Category: 21st Century

June 5th, 2024

On the walk down there we passed through a residential neighborhood and stopped to admire a bungalow fronted with huge, lovely, gray fragrant Rosemary bushes. There was a fence, but they were outside it as though they’d sprung accidentally from seeds dropped there.

The rare bookstore turned out to be closed. It was just as well. I doubt I could have afforded anything in it. Instead, we walked down to a little Buddhist bookstore I’d noticed called Bodhi. Like many LA stores, it was uninteresting on the flat, dull brick outside, but fascinating once you got inside, a maze of stacks, but well organized, with nothing shabby about them. There was, of course, the smell of incense, a cabinetted display of Tarot decks, various new age and Eastern books. The place seemed to function not just as a bookstore but as a gathering place for Buddhists, Wiccans, and other unorthodoxies. It reminded me of the Rosemary Bookstore in Chapel Hill.

I still feel nostalgic for those rosemary bushes. Never before or since have I seen any so large and aromatic. I wish them well and hope they still stand.

The bookstore was actually Bodhi Tree — a landmark bookstore and gathering place that, alas, closed in 2011.

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June 2nd, 2024

On Sunday, Michael and I had agreed to meet Mom and Dad at Urth, a “hot” restaurant my brother recommended. We started out, down one of those flat, pale, ugly Los Angeles roads, this one half dug up with road construction and finally, after getting directions from a woman walking her dog, turned down another flat pale Los Angeles road. Urth was a small restaurant surrounded by a thick mob and little tables near its entrance. A quick look inside showed it to be a dark pace, clotted with people and tables. We emerged into the sunlight and eventually made out two tiny figures in the distance that turned out to be Mom and Dad. After a quick conference on the sidewalk, we decided to go to Urth in spite of the crowd.

We became part of a line that snaked around the small clear space near the front, surveyed plastic menus. Once we got to the counter and placed our order, we were given a laminated number “3” on a stand and instructed to place it on whatever table we found. We were also told we were limited to one hour at a table. After a few moments of searching, I spotted a couple standing up and gathering a chess set from their table. We quickly commandeered that one. It was quite small and pushed up against the building, but it was ours.

I’m not sure why the restaurant is “hot”, though the crowd there gave every indication of being hip and in “The Industry.” Lots of cell phones, several middle-aged, caucasian, shaven-headed men in business suits, the overheard words “production,” and “script.” There was some mix-up over our food. The waiter who brought our orange juices took away our number, and this seems to have knocked all the other waiters off our scent, kind of like ants who lose the ant trail. Only after I spoke to a waiter did our coffees and breakfast finally come. The food was not bad, but neither was it worth the trouble.

After breakfast we walked back to the Parc where Michael and Dad, exhausted from the morning’s exertions, announced their intentions of taking a nap, Dad on the bed, Michael on the sofa. Mother and I decided to check out a rare bookstore I’d noticed on the way back. It had been a silly little place got up to look like a cottage among all the strip malls.

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May 30th, 2024

La Reve Hotel is, like Le Parc, a working executive’s hotel. Pink and stuccoed on the outside, carpeted and cluttered in a worn, European way on the inside. The front desk in the dark little lobby had a line of beige wooden clockfaces giving he time in New York, Tokyto, London…. Two girls in their twenties worked the desk and gossiped as we checked in, trading badinage with a young man in overalls. Our room was not as fancy as Mom and Dad’s at the Parc. No view of green leaves, just some houses next door, and no balcony. There wsa the inevitable FAX machine, a sink with a bar cuboard and, weirdly, a working fireplace with a large mirror over it across from the bed. A small color tv was pushed to one side on a counter.

Dinner that night was at J and S’s house. Chinese take-out, the kind of Kung Pao chicken I like, with a dark, rich sauce loaded with sugar and lots of peanuts.

Dad held his grand-daughter, his eyes down, unable to take his eyes off her, looking happier and more tender than I have seen him in years. That sight alone was worth the whole trip.

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May 27th, 2024

The La Brea Tar Pits museum is a typical Los Angeles pale slab of a building set in the white concrete expanse of an LA business district. The tarpits are a black, fenced-in lake outside the building, with tar accumulating around the edges and bubbling up in a globe near the center. There was a depresssing sculpture of a mammoth sinking into the tar while another mammoth and a distressed baby mammoth watched.

Only one human skeleton, apparently, has ever been exhumed from the tar pit, a woman in her twenties or thirties who died several thousand years ago. She’d been clubbed over the head, her body tossed into the pit and was probably, as the museum put it, “the victim of a homicide.” Strange, hearing the word “homicide” for something that happened in prehistory. Her little skeleton was mounted in a darkened room with a glass window. You would peer in, see the skeleton, and then the lights would dim and you would see, superimposed on it, an artist’s conception of how she had looked, a smiling, stocky young woman with long black hair and bare breasts. Again, the lights would dim and again, we would see the skeleton.

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May 19th, 2024

Wednesday was the hottest day in San Francisco’s recorded history — 105 degrees. I wore a sun dress to work and worried about the cat being alone in the hot apartment all day. Fortunately, the com room at work had three fans, all of them going. Stepping outside was like stepping into an oven. I drank a lot of water. The radio talked all day about rolling blackouts, sunstroke, hydrating pets. When I got home that evening, the cat staggered out to greet me, happily drunk with the heat and determined to cuddle. That night we slept nude again. At 3:00 am the fog finally rolled back in and I woke up cold and pulled the blanket over both of us.

Ah, sun dresses. I loved sun dresses in my youth, but there were few opportunities to wear them in San Francisco. Somewhere in the back of my closet they still hang, silken, colorful, but no longer flattering at my age.

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May 16th, 2024

On Tuesday night we met Michael’s parents for dinner at Michaelangelo’s in North Beach. I walked down the hill at about 6:30. There was not one breath of breeze.

North Beach was packed, every sidewalk table taken, and I was relieved to see Michaelangelo’s had opened all its windows. It’s on the corner of Union and Columbus, a small space decorated with faux rennaissance art and tiffany lamps. The last time I was there, the place had been crammed with people and almost suffocating, but this evening we had arrived before the rush. I had the pasta vongole. Afterwards we went for a walk, got some ice-cream, sat in Washington Square and admired the red, late afternoon light on the spires of the church. Shirt sleeve weather is so rare in San Francisco that when it comes and lasts late into the evening, there’s an air of carnival. Tuesday night, and everyone was outside. A little white dog ran across the park after a ball, a big black dog snuffled the bushes behind our bench, searching for treats. Lovers embraced on the grass, a toddler staggered on fat legs between her parents. Near the edges of it all hovered the homeless, with their peeling skin, their tattered shoes, their stained, badly buttoned clothes. The air that night was strangely pellucid. No mist rolled in to cool things off.

We had a hard time sleeping that hot, breathless night, and we ended up lying nude on top of the bed, the quilt kicked to the floor.

Ah, Michaelangelo’s. Another lost place.

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May 13th, 2024

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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May 10th, 2024

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.

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May 7th, 2024

We walked to Zarzuela. The hills, which seem normal to Michael and me, slightly daunted our visitors, who are used to Chicago. The restaurant is one of those little places on a Russian Hill street that curve up and down like a roller coaster, set in among the old apartment buildings and alongside the cable car track. Across the streets is the Swenson’s that Michael and I visit whenever we’re in the neighborhood. The walk was worth it. It’s a small, cozy place with the tables set close enough together so that you can see what other people are having and ask them about it. Unlike most tapas places, this one had large portions. We enjoyed fried potatoes, snails, baked goat cheese in tomato sauce, Spanish pie, marinated anchovies, olives, bread, etc. Afterwards, we walked across the street to Swensen’s and got some ice cream.

Another lost place that became familiar to us because we liked it so much. It went out of business just before the COVID shut-down. I don’t remember it as small, so perhaps it expanded after 2000 — two dining rooms, umber lighting with touches of red inside, Spanish posters of bullfighters and senoritas, and always, always delicious food that I would enjoy while glancing out the window at Swensen’s, brightly lit and waiting for us on the opposite corner. Swenson’s, at least, is still there. Where Zarzuela was is now a comparatively colorless restaurant. Which I unfairly resent.

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May 4th, 2024

SF MOMA is, like most of the features in that part of the city, relatively new. Also like many San Francisco institutions, its strong features are its appearance rather than its mediocre premanent collection. The building itself looks like a CD player on the outside. Inside, it is light, airy, and quite beautiful.

Since it was the first Tuesday in the month, admission was free and the place was pretty crowded, but not unreaasonably so. Once we were let in, we filed slowly past the exhibits, from Magritte’s rather murky early work to the brilliantly colored canvasses of the ’50s and ’60s. Afterwards, we walked across the street to Yerba Buena Park.

Like MOMA, it’s new. When I first moved to San Francisco in 1988, that whole section of blocks was little more than a hole in the ground. Yerba Buena is now a nice little patch of green, with a fine, man-made waterfall dedicated to Martin Luther King. It was a pretty day, and the park was filled with people. We found a spot on the grass, and I went up a flight of stairs to a Starbucks on a terrace at the top of the waterfall, got some iced lattes for our guests and a frappucino for myself.

SFMOMA is much improved now. I’m afraid back then, my opinion about its permanent collection was formed by the prominent display of the polished , colorfully painted ceramic piece by Jeff Koons of Michael Jackson cuddling his pet chimp, Bubbles.

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Pam Troy

A Writer’s Website

Category: 21st Century