August 2008 Archives

Years ago my wife and I wandered out of the community center in Point Reyes, California.  Staring at the night sky, I turned my wheelchair west, and we made straight for the back fence.  The night was young, even if we weren't, and this was the place to be.  The center, dubbed the Dance Palace, had mounted an evening of chamber music, and the two of us were high.  

We had emerged from the Palace, crossed the palace grounds and now gazed from the ramparts, which turned out to be a barbed wire fence.  Across the tidal meadow where Tomales Bay gives up seafaring and becomes pasture, horizontal lights burned in the blackness.  That's one of the things about Point Reyes, the night is more or less night.  Things get dark in a way they don't in my suburban neighborhood of Menlo Park.  That's among the reasons we come here.  

And this was another, gazing across a pasture after a concert, inexplicably excited, and now a little disappointed to see new construction in the grassland.  They must be condos, I told my wife.  How, I asked her, could developers get away with it in the coastal-commissioned, land-trust-protected likes of Point Reyes?  Dear, my wife said, those are sheds.  For cows.  Yes, now the glowing apparition across the fields came into pastoral focus.  The city never sleeps, neither does the dairy farmer, and without knowing it, I'd stumbled deep into the Point Reyes cow thing.

The Bovine Bakery.  The Cowgirl Creamery.  Murals with cows.  It's the local motif.  The cow thing makes Point Reyes.  Without it, in this era of haute tourism, the town would succumb to the chic.  But cows are all about squat nurturance, eating low to the ground, endless milk and manure.  With a life of chewing and re-chewing grass, it's hard for cows to get either rhapsodic or sprightly.  No cow ever jumped over any moon or even gave the matter serious consideration.  Cows keep us grounded, mudded and fenced.

Their faint spiritual presence added something to the chamber concert in the Dance Palace.  The artists were locals.  They had followed the path of all serious musicians, working where they could, including Portugal.  But now they were back.  They were here in their community, and for this moment so was I.  People are thin on the ground in Point Reyes and towns around it, but there were plenty of them here tonight.  That's why I had to linger a moment longer staring at the cow condos.  As tourists, we had stumbled into one of those rarest of American contemporary experiences.  A community event, spontaneous in feel, the laborious reality graciously hidden.  A cultural show of force.  Music hath charm if one lives in the city, but in a small community it has renewal.

The West Marin Music Festival was hosting a reception across the street.  Marlou and I wandered through the Tomales Bay Food Company, nodding to locals and feeling out of place.  A tall older guy leaned against a column, sipping red wine.  Throwing introverted caution to the winds, I parked my wheelchair beside him and muttered greetings.  Before we knew it, one Jewish guy had found another.  Wally and I.  

Two nights later, Marlou even found Wally and Julia's phone number.  Our dinner guests from Sonoma had suddenly canceled, and with the table in our vacation rental set for four, Marlou searched her brain.  She remembered part of the number, but in Inverness, that's all you need.  Wally and Julia came for dinner and stayed, in a manner of speaking, for years.  They were the older couple in our Inverness lives.  Then were the couple who had separately died and moved.  And by the summer of 2007 I was the guy in the wheelchair who was in Menlo Park phoning the Dance Palace.

To order tickets, I asked the volunteer who answered, where was the website for the West Marin Music Festival?  Canceled, he told me.  The Festival director was very ill.  Thanks, I said.  By the summer of 2008, I knew enough to check the Dance Palace website.  Still no Festival.  But there was the endearing Wesla Whitfield channeling the Gershwins and Cole Porter into West Marin.  So naturally Marlou and I channeled ourselves.  Wesla also leaves me high, this North Bay chanteuse.  And there's our shared experience of being mugged and shot in the spinal cord on Bay Area streets in the same era.  Another story.  

For now, it was intermission, and I was circulating, as much as a wheelchair can, among the Dance Palace crowd.  No, I don't know these people, but somehow I always want to.  And when I fall into a chat with strangers, well it just pops out of my mouth.  What happened to the West Marin Music Festival?

Yes, the director is ill.  But there's more.  The topic makes people uncomfortable.  I've stumbled into something and will never know what it is.  This makes me impatient.  I have to watch my response.  Ours is a consumer society, and we expect music festivals the way we expect FedEx.  It doesn't work that way.  When the directors of the Lincoln Center Chamber Series targeted Menlo Park for a summer festival, they dispatched a team of consultants.  When I tried to whip up local interest in the preservation of a shuttered movie theater, I failed miserably.  Community organizing isn't my thing.  Perhaps these days it's no one's thing.  Worse, I have no perspective on this and can find few who do.  Is it reasonable to find a new purpose for an old cinema ?  Isn't our town wealthy enough to expect this?  Maybe wealth has nothing to do with it.  Maybe Menlo Park's social capital is depleted, our imaginations impoverished.

Which is why I put my money on Point Reyes.  The ghost of the West Marin Music Festival is still kicking around.  I can feel it in the intermission crowds at the Dance Palace.  All it needs is....  God knows.  But I do know one thing.  I may be an outsider, but I do have a checkbook.  And it's remarkably easy to join the Dance Palace organization.  So why not?  I gave them a few bucks, they'll send me a few mailings, and who knows?  We'll be back there soon enough, me parting the intermission crowds with my wheelchair, like an old locomotive with its...cowcatcher.

Marlou and I traipse down the dock at the Golden Hinde just as the tide hits maximum.  The water is all but lapping at our feet, and we are lapping it up.  This is my daily exercise.  With my rowing machine and exercycle in our carport at home, this is my vacation aerobics.  I grip the splintering wood railing, lean lightly to avoid excessive contact with the bird droppings, and proceed.  Marlou links her arm with mine, and we move along the boards.  I take a step with the left foot, which induces a predictable spasm on the right foot.  And we're off.  We are off, given some neuromuscular adjustments, to see the Wizard.  And with arms linked, we do approximate the movie characters heading down the Yellow Brick Road.  If the sprightly quality seems forced, that's because the observer is too severe.  There is, and it's  something I easily forget, a lightness and joy underlying the world.   We have made a conscious and shared decision to enjoy the moment.

 

The Golden Hinde Boatel calls itself that.  It's a motel for boats.  I can't really believe that anyone approaches this place from the sea, sails up the bay and steps on the boatel dock with their bags.  But this is entirely possible.  There are plenty of slips for boats, plenty of room for boaters and even two for quadriplegics.  Ours has enormous picture windows looking directly out on the bay, Tomales Bay.  Here in Inverness, California, views of the water are highly prized.  And here at the boatel, you get the prize as soon as the clerk hands you a room key.  The place is right on the water, all of it.  There is nothing else here.  Oh, there is a swimming pool of sorts, a small place for kids to splash.  There's even a restaurant.  But what people really come for is the water and the immeasurable quiet.  At night Marlou and I both dream endlessly.

 

But for now we are on the dock, and I am lurching over the boards, getting exercise.  I am also getting into the 7:30 p.m. feel of the bay and its breezes and smells.  I tell Marlou that the flotsam is rolling in and the jetsam is rolling out.  Both of us can see the mass of twigs and sticks floating in with the tide.  But only I can see Marlou laughing.  I cannot see her with my eyes, at least not safely, because my focus is on the uneven boards and protruding nails below.   But I can see her laughing in my mind.  More exactly, I can hear her.   Marlou has a certain laugh that comes right from the soul.  Or maybe the heart.  Or both.

 

We have been in Inverness, staying at this motel, for several days and have done remarkably little.  Part of it is the driving.  I enjoy the process of maneuvering my massive Ford van through hill and dale, less and less.  On this particular morning, coming down the small grade from Point Reyes National Seashore, I felt myself getting flung just slightly into the oncoming lane.  I cinched up my torso strap and lightly remarked on the centrifugal force of curves.  But the moment was a reminder.  Driving the wheelchair truck is becoming a chore.  So we have spent lots of time on our boatel terrace and small lawn staring at the bay beyond.

 

Tomales Bay seems utterly Californian.  Facing east from our motel, the mile or two of blue seawater ends in low brown hills, dry, featureless and empty.  This gives the bay an unspectacular feel.  It even looks unfinished.  The other side, the west side which I cannot see facing the water from the motel, has all the drama.  Inverness Ridge, steep and forested, high enough to be interesting, low enough to feel surmountable, green enough to supply water to the town.   Northern Europe on one side of the bay, Mexico on the other.   California throughout.

 

That morning Marlou and I drove to Abbots Lagoon.  The drive was slow, because the fog hung low over the hills.  I didn't mind, relishing a good excuse to go 25 mph.  When we got to the parking lot that marks the trailhead, the morning was surprisingly gray, even cold.  This is not what one expects of August in California.  But this is what Point Reyes has to offer.  The climate is mild, but it is incessant.  One can see its effects on the weathered stucco of the farmhouses.  Yes, there are farms here.  There's an agreement, still being worked out, to keep the place partly wild and partly pastoral.  The ranches came here 150 years ago, and now they have a right to stay.

 

Marlou rolls her eyes at the haute tone of Point Reyes Station, the regional center.  Toby's Feed Store sells bales of alfalfa in front while conducting yoga classes in back.  You can also pick up a $10 box  of granola.  Marlou says the whole scene makes her vaguely nauseous.   But I see something else happening here.  Those old dairy farms out on the windswept Point are barely hanging on, fighting for their economic lives.  The profit margin on milk isn't reliable.  The cost of fuel and everything else associated with farming keeps going up.  And families trying to hold lives together while their kids ride yellow buses two hours to high school in Petaluma...well, it's straining everyone.  Either the farms will disappear or they will have to adapt in the way of, say, the Italians.  These farms will have to become partly agribusiness, partly agritourism.  Just like the yoga at the feed store, the stylish will have to merge with the styleless.

 

I'm there already, lurching down the dock, simply trying to stay erect, no tumbling, and no margin for worrying about style.  Mine is a wholly functional ambulation, scraped together from neurological bits and pieces.  My style is entirely internal.  It is, I suppose, what could be called melancholy.  The sadness in things seems to intrude at all moments.  Which is why Marlou's style serves to balance mine.  She  is facing a PET scan in two days, and facing it with eyes wide open.   Her blood test has shown that her cancer again is on the move.  But for now she's laughing, even if I'm not.  She is laughing for two of us.  Which is fine.  I can't help but experience these moments as wrenching.  Which is why I have to ask Marlou if she knows the meaning of wrench.  Dutifully, she says no, and I explain that a wrench is a place for Jewish cowboys.

The neighborhood is full of babies, Leo tells me, as we stroll out of the Noe Valley Bakery.  I need baked goods on this or any other carbohydrate-rich day like Menlo Park needs more Persian rug stores.  Never mind.  It's too late now, for Leo, friend and former professor, has instructed me in the ins and outs of the whole-grain walnut bread, the berry scones and the bran muffins.  My wheelchair satchel is now bursting like a granary, and I can feel the calories-to-be already finding a receptor site just below my navel.  

Good that we're moving down the sidewalk, me rolling, Leo keeping up a good pace.  A new restaurant.  How can there be a new restaurant when the old one, Herb's, was old before I arrived in this neighborhood in 1973.  Incredibly, it's gone, and a glassy lunch and breakfast place has replaced it.  Herb must be gone too.  And Real Foods.  Still empty and boarded up.  Leo reminded me of the history of the place.  A small organic food store run by small organic guys had been gobbled up by a chain.  All the organic guys with their organic wages and an organic union got fired.  And the new owners of Real Foods got real unpopular.  So the store remains empty, despite all the babies in the neighborhood.  Which is what makes the neighborhood a neighborhood.  The notion and its history has gotten past on over the decades.  And 28 years after I departed, Noe Valley remains itself.

Less than two miles away, even before I emerge from the Muni streetcar elevators, Market Street and Van Ness Avenue remains itself too.  A woman rolls out of the elevator as I approach.  She is toothless, the line of her jaw collapsing like an elderly person's.  But she is much younger than I.  Hello, she says.  The woman breezes past me with a male companion.  The neighborhood is full of people sleeping rough.  As I roll up the avenue passing panhandlers passing out, I feel soft, suburban and protected.  Come on, man, a spare changer insists.  I keep going.

The traffic signal is red at Fulton Street, where a man leans oddly against a light pole.  San Francisco's Civic Center area is just urban enough to make me avoid eye contact.  I don't pay much attention to the guy on the light pole.  But he notices me.  "When you gotta go, you gotta go," he says in a heavy Brooklyn accent.  He brushes by me, heading for the Van Ness crosswalk.  There's a yellow puddle at the base of the streetlight.  The man, having peed, is now halfway across the avenue.  He limps badly, things being unwell in his right hip.  I've had similar experiences, particularly in the early years of my injury, bladder neurology being what it was.  Peeing in alleys, even subway platforms.  The only difference was that I never said anything to anyone.  The man is gone now, way down Fulton Street.  I want to know his story without hearing him tell it.  Yes, I am a sheltered suburbanite.

It's only a couple of hundred meters to my destination, the Opera House box office.  Marlou and I have received enough tickets from the San Francisco Opera this year to create an exciting new board game.  The woman in the box office shuffles and I cut.  Simon Boccanegra out.  Boris Godenov expanded.  La Bohème downstairs.  In no time at all I'm back on the bus and heading to the train station.  The driver, a sunny Hispanic woman, folds up the seat in the wheelchair space, ushers me in and urges passengers out of my way.  Someday, I will write an opera about her.  For now, I will simply not pee on her bus.  This is all I have to offer at the moment.  It's my achievement, of sorts, and it's taken years.

Years seem to have passed since I left home.  The morning's writing had not materialized.  A bad night's sleep, a groggy morning, and then I was on my way to the train station, everything burdened and cloudy.  Marlou's latest blood test showed a spike in one of her cancer antibodies.  Something is happening.  But, fortunately, it is not happening the same way for both of us.  Marlou has moments of despair and resignation, but they go.  Mine tend to stay.  

I realize this, as though for the first time, as Marlou describes her afternoon in Oncology.  With her doctor away, she had a frank tête-à-tête with one of the senior nurses.  I listened to the details, marveling at my wife's courage and capacity for getting what she needs.  More important, I knew that none of this came naturally to her.  It's a hard-fought assertiveness she is showing these days.  I know that, and she knows it too.  And that's all we need.

When Marlou's Oncology tale is over, it is pretty clear that she isn't and we aren't.  Yes, her cancer is slowly on the move.  And here we are, sitting on our still new couch, and laughing.  Marlou, having faced some mortal facts this afternoon is not laughing off anything.  She's off laughing.  She's found something ludicrous behind cancer's grave and mortal façade that strikes her as funny.  It strikes me the same way.  If it's black humor, it's our black humor.  No, we won't always be laughing.  But we're laughing now, because we're alive, and alive with each other.  And Marlou looks beautiful, because she is, and because I am alive in ways I never have been before.

So, while Marlou has been off oncologying, what was she doing?  Talking to the nurse about obituaries.  Marlou has been reading them in, it seems, in her private way.  And she's not pleased.  Mr. X died after a long battle with cancer...following a three-year struggle with cancer...having fought cancer since the Magna Carta.  Marlou doesn't want an obituary like this.

Okay.  It's not for nothing I am a corporate writer.  How about....  

"Tap Dancing with Cancer," starring Marlou Imes, recently concluded a 10-year tour that spanned three continents.  Her husband Paul continues to write material for Ms. Imes.

Marlou thought this over and, like a true client, told me my copy was on the way -- but not there yet.

Although my love of food seems to have no end, there's something happening with me and restaurants.  Marlou and I dine out often, part of a national trend the newspapers say.  I tell myself that it's always enjoyable, even special, going out to eat.  But something in me is not convinced.  Simply put, I am becoming sated.  And, no, it's not the food but the wretched excess.  Only yesterday Marlou and I took a family friend out to celebrate his college graduation with a San Francisco meal and show.  I chose a place that a restaurant critic deemed a major turnaround.  That is to say, having wandered from culinary excellence, a new chef had put the place on the right course.  It all made perfect sense, and I proudly quoted the review at the conclusion of our meal.  But something in me was gagging.  Somewhere, out in the real world, there's a food crisis.  And frankly I'd rather think about the effects of American crop subsidies on the price of corn in Michoacán on this particular day while I sit in a fancy San Francisco restaurant.  I'm getting too used to waiters who describe the 'finish' on the evening's sea bass.  Just as I have grown too accustomed to fish that arrives on a bed of something--and we're not talking box springs. 

 

The fish that arrived last night on a swooping designer platter greeted us on its side.  It displayed its fillets and dorsal fins standing up on edge, doubtless braced by unseen toothpicks.  This bass was 90% bone free, the waiter had explained.  Presumably, it had lived its aquatic life with the normal complement of orthopedic superstructure.  But tonight, for our dining pleasure, someone in the kitchen had relieved this fish of all but its vertebrate essentials.  Voilà.  Enough already.

 

Which is why I prefer the Educated Palate.  It's a restaurant with what must be San Francisco's least trendy downtown location: the Fourth-and-Mission classroom building of City College.  Yes, just off the scuffed and worn foyer and next to the security guard, there's a restaurant.  In a sense, it's a classroom, the site of on-the-job training for culinary workers.  Tomorrow's waiters, busboys, and, for all I know, sous chefs and baking assistants, all are hard at work learning their trade at the Educated Palate.

 

My friend Phila and I met there the other day.  In her 70s, Phila negotiates the likes of BART, the region's subway, with utter aplomb.  As for the rigors of the Educated Palate, I wasn't sure but strongly suspected, she would get into the swing of the place.  Like me, the place swings slowly.  You don't go to the Educated Palate for service -- unless you're me.  For its staff of trainees, the patron becomes a teacher, and the meal becomes a lesson.  And as in all true learning, it is impossible to say who teaches whom.

 

First, the ambience.  The Educated Palate occupies a pleasantly sunny and remarkably quiet room.  The carpets are vacuumed, napkins folded.  The students have been hard at work creating a class act.  Yes, it is a class, and it is an act.  A restaurant is a sort of show.  Maybe all the world's a stage, but I'm equally convinced that all the world's a restaurant.  Hey, good looking, whatcha got cooking?  It's the sort of question you'd like to ask half the staff of the Educated Palate.  But you won't, and the servers are deeply grateful for this, because to understand your whatcha-got-cooking reference they would have to first recover from their mortal shock and embarrassment at your smiling incomprehensibility.  Then they would have to enroll in Advanced American Idiom IIA, and they've almost got enough credits, so give them a break.

 

The restaurant's City College trainees are all, without apparent exception, minorities.  Most are immigrants, and virtually all of these are from China.  They are formal, shy and often excruciatingly polite.  The joshing light-footed style of waiters with their finishes, reductions and glazes will be years away for most of them.  For now, this is a serious business requiring their every attention. 

 

A young man approaches our table with a basket of rolls.  Before we can discuss the options, crusty whole-wheat, focaccia and Parker House, someone motions him to the other side.  Rolls, it seems, are served from the left.  Beats me, I want to reassure him.  He is a skinny kid in a white waiter's jacket, currently cringing with cultural embarrassment.  I tell him the rolls look good.  I smile.  If I could, I would jokingly ask if he has baked them himself, but this would open a Pandora's box of linguistic complications.  My smile will have to do.  Better have a second, I say, as he attempts to depart.  We go through the roll selection process again.  Well, I say, suggesting that this is the most fascinating part of my day, and he should take full credit...one of those.  A piece of focaccia lands on my plate.  I want to compliment his use of stainless steel tongs.  Never mind.  I have loaded up with bread, correctly anticipating what comes next.

 

Time.  A lot of it passes while Phila and I sit, menus closed, and catch up on this and that.  I will have to count on some lunch hour abuse, Phila tells me, a reminder that we have known each other for three decades.  I consider her remarkable in every way.  Phila's civic involvements currently impress me.  Both of us recall the protest era and, particularly in view of the present one, do so fondly.  The University of California has slipped into a lamentably corporate mentality and boardroom consciousness.  The regents want to ensure that UC's pharmaceutical-multinational partners feel, well, comfortable in their new campus home...up the priceless and environmentally sensitive slopes of Strawberry Canyon. 

 

I glower and glance at my watch.  The sun has noticeably shifted since we arrived.  A young woman nervously takes our order.  The menu options are inexpensive and few, so choices are easy to make.  Portions are ample.  Half of the last sandwich I ordered here achieved a second life in my refrigerator.  The young guy comes by again with the rolls.  It's true that they are remarkably fresh, doubtless baked by students in the back.  It is also true that lunch will probably be a while.  Not to worry.  Phila seems into this as much as I am.

 

When lunch arrives, it is worth the wait.  There is a professional instructing the kitchen crew, I am certain.  A good bowl of soup, an excellent salad and, with 20 minutes to go, do I dare order an espresso?  I do.  A foolish move, I realize 15 minutes later.  The espresso has been cooling on the counter to my left for quite a while.  I could insist on another one, but no.  The espresso is cold, but the heart is warm.  And I'm out of here.

 

I pay the bill, thanking everyone profusely.  Training for a job, a real one, in an American restaurant seems such a small thing.  But not to me.  My disabled life has been all about small things.  I understand that wearing a uniform, knowing the indigenous ways of butter and bread plates, enduring small talk and ambiguous humor in a foreign language, these are not trifles for the young students working here.  They are immigrants.  We are immigrants.  We are Americans, all of us at various stages.  And in my stage of life the message could not be clearer.  Welcome.  There are no foreigners.  There are no mistakes.  There is no hurry, at least not now.

 

San Francisco City College in its downtown high-rise conveys the sense of a latter day Ellis Island.  The classrooms and hallways throng with Asian and Latin American students, most young and some not so young. 

 

As I exit the building, the specter of Strawberry Canyon giving up a few more acres of madrone and laurel to a biotech lab comes back to me.  I began my working life with Phila at a UC Berkeley research center.  I know the campus and I know its canyon.  A corporate lab is a sign of the times.  The national government research establishment has been weaned, starved and downsized in ways that are ludicrous and dangerous. 

 

It was almost 30 years ago that I sat in the campus office of Martin Cohen, interviewing the great solid-state physicist.  After the war, following the Manhattan Project, the federal government poured money into physics research.  There was money for anything in the field, Cohen told me.  And so it went at places like Stanford and Berkeley, government funds aimlessly poured into reactors and accelerators, into musings about quantum this and relativistic that...until the curious stumblings of science caught the interest of some more practical minded business persons...all leading, decades later, to my jobs in Silicon Valley.

 

Corporations aren't into stumbling and musing.  They want timelines and results.  That's the problem with corporate research.  It does indeed get results -- it rarely gets surprises.  Cohen drew lines across a sheet of typing paper on his desk.  He was explaining what captivated him in the early 1950s...the migration of electrons in solids.  Why, I asked?  He smiled sheepishly.  He didn't know.  It just seemed interesting.  He invented a name to make his projects more comprehensible to outsiders: electron mapping.  One solid after the next.  Metals like copper, good conductors, versus non-metals like sulfur, bad conductors.  Then this weird class of solids that seemed neither one thing or the other...semiconductors.

 

Of course, there's nothing wrong with a little applied, non-basic, research.  And nothing wrong with a little corporate money.  It's just that the spiritual fathers of the Strawberry Canyon research lab were dining across from me the other night in San Francisco.  They should have been eating here, in the Educated Palate.  Better, they should have enrolled in City College's current term so they could work here, busing tables for a semester or two.

 

Now, 30 years after our chat, what I recall about Marvin Cohen was that while everyone expected him to imminently win a Nobel prize, his expectations were much simpler.  He wanted to teach me what I could learn, however modest, about his work.  His pen moved around the paper, his phone rang unanswered.  There were no dumb questions, no mistakes and he had all the time in the world. 

 

In its heyday, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was a procession of war-era Quonset huts, trailers and temporary buildings, intermingled with blockish concrete structures...all of it linked to sheds and other labs in and around Richmond.  That's the kind of setting where Cohen did his work.  Perhaps that's the character of any real work place.  Which is why the prospect of a Strawberry Canyon lab with lovely views and lavish facilities seems sad.  The loss of nature and the loss of ideals.  A confusing mix of intellectual property and public property, all of it with a no trespassing sign.  It all sticks in my uneducated palate.