so there I was on the beach at San Quentin last week with the flu. The viral cloud of autumn has descended and Sam is back in school which means he is a portable petri dish of filth and pestilence, and we have caught everything that has come down the pike. To make everything worse, there's a truly wonderful writer named Rick Fields who lives down the street, who is in the process of living with metastatic lung cancer. He drives by our house a couple of times a day and -- I consider this so aggressive -- he seems to be in a really good mood most of the time. I hate that: I worry that he's out to get me. Several weeks ago, when I had a head cold, I pounded on his windshield when he attempted to drive by, and said, "Why are you doing this to me? Look at me -- I'm sick as a dog! I'm conGESted."

He smiled. He loves me, loves my emotional drag-queeny self. He's about my age, and he looks a little bit like Spielberg, especially because he wears a baseball cap most of the time now and does not shave every day.

I saw a recent interview he did for a Buddhist quarterly, in which he said that he's savoring the moments of his life so intently right now that he no longer feels that he has a life-threatening disease, he has a disease-threatening life. I am really trying to get there, but I've got to say, it isn't going quite as well as I had hoped.

When I got the flu, the head-achy flu, I limped downstairs in the morning to get my paper, gripping my lower back like Grandpa Walton. And of course right then Rick drove by. He looked grizzled, and radiant, which is a fabulous mix. I stepped in front of his car to make him stop, which he did. Then I pounded on his windshield.

He smiled. "Do you do this just to mess with me?" I asked. "Drive around looking content? Because now I have the flu."

"I'm sorry," he said. "Sometimes colds and flus are harder to handle than cancer."

"Especially for an extremely sensitive person like myself."

"Yes," he said, and patted the back of my hand. "But did you notice what an incredibly beautiful day it is?" he asked. "The air has gotten so sharp with autumn, even though it's sunny, and blue."

"Oh, STOP," I said.

In his interview in the Buddhist magazine, he said, "I'm going to live until I die. And the doctor is going to live until he dies. He thinks he knows when I'M going to die, but he doesn't even know when he's going to die."

So that it is why I came to the beach at San Quentin -- because all of a sudden I began to wonder how I might play out the day if it was going to be my last day on earth. And I do not want to spend my last day on earth doing either Big I, or Poor Me. I just want to be here, on board. Rick said in the interview, "I'll live -- and here I'll add, as well, as deeply, as madly as I can -- until I die." So I decided to go to the beach and practice being in it as if it were my last day of my life.

i stopped on the way and bought the new People magazine, and -- talk about throwing caution to the wind! -- a bottle of real Coca-Cola; on my last day, I will not be drinking diet Coke. That's about all I know for sure.

Driving to the beach, I realized that my nose felt too activated. It made me miss my head cold. The car smelled of dog, and of Sam's school lunch that was on the floor of the back seat, and when I rolled the window down, the air was filled with the smells of a road being repaired -- jackhammer smells, gravel and a nearby tar cart. I had a friend, though, a doctor, who quit smoking and then started up again because she found that the world smelled too intense for her. She thought her lawn smelled too strong, too green, too grassy, and so she started smoking again, and eventually died of a drug overdose.

I pulled into the parking lot of a 7-Eleven and threw away Sam's old lunch bag. It gave me a new lease on life. Then I drove on to San Quentin. I'm drawn to the beach there because my dad taught English at the prison when I was a little kid, and I feel like there is a little bit of him in the sand there. He published a number of short stories in the New Yorker about teaching English to the prisoners, and he wrote a beautiful biography of the prison that came out when I was 7, and when I was a teenager, I got to stand outside late at night in vigils with him and his friends to protest death penalties and inhumane conditions. I can remember almost exactly how he smelled -- of L.L. Bean chamois shirts, beer, cigarettes. He smelled like a tall male, and he smelled of hiking, and of books and blue jeans.

His friends would pass around flasks of whiskey, and because it was always late and cold, they would pass the flask to me. And I would have a sip with the men outside the walls of San Quentin; and the moon would be out, and the stars.

I secretly believe that it is the safest beach in the world. It's also, beach-wise, about as basic as it gets, the Platonic essence of beach. Sand, water, sky, eucalyptus trees jutting over the sand from the bordering hillside. There are no accommodations -- no public bathrooms, no places to buy food. Compared to the grandeur and scope of Marin County beaches like Stinson or Bolinas, it's a simple cloth-coat beach; but sometimes the more luscious and robust a place is, the more you forget about the comfort of quiet, of slow.

Now normally I like heavy luscious. I like a lot of distraction, a lot of physical comfort. I like festive beach umbrellas and chaise longues. I like long white stretches of sand. I like a lot of people around who have been paid to help me, and a small medical staff for any tropics-related incidents that may crop up, like blood blisters, say, or shark-bite. Also, I like to nurse virgin blender drinks with pineapple chunks, and cocktail toothpicks with frilly plastic panties.

But I also love the beach at San Quentin. So on this one particular day, I was sitting on my butt in the sand, reading my People magazine. A little voice inside whispered for me to look up, to pay attention, to breathe in the world, and I said to myself that as soon as I finished the article on Gwyneth Paltrow, I would. That was when I put down my magazine, and began to laugh in a quiet yet somehow hysterical way. I covered my mouth and tittered into my hand. I must have looked crazy, but there were only a few other people around. There was a mother with soggy twin 1-year-olds, just barely walking, lurching about like little 20-pound drug addicts, rolling around in the sand. And there was a guy sleeping on a beach towel who looked exactly like the husband in "Breaking the Waves" -- big and sweaty and snorey. You could almost imagine his small band of horrible sniggery mates. I watched him sleep.

After awhile I began to notice a bad smell mingling with the scent of eucalyptus. Both wafted in from the direction of the driftwood that blankets the back part of the beach. But I couldn't put my finger on what the new smell was. It wasn't fishy, or salty or sweet: it was sort of bodily. I could hear the sleeping man snore, the twins grunting with wonder and effort. The mother watched them, smiling. She was in her early 20s, blonde and plain.

My automatic response was to pick up my magazine, check out for awhile. But I didn't. I let the smell draw me back to the beach.

It was something very familiar, very bodily, but not the usual suspects, not feet or crotch or armpits. It smelled like a wild animal who was letting itself go, who had developed fatty crevices and not groomed properly. The husband from "Breaking the Waves" slept. The babies were still rolling around in the sand. They had begun to look like little breaded veal cutlets.

I sniffed the air. The smell reminded me a little bit of the old people at the convalescent home my church visits once a month, like age and decay, like something going a little bad; like inside smells that have inadvertently gotten out.

The waves broke loudly on the shore. The tide was coming in. The sleeping man slept and the breaded babies played. My friend Pammy always had an earthy smell about her until she got sick. Then as she did less -- less ballet, less flute and fewer errands and acts of kindness for her friends, her smells grew milder. She smelled soapier toward the end, which is to say, less like life. But at the same time, the essential part, the part of her that was beautiful and sacred and whole, was set off more, like a gem. And it grew more and more distinct as her achievements fell away.

The smell on the beach grew stronger, and then out of the blue I realized what it reminded me of. It reminded me of the inside of my belly button. I hate to sound like the late great Roseanne Roseannadanna. It's just that we've all done the occasional spot check, right? And everything smells a little funky if you go in at all deeply. It's life snuggled together way down deep inside, like flug after a little moisture has crept in. Let's face it: It's the grave.

I couldn't for the life of me figure out what, on the beach, could be giving off this smell. But I remembered the first time I noticed it, on my own tiny personal self. Maybe I had too much time on my hands; maybe I'm just trying to find out who I am, but I remember being sort of shocked and vaguely ashamed, as if everyone else had been dealing with this situation all along. As if everyone else knew to tend to this, that all of your fresher women, like Dinah Shore and the Nixon girls, were using something sold in the back of magazines between the teeth whiteners and the itch-control products.

I read my magazine, and drank my Coca-Cola. I got up to go pee behind a boulder at the far end of the beach, and although the sun had made my muscles ache less, I still felt a little arthritic. I thought of the creaky old people at the convalescent home. They smell pretty terrible sometimes, like the inside of a thousand belly buttons. A lot of them are deeply in decay, in flug meets moisture. But here's the thing: They sit there in their wheelchairs, day after day, and often no one comes to visit, and yet when we show up and lead them in worship, they still know the words of the hymns, and they sing. They sit there so lonely, often in pain, smelling not so great, and still singing.

The waves rolled in and out. The menthol fragrance of the eucalpytus trees laced itself up with the odor from the big doggy piles of driftwood. The snoring man awoke and sat up, sat there in the sand looking out at the sea, and not long after, the breaded veal cutlets fell asleep. I went over to the mother and handed her my magazine. She was really surprised and pleased. We smiled at each other; the babies snored. I thought of the message on Rick's answering machine, which is that the road to enlightenment is long and difficult, and that you should try not to forget snacks, and magazines. And I don't know what had happened, but I went back to my spot on the beach, where I sat in the sand and finished my soda, sniffing the air, lost in an ecstasy of smells.