3 days ago
Saturday, February 19, 2005
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!
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!
Friday, February 18, 2005
In California: partly cloudy and warm (he, he)
Thanks for turning the forcast upside down and letting me have this day of sun, clouds and breezy warm air! To whomever accomplished this miracle: I am grateful.
I haven’t the time to write much, but I’m hoping the few shots, favoring what most delights me right now (fruits and flowers), will satisfy.
I haven’t the time to write much, but I’m hoping the few shots, favoring what most delights me right now (fruits and flowers), will satisfy.
In California: wet and ch-ch-ch-chilly
Why "Newark" (the place of my overnights)? Perhaps it is named thus because the immigrants from the east, as always, felt a lack of imagination when naming the new promised land and so they brought with them names of places they remembered with great nostalgia.
Perhaps not.
I am in the middle of Silicon Valley so my cabbie told me last night. My kind hosts -- let me call them Mary and Tom (for one thing, these are their names), are techie-bio-sciencie-engineering types. For once I thought blogging would be a breeze.Not so. Here in Silicon-valley-land (if that is where I am) the phone lines have too little juice to push forward a single post. I could publish from a tiny village in Umbria, from the hilly heights of Ravello, from the mountains of Nagano, from the desert of Arizona, but in Silicon Valley I am stumped.
Not to worry. Today I head out of the valley and into the Bay area with computer in hand.
(P.S. I can already tell what sentence I am likely to hear again and again on this trip: "it's never this wet and cold in mid-February, never!" Maybe this whole sunny California thing is a myth. Maybe they actually have terrible weather here this time of the year but they never admit it to those of us in the upper Midwest who struggle with surviving winter.)
(P.P.S. The triple posting from last night -- now corrected and removed -- is an indication of how my partnership with blogger has worked thus far out here on the west coast. Please be patient with any or all posting errors. It's going to be a challenge to get this right.)
Perhaps not.
I am in the middle of Silicon Valley so my cabbie told me last night. My kind hosts -- let me call them Mary and Tom (for one thing, these are their names), are techie-bio-sciencie-engineering types. For once I thought blogging would be a breeze.Not so. Here in Silicon-valley-land (if that is where I am) the phone lines have too little juice to push forward a single post. I could publish from a tiny village in Umbria, from the hilly heights of Ravello, from the mountains of Nagano, from the desert of Arizona, but in Silicon Valley I am stumped.
Not to worry. Today I head out of the valley and into the Bay area with computer in hand.
(P.S. I can already tell what sentence I am likely to hear again and again on this trip: "it's never this wet and cold in mid-February, never!" Maybe this whole sunny California thing is a myth. Maybe they actually have terrible weather here this time of the year but they never admit it to those of us in the upper Midwest who struggle with surviving winter.)
(P.P.S. The triple posting from last night -- now corrected and removed -- is an indication of how my partnership with blogger has worked thus far out here on the west coast. Please be patient with any or all posting errors. It's going to be a challenge to get this right.)
In California: wet and warm-ish
I think my computer has a dependency problem. In Denver, it begged to be removed from the case, lovingly to be touched at the Wi-Fi points (basically the airport is one big internet café), then, again, as I arrived in Newark (yes, the odd thing is that I am staying in Newark, California), out it came and dialed itself up to life.
Would it be odd to visit with my mother in Berkeley tomorrow and blog at the same time, given that she does not know about blogs? And how about at lunch time, if I get inspired to comment on the food?
California – it’s a forward looking state, isn’t it? A blogger should feel right at home.
Would it be odd to visit with my mother in Berkeley tomorrow and blog at the same time, given that she does not know about blogs? And how about at lunch time, if I get inspired to comment on the food?
California – it’s a forward looking state, isn’t it? A blogger should feel right at home.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
