In California: notes on a day spent rambling throught the past and present with my mother

Yesterday belonged to my Berkeley-residing mother. Things that stand out for me:

She wears a pedometer. We clocked in 12,000 steps. She says that's close to 6 miles. Not bad for an 81-year old.

She lives in a retirement home. It is where my grandmother lived and eventually died, back in 1993. The last time I had seen my grandmother, she was half there, half elsewhere, but in recognizing me, she made her way to the freezer and took out some chicken for me to take home to Madison. The women in my family are always hell bent on feeding others. My mother reached into her cupboard and gve me containers of Trader Joe's chocolate covered ginger. It is easier to take back home than frozen chicken.

I looked at numerous photos of her, of my grandparents. Theirs is an original story. They traveled to the States in the twenties. The Depression wiped out my grandfather's decent job in the auto manufacturing industry. My granfmother took night work baking bread and a day job cleaning. My grandfather became the head of the Polish chapter of the IWO. Eventually they all returned to Poland, in part fearing the McCarthy repercussions for their ties to the community of progressives and communists.

I spent a good part of the day preoccupied with a problem that had arisen back in Madison, about which I found out through email when I logged in back in Denver. Someday I will write a book outlining my theory of the inevitable destruction of civilized life as we know it, on par with the demise of the Roman Empire. But whereas I once read that the main (unappreciated) reason for the fall of the Empire was that the Romans cooked and ate out of copper pots, thereby gradually poisoning themselves to a weakened state, our own world will crumble because we do not know how to be civil and kind to each other anymore.

Berkeley is a fantastic place for seniors. The list of things my mother does to keep herself engaged in life sent me spinning.

When I visited Berkeley as a young adult (my uncle once lived there and so I have had family ties tot he place for a while now), I thought it was a cool town. All those hippies seemed to be part of a wonderful song where people lived for love, peace, and a little bit of pot and they did it all in colorful clothes, listening to cool music. Now, threads of that culture remain of course and it still has its radical underpinnings (90% voted for Kerry and as of yesterday, not a single Ronald Reagan stamp had been purchased at the post office -- so the local paper claims), the hippiness of it all seems sadder, poorer, without an anchor or a theme.

My California hosts met me in Berkeley for dinner at Zax Tavern. Yes, I have pictures of the wonderful food we ate there, but I am in Newark now. Remember? It's the place where my little trusty computer has been shunned and rejected by the Silicon hot shots who have ruled that it's not good enough for their high-tech scene. And BTW, cell phones do not work here either: it's one of the few spots in the country where you cannot pick up a signal. How odd is that!