Category: Berkeley

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My Anonymous Gifts to the Universe

Oakleys

When I’m not procrastinating, interviewing for jobs, asking past bosses and colleagues for references, watching TV, riding my bike, writing clever furniture descriptions for a furniture catalogue that will remain nameless, mowing the lawn, pulling weeds, prioritizing creditors, and whatnot (under which heading blogging comes) — when I’m not doing any of those things, I can usually be found losing an expensive pair of sunglasses.

Just this morning, I regarded a pair of Oakley cycling glasses that I wore on a walk up to the University of California and back. I thought with pride how I’d had them nearly two years — an uncommonly long association between me and a pair of shades. Somehow, while I’ve lost pair after pair of similarly pricey specs — Ray-Bans by the seeming bushelful; and last year, particularly troublesome, a pair of clear-lensed Rudy Project glasses that I bought especially for riding at night, a pair that vanished without leaving even a vaporous thought about when, where or how they might have gone astray — those Oakleys have stayed defiantly in my possession.

"I guess I’m just extra-careful about them," I thought to myself in a satisfied way as I walked home.. Me and my Oakleys — I wore them across France (i.e., to hell) and back during my epic accomplishment of 2003. We’re pals for life.

A couple hours later, I was on BART, headed to the furniture catalogue place in far-off Marin County. I fell asleep on the train and hurried off the car at the first San Francisco stop with my bike and backpack. It wasn’t until I’d climbed three flights of stairs to the exit gate, then another long flight up to the glare of Market Street that I reached for my sunglasses. Gone. Just gone. I might have dropped them — but no, I would have noticed that or, more likely, stepped on them and broken them. Someone might have lifted them while I was on the train — but daring ne’er-do-wells would probably be on the lookout for something more valuable, like my false teeth. I decided maybe I had left them at home, but I couldn’t find them when I returned from furniture catalogue land.

No, I think what actually happened is that I laid them down on the train seat beside me, nodded off, then just got up and walked away from them in my semi-wakeful state. So, unless they turn up beneath a pile of paper here at the Infospigot & Co. domicile, I think I’ve donated those glasses to someone who has no way of knowing what a nice little memento of blood, sweat and cycling fatigue they have. Wear them well. And whatever you do, don’t lose them.

[Pictured above: Me, the PBP Oakleys, a Bridgestone RB-1, and wind-tossed Lake Michigan. Highland Park, Illinois; September 2004.]

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In Bicycle Land

Long bike rides are an exercise in sensory overload. There’s so much to take in over the course of a day. The landscape, of course. Socializing with other riders. Monitoring the way you’re feeling, gauging your effort, measuring what you’re putting out now against how much work you have ahead. Watching everything that happens on the road, knowing that a momentary lapse of attention, an unseen crinkle in the pavement, an unremarkable pebble, could interrupt your ride or end it if you’re unlucky. Keeping an eye on other riders when you’re riding in a pack, taking pains to make sure you ride steadily and predictably while watching everyone else to make sure they’re doing the same. It’s hard to believe how absorbing the sight of a rear wheel spinning 12 inches in front of your front wheel can be until you’ve spent an hour or two or three watching one while trying to stay aware of the road ahead and what other riders are doing; it’s active, rolling meditation.

Beyond the pure physical effort, the factor I identify most with cycling is landscape. I think more than any other reason, that’s why I’m motivated to get on my bike and go. Just thinking about yesterday, when I rode the Davis Double Century, the sight memories all by themselves are overwhelming. A golden eagle. A hundred-foot high dike of lava. Creeks and streams running hard and full. But instead of trying to paint the whole day, just one brief impression: Rolling back toward Davis across the westernmost stretch of the Sacramento Valley an hour or so before sunset, passing acre after acre of newly flooded rice paddies near Interstate 505. The day had been warm, the Valley is just above sea level, and there it felt humid as midsummer in the Midwest. The sky was flawless, the not-quite-full moon well up over the long eastern horizon. The wind was down, and the paddy water held perfect casts of every detail of the world around and the heavens above. In the distance: egrets, night herons, terns, working the edges of the inundated fields; me and all the others rolling past, opening and closing circles, feeling for perfect rhythm.

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Berkeleyana II

Waving1

Berkeley’s got something of a tradition of sidewalk personalities. It’s a small place, about five miles west to east, if you start at the furthest corner of the old garbage dump in the Bay (now a park) and head to the top of the Berkeley Hills, and about four miles north to south. (In Chicago terms, the whole thing would fit between North Avenue and Lawrence Avenue in the south-north axis and between Halsted and Cicero east to west; Berkeley’s land area would fit in about half that space — North to Belmont and Halsted to California.)

Partly because of the city’s size, partly because it seems to attract characters or engender character-type behavior on the part of normally sane, sedate citizens, you quickly get familiar with the cast members: Pink Man, the flamboyant unicyclist (and Jeremy, a more serious one-wheeled type); the morose or perhaps disturbed Orange Man, who wore orange parka, sweatpants and backpack and was often seen pondering oranges he’d hold at arm’s length and eye level; William, the Polka-Dot Man; Stoney Burke, a somewhat nasty comic/political street performer who has been around town since the late ’70s; and, best known of all, the Waving Man, whose passing in 2002 merited obits from The New York Times and Associated Press among others:

“Joseph Charles, who became famous by being very, very friendly, died on

Thursday in Oakland, Calif. He was 91.

“Every weekday morning for three decades, Mr. Charles stood on a street

corner in adjacent Berkeley and waved to each passing motorist. It made him

a local legend, indeed, something of a national wonder, and attracted

coverage from Charles Kuralt and People magazine.”

Sometime in the past couple of months, I discovered there’s a new Waving Man in town. I don’t know his name or whether he’s generated any media coverage. But I see him every time I go across the bike bridge over I-80: He sets up a camp chair above the northbound (OK, officially eastbound) lanes in the afternoon and waves and gestures to the commuters. I brought my camera on a ride one day last week and saw him on the bridge. At first I rode by — I’ve said hi to him before, but he’s so absorbed in what he’s doing that he didnt’ seem to notice. Then I decided to stop and take his picture.

What surprised me once I stopped was how much response he was getting from the drivers below. Lots of them honked. For his part — I didn’t ask his name — he kept up a continuous litany as he waved and gave the peace sign: “God bless you … peace … peace … peace … God bless you … God bless you … peace.” After I’d taken a few shots, I walked by him and said, “God bless you, too.” He looked up, as if he hadn’t known I was there. He looked surprised and maybe ecstatic and turned back to the road.

Waving2

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Berkeleyana I

Cimg3789

Several years ago, the city of Berkeley built a pedestrian-bicycle bridge over Interstate 80, which runs along the shore of San Francisco Bay. The bridge links the town, to the east of the freeway, with waterfront trails and parks to the west, and you have to give the city and the engineers/designers it hired high marks for doing the project right, both practically and aesthetically.

Before the bridge was built, getting to the west side of the freeway involved riding industrial back streets to a narrow asphalt path beneath the University Avenue overpass, crossing a dark high-speed ramp exiting the highway, climbing a long flight of stairs to a narrow sidewalk across the overpass, scurrying across another exit ramp, and negotiating a busy intersection. You had to be really determined and somewhat foolhardy to make the trip.

The new bridge eliminates all the climbing, crossing, and scurrying. Aside from its beauty, it does something I like about other over-freeway pedestrian bridges, too: It creates a seat to look out over this rushing no-man’s land that’s so much a part of how we live and who we are. All that traffic. All those cars. All those lives tied up in their trip home, or to work, or off across the country somewhere. It’s impressive, amazing, and even a little horrifying to be a spectator to what you’re usually engrossed in yourself, what you take for granted, and watch the surge of activity that’s got a life all its own.

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Hotsy Totsy

Hotsy

San Pablo Avenue runs from downtown Oakland through Emeryville, Berkeley and Albany as it heads toward industrial Contra Costa County. Up there, it passes the old dynamite-making village of Hercules and the current oil-refining town of Rodeo before ending near the big C&H sugar mill in Crockett (home of Aldo Ray).

Albany’s a little bedroom community that borders Berkeley on the north. Most of the town is solid middle class, angling for genteel. But where San Pablo cuts through it, it still shows a little bit of its less staid self in a series of bars along the street: The Ivy Room, Club Mallard, and, my favorite (namewise, anyway — I’ve never gone inside any of these places), the Hotsy Totsy Club. I’ve always loved the sign.

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The Commander in Bondage

Commanderad

The Commander, a battered old Dodge RV that until a couple of months ago was a familiar habitué of local byways, is for sale. Big deal. But here’s the drama: The owner, a Berkeley denizen without fixed address (though not exactly homeless, since he had the Commander), made a reputation for himself in the neighborhood by stowing his vehicle wherever his fancy led him.

Naturally, it led him to park in front of a lot of houses whose residents started out annoyed when the Commander took up station at the curb and soon became irritated, if not hostile, with its owner’s habit of not moving until he’d been parked for the maximum 72 hours and gotten tagged with a warning to move or be towed. If the guy had been a sociable sort, maybe his more traditionally domiciled fellow Berkeleyans would have eventually cottoned to him and his semi-nomadic ways. It’s that kind of town, filled with that kind of people. But his general practice was to avoid all contact with the locals; those who managed to speak to him — your correspondent not being in this elite group — found him defensive and truculent in answer to most inquiries. Without putting too fine a point on it, the guy was a pain in the ass and apparently reveled in it.

Late last year, people from several blocks that furnished some of the Commander’s favorite resting places conferred with the neighborhood beat cop. It turned out that the Commander is big enough it qualifies as a commercial vehicle; under Berkeley ordinance, it was an infraction to park it on residential streets from 2 a.m. to 5 a.m. The police, who had a file with more than 50 complaints about the Commander just from this little slice of Berkeley, agreed to come out and cite the vehicle every night that someone complained about its presence. The fine for each ticket is about $30. The bet was that the rapid accumulation of fines would force the Commander — for me, owner and vehicle became one — to find friendlier, or at least less complaining, environs.

Commandertix

He didn’t give up right away, though. He piled up lots of citations throughout November, reportedly went to court to try to get them thrown out, then temporarily departed the neighborhood before Christmas. He reappeared after the first of the year, and the same routine started. He got towed and paid to get his vehicle back. Then one night, after the Commander had been parked in one spot about a block from us for two weeks, the police arrived with a tow truck at about 4 in the morning. They hooked up the Commander — the owner climbed out of the back, where he’d been sleeping — and it was hauled off. Now it’s for sale. As is.

The owner has apparently been taken in by a friend a few blocks away. We’re all wondering if he’ll go to the wrecking yard that’s selling the Commander to try to buy it back.

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Lipto s

Liptos

Lipto s. That’s all there is to say, really.

But for those who want the full story: We have a little store around the corner from our house. Cedar Market, at California and Cedar. Berkeley used to be full of them. Not just on the intersections of major streets, but on corners on residential blocks away from the commercial thoroughfares. They’re nearly all gone, but you can recognize a lot of the old ones from the way their doorways open onto the corner at  45-degree angles or sometimes from the big commercial-size windows that have been clumsily integrated into an apartment front.

I might have even seen the sign at Cedar Market when it still said “Lipton’s Tea.” I definitely remember that “Tea” was still there sometime in the last 15 years or so. Now it’s just “Lipto s.” The market itself just changed hands. A Chinese immigrant couple owned it, and they sold a few months ago to an Arab family. The new owners have made some changes. They’re open later — till 9 p.m — and on Sundays, too. But so far they are content to leave “Lipto s” be.

Cedarmkt

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Bashõ’s Take

Late, and without a blog entry. I resort to another’s words:

“Having no talent,

I just want to sleep,

You noisy birds.”

That’s Bashõ, from Robert Hass’s “The Essential Haiku.”

Noisy birds or no, I’m going to sleep.

Later.

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Monday Meatballs

Meatballs_2

Thom was gone for the weekend, off on his first solo journey (with friends only, no shepherding adults) to a far-off music festival. It was a big deal event down at Coachella, in the desert east of Los Angeles. The New York Times took note (of the music, not Thom’s attendance); so did NPR. For Kate and me, the biggest deal was that Thom was off on his own on a trip that required two late-night drives — late Friday into early Saturday to get down there (it’s about a 500-mile trip), and late Sunday into early Monday to get back (Thom’s friends dropped him off in downtown Berkeley so that he could go straight to school to take a test). It reminds me of Eamon and his friends driving off late on stormy night to cross the Sierra on their way to see the Winter Olympics in Utah. The thrill of the road trip.

Anyway, he made it there and back, and had a great time that he talked about all afternoon and evening, when he wasn’t napping, and when we didn’t have "24" on the tube. To celebrate, Kate made spaghetti and meatballs (despite my a little too up-close-and-personal portrait of the meatballs, they were extra-tasty).

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Aspirador Solo

Vacuum3

A question from the audience: Whatever happened to that vacuum cleaner?

Frankly, I thought I’d ridden that humble household appliance clear round the bend when I found myself turning it into "The Velveteen Vacuum."

But I did go out and check on it one more time. It had migrated from its corner a little way down the street and stood suggestively close to a Dumpster (out of sight in a driveway in the picture) the last time I saw it. Inspecting it, I saw that someone was very concerned that whoever used the vacuum cleaner ("el vaccuum" here, instead of the more common "el aspirador") switched it to the off position when they were done with it.

Siempreoff

The label reads: "Siempre OFF. Solo ON mientras lo uses. Ponlo OFF cuando acabes de hacer el vaccuum." Online translation — Google’s, which is among the many sites I tried that couldn’t handle the word "ponlo" — renders the message thus: "Always OFF. Only ON while you use it. [Ponlo] OFF when you finish making the vaccuum."

Note that el aspirador is switched off. Someone was finished making the vacuum.