Tuesday, May 18, 2004

Down by the Riverside

It was a brief trip - about 36 hours - which only makes the welter of emotions and experiences it aroused that much more potent:

* Riding out to the airport on BART, 8 pm on a spring evening and I’m wearing my ‘phones.  I’ve hopped a car that another rider looked at and rejected and as I settle into the industrial upholstery I sense why - one of the two women across from me is spectacularly drunk. She’s sprawling and falling and laughing and leaning, her words slurred and her limbs loosely flailing, each independently, sometimes at cross-purposes.  Her friend is trying to calm her down, patently without success.  They’re probably in their 20s, wearing demure office support attire.  The drunk one notices me and goggles her eyes, loudly begins to insist that I’m Larry David (imagine my pride), calls out to me: “Hey David - I mean, Larry!” I subtly unplug the headphones so I can listen to her without being obvious; any overt gesture of recognition by me toward her seems sure to send her spinning into new depths of inebriation. Eventually her friend gets her to sit on the floor, put her head down on a bench,and close her eyes. She keeps rearing up to add a confused comment or to see what Larry David is doing.  It was either hilariously pathetic, or pathetically hilarious.  I guess it depends on how often she gets that way. 

* Late supper in Riverside with Mom on the way to her townhouse was a double burger, fries and a malt from a small local chain the name of which I can’t remember.  Their fries were crisp and tasty, especially considering how late in the evening it was; the burger was meaty and well-constructed, with minimum patty slippage and a broad spectrum of flavors.  This chain bills itself as America’s first “double kitchen,” which we think means that they make both mexican and “american” food.  It’s both a bizarre and questionable claim to fame, but they make a pretty good burger anyways so I’m willing to cut them some slack. My only mistake was in tossing a stale glazed donut on top of it all. That donut was more like a do-not but I eventually slept it off. 

* Riverside’s a plain, dusty old town, pierced eighty times a day by trains honking through it like steel geese, the broad bed of the Santa Ana hiding a trickling desert river, scrubby mountains and rocky outcroppings erupting from the sere suburban plains.... it’s a quarter of a million people, one of the fastest-growing areas in the country; I’ve been visiting mom there for seventeen years but I still don’t have a sense of its civic personality, a feeling under my skin that tells me where I am when I’m there: it still feels to me like a place between places, a way station, and I suppoe for mom that’s what it ultimately was.  We couldn’t go anywhere in town without running into people who knew her from her manifold community projects - but it seemed as often as not their actual names had slipped her mind, and in the end I preferred when I wasn’t introduced to them, knowing I’d not be back, not wanting more names and faces in my head to remember, not wanting to think that these heretofore unthought-of people still existed somewhere and bore a recollection of me…

* Breakfast with mom feels very much like it always did, which is a feeling I rarely have anymore.  I don’t think it’s the sort of experience I could clearly describe, so I’m not going to try.  But it has its own distinct feel, one that I hadn’t noticed before, and sitting around a round table with mom and two newspapers, pointing out articles to each other, sharing sections of mutual interest, it certainly felt like old times in a very comforting way. 

* We visited the Fender Guitar Factory Museum, which was entertaining, though modest. I experimented there a little with the camera and learned a few irrelevant factoids too.  If you happen through the town of Corona (think “Me and Julio") you could do worse than to check it out.  You shouldn’t feel obliged, however, to visit the Corona Discount Mart - it was surprisingly clean and well-organized, but but in 15,000 square feet of retail space, I think there were a couple of shirts and a pair of pliers I could have used.  They were also selling RIP t’s - nice t-shirs with a realistic airbrushed portrait of a young man’s face with the dates of his birth and death and a farewell message in spanish.  It’s not even ironic, seeing this out for sale. It’s just sad.  Via con dios, hermano.  Rock on.

* We also visited a street-chalking festival, where different groups and companies reserved squares of a blocked-off downtown street and used chalk and pastels to create temporary artworks on them.  Some of the art was derived from renaissance classics; some were modeled after modern images like album covers or cartoon characters; some were entirely novel creations.  In the midst of several of these works-in-progress I was struck to see one blank area ruled off, marked with a sign (all the areas had little identifying signs) that informed me this particular quadrant - where, as of two p.m., no one had yet showed up to start work - had been reserved in honor of someone serving in Iraq.  How strange, it seemed to me, to offer this brave soldier such ephemeral recognition; how sad, it seemed, that even this evanescent gesture was starting to look like a slight as his supporters continued to fail to materialize, as, all around, paintings took form around his blank square of blacktop.

* There is good stuff in Riverside.  The Mission Inn would be a landmark in any city - Paris, Barcelona, Indio… and across the street at the Antique Mall I could have gotten an authentic vintage 1977 McDonald’s Captain Crook pirate tumbler for less than five dollars, but instead I got a brand new thai fruit salad with spring greens, couscous, pulled roasted pork (to die for) and a nice curried peanut dressing.  That night for supper we went to a little french place in a plain suburban bungalow in a neighborhood that seemed resolutely undistinguished, where we both ate truly great meals - mom’s roast lamb in a coffee crust on gratin potatoes was especially superb.  I ate beef, and plenty of it, with two glasses of wine - the first, a house cab, which came from the “Jean Jean” winery.  This “repeated syllable” theme was carried over on the menu with the inadvertently scatalogical phonic redundancy of the “Jean Jean Cacabernet.” It was tasty anyway.

This was my last trip to Riverside to see my mom.  She’s moving east in about a month.  It was great to see her.  And Riverside, I’m glad to have had a formal chance to say goodbye to you too.  You take good care, and write if you get work!