Category: Berkeley

It’s October 11th, and it’s the Monday closest to the date Columbus landed in the New World. In Berkeley (and in some other places, too) that means it’s Indigenous Peoples Day. The city adopted the holiday back in 1992 as part of its response to the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival. It set off a lot of chortling, even among some Berkeleyites; note also that Malcolm X’s birthday, May 19, and International Women’s Day, in early March, are also local holidays here; what I like about all that is it’s a real-life attempt to try to look at history from a different perspective. (And I admit that I wasn’t sorry to see Columbus knocked off his pedestal; I’ve always had a chip on my shoulder that Leif Ericsson doesn’t get enough press, though he does get an officially designated day, too — October 9).

It struck me when I wrote the other day about Berkeley’s off-street pathways that there’s a group here dedicated to their restoration and preservation. It’s the Berkeley Path Wanderers Association. The picture on the group’s homepage, by a local artist named Karen Kemp, features the same sort of jumbled steps that I was trying to photograph. It’s not actually the same path — plenty of Berkeley’s paths and stairways look this way.

Berkeley is filled with scores of walkways laid out in the middle of its regular blocks. Most are in the hills neighborhoods where the street pattern is curved and irregular to follow the contour of the land. One afternoon earlier in the week, I was following a wandering course home from some unnecessary errand or other and wound up on a section of the Tamalpais Steps. I took the first picture trying to capture how the sections of stairs slant at different angles. I didn’t get that so well and will have to go back when the lighting isn’t so challenging for my little digital camera.

But there’s still a little bit of a find in the picture. If you look at the large version of the image, there’s a piece of paper tacked up on a fence to the left of the walkway. I didn’t notice it when I took the picture. But as I continued up the walk, I saw it. It turned out to be an impromptu poetry posting. A few people around town do this. It’s as unexpected and pleasing as the walks themselves.

I’ve always loved looking down from planes and spotting stuff on the ground I recognize, or think I recognize. Taking off out of Oakland yesterday, I brought my little 3 megapixel digital camera. When we made our big loop out over San Francisco Bay, then headed east, we happened to be right over Berkeley. I recognized a school in our neighborhood and snapped a couple of quick pictures through the window without being sure if anything would show up. Looking at them tonight on my computer at my dad’s place in Chicago, I can see I got a nice detailed look at our neighborhood. The dramatically blown-up image is of our block; I can even make out the addition we just built behind our house and our salmon-pink shed (they’re near the right margin of the image, roughly, and a little more than a third of the way up from the bottom edge of the picture). Don’t know why I’m so amazed, but I’m blown away by the detail.

We go over to the Grand Lake area in Oakland every once in a while to eat at a fun Italian place called Zza’s. It’s not impossible to find a parking place there, but you wind up walking to the restaurant from somewhere in the neighborhood. And while doing that some time ago, we noticed this: Sunset Casket Outlet. The whole idea of a casket outlet is not brand new, and everyone knows that the funeral business is a ridiculously expensive proposition. But this is the only one I’ve seen (in fact, a local weekly once named it the area’s best casket store).

I wish I’d taken a better picture, but inside the window you can just make out one of the odd floor-model caskets. It’s got some painted-on pictures and some graffitied-on slogans relevant is some way to a potential customer. Strange. Tacky (or, in contemporary vernacular, “ghetto”). And just half the price of what most casket stores would charge.

Kate teaches in Oakland, and her union is in some tough negotiations with the district over its next contract. Since the district, like nearly all the urban school systems in California, is in serious financial trouble, the teachers agreed to a 4 percent cut in salaries last year. Now the district wants to cap health-care contributions in a move that would cost most teachers something like 250 bucks a month. Doesn’t sound like a whole lot, but 1) that’s $3,000 a year and could cost teachers another 5 percent or 10 percent of their wages; and 2) that $250 a month is just for starters — the cap would limit the district’s cost and make teachers eat the inevitable future health-care costs. A neighbor who lives across the street teaches in Fremont, a city between Oakland and San Jose, and teachers there struck that sort of deal with the district a few years ago; he says he’s paying $10,000 a year now to insure himself, his wife, and their two daughters. (Gee, where is this issue in the presidential campaign?)

Anyway, the Oakland teachers are gearing up for a big labor fight, and today they held a rally and march from Lake Merritt to downtown. It was probably the first labor event I’ve ever attended on Labor Day.

A couple of kids, a boy and a girl, both about 16, pass me on the sidewalk. The conversation snippet I hear, from the girl: “The only history we have is killing a bunch of people, and we’re continuing today. That’s American history.”

A few weeks ago, Kate and I were walking someplace in the neighborhood and she suddenly exclaimed, “Look, there’s the Commander.” Yes: a well-known local character. It’s a wreck of an old RV spruced up with red paint. It patrols the greater North Berkeley flatlands in search of parking places where the neighbors won’t raise a stink. It graced our street and others nearby last December. Then on Christmas Eve I saw the Commander chugging slowly away; I thought it looked kind of sad; but maybe it was off on an Xmas mission, delivering its own Yuletide treat to a soon-to-be-surprised homeowner.

Now, with winter long behind us, the Commander, which apparently hails from a Canadian RV maker, has migrated back to our block. Not all the neighbors are pleased with its reappearance. The police have been called. The Commander has been ticketed and towed. One guy up the street says he had an angry face-off after following the Commander’s commander to try to figure out where he lived (the owner doesn’t live in the RV, apparently, but ventures out from a more conventional domicile and moves his vehicle from place to place). Tensions run high in a place where some people have a deeply proprietary feeling about their native asphalt and others just can’t give up the romance of the open road. (Though now that you ask, no, I wouldn’t be especially thrilled to have this thing dumped in front of my house, either).