The seasons form a great circle in their changing,
And always come back again to where they were.
Black Elk

The high point for me would be Neptune. But I digress.

It began with a blurry photograph of my father that was taken in front of the Santa Maria City Hall on July 3, 1942. I know the precise date and location because he wrote it in pen across the top, but it is a rather undistinguished photo of a listless summer moment. He is simply sitting on a bench, wearing a soldier's uniform, pausing from an errand or a vacant saunter through town. I recognize him in the broad abstract smudges of his dearly familiar frame and bearing -- but in truth, the picture is completely out of focus. Along the snapshot's lower border, in his handwriting, it says simply: "Bill is blurred out." Indeed he is. Behind him, more crisply, is a white stucco building with curved archways and a tile roof in the Spanish style that is characteristic of Santa Barbara.

But I had no conception of California architecture when I first saw the photo, for I was eight years old and living in New York. I only know that I was very fond of my father's leather album, bulky with snapshots from the 1940's and yellowed clippings from the Camp Cooke Clarion. The war had ended a dozen years earlier, but there was already something compelling and elusive about those black and white photos of jeep convoys along desolate hills, the blank- faced tidy barracks, and my father in uniform, gleaming with dreams. Santa Maria seemed a beautiful name, and the entire area was infused with a mythological allure by virtue of stories I'd been told. "It was beautiful country," my father had said. "I always wished I could return."

Sometimes the soldiers ventured into the nearby town of Lompoc, which opened its scrawny arms to them in a warm embrace. There was a recording booth at the USO facility there. Now sixty years later, I can still listen to him --78 rounds per minute-- sending love to his mother, promising a buddy from Texas the best spaghetti dinner in the world if he ever comes to visit after the war, and flirting unabashedly with a young woman who apparently looked good in a sweater.

There were trips to Santa Barbara, as well. Tony's Log Cabin Restaurant at 532 State Street promised real Italian cooking. Photographers offered soldiers' portraits for $1.25. A parade of tanks drove right past the Granada Theater, and the most beautiful girl in the world sat on a stone wall covered with bougainvillea. She waved as the soldiers went by, and my father thought he had glimpsed paradise.

How could I have known that I would one day make my home here? And when I first arrived, because it was July 3, 1992, it was clear to me that I had to go to the Santa Maria City Hall. We drove into town, and I recognized it immediately, for it was virtually unchanged. The bench where my father had sat was gone, and an area that had been grassy or dirt was now paved. That was it. On the spot where my father had sat on that long-ago summer day, the granddaughter he never knew did cartwheels. I watched her thin legs carve frivolous hoops in the air. What difference did it make that fifty years had elapsed? Sometimes time and space seem to slide around. In that sweet moment, I felt that something had come full circle.

Yet, I've had much to learn of loss and change. I have felt small and battered by the randomness of things. I have reeled with grief, and railed against injustice, and felt no response from the silent spheres. I am a coiled spring, a spinning top, a floundering soul in erratic orbit. There is so much I want back, but remorse just leaves me gasping and constricts the radius of life. I try to remember that acts of kindness touch the world in concentric circles. I try to have faith, and work.

I am a teacher now at Dunn Middle School, and on one recent morning, my colleague, Donna Frost, launched a grandiose plan with our sixth grade students. The idea was to create a scale model of the solar system, but not only would the planets be correctly sized in relation to each other, the distances between them would be based upon the same scale as well. It was elaborate and complicated, just our style. With the sun at the oak tree in front of our school office, far-flung Pluto would be about forty miles away in Pismo Beach; the other planets --and their moons - would be placed precisely here and there along the way. Careful calculations revealed that Neptune would be in Santa Maria. I knew the perfect site.

So where the bench was, and my father, and the cartwheel, there is Neptune now. If life is a cycle, I sometimes think, maybe I can simply sit and wait for everything to come back around. I've seen time slur its grasp, if only for an instant, and paused in the fissure between then and now, knowing love beyond the mere circumference of a life span. I've seen blurry photographs converge with planets. I've glimpsed the stunning synchronicity of the universe, made evident in the silly thing you might have missed if you were rational.