tangerines, plums, apples, raspberries.
Fascinating, no?
Author: Jinx
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We had a minor supplying crisis yesterday when I had to tell Michael no, I couldn’t bake blueberry muffins because we have no baking powder. He was all for going out (for the second time that day) and getting some until I reminded him Le Beau and Chico’s are closed these days on Sundays. Michael isn’t usually that insistent. The poor man wanted his muffins.
Staying inside makes you aware of mental habits you barely notice in normal times. For instance, this morning, as I settled down in front of my computer with my coffee, I felt that brief stab of anxiety I have always felt on Monday morning about the Friday night movie. “Do I have the copy?” Before the pandemic, this meant that as soon as I got into work in the afternoon, I would reassure myself by going through the DVDs on my desk, putting my hands on the movie, and sighing with relief.
Now, of course, it’s not up to me to obtain a copy, so the next little gouge in my chest is about the book event on Thursday. Daniel Mason will be talking with Carol Edgarian about his new short story collection. “Should I go pick up the copies at Alexander Book Company?” I ask myself, and of course the answer is “no.” I’m not going to be trundling a cart across Market Street for a box of books.
“Oh.” My inner self sounds disappointed.
“Ah, but is the zoom set up?” Another little knife pricks me.
Some part of Jinx plainly delights in torturing me.
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uncluttering.
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Twelve years ago my parents and I stumbled upon Prager after a tour of a larger winery. We’d walked up a pretty little shaded path, through a storage room filed with casks, and then into a little room where a white-bearded fellow who looked like Ernest Hemingway seemed to be entertaining a group of friends holding wine glasses. When we asked about the tour, he said, “The tour? Here’s the tour!” He walked to the doorway and pointed to the casks. “That’s it,” he said. He then poured for us the most delicious dessert port I have ever tasted.
This week it looked exactly as I remembered it. On the shady walk, we paused to look at a loquat tree covered with fruit and heard a voice call, “Help yourself!” Michael gathered some of them, took a bite, and said “Wow! This is delicious.” I tried one. To my surprise, it was sweet and juicy, unlike the tart, hard loquats I used to steal from our neighbor’s tree back in Monroe.
We continued up the walk, following the signs that directed us through an enormous wooden door, into what looked like an old carriage house. Yes, here was that same, dark space with the wine casks, and beyond that, the same little room, though the white-bearded man wasn’t there. In his place was a short, stocky, florid, moustachio’d man in his thirties, and a taller, thinner fellow of roughly the same age.
The room was small and dusty looking, with wooden walls, a concrete floor, a counter with bottles ranged on it, a sink with a window over it that looked as if it had been sprayed with fake cobweb goo for a movie set. There were some Catholic icons, a family picture showing the Ernest Hemingway guy surrounded by short, stocky, florid blond people of various ages, and on the walls, many, many dollar bills and foreign currency. The deal was five dollars a person for tasting seven ports.
They were all delicious. Not the cherry-flavored port I remembered and had longed for, but close enough. The short, stocky fellow led the tasting, going through his patter without it seeming like a patter. The tall man, his brother-in-law it turned out, took care of another couple that wandered in. Michael bought a couple of bottles that he insists will be for us, not for guests. As we were going back to the car, we paused to pet a fat, affectionate tabby cat that met us on the walk.
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Daily writing promptShare a story about someone who had a positive impact on your life.
One long weekend when I was in third grade, on our way to a picnic, our car was rear-ended. Hard. Of course, nobody wore seatbelts back then. My sister was badly hurt and I had a concussion.
By Tuesday, I was deemed recovered enough to go to school even though, along with being confused and traumatized, I had classic black eye and was miserable and self-conscious about it.
At the time, Tareyton Cigarettes had a wildly popular ad campaign featuring people with black eyes proudly holding up cigarettes and vowing they’d rather “fight than switch” to another brand. As soon as I walked onto the property of Our Lady of Lourdes Grammar, a boy about my age saw me, stopped, goggled and then ran around a corner yelling to a playmate, “Hey, come look at this girl! She’s a Tareyton smoker!” — which made me laugh.
Instead of staring, pointing, and mocking me, he’d offered a funny explanation for the way I looked in the context of something every kid on the playground loved — television. I enjoyed the bonus of being a “Tareyton smoker” for the rest of the week.
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…the ability to make decisions, to move from job to job, to utter one’s beliefs, without fear of losing access to the necessities of life as a result.
Back in the ’90s I had a co-worker with a partially controlled but ultimately incurable medical condition. It was not dangerous — so long as it was monitored and he continued to get medication for it.
He hated where he worked. He would have loved to find another job. But changing employers would have jeapordized his insurance, and therefore, his life.He had the same “choice” someone has when they are robbed at gunpoint. “Your _____ or your life.” The fact that it was employers and insurance companies rather than the government offering him this “choice” did not make him any less a prisoner.
There’s a common myth that restrictions on freedom can only be imposed by government. People forget that the Hayes Code, which so effectively censored American movies throughout much of the 20th century, was created and enforced by film studios — not the government. The Hollywood Blacklist was an industry, not a government creation. Hell, American slavery itself was less a government institution than something the government simply allowed in certain parts of the country.
To restrict freedom, all that powerful organizations, or even just mobs, have to do is up the ante to the point where the choice is between compliance or ruin.
It doesn’t have to be immediately life-threatening to be effective. Are you working a badly paid job that allows you no time to train for another job, no margin to set aside any savings? Quitting means betting you can find another, better-paying job before you end up on the street. So you stay. Have you striven to build a career over the years, through hard work and sacrifice? Utter the “wrong” opinion and you could lose it all, end up pumping gas or driving a truck instead of teaching, or acting, or directing, or writing. (The current euphemism for this is “consequences.”) So you remain silent, even lie when asked what you believe. Because you could lose too much if you didn’t.
And no, I don’t care what opinions are being expressed. Here’s a truth a lot people don’t want to hear — The umbrella that protects some right wing idiot’s right to say the bigoted things they believe also protects my right, as a left-leaning liberal, to say the things I believe.
Take that protection from them, and you take it from me and everyone else.
That is the uncomfortable, sometimes even unpalatable truth about freedom.
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Friends had told me that when I do go out, it should be in the morning. “At about two or three, everyone decides they want to go outside.” In spite of this, I did not step outside until afternoon, a scarf wrapped around the bottom portion of my face.
The day was gray and rather uninviting, the kind of day that gave San Francisco the nickname of “cool gray city of love.” More people were out and about than I expected, most of them young, their faces uncovered. Every older person I saw had a mask.
My hopes of going into Le Beau for dosa chips were dashed by the crowd I saw in front. Yes, there were white lines painted on the pavement, but people seemed to be only roughly approximating them, standing closer than six feet apart, and again, most of them were unmasked. I walked around the block, giving a wide berth to any passers by. For the sake of exercise, I went a little ways down the hill and checked on the window where two little dogs like to sit. No sign of them, though their toys were there. As I walked back up the hill, I noted how out of shape I’d gotten. Before the pandemic, I’d walked up and down Nob Hill at least once a day. Maybe I should start doing that in the mornings, when fewer people are about.
Apparently there was an anti-shutdown rally near City Hall at noon yesterday. Not reassuring to hear. Judging from what I have seen on the news, these people are getting more and more aggressive, invading the statehouse with guns in Michigan, deliberately approaching cops and counter demonstrators and screaming in their faces, and implying that anyone obeying shut down guidelines is a traitorous coward who wants our economy to fail. I know everyone sees San Francisco as a bastion of liberalism and in some ways we are, but we also have a far right wing presence that is nasty, loud, and borderline violent. Those of us who work in bookstores and libraries are aware of them because they target local bookstores and libraries. A Communist Bookstore in Berkeley had to confront a mob of Proud Boys threatening to burn it down. A friend who works at a San Francisco bookstore here told us they have also been targeted and have had to hire security. “I don’t like walking home by myself” he said.
Stupidity is weaponized in this country.
Most of my day yesterday was spent cooking — Shrimp stew, which is time consuming, and not to be eaten until the following day. For dinner last night, sauteed bok choy with rice, and the frozen pot-stickers from Costco that Michael picked up because he knows I love them.
At dusk we heard the usual voices from the gazebo next door, saw the usual young folks sitting and standing around with wine-glasses, resulting in Michael’s usual frothing, profane reaction. They didn’t stay outside to party this time, perhaps because the wind had picked up and the temperature had dropped. Michael has not yet gone so far as to yell out the window at them.
However, on Thursday night, in the spirit of the 8:00 pm “Howl,” I went to our window and declaimed the first few lines of Alan Ginsberg’s poem.
“I saw the greatest minds of our generation destroyed by madness, starving, naked, hysterical, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix…”
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It’s not just that we “disagree” on discrete political issues. It’s that Trump rejects our entire system. We “disagree” on basics like the peaceful transfer of power, the checks and balances in our government, on basic human rights, which I don’t think the man — or his followers — is capable of grasping.
I disliked George Bush II intensely. I did not think, and I still don’t think, he had the brains to be president. Nothing so far has changed my mind about that.
But I believe that, like most of us, George Bush II was not deliberately raised by his father to feel zero empathy. In the old photograph of George W. Bush holding his two infant daughters, there’s genuine tenderness and joy, a human feeling that seems lacking in Trump. George Bush II, born to wealth and power, is a grossly entitled man, but entitlement is not the sum total of his personality and outlook. If I were alone with him, I would not be afraid to make eye contact.
I cannot say the same about Trump.
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Thursday was the highlight of the visit. That was the day we set aside to take our guests to the wine country in the car Michael had rented.
It wasn’t as nice a day as we’d hoped, being a bit on the gray side, but it wasn’t cold. Just kind of colorless, and because the sun wasn’t out, the countryside didn’t look quite as pretty as usual, especially when we got caught on a Sonoma county road jammed with one of those mysterious California backups, a long line of motionless cars on the two lane rural road. That held us up for about forty-five minutes while we sat and looked out over a predominantly gray and off-green landscape of scraped-looking hills.
By the time we got to the Sattui Winery, we were all hungry. Sattui is a favorite wine country stop because of its deli. You go in, taste some wine in the shop and wine-tasting room, select and buy a bottle, then go into its aromatic, richly-lit deli and look over the selection of domestic and imported cheeses, pates, sausages, breads, mustards, olives, etc. I picked out some wonderfully creay-tasting brie, sharp, pale cheddar, a Cotswold. My sister-in-law picked out a Zinfandel. We ended up with peppered slaami, prosciutto, duck pate, all of which we carried out to one of the picnic tables outside.
Wonderful food, good wine, good company. The perfect picnic, in spite of the tables being set on cedar shavings, the gray sky, the sound of the highway nearby. A family walked past carrying an infant who watched us with a steady and mysterious delight, a little spider the color of burnt gold skittered across the table, we had as much to eat as we wanted, and no place we had to be afterwards. When we finally gathered up what was left and cleaned up the rest, it was slowly, with a lazy, contented ease.
Pam Troy 