On Finding A Photograph Long Misplaced

 

First there is the shock of recognition, a sucker punch hard to the jaw and tears that swell but will not break; my mouth falling open in a round, silent, Oh.

A black & white snapshot from my whole life ago, long-forgotten but now here in my hand like a sudden chill on a warm day, a door that slams when there is no wind. There is his straight-up, Dagwood hair that was white at first and then darkened to a gentle brown with the part falling in the middle; his chest a glockenspiel of bones. Oh, southern mother. Oh, Greek father. My brother and I, five and three, stand in the scraped out backyard of a post-war housing development too new to have trees that are anything more than leafy sticks poking up from the ground. We bookend younger cousins who stand between us, all of us shirtless in the palpable heat of summer. But he stands slightly apart, just enough to be noticeable.  Oh, beautiful boy. I remember the shorts he is wearing, brown with the jagged outline of a Scottish terrier stitched in coarse, yellow thread on each pant leg and last seen in a wicker laundry basket when Eisenhower was President. His one skinny arm is bent out like a wing, the other drawn up so that his cheek rests in his hand, a gesture from the 1890s—my maternal great grandmother did that. He replicates it, utterly guileless and natural, his curly-lipped smile and clear eyes; he has our mother’s face.

In a few years, I will find my brother in the kitchen late one night standing on his tip toes to reach the hissing gas hob on our white enamel stove. He will look at me with eyes that droop and slide  down his face like the melting blue eyes of choir boy candles at Christmas. “Try this,” he says, indicating the front burner where he’d blown out the pilot light. “It will make you feel so good.” And from that moment, I am afraid of him; from that moment he retreats a little more each day; from that moment he is lost. He is not even ten years old. “Oh, Dark Angel,” Judy Henske sings in her spine chilling song about addiction, “Roll me in your dark wings. Watch me fall and let me die.”

July 11, 2002. I am sitting at my desk at home in California. It is morning and I am still in pajamas. Soft, threadbare pajamas I have worn for years, that I have slept in and cleaned the house in and watered the garden in and I rise to top off my coffee and somehow my legs become entangled in the fabric of these familiar-as-my-hand pajamas and I fall to the floor almost laughing at the absurdity of it I fall to the floor and look at the clock as I am going down and I see it is a certain time and I shower and dress and the phone rings and it is my sister in Wisconsin who tells me our brother has settled his tab with a single, self-inflicted gunshot to the head and I ask her, “What time? What time did he die?” and she answers the time I fell.

July 11, 2013. I am sitting at that same desk in my Oakland loft. It is morning and I am still in pajamas. All around me it has grown very quiet and this realization startles me because I live in a working seaport of lumbering freight trains and 250-foot, skyscraping cranes offloading freighters from China and Japan; freeways, airplanes and light rail crisscross in front of and behind my building but all sound has stopped and I look up, wondering why. The sound of shattering glass, when it hits, flings me from my chair and I bite the inside of my cheek racing to the kitchen. There is one cupboard door slightly ajar. I tug it open ever so gently and jump back as the shards of every wine glass I own, every old fashioned glass, every tumbler and beer mug and shot glass and high ball and martini glass spill to the floor in a crystal waterfall and I stand amazed, stunned in the wreckage of a collapsed shelf until I notice every other shelf has held. Nothing else is broken. No plate or cup or saucer. No picture is askew on the wall. No water has sloshed from the cat’s bowl. I log into the California earthquake site. There has been no seismic activity, only a clean, flat line for the day. I consult the calendar, hanging plumb and squared to the wall in the laundry room, even though I know. It is the anniversary of my brother’s suicide. He is saying, Look at me. Remember me from before I was a drunk. Be silent in your grave of ash, clever boy.

March 1, 2014. It is Dump Run Day in my building. An enormous truck will arrive at 9 AM. We can throw out anything we want. Thrilled at the opportunity, I am digging through every closet and drawer. My rule is this: If I haven’t looked at it or used it in the past year, it is gone, baby. And deep, deep in some far corner, lying in wait like a witch’s hex, 'You will prick your finger and die,' is a spiral bound wallet of black & white snapshots dated, in my mother’s handwriting, July 11, 1954.  “Hello,” says my chicken chested brother from the watery world of memory and death. “Remember me?” he asks from our father’s plaid hammock, his hair falling away evenly from the part in the middle of his forehead. Or here, in this photo, his abashed grin, hand demurely at his cheek, embarrassed that his brain spatter  will one day ruin the wall. “Do you?" he pleads looking right at me. "From before Peter? Before Margaret?” mentioning our brother born the following year and our sister still so far in the future. “When it was just us in our Rootie Kazootie tee shirts, our Red Ball Jet ‘run faster, jump higher’ shoes, our mukluks and rooster slippers, our terrycloth bathrobes with ‘Champ’ printed across our tiny, rabbit shoulders; when we rolled around in the back of that mint green Buick station wagon big as a hearse, before child seats, before seat belts, before there was duck and cover and bomb shelters and cigarettes and liquor stores and bars, and me drinking while you slogged away at university for ten years getting degree after degree trying to unlearn what you already knew?”

Yes, I do.

My middle name is Anne to square with his. When I was very small my parents sometimes introduced us to their friends as Mark Andrew and Rebecca Anne-drew, I was so close to my brother. But alcoholism is a progressive, degenerative disease and my enduring memories of him are of what a mean motherfucker he became.  In July, on the anniversary of his suicide, I honor his struggle as an addict. I don't consciously do anything that could be interpreted as using. No alcohol or weed. No sugar. I won't even take an aspirin for my ancient, aching knees.

Today, on his birthday, I'll put a candle in the window at dusk, play the theme song from Peter Gunn, an old TV show we liked, and eat a sandwich of fried Spam with yellow mustard on toast, a ration Mark and I ate constantly those early summers when we took to the field behind our house as dead-tired, unshaven and starving privates-first-class lost behind enemy lines, Japanese zeroes buzzing the tall grass in search of us acting out our father's Army stories. He was my first friend, he of the blue sky, drifting cloud summers only we knew.

I Know It When I Feel It

There’s a woman on Instagram I follow for no reason other than she is so very unlike me.  She and her husband are farmers out on the wide Dakota plains where they raise goats, rabbits, chickens, and pigs and keep horses.  Their rambling yard is filled with big dogs; cats live in the barn.  Her children are still young, under ten.  Almost every picture I see of the woman, she is shooting a gun, getting a tattoo, or has just killed a snake with a hoe.

Recently, the polar vortex has walloped her young family.  Several days ago, her husband drove into town for groceries, a trip of many miles.  A massive front along the western horizon was growling and bearing its icy teeth.  Likely, it was the reason for the supply run.   The front attacked while he was in town, unleashing a drifting white out.  He and the supplies became stranded when all county roads were closed.  The woman, a random pick on Instagram, is out on the farm with no help caring for their animals and children.  Everything is frozen and the snow is piling so high she can record the disappearance of the barn in two hour intervals.  The water pumps are frozen and have stopped working.  She has to haul water out to the barn by the bucket, making scores of trips to supply all their many animals.  Her dog, blanketed by falling snow to nothing more than a snout and a pair of eyes, watches over her.  He will not go in the house and leave her alone in severe weather.

And now the baby goats are coming; born into sub-zero temperatures with wind chill in the -70 range.  Despite everything else this woman is handling alone out on the frozen tundra, she is now posting pictures of the most adorable baby goats, each no more than a few pounds, all fuzzy and bright-eyed, wobbling toward the warmth of her.  Exposure would kill these babies overnight.   But this farm woman, whose name I don’t even know, has cut up all her and her husband’s socks, making little head holes at the toe and leg holes in the foot.  The kid babies are bouncing around in the barn wearing their wooly sock jackets and bleating at the moon.


And I love this woman so hard right now.

Oscar Meyer v. Weiner

Claiming the risqué politician damages its brand by casting a pall over the serving of ground swine anus as food, Oscar Meyer is suing Anthony D. Weiner.  Or should I say Carlos Danger?  Doesn’t Weiner’s nom de Snapchat say it all?

Danger.  The need, the lusting for it.  Isn’t it more about danger than sex?  Yes, sex may be the rail it rides but danger is the train.  Weiner appears to have a compulsion to take risks that are assured of failure from the instant he sets them in motion.  They become a ticking time bomb and the excitement lies in never knowing when the compulsion will reveal its actor to the world.  This man needs attention on a scale that would make Louis XIV blush.

It isn’t the infidelity or the inability to tell the truth, perhaps even an inability to know what is true and what is a lie.  Those practically serve to qualify him as a politician.  No.  It is his need to place himself in danger, repeatedly and for the thrill of it.   Combine that with his utter disregard for whom he drags with him when he acts out and you have a man who needs help desperately. 

What troubles me most is his apparent need to humiliate his wife; to humiliate all women, in fact.  Whatever one may think of the women he targets with his photos and chat, they are selected, one suspects, for their complicity in the risk.  They are the kind of women who readily give in to men most likely to hurt them.  And that makes them attractive to Weiner.  The bonus is dragging his beautiful, intelligent, and powerful wife to the lectern and forcing her to endure humiliation at the hands of the rascal press that found him out as he knew they would.  Tee-hee and gotcha!

In short, this man has a sadistic desire to inflict hurt.  That is why he needs to put down politics and take up residence in some dank basement.  There he can snap photos of his penis all he wants and post them to the world of women who daily make poor choices—his kind of people.

On Friday I Take You to Egypt

He takes the cigarette from his mouth and smiles at me, more gums than teeth. “Hey, c’mere. I got something for you.” He motions for me to follow; his cupped hand scooping at the air to draw me along in the draft. I go. I like this guy for reasons I almost know but can't quite locate. His food truck, of indeterminate vintage but leaning toward 'Soviet,' occupies a corner at the east end of the Jack London District every weekday. Royal Cuisine is the grand name of his business. “From the Ancient Land of the Pharaohs, Egypt," the broad, blue side of the truck proclaims. New American flags snap from the front corners.
 

I’ve seen him often in the neighborhood around Webster and 3^rd, near where I live. In 2011, the Oakland City Council passed an initiative to help build small businesses by licensing food trucks to specific corners in selected Oakland neighborhoods. It gave a tremendous leg up to aspiring chefs and small family operations wanting to be in the restaurant business but unable to clear the hurdle of buying or renting retail space. It was also a boon for those who can’t pass up a food truck without stopping for a taste.

Elmy and I met in the early Spring of 2012. I was out for a walk, heading east on 3^rd. I noticed him in the distance. He stood with two or three other men; dark like my Greek father. Compared to his idle, cigarette smoking entourage, Elmy was animated; hardly able to stand still on his corner. When I got to within 30 feet of his truck, he ran up to ask whether I’d had lunch. It was 2:00 and the street eating scene was long over. Yes, I assured him. ‘Come tomorrow, then,’ he urged, clutching my hand and shaking it. No, I demurred, almost regretting my plans to eat elsewhere with a friend he was so eager to hit it big on his corner. I have plans already, I said. ‘Friday, then,’ he announced, undeterred. ‘On Friday I take you to Egypt.’ I said I’d try but never showed even though I could have.

We continued to see each other in the neighborhood through the summer and fall. He was always on his corner as I passed by walking the neighborhood to uncover its many treasures. We never spoke or lifted a hand and I always felt that missed Friday dragging on my spirit.

I never saw a customer at Royal Cuisine. My neighborhood is at that turning point where people are as likely to want pressed duck for lunch as they are a hotdog. Elmy was neither one nor the other in his enormous blue truck. Other, sleek, smartly painted trucks that lined up across the street had plenty of people waiting to order. Elmy's truck was, well, slightly worse for wear. It likely began its life running newspapers to corner stands in all kinds of weather. In its second life, it does business out of the backdoor; there isn’t a window on the side to display the menu or take orders and hand out the food. The newer trucks, by contrast, were huge rolling kitchens.  Properly ventilated and wired for the Internet, they offered smoked meats, Indian samosas, Vietnamese banh mi, shrimp and oyster po’boys, artisanal cupcakes and rocket fuel coffee. What did Pharaohs eat?

When I think of Pharaohs, the first thing that comes to mind is a shriveled, little brown guy wrapped in linen once fresh and luxurious now stuck like Band-Aids to scabs. I know some pre-classical history but my only visual for a Pharaoh is an ancient, dried out turkey wing in a museum display case. A juicy lobster roll is going to trump that every time. Live and learn, I said to myself as I walked past thinking I should at least buy a shawarma.

Another Spring is hurrying to meet us and today I walked up 3^rd in the late afternoon feeling the sun warm on my back and legs. There he was—a cigarette dangling from his lips; his dark blue apron wrapped around his waist and tied in front; his goatee graying. He lifted the little sandwich board advertising his menu with the weariness of a man who had arrived at the end of his day. He was just folding it away when our eyes met. I raised my hand to him. He stopped and lifted his in return. I kept walking toward him, never taking my eyes off his. When I was close enough for him to recognize, he broke into a smile that made no apology for the missing teeth. He reached out and I grabbed his hand and held it; smiling back at him, genuinely relieved to be received into his good graces again.

His set the sign back on the sidewalk. ‘C’mon,’he said. ‘I got something for you.’ I nodded and followed him. He made his way into the truck calling me after him, ‘Come.” I stepped right up.

'You eat meat?'  Yes, I tell him but he is already pulling lamb from the refrigerator and throwing it on the grill.  It hisses and steams while he prepares a plate for me: white and yellow basmati rice, the most aromatic and richly flavored in the world; purple cabbage, red tomatoes, green chives; grilled peppers, their skin blackened and burst by fire.  'Be careful of that one,' he says indicating a plump, oblong yellow pepper no different from the one beside it.  It is perhaps slightly bigger.  I will, I say.  He packs potato salad into one corner and I laugh.  Did the Pharaohs eat potato salad?  The remaining space is given to iceberg lettuce topped with cherry tomatoes and chopped green onions.  He keeps adding little things; just a taste of something he thinks I will like; tzatziki though surely he calls it something else.

Are you Egyptian I ask, wanting him to talk about himself. ‘Yes.’ Nothing more. I’m Greek, I tell him. ‘Neighbors,’ he says with enthusiasm. He gives me his business card. 'Royal Cuisine' is stamped below a photograph of the Sphinx backed by the Pyramid of Giza. The Ptolemys, I say because I don’t really know where he’s going with any of this. He turns away to tend to the lamb, pushing it back and forth in its own grease until it is glistening with fat and ready to be piled on top of the rice. I think he’s done but no, he is not. He grabs a huge, beaten old white plastic bottle and drizzles the lamb with barbeque sauce. The early Pharaohs must have passed through Kansas City. The mound of food barely fits under the lid when he hands the box to me. ‘For you,’ he says. ‘Made with love.’ I throw my arms around his neck. I have, late in life, become a crier. I cry holding him. Thank you, I say.

It is January so, despite the afternoon sun, it’s cool. The food won’t stay warm long. I had lunch less than an hour before. I’m not hungry but a voice in my head says that right now the food in the box is as good as it will ever be. And I feel I owe it to this man to eat his food at its best possible moment. To taste what he intended.

So I walk over to Heinold’s and take a seat under the palm trees—just like an ancient Pharaoh. I eat and it’s good. I want use my hands—forget the fork. The little yellow pepper pops sweet and tender in my mouth. It is delicious—not too hot, not too sweet; cooked tender to the teeth but still firm enough to chew with satisfaction. I mix the sauce into the rice and bend low to scrape bigger bites into my mouth. The slightly bigger pepper, the one he warned me about, burns my lips and tongue. How did he know? The meat is soft and flavorful; perfect against the nutty taste of the rice. When every last atom has been licked from my plate, I look for him. His corner is empty.

Nine months ago,  the woman in the mirror put it to me straight: Your money or your life.   I chose my life.  Since leaving my job almost a year ago, I’ve made no money and I haven’t yet thought of a plan to make any.  I know I should worry each month when another round of expenses further depletes my net worth.  But I don’t.  Instead, I concentrate on building meaning into my days.  I am not a calm person so I surprise myself being sanguine about the complete loss of income.  Could there be something new at work it in the worn sum of instinct and experience, quirks and neuroses that is me?

Today offers a perfect example.  I rise at 5 a.m.  Morning sun crawls up the back of the Berkeley hills.  In fifteen more minutes, it will crest that horizon and slide west out over the ocean.  The estuary that is my backyard will glint with chips of hard, white light.  I lie in bed listening to birdsong.   This is new.  When I moved here three years ago, my  loft did not look out on a line of green trees swaying in the morning breeze off the ocean where purple finches make their nests.  Now it does because I had the time to pester PG&E into planting them.  I open the drapes and the razor of light that was slitting the bamboo floor pools there as harmless and yellow as butter in a pan.  I cross the loft to the kitchen, a wonder of design and efficiency plopped down amid open space.   I make coffee and measure out food for a black cat named The Bee.  The signets of my spinsterhood are a stray cat and, I shit you not, a degree in library science. 

Bee’s bowl rings like a gamelan when the kibble hits.  I pour oily, dark French roast into a cup and add milk and sugar.  It is so delicious I smack my stomach and say ‘Ahhhh’ like a right proper idiot.  I will sit at my laptop for much of the morning answering emails, fiddling, and pushing a novel forward to something like completion.  It’s Friday, however, and lunch shines brightly at the back of my mind because Larry con amigos are taking me out.

My neighbor Larry lives just above and behind me along the railroad tracks.  He and his wife moved in maybe a year ago.  Larry is one of those people I've met randomly as an adult and with whom I share not DNA but a huge swath of emotional and nostalgic brain space.  We see the world through a shared lens.  The Italians call it simpatico.  I call it Freak Twin.  Even a partial list of affinities reveals the depth of our connection.  We’re both from the Midwest; we grew up in the neighboring states of Wisconsin and Michigan in the Eisenhower/Kennedy years.  Our childhoods were largely unsupervised and thus we developed a keen appreciation for Mischief with a big M.  The very thought of monkey business sets our eyes to twinkling.  We like the same paintings and music—both wildly eclectic in our tastes though we are secret romantics in our view of the world.  The Vietnam War was a landmark for us both—he as a young naval captain running a small recon boat up and down the Vietnamese coast; me in my early teens learning that the world was bigger and meaner than anyone had yet let on. 

Larry and his posse—Alan and Jack—have been meeting for lunch on Fridays since forever.  I am the first woman ever permitted to join them.  It’s an honor I do not take lightly.  These men have eaten in every greasy spoon, dive bar, noodle hut, chop house, diner, and pub in Oakland.  They know every burger, schnitzel, pho, Scotch egg, falafel, pizza, steak-and-eggs, Rueben, tuna melt, and sashimi in a ten mile radius.  They are the Lone Gunmen of the louche lunch.  I am discovering a new side of the city and myself in their conspiratorial company. 

We hit the road keenly alert to trash bars and anything with more than two police cruisers parked in front—the cops know where to eat.  We are almost sucked in to Art’s Crab Shack—the retro design and proclamation, ‘Since 1963’, exerting a powerful gravitational force as we drive by.  But inland heat has pulled a cover of fog over us and we are not just hungry but cold and hungry.  The men delve into a quick and rapturous pow-wow concerning the soup at the Claremont and we slide right past Art’s resolving to return some sunny day.

We bump into a booth—there is no one else in the Claremont Diner, a charming old dump wedged into a sharply angled corner I’ve passed countless times without thinking twice.  It is 11:45 a.m.  The waitress comes by with water and menus that read like tablets handed down to Moses—two columns of temptation inscribed with the orthodoxy of diners: ham and cheese, cheeseburgers, mac-n-cheese, everything that can be done to an egg, malts, shakes, fries, rings, bacon, blu cheese, fried chicken, pie, donuts, coffee, Coffee, COFFEE.  Larry observes that it is International Bottled Beer Day and we resolve to pay our props with a round of Anchor Steam.

As our waitress slaps the cold, beaded bottles on the Formica table top, she recites the day’s specials and is quizzed about the soup.  “Barley,” she answers to the blank stares of my booth mates, “and a cowboy soup of sausages and ravioli.”  The Gunmen look at each other with the alert excitement of children up to no good and call in unison, “Cowboy soup.”  They grin with anticipation and I think how much I like them.

I realize that, as a lesbian, I know very little about men; very little at least about their unguarded emotional inner lives.  These three men have let me see a private moment of friendship.  I have been let into the Bat Cave.  I wiggle with satisfaction and order the barley.  My first surprise is that the soup is indeed remarkable.  I should’ve trusted them to know what’s what.  There follows nuanced discussion about the source of the subtle but unmistakable zing in the cowboy soup.  Pepper?  Chipotle?  Red sauce?  With each conjecture another spoonful is lofted and lips are smacked in analytical rumination.  It is a mystery.

On the drive home the Gunmen call out dive bars and holes-in-the-wall as we pass if they merit, by dint of  endurance or decay, a visit on some future Friday.  I keep quiet, letting the men reveal themselves to me.  I concur with every suggestion noting only that I am especially in favor of a trial run if the word ‘bucket’ appears on the menu as a serving size.  When ‘spotting’ like this there is no adult in the car despite an average age of 60+.  Seen in stop motion through the eyes of memory, we are four kids in Red Ball Jets, seersucker shorts and sand-dusted tee shirts out on a lark, happy to be together casing a neighborhood.

It is now the blue part of the night.  The trees outside my big, factory window have lost their green and everything is drained of color.  Black night will come soon.  I am home writing in my kitchen.  I stop to close the window against the foggy chill.  Above me, the couple who live at the inner corner of my L-shaped building have lit their balcony with candles and thrown a white cloth over their café table which is simply decorated with a vase of white roses, the pink edges flickering in the candle light.  As I watch, first one and then the other appears, each is carrying a plate and has a wine glass hooked in his thumb.  The men laugh, making the dog do tricks for scraps.  I smile up at them and wave before closing the drapes and returning to my computer.  The Bee is pestering me to stop writing and turn on the TV so we can snuggle up on the couch.  In the wee hours I give in and we wrap up in a blanket to watch ancient episodes of The X-Files, grinning and purring like right proper idiots.

Pissing In the Ocean

Some of you may remember my first blog wherein I chronicled the misadventures of The Rockway Institute and my decade-long obsession with golf. The Tute is no more and the golf bug has flitted on to natter in the ear of a new victim leaving my psyche a green field for new neuroses many of which have started to sprout.  Though I can never adhere to a theme for long—or person, or job, or POV—were I to start a third blog I would definitely write of the travails of having to work a toilet at sea level.  God! What a gripe.  Gravity is essential to a good flush and here at the edge of the San Francisco Bay we got nuthin’.

I’ve often remarked that when I bought my loft I gave insufficient (read: none) consideration to my charming lateral lisp and find myself having to pronounce my address, composed entirely of words beginning in S, endlessly to the amusement of every jackath who needs to know where I live.

I can live with the lisp.  The toilet is another matter.  On arrival here, I quickly acclimated to the sight of my neighbor pissing behind the building along the railroad tracks each morning.  He and his dog out for their morning stroll marking their territory.  I thought him rude at first. Then I got to know and like him and adjusted my opinion to eccentric.  Now I realize he is simply practical. 

I’m considering getting a dog.

Skin Deep in West Oakland

‘You live in a cement box,’  my guest said, flustered by her lack of sufficient wit to otherwise describe my home. She was the first to visit since I bought and moved into  an old iron works factory , now lofts, inside the Port of Oakland. There is no denying it—it's a cement box in a foundry just around the corner from an EPA Superfund site. For the double down, it’s not just Oakland, it’s West Oakland.  West Oakland, for those who have been living abroad for the last decade, has a national reputation. Giving it the most positive spin I can, when it comes to murder rates West Oakland has consistently out-performed every other major metropolitan area of any size. Two years ago, when I told people I was selling my house in a safe but dreary East Bay neighborhood to live in West Oakland, they all had the same reaction. First, they would ask if I was kidding and, when they realized I wasn’t, would take a big step back as though proximity to such madness might result in contagion.
 

Now, to be clear, I don’t take the murder rate lightly. Or the toxic top soil. Nor, for that matter, abysmally bad air quality due to the Port of Oakland in whose rough lap I tenderly sit. I am aware of the people living in their cars, always in the shadow of shipping containers stacked six high and I know about the abandoned buildings across the street.  I am not at all surprised by the people who say ‘no’ to this outpost of civilization.  Very few of them, however, are still my friends—if they don’t get this neighborhood, they don’t get me.

 For their every one of their no’s, here is a yes:

·         I awoke one morning to find the street blocked off so that a crane, working with a helicopter, could load a 15-ton metal sculpture onto a flatbed taking it to an installation in New York. People watched all day as the piece was slowly dragged from the sculptor’s studio (big as an airline hanger) and hoisted onto a pallet, strapped and bound like Prometheus, and then loaded and secured. Small cart vendors showed up around noon selling hot dogs, sandwiches, soda. It became a party. 

·         One of the first entrepreneurs to stir each morning is the local brew meister pedaling his bike up 3^rd Street making deliveries to local restaurants and bars. The bike is custom built to have a low platform settled between the pedals and the front wheel—a mini flatbed—that can hold a half dozen beer kegs. His long beard blows back over his shoulder as he makes his rounds.

·         The days all three local coffee roasters fire the beans.  The scent of hot, moist steam rising from vats of boiling malt having some sort of misty, twiney amoeba sex with the nose-singing flare of burning coffee makes me smile.

·         The restaurant causing the most excitement this season is El Taco Bike—a mobile taco stand specializing in carne asada with salsa verde. The bike is charming as all hell and I want it. If you grew up in an era when boys delivered to doorsteps newspapers thrown from the front of their bikes you’ll have no trouble envisioning the small, aluminum steam table attached like a newspaper basket to the front of El Taco Bike. Pulled pork on one side of the divided compartment and sauce on the other. Move to the back of the bike for condiments—extra hot sauce, more salt, diced chilies—and napkins arranged on a café table no bigger than a pizza stone welded to the back seat where a child’s seat would go. The wee-est, little trash canister sits under the table.

·         On summer nights the Oakland Opera sets up in an old, converted warehouse just around the corner from me on 3^rd across from the hardware store and hydroponic outlet for people who grow their own pot. On show nights, an enterprising young man operates a martini cart on the sidewalk. He is usually joined by a hotdog vendor also working the pre-show crowd and us casual diners/drinkers who happen by.

·         Love beer and you’re in heaven here. The stretch of 3^rd between Linden Street, home to Linden Street Brewery and Merchant’s Saloon in the Produce District attracts an international crowd of beer connoisseurs out to taste some of the most innovative flavorings made today. Head east to catch International Beer just west of B’way on 3^rd where bikers catch the late afternoon sun on their leather and chains. Jog south to Jack London Square and stop in at Heinhold’s Last Chance Salon, a bar The New York Times has dubbed one of the ten best in the world. Built during the gold rush days, it was where a young Jack London bent his elbow with grizzled sailors from all over the world and learned how to tell a story. It is no bigger than a single car garage and everything in it is uniformly the same color—table, floor, walls, chairs, lamps, décor. It is like stepping into an old sepia-print photograph; a different world.

·         The newly dredged Oakland Estuary allows the Port of Oakland to take more and larger cargo traffic away from San Francisco and other, West Coaster seaports. On any day, tug boats push and nudge and herd cargo ships bigger than the high school I went to into berths where stevedores high in the sky guide three story cranes over their holds to empty them out and reload in a day. They work through the night and I have grown accustomed to the light and noise.

·         The hottest venue in this part of town is a triangle-shaped wedge under the 24 where it crosses I-880. A local man started a garden there, eventually adding a stage and café tables. The whole thing is maybe 2,000 square feet and holds only a few dozen people lucky enough to get a seat when local bands play for free because they want to.  This isn’t a government subsidized community enrichment program.  It is neighborhood people getting together on summer nights and grilling hotdogs and holding their babies on their laps, and watching the moon come up. It naturally attracts artists and people and dogs and food trucks. Girls in summer dresses dance in the late light, their shadows stretch long and thin; their sandals crunch on the gravel as the girls twist and turn and laugh and call to their boyfriends.

·         Jack London Square is the Paris of California. All the street art I could ever hope to find is here. A school of taggers working from here up to Fruitvale is producing the most dynamic and beautifully rendered paintings; gorgeous and beautifully crafted, these paintings are masterful.  Artists live and work here alongside trades people and stevedores, truck drivers, musicians, bakers, meat cutters, produce markets, painters, photographers, dancers, writers, and a strange boy who stands silently in the Square weaving his hands around each other like soaring birds in swarming flight—it is hypnotic and beautiful and utterly useless except to delight.