Thursday, July 30, 2009

The Hard Dunk - a love that never fades

Thinking back recently upon my travels to England when I was very young, one recollection arises unbidden and repeatedly.  In fact, I have never truly stopped remembering it, with desire tinged richly with regret.  Of all the good things, it’s the one I’ve missed most consistently; amid the bad things, it always softened the blows.  There’s not much to be said about it, but the articulation of those meager memories reifies them for me - helps cement their sweetness in the shifting matrix of memory.  Sure, they’re just cookies, but these are cookies I’ve craved for forty years - and a forty-year craving is worth a few lines of blogscrawl, I should think.

The England of my recollection from 1970 was a place of ludicrously rich foods.  Milk came in bottles the top quarter of which was pure cream that would stick to my spoon as I ate my cereal; chocolate was tangibly thick with fat.  The ice creams were a disappointment texturally, but were plenty sweet enough if not too much so.  The national punch, “squash," was sold in a concentrated form that was hallucinogenically sugary.  And while cookies, per se, did not exist, the range of baked goods available in their stead more than made up for that deficit: hot scones drowning in butter, cakes and tarts of every description, gateaux and jellies and puddings unlike anything I’d ever tasted - and, of course, the ubiquitous, if seemingly inaccurately-named, “biscuits.”

I was used to thinking of biscuits as the crumbly love-child of a cracker and a dinner roll, typically served with gravy and certainly not dessert fare.  Not so in England, though.  An English biscuit could go from bland to overwhelmingly glucose-laden, covering a wide range of the flat baked confection genre.  Big’uns, li’l’uns, thick’uns and thin - “biscuit” was a generously inclusive term for one of my very favorite kinds of food. 

In the panoply of biscuit-dom, I found much to admire and many to recommend - but one stood out so far above the rest that my longing for them persists to the present day.  What I recall of them may be gilded by the artistry of memory, but, if so, not much.  There just wasn’t that much to remember, and I’ve held onto it so devotedly. 

The biscuits of my beloved memory were dunking biscuits, though I can’t vouch that that was their actual name.  They were square, about two inches to a side, and baked to a rich dark color.  Significantly, they were hard.  Damn hard.  The other noteworthy quality possessed by these biscuits was that the top was heavily glazed with brightly colored images of simple familiar things - a tree, a house, a tiny car - simplistic to the point of being juvenile, but crisply rendered in bright colors made entirely of thick, plaster-like sugar.  This, in combination with the high tensile strength of the biscuit itself, made for a confection of unrivaled rigidity.  They were designed to be softened up by being dipped in milk or tea; eaten out of the cardboard carton, it took all my youthful masticatory vigor to work through one, and I actually recall having sore jaws after enjoying two of them dry in quick succession. 

After we returned to L.A. at the end of that trip, we occasionally did some shopping at English specialty stores - the sorts of places that sold crumpet mix, mushy peas, and Bird’s custard.  I always looked for the dunking biscuits at such shops but I never did find them.  When we returned to the fair and pleasant land six years later, I arrived with high hopes of renewing my acquaintance with the hard biscuits, but no dice again.  And since then I’ve checked at any number of brit boutiques and limeytoriums - all to no avail.  Even on-line searches - which officially turn up everything - have proven unsuccessful.  My beloved dunking biscuits seem to have utterly flown the coop. 

The longer I look for them, the more I want them.  So you can take this as a whining rant, a cry for help, or what you will.  Just so long as one of you tells me how to get some of those damn biscuits again.  Otherwise, what is the internet even for, anyway?

Coming up when I get around to it: rusty truck and dinky mountains!  You can’t afford to miss it!  Don’t make my site tracker hunt your sorry ass down!  because that’s an extra charge and I don’t think I’ve subscribed for that part of the service, you know.

Monday, July 27, 2009

Reliving the Magic: More Weekend Photos cuz there was More Weekend

Okay suckers, you got the first chapter of Weekend Recap - Phototastic Version yesterday - but you knew that was just a warm-up.  The weirdness would get weirder.  The cuteness would get cutesier.  And Proud Mary would keep on burning. Just as soon as I got a chance to upload a few more photos.  Which is happening even as I type these barely coherent words.  So let’s get started with the photoblogification of the weekend just past: 

We’ll start with something simple and straightforward: Zachary at his soccer class.  Jesse, too, seems to enjoy these outings, and it’s all we can do to keep him from stomping his irrepressible way out onto the practice pitch.  I’ll show you what I mean, but, those of you with cuteaphobia: AVERT YOUR EYES!

Later that Saturday, after a whirlwind session of housecleaning and forty-wink-taking, we hied our butts hence to the east bay for to see some visiting relatives and some relatives who actually live hereabouts but we all too rarely see.  For purposes of pure edification and character development, then, please to enjoy: the Blattner meet-up!

Let’s skip ahead to the next morning.  We arose early enough to enjoy a mouthful of gen-u-wine San Fran fog, drove across the Big Orange Bridge,

and headed up to Sonoma and the hallowed open-air halls of TrainTown - one-fifth the size of Disneyland and possessed of what they claim to be the most fully-developed scale steam train in the Americas.  And do NOT forget, that includes Guyana AND Uruguay.  DUDE.  That is one damn well developed scale steamer, and you can keep the Cleveland.  We rode the train,

visited the old western mockup village,

and even hit the dragon-coaster with Zach - twice. 

(Kel is the one in the white hat… yeah, this one’s sort of more documentary than ottistic, but it’s my blog and you’re gonna get that sometimes.  Suck it up.) Airhockey was played.  A carousel was rid.  Corndogs were consumed.  A game of Ms PacMan was ignominiously lost.  (Did you check your coat pockets?) “The Spirit of New Orleans” was repeatedly listened-to over omnipresent loudspeakers.  And, perhaps most importantly, coupler knuckles were clearly identified:

As the sun crept over the yardarm, or whatever it is that trainfolk use to tell them it’s getting to be the afternoon, we took our leave of TrainTown and drove the rented Hyundai back down towards Frisco City.  However, since we’d spent so much time entertaining the kids, Kel and I insisted on one side trip for our own gratification, to Cline Winery.  We figured the kids, or the one of them who was still awake, anyway, would enjoy the ponds while we tasted a dozen or so tiny mouthfuls of delicious, delicious deliciousness.  As it turns out, the ponds were even more fascinating to him than we’d anticipated.

And what, exactly was he watching so carefully?  Ooh, the weirdness returns… Let’s zoom in real tight for a HIGH-DEF CARPTASTIC FREAKOUT!

Plus, they have a real-to-goodness bath house there - not like the ones here in town here where you arrive clean and go home so dirty your priest would slap you, but the kind where you arrive filthy with trail dust and creosote, and get just a tiny smidge less filthy by immersing your wretched self into murky but enclosed waters.  That’s how they did it in 1877, anyway.  And at Cline they’ve got the wall-carvings to prove it. 

After that, we drove right back home, where the kids woke up the moment we put the car in “park.” Then they watched television and threw toys all about the house till we finally got them to go back to sleep again well into the evening.  And that, my beloved lurkers, was enough of a weekend for me. 

Ah, you caught me, didn’t you.  You know we just had to replace our car because of a NOT OUR FAULT accident - so why am I driving a *rented* Hyundai?  Well, it’s a funny story… Kel was driving the boys and me to Jesse’s day care, so I could drop him off and she could continue to Z’s preschool where she does the drop-off for him.  Yeah, it’s a little complicated, but the point is, we were all four of us in the car at 7:45 in the a. freaking m., when, as we drove through an intersection where cross-traffic was controlled by a two-way stop sign, for god’s sake, someone decided she could sneak across in front of us and wound up ramming our front left wheel with her diesel Mercedes.  Upshot: our car’s in the shop for two weeks and I am seeing a chiropractor.  Hence the rental Hyundai.  And the throbbing discomfort.  Good thing the kids are unhurt and still very cute… and that life is still weird enough to distract me.... next up, eventually, more regular wordosity, probably.  But I’ve got a site visit tomorrow that takes me next door to the world’s smallest mountain range, so let’s see if I get any inspiration up in Sutter County, shall we?

Sunday, July 26, 2009

Weekend Photorama #1: Fairyland, Already

Surely you’ve had enough of my words for the time being, however short a time that may be, after that last post.  By way of giving you a break from the blather, here’s some photos from the past two weekends.  I warn you: some of it gets pretty cute.  But rest easy, the rest of it is full-on weird.  It’s a nice balance, really.  Not unlike my own life. 

SO: Two weekends ago was the trip to Children’s Fairyland, the little amusement park that inspired one “Walt Disney” to put the Brothers Grimm on steroids.  It’s about ten acres on the shore of Oakland’s Lake Merrit, and is based on the concept of small settings with buildings and sometimes sculpted figures, that replicate some of the more beloved fairy tales and mythical children’s stories.  Many cultures are covered but the anglo-germanic traditions are most prominently featured.  It’s very low-tech, low-impact, aimed at the youngest of the ambulatory children, and fascinatingly untainted by generally commercial imagery.  We visited with the Paiges, and had a delightful time, as to which, the following are a pale reminder:

They have an “Alice in Wonderland” area with strange tunnels and murals and slides, ultimately debouching into the kind of maze that adults seem to find more disturbing than the kids do:

And who doesn’t know that old poem about how there was a crooked man, who walked yadda yadda yadda?  Sure, we all loved that one.  But can you still even like it anymore when you realize that this is that crooked man?

Just inside the entrance, which is loaded with crazylooking “Aladdin and the Freaky Genie” imagery, is this little watchtower.  There’s no ride or story attached to it; it’s just sort of Di Chirico in real life.  Even in the daylight, it seems impossible and possibly unreal:

One of the many little rest pavilions scattered around the park had hand-painted benches with variously figurative scenes on them.  This one caught my eye, as a very wry reworking of Edward Hopper’s classic “Nighthawks at the Diner.” Kids probably wouldn’t get this one, but some parents do…

This was so weird that I felt I had to double up on it.  Outside the little Fairyland Chapel is a set of figures designed to replicate - not a fairy tale this time, but a Christmas pageant.  I admit readily to utter inexperience with such pagentry, but is this really what they are supposed to look like?

This one claimed to have something to do with a whale, but I didn’t recognize the name of the story.  I did recognize that a similar item appears at Disneyland, much larger and rather more frightening.  This one is just weird, and that’s the way I like it:

You may have noticed that the kids are not featured in these photos.  I’m just not posting those ones because the cuteness factor is sort of excessive, but here’s a nice shot of D, K and J lining up for a glare-off:

After several hours at F-land we retired to the Paige home for cocktails and wheeled toys.  Here is the heart-catching beauty of our four kids playing together as the sun slides down over Berkeley:

Finally, just to show you how damn magical the whole thing was, here’s a little plaque that’s stuck to the back fence at the Paige house.  I guess I always wanted to get a nice shot of it, and here it is:

Okay, that’s actually enough for now.  I’ll come back later in the week with the Soccer, TrainTown, and Winery shots.  Till then, practice patience.  Or I’ll send that crooked dude after you.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Back Up and Run Over It Again: TOP FORTY TIME

You knew it was coming.  Like tsunamis, colonoscopies and Broadway revivals, there’s really no stopping it.  At the appointed hour on the appointed day, fate will fulfill itself.  All you can really do is brace yourself, because baby, fate don’t come with airbags.  It hardly even comes with funbags.  But it does come with THE ANNUAL CHUCKLEHUT TOP FORTY REGURGITATION! 

Regular readers know the score, which is currently, I think, 40 to 6 - six years I’ve done a “top 40” review of my least-execrable posts.  New readers, to the extent such things exist (and I’m the guy who is pretty sure that the Lord of the Rings trilogy was based on actual events from a Star Trek prequel novella), should carefully peruse the following Articulation Of Criteria, so that they can appreciate just how random and arbitrary the following list is:

The “Top 40” is “like” “obscenity,” in that I know it when I see it, but not in the sense that it is actually obscene, which to my best understanding, it is not.  Mostly. 

So now you understand my ratings system, n’est-pas?

Perhaps a bit more detail would be appropriate.  This is, after all, a critical annual endeavor.  Nations wait breathlessly, pundits pant pendent and big dollars ride on the outcome of these deliberations.  It’s the Oscars, the Emmys, and the meaningful half-dozen of the People’s Choice Awards, all crumpled up into a single indistinguishable ball and sent through the clothewasher by mistake.  People want to play along, make their best guesses and see how their picks stack up against those of our panel of expert - of which there is, as it happens, only one, who is myself.  I’ve worked solo ever since that Jimmy the Greek death-match fiasco a few years back.  My point being, here’s a few other criteria I try to keep in mind when selecting my Top 40:

* They’re from the period 24 to 12 months ago - not the immediately-expired year.  Some wounds are just too fresh to re-open.

* They’re relatively well-written - decent sentence structure, interesting vocabulary, clever wordplay, thematic consistency, provocative story development if that sort of thing applies.  It’s writing, in short, that doesn’t make me overly-confused and cringey to discover that I’ve produced and posted it.

* If they’re not meaningful and touching, at least they’re good for a cheap laugh.  You should take something away from the reading, be it only a juvenile giggle sometimes.  Don’t underestimate the juvenile giggle. It’s what keeps me young, or at least, what keeps me juvenile. 

* There are FORTY of them, randomly distributed across the identified reporting period.  FORTY.  Get it?  This is a tricky one.  Think “two-score,” or perhaps “Fifty-four-THIS-or-Fight.” Memnonics can help.  Anyway, they helped Memnon.  And look what happened to him. 

That’s enough prologue.  Let’s get to the good stuff: DAN’S TOP FORTY POSTS FROM JULY 23 2007 THROUGH JULY 22 2008:

Coronets and Kings
Crispy Ham Sandwiches - The Powersnak
Sheeting the Bed
A Sack Worth Grabbing
Parke and Go
Heaven Forfend
Giggidy Giggidy
Shipshape
Use Deadbolt for Safety
The Moralizing Brownie, or the Dessert of Repentence
Scoping Things Out
Drumhead
Punkakes
Bored Games
Lassitude
Mortality: Coiled and Ready to Strike
Hoppy Days
New Change
Smiles, Everybody - Smiles!
Playback - Remastered
Pop Star
Badass
Boatman of the Badlands
The Limalchemist
Going Postal
Shmuel and the Tallis
Valentines Greetings from the Artist in Residence
Shady Character
The Straight Line, plus Bonus Photo Delite Goodies
Trans It
Looking Quite Well Preserved, Anyway
Inside the Animated Children’s Actors’ Studio
Miscellany, Braindribbles, and the Tahoe Pix
The Devil and Mr. Johnson
The Devil and Mr. Johnson, Pt II (I’m counting this two-parter as a single post, because I have authorial privileges and an aristocratic bearing and embrace the chaos of modern life and I’M A FREE SPIRIT, MAN)
The Alien Next Door
Word on the Street
The Wet Fish
The Turning of the Tide
A Fraud in the House of Cool
Pigmental Monday

I think that’s enough for now.  Remember, you have to finish them all before you get dessert.  Enjoy, if you can.  Otherwise, I’ll just catch you later with more of the same.  I know, I know.  But it’s what I do!

And here’s a little preview of upcoming Fairyland photos, just so you don’t get too burned out on the wordosity....

Monday, July 20, 2009

An Au Pair to Remember

My dad’s gone off to England for a little soiree to honor the first matriculants of his Oxford college, among whom he in fact numbers himself.  Simultaneously, I have found myself in conversation upwards of twice in the last month with the hot Eurau-pair ladies whose charges frequent the same playground as my delightful J-Dogg.  I think they’re German or Swiss or something; they usually keep to themselves.  But on more than a couple of occasions lately, Jesse has charged into their little play circle, bestowing upon them his delightfully confrontational stare-down.  They spoke to him, and then to me.  Dad in England.  Chatting up the au pairs.  There’s a story there somewhere.  I don’t recall much of it, but the small bit that remains I must memorialize lest it evaporate on me altogether. 

The year was 1970 and I was six years old.  The family was off for half a year accompanying my dad on sabbatical, ending up eventually in Israel via Rome, but spending most of our time in England.  That trip had some ups and some downs for me.  I’ve shared some of the downs.  Now, to the best of my recollection, here’s an up. 

Let’s start with the recognition that my parents were - and are - good parents.  They look out for my sister and me.  I’ve always felt safe and protected with them.  Maybe not every single choice they make is beyond reconsideration, but that’s true for everybody.  Mom and dad did their level best, and that was pretty damn good. 

Let it also be noted that life in 1970 was different.  Most cars didn’t have seat belts.  Playpens were primarily designed to maim and strangle toddlers, and toys spontaneously ignited in cheerful conflagrations of noxious, colorful smoke.  Child safety was more a matter of “do no harm” than the elaborate enterprise it is today.  Don’t ride inside the dishwasher; stop eating matches.  Simple rules for a simpler time.

I remember being a small child out with my mom on errands, not wanting to languish with her for however long she’d take in the knitting shop or grocery store - and she was just as happy to conduct her business without my interruptions.  She’d just leave me in the car with the key in the ignition, so I could keep the radio going.  This was good parenting, and it made for cumulative hours of great childhood memories for me.  Leaving your kids - that’s what good parents did.  And in the bosom of the safety of international travel, even more so.  Hell, leaving the kids was as good as obligatory.

So, during our trip to England, on the exceptional occurrence of a visit out to London where we stayed in a genuine hotel and imbibed the heady draught of pure vacationism (instead of mere sabbaticalosity), it was not inappropriate for mom and dad to take one night for themselves.  I think it was just a nice supper out alone for the grownups, a chance for them to be themselves instead of being parents, for a mere evening.  My sis and I were fed, bathed, enpajamulated and lovingly tucked into our respective sacks.  Then mom and dad shut off the lights, quietly slipped out the hall door, and abandoned us to our own devices. 

Sis, at age three, fell asleep swiftly and soundly.  I, however, had lately embarked upon several years of insomnia, and lay awake in my bed in the quaint old hotel in a quaint old quarter of Jolly Old London - home of Beefeaters and the White Tower, Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus, Hyde Park and Sikh Temples… a throbbing metropolis very much unlike our usual haunts out on Oxford’s quiet Banbury Road.  London even seemed to rival in size and intensity my old home town of Los Angeles, which I supposed was saying quite a bit.  It got me sort of charged up, frankly.  I couldn’t sleep. 

The City was calling.  Only my sister’s soft snoring was keeping me in the darkened cloister of my hotel room, and that turned out to be an insufficient anchor.  I got up out of my bed, fiddled with the door till I got it open, and stepped out in my sleepduds into the brilliant world of the hallway.

I seem to recall leaving the room, and the brightness, and the crown moulding high up over my head.  I recall that the carpet was old and worn.  And I think I recall voices that beckoned me, siren-like, down the passageway.  Ladyvoices. Fun ones. 

I have mere memories of memory from here on - flashes of past remembrance of things I’m not entirely sure I still actually remember from their original occurrence: a heavy tarnished doorknob on a deeply coffered door; a tentative knock; a suspicious answer.  The door creeping open, revealing a well-lit interior and bright curious eyes.  White nightgowns, giggles, halting explanations, introductions.  Biscuits - English-style, crumbly-sweet, deliciously illicit. 

Of the two young women upon whom I’d imposed myself, I sadly recall almost nothing.  I did know they were European but not English, that they were excellent hostesses, that we played games - cards? - and I made myself very much at home in their hotel room that night.  The term “au pair” was not known to me at that time, though I learned later that’s what they were.  It is a term that ever since has been imbued for me with the sublime scintillation of pleasures obtained without permission.  And biscuits.  And, possibly, cocoa. 

I was surprised by a knock at the door: my mortified parents had come back from an otherwise relaxing night on the town to discover their first-born gone missing.  What they had done to find me - frantic calls to the front desk, random door knocks - I never knew; what I had put them through by disappearing like that - anguish, embarrassment, fear - never even entered my mind.  All I knew was that I’d been bored and awake, but then found some new friends to entertain me.  I bade my continental girlfriends adieu for the evening and returned to my own room with my parents, all of us ready for a bit of a rest.  I never saw those young women again, but I have thought of them many, many times since.  Needless to say.

And now that dad’s gone back to England yet again, I’m reminded anew of that night.  Plus, I guess I still have a bit of a soft spot for those au pairs.  They do make the ol’ playground seem that much more.... playful.  Perhaps I’ll bring them a plate of biscuits to return the favor and get some karmic closure, but I’m afraid the gesture might be misunderstood. 

Monday, July 13, 2009

Keepin’ It Real: Old School Sounds and a Face Full of Fun

It’s about time for something easy and fun, dontcha think?  I mean, if the internurt can be used for such purposes.  Rumor has it such things are possible, so I’m gonna test it out by posting a little fistful of details and you’re gonna have a damn fine time coming along for the ride. 

Item the First:
We’ve been doing more driving lately than I have done for a while.  Parties up in Marin, out in Oakland, down in Pacifica, trips to shoppes and stores hither and yon… Kel is used to all the driving but it’s been something of a change for me - or maybe more like a throwback, since I’ve only had the pleasure of a bus commute for less than a decade and before that it was hours every day behind the wheel.  When I started my bus commute, I didn’t have an iPod yet; it’s been only about five years that I’ve had electronic access to my tunes while I’m being ferried around.  We can plug it in in the car as well, but I guess I sort of associate in-car entertainment with the technologies I relied on back when I was an auto-driving man - mostly, cassettes.  I know it’s archaic but it’s what I had way back when, and it did the trick.  And the funny thing is, now that the new Jetta has the old technology built right into the dashboard, I exhumed the sack of preserved cassettes and would you believe it, I’m enjoying the hell out of them again.  It took a lot of work to make those mixes, and I am re-reaping the rewards now regularly.  Yes, the old cassettes are making a big fat comeback, and to be more specific, here’s what I get to listen to now: 

MIX TAPES THAT ARE BACK IN THE MIX
Big Dance Faves ‘84
Blues Mix 1984 (backed with Duke Williams’ A Monkey In A Silk Suit is Still...)
Aztec Toaster Dance Mix ‘85
Perky Little Tunes 1985
Another Rockin’ Mix - 1986?
Funksgiving - Thanksgiving ‘91
Chipotle Stuffing - Thanksgiving ‘94
Heal This Chicken - Thanksgiving ‘96
Gallinaceous Boogie - Thanksgiving ‘97
Legend of the Flaming Yam - Thanksgiving ‘98
All the Fixins - Thanksgiving ‘99
Bake Till Hot - Thanksgiving ‘00
Hungry Music Mix and Tunes of Satiation - Thanksgiving ‘01
Fattening - Thanksgiving ‘02
Plus, From Simon:
Kaballah Beatbox Mix/Mix-vah Mix
I Have Been Here Before/That’s The Way We Flow Mix
Red Beans French Fries Cumbia/Fish Fry Mix
Selected Goodies (b/w Booker T and the MGs - Soul Limbo)
Plus, from Glen:
Slide and Glide Mix
Reggae Got Soul Mix

I tell you good bloggy people, I’ve been cranking the volume to 11 on these suckers and they really hold up.  A lot of this stuff I don’t have access to anymore, and wouldn’t even know how to find it.  The Feelies?  The Bonedaddies?  The Skatalites?  These tunes aren’t just floating around out there anymore.  It took a long time ago to pull them together, and I intend to enjoy them for so long as I can.  In fact, special credit goes out to Andrew C, who digitized my Duke Williams/Blues Mix cassette for me.  Now I can even listen to that stuff on the bus again, but without having to fumble with those plastic cassettes spooled up with magnetic tape.  Not that that’s such a bad thing, I am coming to remember....

And as part of that recollection: ITEM THE SECOND:
Kelly just gave me an AWESOME gift - a nice, well-built, stylishly-manufactured t-shirt.  My white T’s were looking pretty shoddy - most of them were old enough to pre-date cell phones.  But my new gifty T isn’t just cleaner and fresher-looking than the old ones, it’s demonstrably cooler - it’s the Upper Playground CASSETTE T!  I don’t care if the kids don’t know what the hell they are, they look fantastic.  The designer even took the effort to replicate actual classic cassettes that I knew really well - the Maxells and Denons and TDKs of my mis-spent youth.  Good going, Kel!  I’ll say thanks once but you can hit auto-rewind and hear it on an infinite loop!

Which brings us to item the THIRD:
I was so psyched about the t-shirt that I wanted to do something nice in exchange.  I’d seen a book at a friends’ house that I thought Kel would enjoy but had no idea how to find it, but as fate has it, it was for sale (and ON sale!) at Green Apple just right here in my ‘hood, where I went to get the presents for the b-day parties the boys took me to last weekend.  I picked it up today and when I presented it upon my return home after work, Kel was so excited that she made me hold Jesse away so she could play with it, because J was pretty damn excited too and kicked me in the nugatories twice in his eagerness to lay his chubby muffincrushers on the new volume.  Zach was almost screaming with excitement and impatience to play with it.  Yes, it’s the Cornell Ornithology Push-n-Listen Bird Song Book, with hundreds of gorgeously rendered drawings of loudmouth featherfreaks together with digital recordings of songs for each of them.  From ravens to spoonbills and quail to eagles, it’s a very cool compendium of color and sound.  We are enjoying it with great enthusiasm.

And finally, item the fourth:
This one ties in to the “enjoying with great enthusiasm” theme.  It’s from a party a few weeks ago and features J-Dogg and his old man taking a relaxing dip in the Pool of Luxury.  This photo just makes me feel good when I look at it, so I’m putting it here for my own gratification.  However, if it tickles your fancy as well you can just consider yourself a third-party beneficiary and no one needs to get supersoaked:

That ought to be enough for now.  I am still waiting for a little confirmatory research to come through on the au pair issue, but don’t fret, I won’t leave you hanging much longer.  Which reminds me that I think I heard someone seriously mention a while ago that he was going to make things easy for himself by “plucking my low-hanging flute.” Now if you’ll excuse me I need to ream my spitvalves. 

Wednesday, July 08, 2009

History’s Scrapheap

Quiz: what is special about today?  Hint: I AM A NERD.  And now for your ignorification, here’s an honest-to-goodness transit tale!

I had been riding the bus for a while and nothing noteworthy had come to my attention.  I almost felt ripped-off, as if my monthly bus pass entitled me to have amusing little stories dropped in my lap like party favors, or toothbrushes at the dentist’s office.  But day in, day out, the ride was just a rotating menagerie of humanity.  A humanagerie, if you will.  You can see the lengths to which it drove me.

The thing about a dry spell on the bus, is that it doesn’t take much to end one.  For example, not long ago I rode the ol’ 38L all the way to the terminal.  The bus was, as the young people today would put it, hella crowded, from when I clambered on board at Divis (having gotten some blood work done, if you must know) all the way past Union Square.  I was lucky to get a seat in the back but it wasn’t till we hit the home stretch on Market Street that the air stopped smelling like other people’s clothes and breath, and floorspace enough opened up for me to uncross my ankles and untuck them from beneath my plastic bench.  For a short while I just reveled in having a little space to myself, new tunes on the ‘pod and sunlight casting down the center aisle.  Soon I’d be back at my cube for the duration yet again.  This bus was basically empty now, and getting even emptier at every stop.  For the first time since I’d had the tourniquet wrapped around my arm earlier that morning, I vouchsafed myself a moment to relax.  That’s what it took for me to see the book. 

I was luxuriating in my seat in the back of my bus.  When I glanced forward to watch the long vehicle bend at its waist as it rounded the corner from Market to First, I noticed a large cream-colored object lying on the floor under a seat just in front of me, next to the big hinged articulation.  I recognized it immediately, at least on a generic basis - I have a few of them myself, after all.  Too tall for a standard bookshelf, bound idiosyncratically with brads and cord, a cover of embossed leatherette enclosing thick sheets of rough construction stock; the sheets didn’t lie flatly together but rather showed the warping that results from having something different stuck to every page.  It was a scrapbook, and it did not belong on this bus.

The book was lying on the littered floor, half under a single forward-facing seat only recently vacated - until I got out of my bench and picked it up.  Its presence told an eloquent backstory: someone had intended to bring a family heirloom, a record of one clan’s journey through time, to work, maybe to scan irreplaceable keepsakes, maybe just to show them off.  In the crush of the morning commute this person had stowed the precious volume under a seat for safekeeping, and in the rush for the doors and the excitement of starting a new workday, those irreplaceable keepsakes got left clear behind. 

There was less than a block left before the end of my ride - not nearly enough time to do a proper job of reviewing a total stranger’s most precious memories.  In fact, I think that was what the cover said: “Precious Memories,” printed in an elongated loopy blue script in the lower right corner; a blue border delimited the periphery with ornamental carats and dots, and a replica of a bouquet of flowers sat fading at the lower left.  It was certainly of an era - the era before cute went kitsch, when big-eyed kittens and hopeful clowns were still unironic.  The cover was thick and sort of puffy. I’d guess it came from the mid-’60s.  As did I.  We had so much in common, it seemed, and so little time to share it.

As I picked it up, its portentiousness resonated through my fingertips.  I extended it, amazed, unbelieving, to show it to my sole co-rider - an elderly back woman with severe features, sharp throat wattles and silver-shot hair pulled back tightly.  “See?,” I expressed to her wordlessly, “See what someone left behind?” Without words she replied in a sneer: “Forgetful sentimental fool deserve what he get.  Which is nothing.” I broke my gaze with her.  There was no time to waste on emotional selfishness.  I held someone’s life in my hands and mere seconds remained for me to explore it. 

I let the book fall open at random, its heavy sheets rippled with glue, age, and disparately-inserted contents.  On the first page that was revealed, I saw a large-format birthday card, all balloons and cakes and kittens, embossed cardstock and goofy loopy script, a perfect match for the style of the scrapbook itself, a palpable blandness that had long outlasted its synthetic charm.  I flipped a few pages, revealing a folded sheet of heavy paper, royal blue faded to baby, with an inscription in crayon: “Don’t Tell Anybody”: a home-made invitation to a surprise party.  The letters were printed tall and neat in thin unornamented lines, somehow in their simplicity still evoking long-past good times. 

The bus was pulling in now, making the final turn off First Street and climbing the little hill to the landing.  Flip again: four small cards, scalloped edges, teddy bears, pastel-style drawings of presents with bows - too small to examine closely as I walked up toward the driver at the front of the bus.  Flip one more time: more of the same, holiday sentiments, long-stale, like an Easter peep on Thanksgiving.  The doors were opening now; the elderly woman disembarked out the far back steps immediately but by now I had reached the driver’s seat with my treasure in tow. 

He regarded me warily, pulling back from me in his padded captain’s chair.  He was a slender Asian man with reflective aviator shades that seemed to shrink his face; in his big operator’s seat he seemed almost childlike.  “Excuse me,” I told him, trying to modulate my voice and put him at ease, “Someone seems to have left this behind.” I extended the scrapbook toward him; he shrank back a little further and made no move to take it from me.  “I think it’s probably pretty important to somebody.” With tangible reluctance he extended a hand for it. “I guess I’ll turn it in,” he muttered, tight-lipped.  “Thanks,” I replied, handing it over. 

He turned away, our business obviously complete.  I descended the steps, stepped out into the bright morning sun, and felt a pull on the skin inside my elbow.  Tape - where I’d had my blood drawn.  I yanked it off, exposing a little red welt.  A small memento, soon enough to fade away, insignificant even to myself.  Such is the nature of mementos, I supposed.  Then I promised myself to dig out my scrapbooks and look through them once I got home, for old time’s sake, and new times too. 

Still haven’t done it yet, though.

Fun, eh?  Well whatever.  And the answer to my quizriddle: the special thing about today is the date - July 8, 2009.  07-08-09 - it’s consecutive numbers day!  While we’ve had these annually for the past six years, this was the last till January 2, 2034.  Hope you commemorated it appropriately, and pasted a nice photo of it in your scrapbook myspace!  Still to come - my hot date with the au pairs.  You won’t want to miss it! 

Sunday, July 05, 2009

Why Not The Fourth of July: Everybody Celebrate My Great Weekend!

Commemorations are meant to be memorable - that’s the whole entomology, isn’t it?  Co-memorate - to remember together.  It’s been a long time, though, since a day as profoundly historical as the Fourth of July has had its ass so totally KICKED by the things I did this past weekend to remember it.  I think that the founding fathers should probably come forward in time, see how awesome my weekend was, and then re-establish the basis of the holiday in honor of me and my parties.  Oh yeah, Al Hamilton, I’m looking at you.  You Jamaican dudes know how to party, eh wot? 

We’ll start by recognizing that it was a four-plus day weekend for Daniel that started by leaving work a little early on Weds to see my MD for my annual physical.  Other than shrinking a quarter of an inch (and it was my favorite quarter-inch!) in the past year, I’m really doing well.  Steady weight, steady cholesterol, and the alien implants are no longer resisting the radiation probe.  I’ll have to post a photo of that eventually.  More to the point, after my physical Dr Andy and I headed out to Shattuck Ave in Berkeley to enjoy some ‘za and suds at Jupiter, which was appropriately gas-based and super-dense.  I’m sorry, I misread my notes, it was - let me see here - delightful and delicious, hanging out on their brick patio with the east bay hipsters, chugging down a quart of beer with my b-q chicken pizza.  Thanks, Andy - it’s always a pleasure. 

Thursday I got to stay home with Jesse, whose day-care provider was on vacation for the week.  We frolicked and traipsed around, visiting playgrounds and coffeeshops for our respective entertainment.  Once Kel got home I loaded J into the jogstroller and hauled him out for a really good run in the park, taking the big carriage along my “back route” for the first time.  That route has lots of hills and single-track, so it was a bit more challenging to maneuver him through it - and that much more satisfying to have done so.  He seemed to have had a good time, and I still can feel the work-out it gave me. 

Friday was a day of rest.  We started with some time at the Discovery Museum, where we immersed ourselves in Chinese culture in their excellent new exhibit before retiring outdoors to several of their various themed fields, habitats, and play structures.  Later that day we hit Target for a whole mess of supplies of the least sexy but most necessary sort.  We went in with a very large shopping list and had acquired everything within about an hour, even though they’d re-organized the whole damn place in some misbegotten fit of retail enthusiasm.  (Note to Target: If I have to search the whole store to find something, it’s not going to put me in the mood to pick up off-list items as random impulse purchases.  More likely, I’ll chuck the whole enterprise and shop elsewhere.) (Except we were already there and had a cart full of toilet cleaners and kiddy toothpaste and coenzyme Q-10 and all that other crap we only buy at Target.  So, note to Dan, from Target: Yeah right, see ya next time.  And good luck finding the hand sanitizer then.)

Friday night I popped over to a grocery store and got ingredients for lucky glucose squares, and then cranked out a basic double-batch of them with a little “oh you, thinking you can dance and everything” shoehorned in the middle.  It’s an easy recipe and I’ve got it pretty well down, so I still got to bed before too late even with all the television.  And let me just make a shameful admission.  It’s not that I enjoy watching “So Who Says You Can Dance,” that’s already well-enough known.  But I have come to have a soft spot in my heart for Cat Deeley, the eight-foot frenchwoman who hosts the show.  She’s the sort of person of whom I thought, upon first viewing her, unflattering things.  But as time has gone on, I’ve had to reconsider.  She comes off very unpretentious and open, for a media creation who’s probably mostly built out of tuille and carbon fiber.  Hell, she put Twitch’s grill in her own mouth last season.  You can’t be standing on ceremony when another person’s faux choppers are glinting between your jaws. 

Moving on, Saturday was the Fourth of July.  We got up early enough to meet friends in Woodacre by 11:15.  Woodacre is a tiny town in rural west Marin, a land of apple orchards, salmon runs, hidden lakes and friendly people.  We met up with Kel’s work friends, stashed our stuff, and wandered down to the “town center” for an authentically small-scale parade.  There were tractors, horses (not really in formation), kids on scooters, and a firetruck with santa on it.  (He seemed warm.) Everybody sat around in lawn chairs drinking steadily and cheering everything, even the frightened deer that scampered through the middle of town just before the parade began.  Z picked up a scadload of thrown candy (a “scadload” just barely fits inside a plastic fireman hat, such as those distributed free to children at rural firehouses on the Fourth of July) and Jesse giggled and chortled enormously, a huge hit in his luau shirt and plastered grin.  The parade lasted only about 20 minutes and then we strolled back to the house along small lanes canopied by majestic oaks and sycamores. 

Then the gorging began in earnest.  Our hosts had set up their b-q grill in the backyard, surrounded by fruit trees and under the watchful eye of innumerable songbirds theretofore unknown to me.  I saw a purple finch and got buzzed by hummingbirds and hung out with a chicken in its coop, for heaven’s sake.  (Aside: this coop, like all others, had two doors.  And why?  because if it had four doors it would have been a chicken sedan.  O how I amuse myself!) We ate and drank exceptionally well (microbrew in the full keg and fantastic mojitos by the pitcherful, freshly muddled with back-garden mint) but for me the highlight was the company, which was excellent.  I was inexplicably a little anxious about meeting all these people again.  We’d been there last year too and I have no idea why I repressed how cool everybody was.  In particular, there was this one guy.  John.  Big John.  All I remembered from the prior year was that he was like a wall with arms and legs, and those arms were the size of my legs, and were robustly tattooed and actually branded.  He’s a bodybuilder and personal trainer, and just at the thought of spending time in his hulking shadow made me inappropriately nervous.  He wound up being one of the first people I saw when we arrived there, though, cradling his 15-month-old daughter in his massive arms like I’d carry around a baby guinea pig.  I was lugging Jesse and some bags of groceries, and had to switch my boy from one tired arm to the other arm that was ready to get tired again.  John gave me a respectful glance and said in a voice that was soft and quiet, “he’s a big one.  bet carrying him feels like you’re carrying a hundred pounds.” Hell yeah it does, John, and thanks for recognizing it.  From there, things went great.  John and I chatted a good bit about the baby-carrying burn and many other random conversational nonpareils, and I was glad for his company while I was out with Jesse amid the gardens and chickencoop while we both were on kid-corral duty.  Parade, wildlife, great weather, great food and drink - but good honest human contact was the best part of all, I think.  That, and the kids sawing logs in their seats on the ride back home.  Gotta love them napping boys.

That night was the Explosion O’er the Ocean - our fireworks are set off above the bay at Pier 39 .  In years past Zach has insisted, first, on leaving the display just as it began, because it was too noisy, and then the next year, he bravely sat through a display that was totally obscured by clouds.  This time the family split up, with Kel keeping watch over Jesse asleep at home and Z and me going out for the Explodo-rama.  He enthusiastically walked a nice long distance from our car to our preferred viewing station, picked a comfortable spot on the berm, and settled down to be a big boy who enjoyed watching things getting blown up. 

He did get nervous about the loud noise once the show started and asked to leave a few times, but I held him on my lap and spoke quietly to him and kept him warm and safe.  I couldn’t smell the black powder burning or the acrid pyrotechnic stink, but I could smell the fresh flowing tide at our feet and my boy’s hair, all old shampoo with a touch of sweat and enthusiasm.  He was warm in my lap though the night was chilly, and we watched the air fill up with color from San Francisco’s two launch sites as well as from Sausalito and Berkeley, both of which were having displays simultaneously with ours.  The moment the show ended I handed him a glo-stick he’d been hoarding for months and helped him bend it to initiate the chemical reaction; then I hoisted him to my shoulders for the long walk back to the car.  He was heavy on my back and legs but I would not have traded out a single ounce of it.  He pointed my way with the glowing stick; I told him stories from when I was a boy; we talked about night vision and night creatures.... the delight of his company far outweighed his paltry avoirdupois.  We chatted a little more on the ride home till he mumbled, voice thick with sleep as we left the Presidio, that I should turn on Lake Street, because that was the fastest way home.  He was right, but was snoring by the time we got home anyway.  I gently extracted him from his car seat, carried his small self upstairs, and slipped him into his bed (we’d taken the precaution of putting him in pj’s to start with).  He was asleep before I left the room.  I’ve never felt more like a dad, and never been happier to be one. 

Which brings us to July 5, or the last day of my four-plus day weekend.  How to give it its due?  Get up at a leisurely hour (7:20 am, and I’m grateful for every minute of it), play games with the boys for a few hours, and then load up the car for a trip down to Hillsborough.  This is a town that is sort of the polar opposite of Woodacre - barely any commerce, but chock-a-block with huge lovely houses.  It is tony, upscale, and pants (subgroup: fancy).  It’s a bedroom community for both Silicon Valley and San Francisco, and the streets are all named after costly competitions like “Yachtsman Drive” and “Chukker Way” and “Yale-beats-Princeton Place.” Our dear friends MC&E have relocated from their mission farmhouse (that is, their old mission-style farmhouse in SF’s funky mission district) for about six months, during which the plan is that they will totally rehab the place to their own genius design specifications.  Meantime, with a little kid and another on the way, they need a safe home for a while so they somehow rented out a five-bathroom mansion in the nicest part of the “nice” suburbs.  There, they had us and about a dozen of our closest friends over today for a pool-n-food party.  Every one of us felt like we were crashing someone else’s garden party, but like hell we were going to leave.  We all hopped into the huge, warm pool (garnished with an enormous inflatable swan that seats two heavily-drinking adults) - even Jesse, who had only been in a pool once before.  He began the process with deep and appropriate skepticism, but ended it screaming with glee and dipping his face under water just to feel it pour out his grinning mouth.  The food was superb as well - a very well-rounded cheese and pate table; sandwiches made of hot sausage, french fries, grilled onions and harissa aioli (or grilled flank steak if that’s your poison); appropriate summer salads; a wide variety of delicious beverages; and plenty of deadly desserts including strawberry shortcake with handwhipped cream. 

By the time we left at 5 pm, the kids were shivering with exhaustion and glee.  They got to bed on time and are asleep as I type this.  Actually that sounds like a pretty good idea.  It’s been a great weekend but it’s clearly time to let it go.  Tomorrow things begin anew and I had better be ready for them.  At least I have some truly revivifying experiences to look back on when I need a little boost.  Blowing up stuff, or even drafting a constitution, is all well and good - but good food, good friends, and good times with my good kids is worthy of a four-day weekend every week of the year in my book.