A week in May

This week I travelled to San Francisco and to Irvine. My San Francisco job wasn't yet ready, and it gave me the opportunity to do some spur-of-the-moment work. I dropped by a store in Palo Alto which had requested a service visit but did not have any problems, and I travelled to Rutherford, Napa Valley, to address some small issues with a large house.

I understand it is the guest house, the main estate is across the road, along the banks of the Napa River. The roads heading up away from the vineyards are free and western, unapologetically single-laned, and breathtaking! I recommend anyone finding themselves there to try to oakville grade-dry creek road route.

Arriving in Orange County led me to all kinds of angering memories of all that is wrong with the sprawling anonymous corporate parks, with professionally managed properties and groomed landscaping. No indication or reason behind the strip mall, and no guidance at intersections to lead one way or the other. There aren't enough restaurants, and there is no way to find one. Even Silicon Valley doesn't suffer from this bizarre anonymity and emptiness. In Santa Clara there may be a factory or corporate park, but the settling effect of time has planted homes squarely beside it. Irvine is still too new, the plastic hasn't peeled off the windows of the homes, and there is no weathering of the tiles.

Patterns of supply and demand haven't shaken out, and the corner stores are nowhere to be found. Maybe what they really need is one big surge of immigration, entrepreneurial family men who can't help but open a 400 sq ft retail duplication of effort. What else is there for a man who can't understand the culture of work in America, and can't compete in office politics. What better use for a child than to tend shop semi-legally. I guarantee a child who spends his time stacking boxes for his pop isn't out popping pills with little Susie Latchkey.

Dustin and I went down to San Diego to visit a friend of his who lives now in New York near Saratoga. It was a marvellously uninspiring visit, but it put me in contact with small children, and I keep pretty well when there are toddlers at play, lisping and mumbling with all the right vowel shapes and none of the stacato precision of consonants.

When language seems more like a dance of directions and not a sequence of stops. I find my admiration of small children unremarkable and natural, but am constantly being told how conspicuously fond I am of children. Maybe I am in practice for my grandparenthood.

San Diego was all I remembered, with none of the familiar faces. The apartments next to sweetwater HS in Natl City were mere blocks away from the old bachelor pad in Chula Vista, the freeways have gotten neither better nor worse, and the thrill of knowing 80MPH is perfectly normal is a pleasure I hardly know now, with business travel putting me square in city centers during rush hours, and Washington Culture preventing more the 70MPH without the certainty that I am being unpleasant to those around me and asking the State Patrol to pay me a visit.

I travelled over the Golden Gate Bridge for the first time. The last time I had business in Marin I came from Oakland on the Richmond-San Rafael bridge, but this time I had a long while to occupy myself with the drive, and was coming from just south of San Francisco. It had been some time since I took 19th Av north through the city to the bridge, and I feel like I made it the length of the city with only a stoplight or two getting in my way. Somewhat remarkable how San Francisco stays so functional without an excess of crosstown freeways. The secret is the 3 lanes each way no left turn thoroughfares. I can think of Van Ness, Geary, 19th. To a lesser extent the streets south of Mission, and Mission itself. Better paving and fewer streetcar tracks, it might be a pleasant experience. Beth wins, however, the houses do go right out to the curb, with no lawn. I feel like Brooklyn was greener. Hopefully what they lose in lawn they make up for in parks. Yerba Buena near the metreon/moscone/sfmoma complex is beautiful and lively.

I just missed a standby flight to Seattle. This sets me on the waiting list for a flight over two hours from now. If the 35 folks who didn't get on the flight alongside me are waiting for the next one, I may spend all evening here in San Francisco.

I finished reading George Elliot's Felix Holt: The Radical this week. I read Dubliners a few weeks ago (on the flight to Mexico City). Felix Holt was almost too much to handle, the story of a young doctor's apprentice who becomes a watchmaker, a young gentleman who returns rich from abroad--with much whispering from the Bennett ladies about the size of his fortune, no doubt. And to stir it up, add a pretty young lady, secretly the rightful heiress of the gentleman's estate, and almost Randian in her devotion to Felix's masculine resolve. Everybody lives through to act 5, Felix is jailed and pardoned, and marries a decidedly poor bride, who having tasted the sterile padded cages of upper class domesticity, moves back in with her poorly dressed low-church dissenting minister father.

I stopped in to the Borders in downtown Palo Alto, and wandered through the fiction
section taking calls. I must be a terrible nuisance to the high-browed Stanford set,
wandering aimlessly through the store talking loudly to engineers about projects I'd just as soon be done with. While I tortured myself over several volumes I really didn't want to read, I saw a gleaming new copy of Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose. I immediately picked up the book and walked to pay. It is shaping up nicely, miners, marriage, dirty towns and alienation from eastern culture by a lonely wife, with a considereable deal of avoidance by a very western oriented man struggling to elevate himself in the mining hierarchy. I wonder if it isn't as good a book about life in America as Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance, which should be required reading for HS Juniors in my opinion--much better than Ethan Frome in my opinion. I wonder whether I wouldn't have postponed Hemmingway in order to get more exciting access. Is there a course on teaching Hemmingway to young adults with no significant life experience to base an appreciation on that was running through English schools in the 60's, or did the schoolboards select the titles based on merits of their value with no thought to their emotional accessibility. Apologies here are given to every person who tried to persuade me to separate sentences into small atomic thoughts. Strunk and White are turning in their graves.

The language was clean enough, almost spartan, and I since have developed a great
appreciation for most of Hemmingways works, but plodding through the Old Man and the Sea at 16 years old, 2 chapters at a time with an hour of discussion on thirty pages is torture to someone who has spent his entire life hurtling forward to a future, not yearning yet for a time gone by. How can you begin to understand the life of Santiago at that age? Julius Caesar has greed and struggle, murder, hate and war. These are things a young man can understand. Romeo and Juliet had a grudge, gangs, street fighting, and forbidden love. These are clearly things a 14 year old can relate to. But going fishing with a rotten old man, whose stoic acceptance of his bad luck permeated the whole story, I can't think a healthy american boy without 3rd world relations could sympathise.