|
|
|
north to Napa
Friday, December 15 2017
location: Room 206, Inn at Temescal, Oakland California, California
This morning we returned again to Timeless Coffee, walking the same route as before (it is one mile from the inn). The grungy blanket was gone, but the stomped mayonnaise package was still there, its contents now blackened from exposure to the sun and air. There was a different pattern of stepped-on dog shits to be avoided, so I kept my eyes down for that. In the afternoon, there are three or four bums scattered around the basketball courts at Mosswood Park, but at a little after 8:00am they aren't out and about quite yet. Unfortunately we walked up the east side of Piedmont and I couldn't check to see if a disembodied human braid (it had looked like an 80's-style rat tail) was still on the sidewalk.
At Timeless, we got mostly the same things we'd gotten yesterday, though we also tried the pizza roll, which was better than the "pizza-flavored bread" we'd expected.
Our next activity was a walk in the Mountain View Cemetary at the north end of Piedmont, starting with the Jewish part and then moving on to diverse section rich in East-Asian names. As we walked, some species of dark tyrant flycatcher flitted ahead of us from stone to stone (black phœbes?). We never made as far as Millionaires Row, though that is apparently a place where the rich can continue their wasteful use of resources here on Earth for all eternity. The most poignant sight in the cemetary were old stones with a space left for a future inscription that was never made. If an existing inscription was for someone who died in the 1940s, it was unlikely the other space was ever going to be used. What had happened to the person for whom this space was intended? Had they remarried and been buried with someone else? Had they opted for cremation? Had the stone simply been forgotten about?
As we left the cemetary, Gretchen had the idea of detouring east on Ramona Street just south of it through the adjacent neighborhood. The houses were all Craftsmans and looked tiny from the street. But they were bigger than they appeared, each stretching far back from the street on their narrow lots (similar to the shotgun shacks in New Orleans). We rounded the corner and headed south on Moraga, where the houses were larger and the sidewalk was initially tucked between rows of bushes. One of the houses (I think it was this one) had been damaged as if by a car that had run off the road and collided with one of the stucco pillars holding up the porch roof. But then we noticed dozens of bullet holes in the wall and front door, many of which had been circled (as, it seemed, part of a police investigation). [I would later find an article reporting the apparent incident, though it made no mention of a vehicular crash.]
On the walk back to the inn, we stopped at an old-school men's clothing store to buy me a pair of dress socks (the ones I'd packed, which had once belonged to the late congressman Maurice Hinchey, had been lost somewhere). The store featured a salesman and two tradesmen. One worked at a special ironing station with an iron supplied with water from an overhead plastic reservoir. The other had a small workspace strewn with tools and instruments (including a tiny multimeter) where he hunched over a table, loupe to his eye, repairing watches. My new socks, made entirely from artificial materials, cost something more than $6.
The bums were awake and doing their thing (sitting passively, not appearing to move) on our walk back past Mosswood Park. The mayonaisse pack was still there, its sprayed contents now somehow even darker.
Gretchen had arranged for us to checkout at 2:00pm, partly in compensation for the no-longer-provided free loaner bicycles. It was nice to have some downtime back in our room. I'm the sort of person who is perfectly comfortable spending hours at a time in a hotel room, feeding on the unusual surroundings to do what I would've been doing otherwise at my computer back at home.
After we checked out, we carried all our stuff (which, as you'll recall, didn't come to much) back to Piedmont. Gretchen wanted to catch the movie Lady Bird at the Piedmont Theatre. The plan was that while she was watching the movie I would just hang out at a coffee shop or something (which was all I really wanted to do). First, though Gretchen was hungry and managed to get a container of four big fresh spring rolls at a Piedmont Grocery. We ate them (with peanut sauce) in the seating outside the nearby Peet's Coffee.
After Gretchen vanished into the theatre, I wandered first north up Piedmont and then south again, looking for a coffee shop that also served beer. I wanted the coffee shop vibe but with alcohol. What I didn't want was a depressing alcoholics' bar or a fancy place where people drink afternoon wine. Ultimately I settled on a place called Caffé Trieste, where I started with a 8 oz glass of a potent imperial IPA and then (because I didn't like it much) moved on to a standard 16 oz. Lagunitas IPA (which isn't all that exciting). I cranked through some pleasant worky work, burning through both hours I had to kill in a very pleasant manner.
Gretchen I rendezvoused at Timeless Coffee, where we'd eventually be picked up by Gretchen's parents, who would be driving over from San Francisco. Some woman at Timeless had promised there would be baked goods all day, but unfortunately, most of the things Gretchen had hoped to buy for her parents were gone. We sat in a corner in the coffee shop, eating various snacks and drinking cappuccinos, getting updates now and then from Gretchen's parents, who were stuck in horrible rush hour traffic.
Eventually they arrived, we hopped into their rental Kia, and we all headed north up I-80 into wine country, occasionally experiencing Friday night highway congestion. Much of the conversation along the way was logistical (as it tends to be), but there was also a long discussion of Gretchen's eventually-to-be-published collection of prison persona poems, which had been accepted for publication by Willow Press, where Gretchen would be their first non-minority author. Later in the drive, we had a somewhat depressing conversation about the soon-to-be passed Republican tax bill, which is as craven and insane in its own way as Donald Trump himself. Don't let anyone tell you that the Republican rot is concentrated in any one horrible person!
Our immediate destination tonight was some sort of brewery where the rehearsal dinner for Gretchen's cousin's wedding would be held. The cousin in question is named Holly, and, at 30 years of age, she is the youngest daughter of Gretchen's mother's sister. We'd both been to one of Holly's sisters weddings, back in 2008 in Monterey, and all of them were in attendance, along with a number of maternal second cousins, at least one of whom had been to our wedding. The food tonight was being provided buffet-style by a Mexican taco truck, and it was possible to get a good vegan meal if one avoided the ground beef. (The corn chips were terrible, unfortunately; they resembled Tostitos.) We spent a fair amount of time with Holly's oldest sister Jessica, catching up with the gory details of Gretchen's recent hysterectomy. Jessica is also childless and seems intent on remaining so. She was married once, but it only lasted a few months. As these things were discussed, Stephen, one of the older first-cousins-once-removed sat nearby, laughing hysterically every time one of the women said the word "fuck." He's apparently from a generation where women didn't say such things.
Also in attendance was Holly's spouse and all his extended family. They're a decidedly WASPier bunch: tall, thin, and long-in-the-face. The only impression I had of them so far came from the fact that they'd decided to have the wedding at a golf resort.
At some point, several wine glasses later, we drove back to that golf resort. It was huge sprawling place called The Silverado. We checked in, took our meager luggage to our room (which felt a bit like a private cottage, though there were rooms adjacent to ours overhead and through a wall). Gretchen stayed up late talking with Melanie, another of Holly's sisters, while I continued doing worky work on my laptop. I have to say that I am so bad with identifying unfamiliar people that for a time I thought Melanie was actually Jessica and that the conversation in our room was a continuation of one we'd had back at the brewery.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?171215 feedback
previous | next |
