Emissaries from The Bulb

 I've been trying to write a post about three clients who showed up at the Berkeley Food Pantry on Monday.  This has not gone well, but somehow I can't not mention these people, so here it goes.

All three were from the homeless encampment at the Albany Bulb, a peninsula of landfill that pushes out into the Bay near I-80.  It used to belong to the Santa Fe Railroad, then it was a dump, and then it became part of  Eastshore State Park.  If you go  there for a walk, you'll find rebar, grafitti, urban art, exotic plants, dogwalkers,  and clusters of homeless people whom the City of Albany occasionally tries to evict.

This trio came as a group, two men and a woman.  They smelled bad, and they were loud.  One of the men stopped dead at the doorway and glared at us for some minutes,  which was so unnerving that Judy went and got a fellow volunteer, a sturdy young man, to stay in the room with us until we realized that the this client was so stoned he couldn't put a sentence together.

They took forever to get organized.  They unpacked and randomly re-packed their groceries.  They gossiped about other homeless people at the Bulb and whether the drinking water was any good.  The woman was especially loud and angry-sounding.  I just wanted them to go, and finally they did.  

Every draft of this post included comments about how inexcusably unfair life is, how their condition has nothing to do with being lazy or getting too many government entitlements (that's for you, Mitt, et al.),   how I feel guilty about having booked a cruise that day and for that matter having a much more comfortable life.  But it boils down to this:  I don't know where to begin to help them and I just wanted them to go.

Early Risers

Breakfast at La Note

Today we celebrated the anniversary of our first date, which we do every year,  usually with a lunch, which is what we did 36 years ago.  But lunch wasn't going to be convenient today, and I woke up very early and thought, what the hell, let's go out to breakfast.  Somewhere fun, somewhere French.

We drove through the streets of downtown Berkeley, which were pretty much deserted except for sad, muttering street people and the yellow-windbreaker city employees who keep an eye on them.  We were the first customers at  La Note restaurant.  Even the parking meters weren't up and about--no fee until 9 am.  Our waitress spoke with a French accent. The food was delicious.  We came home and booked a cruise to Alaska.

That's right.  Another trip, and another cruise.  Those who read my May 2011 trip blog know our disillusionment with cruises, but we want to look at glaciers and we don't want to drive and we want comfort and we want to be waited on.  Age and laziness, plus another glossy Oceania Cruise Line brochure, colluded.  We're booked for summer 2013.  There's a 2-for-1 deal and a half-price only deposit until March 31.

Besides, yesterday we spent all afternoon doing our taxes. Jerry's face tells the story.

Doing the taxes: Always an interlude of marital bliss

Taking to the Skies Again (and again)

 Kew Gardens,  London,  2008

Since 2006, when I overcame a post-9/11 aversion to flying,  we've been to Washington, D.C.,  New York City, Texas, Boston,  Arkansas,  London, Paris, Rome, Venice, the Cinque Terre (Italy), Monaco, Mississippi, Seattle, Quebec, the Hudson River Valley, Montreal, and Corfu. Oh, and Memphis, which has the National Civil Rights Museum, a must-see that should be on that list  floating around on the internet of "100 Things to See Before You Die."


It's all been memorable, and to  my mind, a firm slap on the face of mortality.  As in,  "Ha , ha, I managed to do that before the Big Eraser came down."

Travel takes money and, for us, a re-ordering of priorities. We have two bathrooms that need remodeling, a dated kitchen, and I drive a 16-year old car. Don't care.    By the time I was in my late fifties and Jerry was in his seventies, I thought, it's now or never.  I worry about every flight, but I go. 

What's next?  Chicago in May and Glacier National Park in August.  And May 2013 is shaping up to be a mega-trip: Boston, Switzerland (Alps), and England, including London, Oxford, and the moors of the West Country.

I made it to Paris by sheer luck when I was 9 (my parents won a Cadillac  they sold to finance the trip).  When I was 59, I made it back to Paris, a sentimental journey.  See photos below.  This was better than a Prius and granite countertops.

My sister and me in the Tuileries garden in Paris, overlooking the Place de la Concorde, 1959

Fifty years later in  approximately the same spot

And the Point Is?

I came across this in last week's Sunday New York Times Style Magazine:

 

Artist Nick Darmstaedter, 23, wears a Calvin Klein shirt ($195) and A.P.C. jeans ( $250).  (A.P.C. stands for "Atelier de Production et de Creation.")   He's in a co-op of young artists in Brooklyn, an art collective called "Still House." The conceit is that "the Brooklyn look cleans up cool."  I tried to find these jeans on the A.P.C. website to confirm their condition and their astounding price. No luck.

And here's another co-op member, Louis Eisner, wearing an Adam Kimmel jumpsuit, "price upon request," presumably because we would laugh outloud at the idea that a 23-year old artist could actually buy it.

Why marry struggling artist with boutique fashion?  These guys aren't working in these clothes!  It would be much more interesting to see what they're working on than what the Times has tricked them out in.

This silly concept's a winner, I guess, for the artists (publicity) and for the Times (a catchy idea for the magazine), but not for the rest of us who might want an inkling of reality.  And perhaps integrity.  Young artists struggle;  it is not a romantic and stylish life.  It's hard work.   And besides, show the 99% wearing what they can really afford to wear.  Please.

I'm always annoyed by this glossy magazine, which is occasionally bundled with the Sunday New York Times.   There was also a piece on Dustin Hoffman, a brief profile that mentioned his clothes (mostly gray).  An article by Suzy Menkes, fashion writer for the International Herald Tribune,  was entitled, "War, What Is It Good For: Combat on the Catwalk." My brain shut down on that one.  Reality, anyone?

Judge Judy and Me

Yes, I watch Judge Judy.  She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed with the doily collar and the expensive highlight job and the reader-glasses she rakes off her face in exasperation.   She's sort of awful, but on Monday afternoons, after volunteering at the Food Pantry,  I flop in my chair in front of the TV and watch.

Boy, she can be a bitch!  I boycotted her for two weeks after she yelled at a victim of domestic violence for not going to the police immediately, which she says she would have done.  I know she'd be mean to our clients, who have so many strikes against them.  She's always asking people if they're employed and for how long, and she's always rolling her eyes at people's misfortunes and telling them they brought it on themselves.  People are idiots, jerks, and liars, and she not only gets to decide that, she gets to tell them.

I cringe, but I watch.  After three hours at the Food Pantry listening to desperate people who are grateful for any food they can get,  people who are in drug treatment programs,  people who whisper that they are homeless, I want to enter a world of black-and-white: no gray, no nuance, NO TRAGEDY.  I want someone to bang her gavel and say, "That's it,  problem solved, we're finished," and have everything fall tidily into place.  I really do.

Spring

Primroses purchased at Berkeley Horticultural Nursery at 8:43 this morning.  Dual purpose: decorations at a party next weekend for the pool exercise teacher, then color spots for our garden.  You can park right in front of Berk Hort at that hour.  Just don't run over dozy people on the street carrying cups of coffee.

Nostalgic All Over

Investigator

What the hell am I doing?  Investigating the past.  I'm looking through my high school scrapbook, which is so intensely infested with dust mites that  I'm wearing the mask Jerry uses when he operates the leafblower.

Last night Scott Pelley announced on the Evening News that one of the Monkees, Davey Jones, had died.  In the background , "Daydream Believer," was playing,  and I had a nostalgic attack so severe I just about had to be taken to the ER.

It was 1967,  and I was wearing a baby-blue pleated skirt and matching cardigan sweater, which I bought at a shop in Town & Country Village.  It was rainy, and leaves were splayed on the sidewalk.  Nancy picked me up in her mother's lemon yellow Impala, and we drove to Del Mar High School.  Our skirts hit mid-knee, no shorter, or the old bat Mrs. Woodward would have called us in to the Dean of Girls, Georgina Somebody.  No pants, ever.  We were really, really good girls, mostly because we had no choice. 

The Scotch tape in my scrapbook has failed, and everything was loose and flopping around.  I was hoping I'd find the weekly KLIV radio station list of top rock songs with "Daydream Believer" on it. No luck.  I gave up and consulted Wikipedia:  The song was released in December 1967.  I was 17.  Did find a bunch of stuff that only another Del Mar-ite could appreciate:

Spirit ribbons and the school newspaper. We were "The Dons"

Stuffed all that back in the book, and downloaded the song from iTunes, along with--I kid you not--"I'm Into Something Good," (Herman's Hermits), "Glad All Over" (Dave Clark Five), and "Can't You Hear My Heartbeat?" (Herman, again).  I listened to them several times, and that may be it for years.  Catchy, but not a whole lot of substance.

And, by the way, Scott Pelley's one of us: born in 1957.