgiving is the fourth Thursday of the month. "So, they're having it on Thanksgiving," I said. There was a pause followed by a glare that said rather distinctly what a moron. But later I was told that Calvary Church about two blocks from here was also having a Thanksgiving dinner. Against my better judgment I asked when they were having it. The answer was, "I think they're having it on Tuesday so the people who work there can spend Thanksgiving with their families." Or, maybe, have dinner at the Catholic Church. Martin Luther, I think, based his 95 Theses on something much deeper than theology.