At Mariposa and Utah streets, west flank of Potrero Hill. On clear nights, I always want to try and capture the glow that lingers over the peaks to the west after sunset. It’s not to be captured, or not by me, at any rate. The profusion of wires at the corner was a consolation prize and the best I can do by way of marking the day.
Pandemic, the Game
If you happen to spend time with your adult-age kids, as we occasionally do, they may share some of their enthusiasms with you. Our older son, Eamon, and his wife, Sakura, have become avid fans of the San Jose Earthquakes and taken us to several games. I realize that I like non-American football. I’d be up for seeing some rugby and footy, too.
Our younger son, Thom, is into what I’ll call new-wave board games. Ticket to Ride, a railroad-building game. Carcasonne, a sort of territory-acquisition game. Power Grid, the game of electrical utility domination.
He also introduced us to Pandemic. It’s different from most board games in that players cooperate to head off a series of global disease threats. The game requires consideration of what threats deserve immediate attention and a lot of planning for how to respond. We played the game once. Sadly, we were unable to prevent the world from being overrun by multiple deadly disease outbreaks.
Strange Season
Nearly midnight here in Berkeley, and it’s still pushing 70 degrees. It’s windless, too–dead calm. I’m not preaching climate change this evening. The weather annals show that the week of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, which occurred April 18, was hot, too: highs in the 90s in San Jose and Santa Cruz, for instance–records that still stand. (No, I’m not suggesting this is “earthquake weather,” either).
But warm night-time weather is a relative rarity here. And with the stillness, the heat rising from the sidewalks, the little pockets of cool in the low spots where creeks used to run, the clear moonless sky and the smell of jasmine and other flowers filling the dark–it feels like a strange season.
Road Blog: Ode to California
(Upon crossing the Colorado River)
Ah, California!
Your fiscal mess, your taxes, your repossessed homes;
Your Governator, your initiatives and your political schemes;
Your freeways and traffic and drivers yearning to speed;
Your 36 million people and all that they want;
Your deserts, your mountains and valleys and rivers, your dams;
Your stunning weather, your drought and your thirst;
Your condors and salmon and spotted owls, your smog and wildfires;
Your ports, your cities, your suburbs flung every which way;
Your towns: Beverly Hills, Oakland, Weed, and Shafter; Berkeley, Compton, Taft, and Fort Bragg;
Your prisons and prisoners, your guards, your cops;
Your students, your teachers, your school segregation;
Your sunshine and field workers and endless farms;
Your agribusiness, your entrepreneurs, your next big things;
Your visionary schemes and your reluctance to pay.
The limitless dream, the busboy, the kid who can’t read;
The redwood, the dead mill, the air you can’t breathe;
The surf, the oil spill, the guy asleep on the street;
A million reasons to stay and a million to leave.
On the prairie and over the mountains I roam;
Crossing the Colorado, California, I’m home.
Road Blog: Jolly Kone
One more from the road: a drive-in we passed in Wasco, between Highway 99 and Interstate 5 north of Bakersfield. The featured role of pastrami is notable, but pales next to the claim, “The Best Food in Wasco.” I can’t testify one way or the other.
We pretty much stuck to the route that Google Maps or Mapquest might give you between Barstow and Berkeley: Highway 58 to Bakersfield and Highway 99; then up to Highway 46, through Wasco to I-5. Then all the way up the San Joaquin Valley to I-580, which takes you into Oakland. The route is simple and it is fast, and the traffic in the valley mostly behaved itself. We hit the front door here at about 5 p.m. straight up. Total driving for five days: 2,685 miles. Not a killer, but in a mini-Toyota it was a little bit of a challenge. Now that I think of it, I don’t recall seeing a single Echo on the road between here and Chicago (plenty of Priuses, though).
More tomorrow. I get to sleep at home tonight.
1951 Buick
It’s a Buick Roadmaster Deluxe. For sale for $4,000 if you’re looking for a project. It’s been parked at various spots around Mariposa and Alabama streets, a couple blocks from where I ply the radio news editor trade, for at least a month. (Those stacks in the background of the top photo–I’ve been looking at them for the last year and I haven’t yet investigated what defunct local manufacturing operation they might have been part of.)
Whiz
At 18th and South Van Ness. I walked by a couple months ago at midday while exploring a different route to work. I haven’t investigated, but maybe the location is part of a bygone chain (on the other hand, the sign says “since 1955”). In any case, it’s the one and only Whiz burger stand I know. I haven’t yet sampled the fare.
Double Nickel
By my mother’s account, she went into labor sometime late on March 31, 1954. Dad drove her to a hospital on Chicago’s far South Side; she didn’t supply the detail on how she got to the hospital, but it’s the only way I can imagined it happened. The weather, from what I glean from weather records, was cold; March had ended with an 8-inch snowfall, and the And then, she said, they waited. She was in labor all the way through April Fool’s Day. Then around 9 in the morning on the 2nd, I made my debut. I’ll go light on further details.
So here I am, at the threshold of 55. I know it’s not one of those big decade numbers. Still, there’s some weight there for me. Maybe it’s the memory of my father losing his long-time job when he was 55. I was talking to my friend Pete about that episode recently and how back then, in the age before the mass layoff, getting fired or pushed out, especially from a job one had invested 25 years in, as my dad had, carried a sense of death with it. At 55, you weren’t a kid anymore. How were you supposed to pick up the pieces and continue? As it happened, my mom went to work and my father did put the pieces back together.
So, 55. I’ve found myself thinking about the group of kids I went through school with in the fringe suburbs of Chicago, kids who had birthdays around mine. Somehow, I’ve managed to keep track of a few of them. One’s a petroleum geologist, now working in Nigeria. One’s a job counselor for the emotionally disabled in the Sacramento Valley. One’s an atmospheric scientist in Chicago. Another runs a homeless advocacy group in Indianapolis. And one is a programmer-type down in Texas.
Odd to think of them all hitting this age. I remember them in First Communion class, or on the playground the day President Kennedy was shot, or helping run a classroom campaign for LBJ in fifth grade, in the band room at our district junior high school, or on the basketball court, softball diamond and football field (many of these people showed up in more than one of these scenes, along with a cohort of other friends, older and younger, who I’ve not forgotten).
Not kids anymore, but I knew them when they were.
2009 in Brief
Hello, April.
Goodbye, March. Goodbye, February. Goodbye, January.
Honestly. Where’d you go already?
Mission Palms
Last night, at the northeast entrance to the 16th Street BART station. Beautiful, warm afternoon and evening. Lots of people on the street, and the scene at the plaza around the station had a little bit of crazy energy to it at the moment I showed up: some of the homeless and local SRO (single-room occupancy) hotel residents arguing, parents reprimanding kids, a mom yanking her kid by the arm as she took him into Burger King for dinner, people spilling out of a Muni bus that had just pulled up at the corner.
For several blocks, I had watched the light above change and looked for an opportunity to try and catch it. Not that it’s so important; but in a way these pictures are a little like postcards to myself, reminding me of a place, a moment. This was my last look at the street scene before heading down the escalator to the train.