Middle Summer

Blackberry, where are you?

Have you noticed all the signs for lost pets lately? Postings started on July 4 and haven't stopped; every telephone pole in my Northeast LA neighborhood is covered with messages of the missing. I was walking this morning at the top of my hill and heard a woman calling, "Lucky, Lucky, Luuucccky?" as she looked for her dog. Right there and then, I resolved never to call a pet Lucky. Once I saw a sign for a lost parrot who was blind in one eye, had a busted wing and a nervous condition that required meds. That bird was called Lucky too. 

Talking about lucky, I feel extraordinarily lucky having my daughter home for a week before she goes back to college. 

On Thursday, I drove up to San Luis Obispo with my old friend Hudson, which got me halfway to seeing Maya who'd been away all summer. That night we stayed at the Peach Tree Inn, a throw back to the sixties, and ate at The Range in Santa Margarita (a small restaurant in the middle of nowhere that deserves an enthusiastic 5-stars!). In the morning, we explored the Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa, founded by Junipero Serra in 1772, the fifth California mission to bring the Catholic faith to the area's native inhabitants. 

The mission's sanctuary branches off into an "L," and as we walked around I wondered about its odd shape. Did Spanish landowners pray in one arm of the "L," and Indians, out of sight, in the other? A little museum sits off the sanctuary, with numerous Indian and Spanish artifacts, certain evidence that native peoples' mission life wasn't pretty; those that survived were forced to give up their language, their religion and their freedom. In the early 2000's, a local artist painted the sanctuary walls with an array of decorative birds and flowers, a beautiful whitewash over a cruel, earlier history.

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The next day I said good-bye to my friend and drove to Oakland to retrieve Maya at Mills College. Here are a few highlights of the trip:

Seeing Maya for the first time in 7-wks and hearing a mellifluous, fluid French spill out of her mouth! 

Seeing Mills again, one of the most beautiful campuses in California.

Bakesale Betty's: What looks like a pop-up storefront is the wildly popular eatery in the Temescal and Telegraph Ave district of Oakland. Food constructionists whip up fried chicken sandwiches with spicy coleslaw or the vegan version with fried tofu, and strawberry shortcake, on a daily basis. The bake goods are out of this world. 

 Food constructionists at work in Bakesale Betty's

Outside, long lines waiting for Betty; notice the ironing board tables.

Telegraph Road: There's so much on this road to recommend; I was eager to go back to the Restaurante Dona Tomas, but we ended up at Lane Splitter's Pizza and Pub. Maggie, who'd come over from San Fran to spend the day with Maya, joined us for lunch. Maggie and Maya hadn't seen each other all summer and watching them giggle and chatter was half the fun. Here they are letting me take their picture:

It's wonderful having Maya home for a week, but then she goes away again. (and again...and again...) I'm used to it by now, or maybe, it's just that all my defenses have been shattered. It's still not easy to see her go. 

Weekend in San Fran

The first thing I did when I got home from San Francisco was pull out Rebecca Solnit's Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas. When my friend Lu first handed me the book, I didn't know how to look at it: I'd never gotten San Fran as a city; it was too small and too big at the same time, too baffling in its hilly and divided neighborhoods. It also brought up memories of passing through in the seventies when the Mission District was a scary run down 'hood and Haight Ashbury had turned into a needle park. Some good memories too, like Green Gulch Zen Center—again, my guide Lu—and Tassajara Bakery on Cole Street, which, if you've never tasted Tibetan Barley Bread you might not get the reference, but sadly, it's too late; the bakery closed its doors in 1999.

This visit was different, though; I saw the city for the magic, infinite city that it is and opened Solnit's book immediately. It's a series of atlases around which she and a bevy of artists/writers/cartographers dissect the city, a city whose demographics and history have changed as much as any great city in the last 40 years. She writes about getting her sources from great books, but also from "living atlases,"  misfit characters who she interviews extensively: "I live among...these books. I also live among ghosts. For better or worse, the familiar vanishes, so that the longer you live here, the more you live with a map that no longer matches the actual terrain. After the great 1972 earthquake, Managua, Nicaragua, lost many of its landmarks; people long after gave directions by saying things like, 'Turn left where the tree used to be.'" 

And that's what this book is like—getting the perspective of ghosts, hobos, migrant workers, thieves, queers, Zen masters, trees, fish....

My own understanding is slight, but on this trip, I came to translate the city (plus Oakland, not the wasteland I expected) in my own way. Bear with me, dear reader, and then read Solnit's book for true illumination.

Rat's Nest basic understanding:

Castro

and

The Castro

The Guggenheim

and 

The Gap at Union Square

telegraph

and

Temescal and Telegraph Ave District, Oakland
(great art, restaurants and thrift stores found here!)

Tenements, NYC

and

Luxury Apartments, San Fran

Mill with sheep

 and

Mills

As part of the Middlebury Language Program at Mills College, 

signs in Arabic, French, Spanish and Japanese appear across campus.

No sheep.