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May 7, 2009 – A Ride Downtown on the San Jose Light Rail

2009-05-07T21:01:00.000-07:00

It was about 20 minutes before 8:00 AM on a Friday morning in early March. I had just dropped off my car with Franklin at his garage on Winfield Blvd in the Blossom Valley neighborhood of San Jose, California for its periodic service. Franklin dropped me at the Almaden Station of the Santa Clara Valley Transit Authority (VTA) light rail spur (also called the Almaden Shuttle), which runs between Almaden station and Ohlone/Chynoweth station, named for the Ohlone Indian tribe that settled California before the Gold Rush and Mary Folsom Hayes Chynoweth owner of Hayes Mansion. I boarded the two-car electric train about to depart. The trip took less than five minutes and stopped only once at the Oakridge Shopping Mall station. No sooner had I disembarked at Ohlone/Chynoweth station—and the shuttle reversed and headed back to Almaden Station—than the VTA’s Alum Rock-Santa Teresa light rail train pulled into the station and I boarded, along with a couple dozen others, for the trip north.

My light rail trip had begun, a ride along Highway 87 through a part of San Jose I seldom get a chance to see. Instead of letting someone else drive, I’m usually zooming by though never during compute hours unless it’s a holiday or on the weekend, eyes glued to the road. Taking public transportation is giving yourself over to an automated system that you cannot control. Trains arrive and depart at prescribed intervals and you are responsible for being at a terminal at the appointed time of departure or face a 15-minute wait for the next train in the schedule: the concern of the many over that of the individual. Public transport is a form of socialism where everyone is treated equal. I board without buying a ticket at the station kiosk because my company has provided all its employees with light rail passes.

The VTA, which Santa Clara County residents voted into being on June 6, 1972, is relatively young as mass transits systems go. It came into being under the stewardship of 59th Mayor of San Jose, Norman Yoshio Mineta, the first Asian American ever to head a major U.S. city. The mass transit’s rolling stock came from three financially strapped local bus lines—Peninsula Transit, San Jose City Lines, and Peerless Stages. VTA, then called Santa Clara County Transit District (SCCTD) acquired the assets on January 1, 1973. In 1982 the federal government funded the preliminary engineering phase for the County’s first light rail line during Mineta’s tenure in the U.S. House of Representatives as Santa Clara County’s congressman.

The ride north passes by the San Juan Bautista Hills on the east, atop which sits Communications Hill, the large Kaufman-Broad high density housing development that began covering the hillside a little over a decade ago. The name Communications Hill comes from 11 large microwave towers located on top of Oak Hill. The development sits between the Capital Expressway and Curtner Light Rail Stations. The station before Capital is Branham, which follows Ohlone/Chynoweth. Every morning I run across the earthen bridge that carries Branham Lane over the rail station and Highway 87, and watch for a few moments the light rail and the early morning commute traffic on the freeway zooming by at the limit below me. Beyond, Curtner is the Tamien Station—named for the Tamien Indians that inhabited the Santa Clara Valley. There passengers seeking an even smaller carbon front prints disembark the light rail board Caltrain to stations north along the Peninsula or to stations south toward Morgan Hill and Gilroy.

The light Rail parallels Highway 87 just after leaving the Ohlone/Chynoweth station for five stops—the last of which is Virginia. From there it cuts right under the freeway and meanders left by the Children’s Discover Museum on Woz Way. Of the two Steve’s forming Apple, Wozniak got the street in front of the Museum named for him. Jobs, by far the more famous of the two, didn’t, perhaps because Woz was the largest private donor funding the museum. My wife and I took our grandkids to the museum. We found it thoroughly engaging.

If I were homeless, the underpasses the light rail lines runs under just before the museum would be decent shelter from the elements, though I’ve never seen obvious signs of habitation as the train passes by. I find it curious how hope—the museum—and despair—the underpass—reside side by side.

Once the light rail leaves Virginia Station, the 60 MPH speed it clocks between the stations along Highway 87 slows to a crawl approaching and beyond the museum, where the rail makes a hard right turn onto San Carlos Street, the metal wheels squealing until the length of the two cars have straighten and the train rumbles over the Guadalupe River bridge, past the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts, over Almaden Boulevard to stop at the Convention Center Station. Look south from the station and you’ll see the original San Jose Martin Luther King Library, a gathering place for our young family when we first moved here in 1974, now abandoned for newer digs at San Jose State University.

The convention center, which sits behind the abandoned library and runs the entire block from Almaden Boulevard to Market Street was named for Tom McEnery, San Jose’s 61st mayor from 1983 to 1990. It was during his tenure that the light rail system was constructed and a good amount of downtown San Jose was developed, from the early 20th Century California agricultural town architecture to the high-rise urban area is has become.

Once you leave Convention Center Station, the train takes a leisurely pass through that San Jose of old. The first landmark is the six-story Sainte Claire Hotel at 302 South Market Street opened in 1926 offering all the big city luxuries of the time. Furnishings from Czechoslovakia still fill the antique lobby. The lounge and lobby are adorned with a hand-painted ceiling. Wealthy San Jose landowner Thomas S. Montgomery contracted the San Francisco architectural firm Weeks and Day to build the hotel. The firm had built the Mark Hopkins, the Sir Francis Drake, and the Huntington Hotel on Nob Hill. Now dwarfed by the towering new Marriot across the street and the Three Sixty Residences, a 23-story luxury downtown San Jose condo complex under construction behind it, the hotel continues to bring the turn-of-the-century French beaux arte look and feel to the South Bay

Next to the hotel is the Sainte Claire Building at 301 S 1st Street on the corner of Market, another Montgomery property Weeks and Day built. Opened in April 1925, local architect Herman Krause designed the ground floor for Appleton’s Clothing Store, while numerous medical professionals offices occupied the floors above. Spared the wrecking ball, the building has been turned into condominiums for residents who prefer early 20th Century milieu with 21st Century amenities. The recently renovated ground floor is home to Original Joe’s, a spin off of Original Joe's that the Rocca Family opened in San Francisco in 1937. The San Jose version opened its doors May 24, 1956 and has been at the same location ever since still owned and operated by the Rocca Family and its associates.

The light rail turns left at Original Joe’s and heads north along South First Street, passing on the left the Montgomery Hotel at 211 S 1st Street, an 86-room boutique hotel and another landmark downtown building that opened in 1911, a boutique European style hotel back then as it is today. Designed by local architect William Binder, it was also owned by T. S. Montgomery. The hotel was originally located where the new section of the Fairmont Hotel sits today. The old hotel was moved 186 feet south of its original site on January 29, 2000, with a large number of spectators on hand to watch the historic event, at a cost of over $12 million. The relocation broke a record as it was the heaviest building, at 9.6 million pounds, ever moved. Special equipment built for the project included remote controlled machinery placed under the structure, which inched along for more than 3 hours before reaching its destination.

The hotel now rests across the street from the Paseo de San Antonio light rail station and on Friday nights, my wife and I join dinners at the Mosaic Restaurant and Lounge—previously the Paragon Restaurant and Lounge—and watch the parade of buses, lightrail trains, cars and pedestrians as they enter and leave the open air station. Paseo de San Antonio is near ground zero for the founding of San Jose. In 1777 Don Felipe de Neve selected Lieutenant Jose Moraga to command nine soldiers skilled in farming, five pobladores (settlers), and their families—66 people in all. He directed Moraga to establish the pueblo San Jose de Guadalupe along the banks of the Guadalupe River. By 1797 after being flooded out each winter by the river, the settlers moved to the corner of what is now South Market and West San Fernando Streets—a half block north and a block west of the Paseo.

Near the Paseo de San Antonio station, at 210 S. 1st Street is the historic Twohy building an office space constructed in 1917 for Judge John W. Twohy. Now renovated into a mixed commercial/loft-housing complex of 36 apartments. Curiously, a recent attempt at large scale redevelopment in downtown San Jose near the site of the turn-of-the-century success failed. The Palladium Company a leading national developer of mixed-use projects in urban centers proposed to redevelop a five-block area in downtown San Jose, that the train I’m on cuts through: Mitchell Block—bounded by St. John, West Santa Clara, North First and North Market; Fountain Alley—along First Street; Zanotto's parking lot; a parcel at First and San Fernando; and Block 3—at South Second and West San Fernando.

In total the project would have built 500,000 square feet of retail space, a 350-room hotel, 350,000 square feet of office space and more than 1,000 downtown homes. On March 25, 2002, in the aftermath of the dotcom bubble implosion, Palladium pulled out after investing more than $3.5 million in the project. The Palladium proposal would have required approximately $1 billion in private investment. The massive complex at Santana Row, which was as ambitious as the downtown project, had begun a few years earlier and was nearing completion. It coasted through the recession to great success in its aftermath. In the process, Santana Row diverted the commercial trade that might have been captured downtown had the Palladium project completed. Timing is everything.

May 2, 2009 Hanging out on Moonstone Beach Listening to the Surf

2009-05-05T22:40:00.001-07:00

Moonstone Beach, Cambria California, May 2, 2009 I’m sitting in the Sea of Japan Suite of the newly renovated Blue Dolphin Inn listening to the surf crashing rhythmically against the shore just across the two-lane blacktop. Below a sporadic cluster of pedestrians make their way north along the shoulder of the macadam lane toward the Moonstone Beach Bar & Grill. There is hardly any breeze and the temperature is in the upper 50s but it feels like mid-60s. I’m sitting with the window wide open and feeling comfortable in a tee shirt. From where I sit, indistinct bits of conversation waft up occasionally from those strolling by below. It’s half past eight in the evening and the sun has finally succumbed to night after struggling most of the day to break through the dense fog hugging the coastline and spilling over into most of the West Village of Cambria.

The inns along this stretch of road are filled with members of a Porsche car club this weekend. Every space in a parking lot at the inn next to ours is nearly filled with the slick racing machines. The Porsche’s link to the Central Coast was firmly established on September 30, 1955, when James Dean driving west on Highway 466—today’s Highway 46—crashed into a car driven by Cal Poly student Donald Turnupseed that was turning left off 46 onto Highway 41. Highway 46 connects the California Central Valley—Interstate Highway 5 and California Highway 99—to California Highway 1, the Pacific Coast Highway, that hugs the rugged California coast from just south of Orange County to just north of San Francisco. Highway 46 T’s into Highway 1 about three miles south of Cambria. The movie star was driving a rare Silver Porsche Spyder, one of only ninety built in 1955, his mechanic Rolf Wuetherich in the passenger seat was thrown free of the car and survived as did Donald Turnupseed.

Most of the Porsche club members temporarily populating the artist community certainly know of Dean’s unfortunate mishap. If this gathering is in any way connected with the doomed movie star, it’s hard to say. This assembly included a wide range of model years. It’s possible that among those visiting the village there was a rare 1955 Silver Porsche Spyder. However, this group is not unique. Cambria is host to clubs of Corvette affectionados, vintage car buffs—one time there were some many in the village, it was as if we’d been taken back in time to the days of William Randolph Hearst— among many others. The explanation for the gathering is more likely that Cambria is one of many stops club members make as they motor the length of the Pacific Coast Highway.

We’ve just returned from an early dinner at the Black Cat on Main Street in East Village of the seacoast artist community with a population of just under 6000. The Black Cat is one of the newer restaurants in the East Village, having come on the scene in 2002. The place is the creation of Chef Deborah Scarborough. A refugee from television production in Los Angeles, she’s turned the place into one of, if not, the best eatery in the seaside resort. Our meal tonight consisted of a main course of pheasant for me and abalone for my wife IM, preceded by blue cheese and goat cheese salads, respectively all accompanied by a glass each of Piper Heidsieck Champagne—the only way to celebrate a Saturday.

March 4, 2009 – A Walkabout San Francisco’s Barbary Coast

2009-03-04T22:06:00.001-08:00

It’s Friday morning, November 8, 2008 at 8:00 o’clock. I’ve parked in the Golden Gateway Garage at 250 Clay Street in San Francisco several blocks from the office building near the Transamerica Tower where I have an appointment at 10:00 o’clock. I’ve come early to meet someone for breakfast but I’m not expected until 9:00 o’clock. I’m going to use the time until then to enjoy this part of the city. Where I am is what was the southeastern boundary of the Barbary Coast, that notorious section of the city that erupted when the first crush of gold seekers overran the small village of Yerba Buena toward the end of 1848. Being here is being at the epicenter of an explosion long after it detonated and time has covered over all trace of the initial event. In 1848, the small village of Yerba Buena, population 900, erupted into San Francisco, population 56,000 in 1850 and accelerating.

I exit the parking garage and turn right heading west on Clay toward Battery Street and the financial district further on. The office and residential towers of Two Embarcadero Center are on my left. Embarcadero Center sits atop what was Yerba Buena Cove in 1850 when everything southeast of Sansome from Jackson to California was underwater. The four large rectangular shaped building, between Clay and Sacramento Streets from The Embarcadero to Battery Street, and two hotels command 9.8 acres of the most prime real estate in San Francisco. The 45-story One Embarcadero Tower that I’ve just past was completed in 1971. The center’s rising happened just before my family and I found our way west to the Bay Area.

Embarcadero Center is the latest covering time has layered over the big event of 1849; the two towers of Three and Four Embarcadero Center are behind me. The brainchild of M. Justin Herman—the city named a plaza after him—the center began in 1967 when according to Time magazine, David Rockefeller President of Chase Manhattan Bank and his brother Arkansas Governor Winthrop Rockefeller proposed the $150 million project to San Francisco Redevelopment Agency Director M. Justin Herman. John Portman was the architect—think hotels like the Hyatt Regency with Atriums that soar skyward. Manhattan-based builder George A. Fuller Company would build the structure, with wealthy Dallas realty investor Trammell Crow participating in the deal, too. At the time the development was called Rockefeller Center West.

Running parallel to Clay and Sacramento and entirely covered over by the huge complex are five blocks that was once a notorious San Francisco thoroughfare, Commercial Street, which continues as little more than an alley from Sansome Street to Grant Avenue. In 1912 the 700 block of Commercial Street between Kearney Street and Grant Avenue had 15 houses of ill-repute—including the Parisian Mansion, the Lively Flea, and The Red Rooster—a year before the April 1913 Red Light Abatement Act became law in the state of California, officially shuttering the illicit trade of the notorious Barbary Coast though it would take a California Supreme Court ruling in 1917 before an organized police action on Valentine’s Day to close just over eighty houses of prostitution and evict over a thousand lady boarders from the establishments. San Francisco had come kicking and screaming into the 20th Century. However, the illicit trade didn’t stop; rather it moved to the San Francisco Tenderloin—today, the area between Polk Street, Sutter Street, Mason Street, Market Street, and Golden Gate Avenue—and went underground.

The Hyatt Regency San Francisco, sitting amidst the right triangle formed by Drumm and Sacramento Streets with Market Street as the hypotenuse, began welcoming guests in 1973. The hotel’s atrium lobby would be featured in “The Towering Inferno,” a year later. Two Embarcadero Center reached its full 30-story height in 1974. Three years later saw the completion of the 31-story Three Embarcadero Center and in 1982, the 45-story Four Embarcadero Center opened its doors for business. It would take until 1988 before the 25-story Park Hyatt Hotel—now the Hotel Le Méridien—at the corner of Battery and Clay Streets received guests. I stand out front of the hotel lobby for a moment remembering the times I had dropped off and picked up executives from my employer, a Cleveland-based publishing company. They liked staying here when visiting because the hotel chain bartered room accommodations for ad space.

I turn left at Sansome, walk halfway to Sacramento, and find the narrow asphalt thoroughfare that is Commercial Street leading west toward Montgomery Street. Beneath the concrete and asphalt of Embarcadero Center across Sansome are the hulks of many ships that brought the Argonauts—after the Greek mythological seekers of the Golden Fleece—and all merchandise they would consume. By the summer of 1850, over 500 vessels were recorded in the vicinity of Yerba Buena Cove. Most had been abandoned as passengers and crew struck out for the gold fields. The abandoned vessels were converted into warehouses, hotels, saloons, and jails or dismantled for their timber used in building construction by the San Franciscans who stayed behind to mine the miners. The history of the ship Niantic describes the fate of many.

Under command of Captain Henry Cleaveland of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts and his sons James and Daniel as first and second mates, respectively, the Niantic rounded Cape Horn from Rhode Island en route to the Pacific Northwest. Stopping in Panama to drop cargo, it picked up 250 Argonauts who had crossed the Isthmus of Panama racing to the California Gold Fields. The Niantic dropped anchor in San Francisco Bay on July 5th 1849. All passengers and most of the crew hastily disembarked and went in search of wealth. Without a crew Niantic’s owner, Burr & Smith, instructed Captain Cleaveland to sell the ship. Upon carrying out the order, Captain and his two mates did not succumb to the siren call of the gold field but sailed away on another ship. The Niantic was hauled to where Montgomery and Clay streets are today, covered with a shingle roof, sub-divided into stores and offices and painted over with signs of the various occupants. It earned its owners $20,000 a month in rent, returning far more on land than it could ever have produced at sea. The great fire of 1852, one or more of the six that ravaged the area from December 1849 to June 1852 destroyed the structure. It was rebuilt on the hull of the ship as the Niantic Hotel, the finest hotel in San Francisco back then.

The Barbary Coast would survive nearly 70 years until genteel society finally determined to rid the city of its Dionysian soul. The task of dismantling the Barbary Coast fell to James Rolph Jr. the 38th mayor of San Francisco. He was a banker, shipbuilder, and California governor from 1931-1934. But, even he and the California Red-Light Abatement Act could not shut it down for good until 1920. Afterwards, the area became San Francisco's Produce District where the area's narrow streets were lined with vendors selling fruits and vegetables.

If you look back on the years that this piece of ground has hosted large-scale human habitation, the time seems remarkably brief. I wonder if a hundred years from now these high-rise towers will likewise be torn down by developers or natural disasters and built over once more. Civilization continues to build upon the past and nearly all the memories in that past are locked away waiting for some curious soul to dig them out and give them an airing. I resume my walk along Sansome heading toward Sacramento where I turn left and head toward the Hyatt Regency and my first meeting of the day. I’m reminded of the Emily Dickinson poem.

Forever—it composed of Nows—
'Tis not a different time—
Except for Infiniteness—
And Latitude of Home—

From this—experienced Here—
Remove the Dates—to These—
Let Months dissolve in further Months—
And Years—exhale in Years—

Without Debate—or Pause—
Or Celebrated Days—
No different Our Years would be
From Anno Domini's—

February 22, 2009 – The Dichotomy of Social Networking

2009-02-22T23:45:00.001-08:00

Walking into Faz’s Restaurant in Mountain View—near where Highways 101 and 237 intersect—at noon on Thursday last week, the din of conversation, the line at the maitre d’s podium, the energy in the dining room as my companion Irving and I were seated; you’d never suspect that there was a full-on recession going on outside. Upon being seated I launched into the benefits of social networking, particularly services such as LinkedIn that help in finding job opportunities, in these precarious times of layoffs. Irving was reserved, expressing concern about the amount of everyone’s personal information being made public in such forums. But, it’s only your resume, I persist to a still unconvinced lunch mate.

I must confess to an earlier reluctant to dive into social networking over the same concern. And, my reservations have resurfaced in light of the recently rescinded attempt by Facebook to mine the personal information of its billion or so subscribers. The cautionary tale in Orwell’s ‘1984’ and a more up-to-date version in John Brunner’s “The Shockwave Rider” still resounds in my mind. However, my wife and I and both my daughters are on Facebook and everyone except my wife is on Linkedin. We all enjoy the benefits that derive from our participation: reconnecting with middle school, high school, and college schoolmates as well as with professional colleagues; sharing information with network connections that informs, entertains or helps one another day to day.

Having a place—where everyone knows your name—within the World Wide Web to hang out and commune with others provides incredible synergy. I liken it to the human race forming a collective intelligence with each user serving as a neuron in this virtual brain. And like the real brain, when an impulse hits somewhere within the consciousness of this intelligence, a wave of activity explodes outward across the entire network: the recent terrorist rampage in Mumbai as an example. Images, descriptions, video, and even recordings of what was transpiring were being broadcast real time throughout the network, always ahead of the international news gathering organizations.

However, the benefits come at a cost. I cite the example of “25 things about me” I recently received on Facebook and dutifully completed and posted. I chose to reveal more about my observations on life and the world around me than things that would have more commercial value to a data miner, such as age, physical description, taste in clothes, preference for automobiles, type of soul mate being sought or already found, taste in music, movies, food, drink, and entertainment. The type of information such an innocuous diversion collects is even more revealing than revealed by the discarded AMEX and MasterCard statements a dumpster diver might find. In the case of Facebook, this information is restricted to a select group of friends. Nevertheless, it is recorded and certainly available to enterprising hackers—not to mention the owners of Facebook.

The argument in favor of using this information is that advertisers can be more selective in what they bombard you with. The advertising dollars are not wasted and you are not subjected to what you have no interest in receiving. The economy, as a whole, benefits from resources being more efficiently consumed, e.g. eliminating tons of unopened catalogs and pieces of direct mail.

But, in the process the privacy of the individual is compromised, which leads to the question: what is the value of the average law-abiding citizen’s privacy? For many, the value is nil as they post a great deal about themselves and others on blogs and webcams. By contrasts, participants in reality television do receive compensation for their personal information. Ultimately, each of us determines how little or how much of ourselves we make public. In general, today’s young adults are inclined to share far more than their parents or grandparents, but the older generation is being increasingly conditioned by their young offspring to let it all hang out.

At the end of our lunch, Irving remained firmly opposed to the idea of large-scale disclosure. I would describe his LinkedIn page as minimalist. If Facebook decides to begin selling the vast amounts of its users information to ad agencies and large corporations, he may be right.

December 12, 2008 – The Moon Is My Companion

2008-12-15T19:54:00.001-08:00

Tonight we will be able to see the largest moon of the year, this according to the website Space.com. Editorial Director Roy Britt writes that the moon will be a mere 221,560 miles from earth. That’s 17,295 miles closer than the average distance the moon is from the earth throughout the year. This accounts for the increased size of La Luna on this particular day of 2008.

The moon and I are on familiar terms as she often greets me in the morning during the workweek when I leave home on my morning jog at 6:00 AM. And I see her frequently at this time of the year as I leave work at 6:00 PM rising in the northeast sky. We both share a syncopation in life. She orbits the earth every 29.5306 days. She rises and sets at a prescribed time each day. Her actions are as predictable as clockwork. My daily ritual is very similar, though lacking in the timely precision of the celestial body: up every morning just before 6:00 AM and returning from work around 6:30 PM.

A few months into the new millennium, the moon and I came to know one another on our present terms: I bidding her farewell after rising each morning and greeting her as I leave work each evening just after sunset during this time of the year. In the old century I was a nocturnal creature working until midnight and up after the sun had risen even during the winter. I still take comfort in this new cadence of life. During the time each morning I spend alone from 6:00 to 7:00 before the sun has risen, I observe the inhabitants that share the world with me at this early hour.

I don’t see them all the time but on occasion they make their appearance like the critter—I want to think it’s a raccoon—that scavenges the garbage cans on Wednesday mornings, our garbage pick up day. On one such occasion I recall hearing him or her tip over a can and for some reason I imagine the animal feeling foolish, much as I’ve felt the more than once I’ve tripped trying to avoid a pedestrian coming toward me in the dark dressed in dark clothing that makes him or her hard to see.

The other animals I come across are mostly cats peeking out from under cars to use the protection and what little stored heat they find. They occasionally cross my path. Then there are the geese flying in formation overhead, their honking—not an accurate description of their call—occasionally startling me as I concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other, after having given myself over to the monotony of my rhythmic pounding. They typically fly over toward the end of my time alone during the homeward stretch and ole Sol is peeping over the Diablo Mountain Range that sits astride the Hayward Fault.

I occasionally come across others bipedal creatures walking the sidewalk along Branham Lane where I run. They appear on odd days, sometimes passing at the same hour for a stretch of days then absent for a time. We pass without speaking. We each have our destinations and somehow saying “good morning” before the sun has risen doesn’t seem right. I pass this short, heavy-set fellow—of indeterminate age, though I surmise him to be older than 40 for some reason—coming east on Branham, a few blocks west of Snell Avenue. Dressed in a dark coat and typically carrying a bag in one hand he walks past me wordlessly. One morning I heard him speaking on a cell phone as we pass and somehow his voice matched his body shape.

There is a woman who jogs that same stretch of Branham and we pass infrequently. For some reason, she runs in the bicycle lane against the flow of traffic along Branham. She is taller than me with a Rubinesque figure—perhaps that is why she runs. She does say hello and I respond in kind. Our meetings are sporadic, either because she only runs certain days or she varies her time earlier or later day to day.

About a quarter mile west of the Carlton Plaza of San Jose assisted living facility at the intersection of Branham and Vistapark Drive, I occasionally come upon two women conversing as they walk past me. Their voices carry over the distant roar of traffic on nearby Highway 87; their conversation made indistinct by the intermittent car hurrying along the otherwise empty three lanes of Branham. Occasionally, I pass a man and woman at about the same place and I wonder if one of the women couldn’t make it and the husband of the one intent on walking filled in.

There is plenty of activity at the northeast corner of the Branham and Pearl Avenue intersection. An all night Arco station is typically busy with motorist filling up on the cheapest gas in South San Jose. We pay one another no mind. They belong in the world of automobiles and I belong in the world of pedestrians. Sometimes, one or more teenagers wait at the bus stop in front of the Arco station on Branham Lane for their school bus. What’s curious to me is that I saw them for a stretch of time and now they’re gone. Did the bus stop move or did their class schedule change?

Left onto Pearl, I pass a 7-11 convenience store, which like the Arco station, is busy at this early hour with patrons picking up coffee, breakfast foods, and cigarettes. They all seemed to be in a hurry to get into the store and get out. Further south on Pearl is a coffee shop in an L-shaped strip mall. It’s a Starbucks wannabe, offering Java City coffee though not a licensee. Occasionally, I’ll see a car pull in for coffee but most mornings the only person I see in the shop is the owner or employee. The welcome smell of coffee wafts across the dark morning fills me with a sense of warmth and satisfaction.

The rest of the way along pearl is residential until the intersection with Chynoweth, where on the southeast side of the intersection is the large Ohlone Chynoweth Commons Apartment Complex and the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) Ohlone Chynoweth Light-rail Station. On the rare mornings I pass another soul it’s one or more backpack-laden students on their way to the station or to nearby Gunderson High School, though it seems awfully early for classes to begin.

Turning left on Chynoweth Avenue, I jog down a slight decline that allows the street to duck under the concrete overpass of the Guadalupe Freeway (Highway 87) terminus where concrete flyovers sort traffic between Highway 87 and Highway 85 and Santa Teresa Boulevard.

Underneath the spaghetti maze, I pass two huge concrete columns supporting the off ramp from 87 to Santa Teresa Boulevard. Next, I come upon three large round columns supporting 87 as it shuttles traffic east and west onto 85. Next, I pass a single large oblong shaped column supporting the light rail tracks taking the one-, two-, or three-car Santa Teresa Train in and out of Ohlone Chynoweth station. I come next to three more large round columns supporting the three-lane convergence of two on ramps bringing traffic from east and west bound 85 onto 87. Finally, I pass two more large round column that support the 87 on ramp from Santa Teresa Boulevard.

Even at this early hour, the sound above me is that of cars accelerating and decelerating and the screech of the steel wheels of a light rail train slowing as it enters the light rail station. The lights within the cars illuminate a few early morning riders en route to start their day.

After emerging from the underpass Chynoweth climbs to its level before its descent. Over the eight years I’ve been making this early morning journey, only one person have I seen once or twice a year with regularity. She’s a young woman, short, medium build, with glasses that jogs alone. She too insists on acknowledging our passing with a greeting to which I respond in kind.

This stretch of Chynoweth comes to a dead end at Barron Park Drive, but I turn left on Hyde Park Drive past Vista Park and begin the last fifteen minutes of my solitary contemplation. The moon is at my back and the sun is making its appearance ahead of me. A lone plane—its landing lights shining—cuts a straight line from Morgan Hill to my right and Mineta International Airport at my left. I’m about to begin my work day along with everyone else in the Santa Clara Valley.

December 4, 2008 – Commuting Past a Life in the Balance

2008-12-06T01:09:00.000-08:00

It’s Thursday morning, December 4, 2008 just around 8:00 AM. I’ve dropped off some laundry at San Jose Laundry on Winfield Boulevard and exited the industrial strip mall—this stretch of Winfield is lined with them—turned right and headed toward Coleman Avenue where I turn right at the traffic light and drive over Almaden Creek to Almaden Expressway, the six-lane thoroughfare that everyone in Almaden Valley relies on to access Highways 85 if they are commuting north and west to high-tech campuses in Santa Clara, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, and further north to Palo Alto and Menlo Park. For those of us heading into San Jose, our choices are Almaden Expressway or Highway 87—great if you’re car-pooling but as slow as, if not slower than, Almaden Expressway—with all its traffic lights during the morning commute.

Joining the stream of traffic on the expressway at Coleman, I accelerate to the speed limit but then begin to slow as I approach the Blossom Hill Road intersection where the light has turned green for us but the queued traffic is taking its time getting started. By the time I come abreast of the traffic light, the fast lane has begun to clear as cars merge right readying to exit onto Highway 85 less than a quarter mile ahead. By the time I reach the 85-underpass, my lane is clear and I make the lights before and after the underpass, as well as the light at Branham Lane further on. Now, moving at nearly 50 MPH the traffic cluster I’m in races toward the Capital Expressway overpass and the traffic light at Foxworthy Avenue. There the light is also green for us but we have to slow to accommodate traffic merging on from Capital Expressway as well as commuters from the sprawling high-density Communication Hills Community coming on from Old Almaden Road. The community is that development covering the bronze colored hill you see landing at San Jose Mineta Airport from the south off the port side of the plane.

Beyond this bottleneck the traffic picks up speed again as we lose commuters in the left lane peeling off onto Lincoln Avenue—I always wonder who works in Willow Glen—but begin to slow as we approach the intersection at Ironwood Avenue, on the right, and Almaden Road, on the left. The light is green for us and we race onward. I’m in the middle lane and speed up to merge into the right lane just as a late model Toyota Celica merges on in front on me from Curtner Avenue. He accelerates and moves into the middle lane as I pass him in the right lane and slow to allow a red BMW 350 to merge on from the Canoas Garden Avenue on-ramp a few hundred yards down the road. By now, everyone going to Highway 87 is in the far left lanes and everyone going into downtown San Jose is in the right two lanes as we speed over the 87 overpass and begin to slow as we approaches the traffic light at the San Jose Avenue intersection.

This stretch of Almaden Expressway from the Highway 87 overpass to just beyond the San Jose Avenue intersection has remained unchanged since my family and I arrived here in the mid-1970s. On either side of the highway are industrial strip malls of long single story buildings, separated by open space to accommodate parking and traffic, that cater to collision repair, automotive maintenance, brake and tire repair and replacement, etc. Immediately on my left after I crest the overpass over Highway 87 is the South Valley Automotive Plaza with its rows of shops and the Enterprise Rent A Car handy for providing transportation after you’re dropped your car off and need a ride. The mall is accessible by Villa Stone Drive, which runs parallel to the expressway. Just north and west of the mall on Villa Stone drive at its intersection with Orto Street is a block of residences mixed in among the industrial park—single story 1950s-1960s homes if I were to guess. Further on is Almaden Body and Paint Shop with its sprawling parking lot of cars in various stages of repair along Stone Court: a side street that “T’s” into Villa Stone Drive. On the right side of the expressway is a sign for AAA Furnace on Stone Street which also parallels the expressway on the north east side.

The backup at the traffic light on San Jose Avenue, where I’m stuck three cars back, extends rearward toward the overpass to Orto Street—about four or five blocks. The light changes and the cars rush through the light and have to slow behind the backup at the next light along Almaden Road—the expressway ended just after we passed through the intersection at San Jose Avenue. The light holding us up now allows the residence of a large apartment complex on the right of Almaden Road to leave. The sprawling community of three story multi-unit apartment buildings occupy a large right triangular plot of land with Almaden Road forming the hypotenuse, La Rossa Circle, the next street up from San Jose Avenue—without a traffic light—forming the shorter leg and Little Orchard Street, to the north and east, the longer leg. The community was built in the 1980s when my daughters were in high school. We drove past the area en route to school every weekday for most of the six years it took the two of them to get their diplomas. A similar triangle of apartment dwellings occupy the plot of ground on the left side of Almaden Road with West Alma Avenue forming the larger leg and Shadowgraph Drive the other leg.

Beyond the light at the apartment complex entrance, the traffic moves to the next backup at the West Alma Avenue intersection with Almaden Road, where I eventually make the right off Almaden and onto West Alma heading toward Monterey Highway about 600 yards—around a quarter mile—away. I drive past new town homes on the left, a large commercial office building on the right—newly built and unoccupied as are a number of the new homes across the street. Further on I pass the DMV office at Plum Street before arriving at the intersection at Monterey Highway where the West Alma Avenue traffic can turn left from the two left lanes. I move into the left most which is shorter but I’m still back about five or six cars. As the light turns green for us, the two lanes begin the curve around only to find that the right most lane of the three on Monterey Highway—it’s officially South First Street—is block by a fire engine. The traffic slows to a crawl as cars slowly interleave in the middle lane just in front of the Denny’s Diner at the corner of Monterey and Alma. As I creep past the fire engine blocking the lane, I see a fireman on his knees besides a man lying on the sidewalk in front of the large AutoMart used car lot—the sign has a model T beneath the words AutoMart. The fireman is administering CPR on the fallen soul, who is completely inert. Just beyond the fire engine, I see a car—Japanese make, possibly a Nissan—and an SUV—first impression is a late model GMC. Both vehicles are pulled up onto the sidewalk. The scene suggests a minor fender bender but that shock of the accident drove one of the drivers—or possibly a passenger—to a heart attack.

I drive on, the scene receding in my rearview mirror as I ponder the reality for the poor individual lying on the pavement, his life hanging in the balance as the medic attempts to forestall the inevitable until another day. What’s going through the patient’s mind? That he’s having a heart attack and his spirit is hovering over his body looking down watching as the medic attempts to coax life his life force back into the inert shell of skin and skeleton. Is his will to live greater than the urge to leave all the suffering and pain that the inert body will administer if he returns? I leave the scene realizing that I will never know the outcome of the drama. Does the hero manage to hold on returning to his body and bearing the pain and panic of an ambulance ride to the Santa Teresa Community Hospital—West Alma Avenue to Highway 87, south on 87 to Highway 85, west on 85 to the Cottle Road exit then to the emergency room all traveling against the commute, 10 to 15 minutes at most. Or does the poor soul expire on that sidewalk, his life becoming part of the past, and the world around him like me leaving him in the wake.

November 24, 2008 – I-280 into San Francisco

2008-11-24T21:40:00.001-08:00

Friday morning, November 8, 2008, 0630 hours, traffic is light on Monterey Highway northbound just south of downtown San Jose and the Interstate 280 interchange, my intermediate destination. Once beyond the congestion around the new shopping complex called The Plant, (built on land that once housed the giant General Electric campus at the intersection of Monterey Highway and Curtner Avenue), traffic moves at the 40 MPH limit past the SIMS Metal recycling center on the east side of Monterey and the Department of Immigration and Naturalization office on the west side of Monterey. The cluster of traffic I’m in stops at the Alma Avenue traffic light, about where Monterey Highway ends and the street we’re on becomes South First Street. The Windy’s fast food restaurant where the infamous finger in the chili was found sits unoccupied off to my left while diagonally across the intersection and just ahead on my right the Denny’s Diner is beginning its breakfast rush.

Through the intersection I follow the traffic veering off South First right onto Keyes Street for one block then left onto South Third Street, which is one-way northbound. I follow this to East Reed Street, where the traffic congestion around all-girl Catholic college prep Notre Dame High School is not yet underway thanks to the early hour. Turning right on East Reed one block and making another right at the South-Fourth-Street traffic light where South Fourth becomes the on-ramp to I-280, I’m soon merging onto the freeway that will take me into San Francisco. It’s just before 0650 hours. Sixty minutes from now, this stretch of I-280, where the freeway passes the Highway 87 and Bird Avenue interchanges in quick succession, will be bumper to bumper with cars exiting at both off ramps while others attempt to enter the highway from the two on-ramps. For now the traffic is moving at the limit and I’m anticipating no delays until 280 crosses Highway 17 and thereafter a slight slowdown where I-280 crosses Highway 85 and the Foothill Expressway.

I-280 after Highway 85 is one of the most scenic drives you’ll experience—with the exception of California Highway 1 from Monterey to San Simeon. I-280 rises gently off the floor of the fertile Santa Clara Valley as it passes through Cupertino. Once, before high tech became its major commodity, This stretch of land was called the “Valley of Heart’s Delight” for the cornucopia of fruit it produced. Beyond Cupertino, I-280 climbs onto the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains—the seaward bulwark holding back the Pacific Plate’s relentless geological assault on the North American Plate with the San Andreas Fault forming the battle line between the two. In this hundreds-of-millions years war the former is winning as witnessed by the gradual uplift of the Santa Cruz Range. The four- and five-lane wide concrete and asphalt freeway climbs and traverses tree- and brush-covered rolling hills sparsely populated with custom homes on large lots within the cities of Los Altos and Los Altos Hills off the Magdalena Road and El Monte Road exits from I-280. Beyond these exits the road curves left and descends to just beyond the Foothill College campus on the left before beginning to climb once again gradually veering right for nearly a mile. Traffic on the now-four-lane road has thinned considerably allowing the frustrated traffic to speed at 70 to 80 miles per hour using the right- and left-most lanes to pass slower cars and trucks in the middle.

Just over the hill north of Foothill College, the Interstate begins a fast descending gradual right curve then bending more sharply to the left with the grade diving, driving the speed of traffic above 80 until the highway bottoms out at Page Mill Road and begins to slowly bend right and rise once again. We loose the Palo Alto commuters here. Beyond the exit off to the right cattle graze beneath a handful of large tall microwave dishes scattered about dirty brown acres of open grassland spotted here and there by a lone tree. Land on both sides of the freeway, which has continued to climb gradually, is fenced-off with no sign of settlement until near the Alpine Road exit, where trees and shrubs once again populate the landscape. Just before Alpine Road, the road starts to descend again and off to the left custom homes on large lots follow Alpine Road as it meanders south and west. Just beyond the Alpine Road exit, the roadway begins a steep ascent crossing over the 2-mile long Stanford Linear Accelerator just before cresting the rise and curving left as the traffic passes the Sand Hill Road exit. The colony of low-rise office buildings on the northeast side of the Interchange signals an enclave of Silicon Valley venture capital companies and the surrounding residential community of tree-enshrouded Sharon Heights to the east and north. The golf greens of the tony community’s Golf Club follows I-280 north.

Beyond Sand Hill Road, traffic has thinned even further as we lose the Menlo Park and Stanford University commuters. Now, the freeway descends before passing the wealthy community of Woodside, west off the Highway 84 (Woodside Road) exit. After the Woodside Road exit, the freeway climbs once again. As it nears the crest of the rise, the road curve left passing the Farm Hill Road exit. A half mile north of Farm Hill Road on either side of the I-280 all the way to Highway 92, the landscape is as unsettled as in the time of Father Juniper Serra for whom I-280 is named. The subdivisions have been blocked from encroaching and the land of either side is covered over by trees and brush browned by accumulation of dust and grayed by the dearth of rain that California’s long dry season has wrought. The Bayberry, Pacific Madrone, California Bay Laurel, Coast Live Oak, Coastal redwood, and Douglas Fir that claim this landscape are all impatient for the next overdue winter storms—one that occurred a little while back merely teased this area with an unkept promise for more.

Approaching the Highway 92 exit, I-280 dips and rises before curving left and steeply diving toward the interchange, where CHP Radar are typically waiting to catch drivers hurtling down the hill at 90 to 100 miles an hour. On the western side of the roadway is a spectacular view of Upper and Lower Crystal Spring Reservoir, featured in the Bond movie “View to a Kill”—the last in the series featuring Roger Moore. Taking 92 west brings you to Half Moon Bay; taking it east carries you through San Mateo to Foster City—built off land reclaimed from San Francisco Bay—and further across the bay via the San Mateo Bridge to Hayward—the first suburban Bay Area town I spent time in during my nine-month stay in the Bay Area in 1963 to 1964.

The Upper and Lower Crystal Spring Reservoir flood the base of the San Andreas Rift Valley. The San Andreas Fault, which runs through the heart of this valley, created it. Further north and not clearly visible from the freeway is San Andreas Lake, which gives its name to the fault line. However, it was Father Francisco Palou, the diarist and historian to Captain Gaspar de Portola, governor of Baja California who named the lake and valley on November 30, 1774, to honor the feast day of Saint Andres, the younger brother of Saint Peter. I’m fond of this saint as his feast day falls on my birthday. In the late 1800s, the city of San Francisco purchased the lands within the watershed to provide a source of water for the growing city. Unable to satisfy the voracious thirst for the city’s inhabitants, in the second decade of the 20th Century San Francisco built a reservoir in Hetch Hetchy Valley to supplement the supply from Crystal Springs.

Beyond highway 92, the road traverses upscale Hillsborough, one of the wealthiest suburban enclaves in America with a population of around 10,000 and the highest income of anywhere in America. Seventeen miles south of San Francisco, the city looks east at San Francisco Bay. Just past Bunker Hill Drive the next exit after Highway 92, the highway slopes downward toward a bridge that takes I-280 high over San Mateo Creek. The gorge created by the creek serves as a moat between vast expanses suburban Hillsborough on the north and San Mateo on the south. Just over the bridge on the edge of the gorge is a house that looks like something out of a Flintstones cartoon. The home has graced the side of the freeway since we arrived in California in the early-1970s.

On the western side of I-280, just north of the Haynes Road exit, is Crystal Springs Golf Course. Within the city limits of Burlingame, the links run along and high above the Lower Crystal Springs Reservoir (which is north of Upper Crystal Springs Reservoir). From the golf course northward the right hand side of I-230 is lined with expensive homes some with striking views of San Francisco Bay off to the east and below. Just north of Haynes Road, Highway 35 intersects I-280 then traverses beneath. Here the concrete freeway—tree-lined on the west with an expanse of apartments on the east—begins a rapid decline curving right as it races toward sea level. Careening down the grade, you get a dramatic view of San Francisco Airport as I-280 rushes toward its interchange with I-380 the short stub of a road that carries I-280 traffic to Highway 101 and to the northern hangers and long term parking and the newly-built rental car facility at San Francisco International.

Beyond the interchange I-280 passes the expansive 161-acre Golden Gate National Cemetery, home to 138,542 souls as of the end of 2007. Rows of uniform-shaped white marble headstones bearing the name of each interred below run for as far as the eye can see. The Pete Seeger song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” comes into my head every time I pass this place: “…gone to graveyards everyone. When will they ever learn…” (It’s the song I sang when visiting my Scottish in-laws decades ago and the custom after a few rounds was each person within the party graced the gathering with his or her song.) When viewing the thousands laid to rest alongside the highway, the last line of the Funeral Oration of Pericles from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War seems appropriate: “And now, when you have duly lamented, every one his own dead, you may depart.”

Beyond the cemetery, Interstate 280 becomes another urban freeway bearing its burden of 100s of thousands of commuters in cars and trucks all rushing some where to get some thing done. I’m one of them and I’m going to be an hour early for my appointment so I’m in no rush.

November 2, 2008 - Conversation with Dad

2008-11-02T22:24:00.000-08:00

I called Dad today and learned that he was not well, having come down with a cold recently and was just getting over it. The subject of our conversations typically revolves around his health. He went to William Beaumont Army Medical Center to have his lungs checked. They were clear. The hospital has been caring for him and my mother until her death in January 2006. In fact, the hospital has given care to my father since the 1950s, when he convalesced there after a car accident in Germany almost left him paralyzed. The hospital gave him antibiotics in case what he had was bacterial and sent him home. The fever broke yesterday and he was now over the worst and planning to have his flu shot on Tuesday—the ounce of prevention his fragile lungs requires.

For a man three years shy of ninety, he’s in remarkable shape, considering all the insults his lungs has suffered. He started smoking when he joined the Army at the outbreak of World War II. He was twenty. He gave it up, cold turkey, forty years later when he was turning sixty. He worked around asbestos and other hazardous materials during his twenty-three years in the military and during the twenty some years afterwards working at the ASARCO copper smelting plant in El Paso—you see its tall smokestack heading into El Paso from Las Cruces on Interstate 10. You can’t miss it on your right.

He is still able to get around and is clear-headed, though a bit hard of hearing. I tend to speak softly, a complaint that goes back to my speech class in high school. When we converse by phone, I yell into the mouthpiece to make myself heard. He drives himself about town—to the hospital, to Ft Bliss Army Base, and to most places around El Paso. He tells me he’s voted at Northgate Shopping Center last week—first time for him to vote a straight ticket along a single party line. I won’t divulge which party.

We talk about the Filipino community where he still belongs. Father Benito, the retired priest that my father credits with bringing him to the Catholic faith continues to proper in the care of one of his parishioners—a widow who befriended him during his time at Our Lady of Assumption Church on Byron Street and took him in rather than have him live out his life in the care facility provided by the Catholic Diocese of El Paso. The wife of one of my high school friends, a Filipina who came to El Paso as a nurse, is now in poor health. The daughter of my mother’s closest friend, who passed away recently, had a stroke and is being cared for in a city health facility. Thus, goes the small dramas that beset the community I left forty years ago.

Finally, he tells me he’s received some literature from the Veterans Administration informing him he’s eligible for a low-cost loan for home improvement or to purchase a home. He’s thinking of building a new place on property he owns nearby. His lifelong friend Charles Upton willed the property to him a few years back. It has a small one-room house on it and Dad is thinking about expanding the building or raising it and putting up a new house. He’s 87 and still thinking about building, a pretty optimistic statement. It’s the sort of guy he is.

We’ve been on the phone for an hour and he’s getting hungry so we ring off.

January 16, 2008 - Receipt #10 – Angelo’s Pizza, 117 West 57th Street

2008-01-16T22:02:00.000-08:00

January 16, 2008 - Receipt #11 – Angelo’s Pizza, 117 West 57th Street

Sunday morning May 19th was living up to its name as sunlight brightened the inside of our room on the 11th floor of the Buckingham Hotel. This would be the last day of our four-day weekend in the Big Apple and we would fly westward to our work-a-day world in Silicon Valley, which would be no different that the same work-a-day world in Manhattan had we lived here. A vacation always put me in mind that somehow the world that exists when I’m not working is better than the world when I am. Of course, it’s an illusion no different than that of time itself. What happens to those happy moments you experienced some time ago when things were so much better than they are now? Those moments lost in the past make me realize how fleeting and transient human experience really is.

My wife IM and I have tickets to a matinee performance of the Broadway musical “Curtains”, which features the actor, David Hyde Pierce, who played Niles in the television sitcom, “Frasier.” I suspect the transient nature of human experience is why we so enjoy a good play and can return to see them over and over—if any of Shakespeare’s play or for that matter Andrew Lloyd Webber’s in our time is any indication. Plays are more engaging than cinema or video because the actors are real. They strut about an imaginary landscape that our minds make real for the couple of hours we suspend belief. They provide an unframed three-dimensional illusion rather than the two-dimensional framed one of film or video—always restrained by the limited range of a lens. In a play we are able to see a period of time reanimated over and over again as if we were watching the events unfold in life—somewhere in Boston in 1959 for the setting of “Curtains.” We watch Boston Police Detective Frank Cioffi try to unravel the mystery of who in the cast of a Broadway-bound western musical is killing the other cast members. In the process, he helps rewrite the play and wins the heart of the leading lady. How nice to see life’s most overwhelming problems solved before our eyes and why isn’t real life like that?

The great problem we confront in our lives is that our memories lose that three-dimensional quality captured in badly framed photos and video. It’s as if you were looking at the past through a keyhole that won’t let you see anything except what’s in front of the hole. It’s that way with the video I took during our stay in the Big Apple. Hours of recorded footage and all I have to show for it are minutes at most of various street scenes taken around midtown—up and down 6th, 7th and 8th Avenues; Times Square; and 8th, 5th, Park, and Madison Avenue and east and west along 43rd, 44th, 45th and 57th Streets. We’re too busy confronting the present to spend much time reconstructing the past, though I have tried by editing those hours of footage into 3 to 5 minute clips that I’ve uploaded to YouTube.

One clip is of the Sunday morning of which I’m writing. It begins with us walking along West 56th Street between 5th Ave. & 6th Avenues. The camera is capturing the storefront on the side of the street opposite to where we’re walking. Pictures of the front of the Judge Roy Bean Pub at 39 West 56th and further down the block the dark green awning of D & S Market Place and finally a red and blue stripped sign before a building with “Nails…” (fingernails) centered on the red stripe and “Torino” centered on the blue stripe. The scene segues to a slow motion sequence of us walking west on 56th Street toward 5th Avenue where we come upon Trump Tower at 725 West 5th Avenue. The building is encased in a vinyl canvas four-story—at least—high and extending from the 56th-Street/5th-Avenue-corner to the building entrance on 5th wide. Upon this humongous canvas is printed a bright red Gucci ad with several giant skinny models dressed in elaborately patterned red print frocks looking down on the pedestrians passing beneath. As you might guess, Gucci has a large very upscale retail store inside Trump Tower. Advertising has managed the illusion of stretching a perfect minute out for as long as the viewing public is held captive. Another perfect moment replaces the first once the first fails to capture public attention.

As we turn right and amble down 5th Avenue, coming upon the Disney Store on our left, we pass a young couple coming toward us. The young woman is draped in a gauzy green-patterned ankle-length dress flowing in the gentle breeze blowing down the avenue. Sensibly, she is wearing a long sleeve green woolen turtleneck sweater beneath the dress—it’s cool in the shade of the tall buildings along 5th. Her companion walking on her left—guarding her from the traffic along the street—is attired in a blue pullover vest worn atop a short sleeve T-shirt—a red left sleeve and collar and a blue right sleeve—atop a pair of jeans. The man was forgettable; the brownish-blond woman, with deep-set eyes and distinctive Celtic nose was not because of her features, her outfit, and the figure she cut walking down 5th avenue.

The video segues to six seconds of video shot across Madison Avenue from the entrance to the Sony Building at 555 Madison. Hanging upside down from the top of one of the first floor display windows partially hiding a “Sony Style” sign is Spiderman, straight stands of his spider web shooting down the window toward the street—kitsch to say the least. At a stationary position away from the street and out of the line of pedestrian traffic on the sidewalk, I zoom my Panasonic video camera all the way to maximum magnification until Spiderman fills half the frame from top to bottom then slowly zoom back out. Spiderman is the hero of both grandsons.

The video ends with a slow-motion very jerky walk—as recorded by in the video—along 57th Street to the Buckingham Hotel just beyond 6th Avenue. The most compelling features of the remaining 45 to 50 second of video is the cacophony of traffic sounds along the street and the busy pedestrian traffic coming toward us and crossing in front of us at 6th Avenue. All the while Bobby Darin is wailing the lyrics of “Sunday in New York” over the ambient sounds of the city. “You can spend time without spending a dime watching people watch people pass. Later you’re pausing and in one of those stores there’s that face next to yours in the glass…” That song always comes to mind when I think of the times my wife and I spent in the city during the first months of 1965.

We return to the hotel and rest until it’s time for the afternoon matinee of “Curtains.” As Broadway musicals go, it was entertaining, but it lacked that one piece that followed you out of the theater and stayed with you for months on end. In the first months of 1965, the song was “People” from “Funny Girl” and “Who can I turn to” from “Roar of the Greasepaint, Smell of the Crowd.” The song lasted far longer than the play, which closed in less than a year. During our children’s theater going years, it was “What I did for Love,” from “A Chorus Line”; “Memories” from “Cats”; and “One Night in Bangkok” from “Chess”; among others. Still, “Curtains” was enjoyable; talented actors bringing to life a play we in the audience wanted to see. It was a good mystery and love story and had enough song and dance that the theatergoer didn’t fall asleep.

At the end of the performance we made out way out amid a river of people flowing out each of the theater’s exits. Out on the sidewalk we joined an even larger stream of theatergoers all trying to make their way to the cars or hotel rooms. We managed to cross 45th on 8th Avenue heading toward 57th and let ourselves be swept away by the current of pedestrians moving up the avenue. Turning right on 57th we headed toward the Buckingham and just before arriving, we came upon Angelo’s Pizza, where we decided to have our last dinner in the city before our return trip home. It’s your family style pizza place that also serves pasta, which is what we had. It sated our hunger sufficiently that we decided to walk along Central Park South back toward Columbus Circle. By the time our walkabout brought us back to the hotel, the sun was setting and we were ready to call it an early evening.

November 25, 2007 - Receipt #10 – Brasserie 8 ½

2007-11-25T22:33:00.000-08:00

November 25, 2007 - Receipt #10 – Brasserie 8 ½

May 19th, Saturday evening, my wife IM and I decide to spend having dinner at a nice restaurant nearby the Buckingham Hotel where we’re spending a long weekend in Manhattan. I’m recounting the four days in the Big Apple through the receipts I’ve collected during our stay. I’m on the 9th receipt, which we acquired Saturday evening at the Brasserie 8 ½ Restaurant at 9 W. 57th Street—just over a city block from the hotel. The towering 725-foot high 49-story black and white building occupying 70 percent of an acre of prime Midtown Manhattan real estate where the restaurant resides is a landmark on 57th Street. A large red sculpture of the number “9” smack in the middle of the wide pedestrian travertine marble sidewalk in the front of the building announces its address.

What makes the building—designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill—unique is its shape. Viewed from a distance looking east or west you can see a distinct bell-shaped 40-degree slope on its north and south face as the building descends from the 19th floor to street level. Looking at the east or west side of the building, you see two white columns of travertine marble separated by a dark area slightly wider than either column. The white marble frames the dark area at the top. Within the dark glass covered center column you can make out three huge “x”s—the width of the center column—equidistantly spaced between the roof and ground floor of the building. The north and south façade of the building is likewise covered from top to bottom in dark-colored glass framed on the sides, top and bottom by a width of the same white travertine marble.

Brasserie 8 ½ occupies the basement of 9 West 57th Street. You get there by descending a red-carpeted spiral staircase that curves around a red-carpeted lounge within the center of the spiral, passing a long bar—about as long as the diameter of the lounge with a slight bow in its middle—and ending at a Maitre ‘d at the end of the stairs. At the bottom of the staircase, the long bar is on your right and you’re facing a smaller bar just ahead and in front of the 250-person capacity main dining room—one bar is smoking; the other non-smoking. At the end of the room opposite the staircase is the kitchen.

Patina Restaurant Group owns the restaurant along with many others scattered on the east and west coast of the country. One of the restaurants the company owns in Manhattan is the Brasserie, located in the Seagram’s Building at 100 East 53rd between Park and Lexington Avenue, where my wife IM and I have dined on many occasions starting back in 1979 when I first started traveling to New York as a PR account executive.

The Brasserie derives its name from the French word brasseur, meaning brewer. Refugees from the Franco-Prussian War in the late 1800s found their way to Paris from the Alsace Region. Some Alsatians started breweries like those they owned in their region. In the breweries they also served the food typically found in a hofbrauhaus in Germany—sauerkraut with sausages of various kinds, which the French called choucroute garnie—as well as the dishes Parisians demanded.

Patricia Wells writing in the December 4th 1992 issue of the Herald Tribune described the quintessential Parisian brasserie, “Le Train Bleu” founded at the turn of the 20th century. She writes “the two giant dining rooms—with their eclectic, "neo-renaissance baroque" décor—are adorned with signed paintings by more than 30 provincial artists, each selected to depict the glories of his region. The paintings fill the walls, curling up onto the ceiling, and their cheeriness is particularly welcoming on gray Parisian days.”

The Brasserie was the place where the classes mixed: shift workers showing up before or after the morning, swing, or graveyard shifts for a quick, inexpensive, good, and filling meal; rubbing elbows with artists, professionals, politicians, and every other occupation found in a thriving metropolitan city. That’s how I came to first find my way to the Brasserie on East 53rd in the late 1970s. Landing at Kennedy at 8:00 PM on a Sunday evening and wanting to grab something to eat after a long flight from the west coast, my companion—a product marketing manager from Apple Computer—and I ended up there having dinner and wine at 10:00 PM.

The Brasserie 8 ½ couldn’t qualify for the description Patricia Wells attributed to “Le Train Bleu”, though the original Brasserie in the late 1970s certainly fit the mold of egalitarian eatery. Both restaurants today tend toward the avant-garde in décor. The banquette of the 1970s in the original Brasserie replaced by plush leather booths—the bench seat backs of which extend to the ceiling providing a floor to ceiling barrier between diners in adjacent booths.

We had arrived at 7:30 PM and the Maitre ‘d showed us to our table and the waiter showed up with menus and we each ordered a glass of champagne, Veuve Clicquot Yellow Label. We ordered a dish of Escargot—the evening’s appetizer special—to split between the two of us. The evening’s fish was a halibut, something IM couldn’t resist. I, for my part had my heart, set on steak frites. Before the snails arrived, the waiter showed up with a complementary appetizer, a bite of something special he had come up with to surprise each guest. The main course came and I ordered a glass of Chianti to go with the medium rare steak. IM opted for another glass of Veuve. We finished off the meal with chocolate cake that we shared and latte for IM and regular coffee for me. The receipt came to $222.41 with tip. Up the stairs a little after 9:00 PM, we decided to walk our dinner off along Central Park South.

November 1, 2007 - Receipt #9 – "Curtains"

2007-11-17T17:10:00.001-08:00

November 1, 2007 - Receipt #9 – "Curtains"

In recalling four days in Manhattan earlier this year through the receipts I collected during the stay, I’ve arrived at the ninth one, which was acquired during the middle of a day of walking through midtown with no other goal than to get some exercise and experience the city on its first weekend day. It's Saturday morning May 19th and most of the Manhattan’s weekday workers have abandoned their jobs and those living in the city have started enjoying themselves. Mayor Bloomberg or someone in the city’s bureaucracy had issued a permit that turned 6th Avenue from 56th Street south for a good 15 blocks or more—we didn’t walk the entire length—into a street fair. We stumble upon the festival after leaving our room at the Buckingham Hotel and walking out into the now overcast Saturday morning south on 6th Avenue.

At 56th Street, NYPD-blue painted wooden horses with white lettering blaring “POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS” blocked southbound vehicular traffic on 6th Avenue. Once behind the police line, we joined pedestrians filling the center of the avenue. On either side of the wide thoroughfare along the curb stood a line of mostly white tents, each occupying a 10-foot square space. Supporting each were four poles, one at each corner holding aloft a four-sided pyramid top. Beneath each top, vendors offer everything imaginable for sale: ethnic foods, tee shirts—lots of tee shirts, Big Apple souvenirs, etc. As we walk, a blue- or green-topped tent intermittently disrupts the uniform pattern of white. And nearly every block has its flat, square-topped, red or yellow tent with huge “Gyro” sign painted on each side of the square. As we walk, a loud speaker somewhere to our right blares out entreaties to “step right up for a free sample of fresh made kettle corn.”

As we reach Radio City Music Hall, we see one vendor who has broken the uniform mold of his conformist neighbors. He has constructed a complete emporium of ladies decorative shirts hanging from pipes within his unusual tent. This structure is unique in that the pipes supporting each 12 ft tall sidewall form the shape of the Greek letter pi. At the top of the tent, a pipe running between the two pi-shaped structures at the front and at the back keeps the sides upright. A large blue tarp drapes over the top and hangs down both sides. Hangers on the pipes contain the large variety of women apparel being offered for sale.

Next to this large tent in a simpler one with a shallow inverted “V” tent top and no sides. It has a huge “OILS” sign hanging in the front. Next to it is a red tent the size of the white ones we’ve passed along the way. It carries a large sign reading “psychic”. In the center of 6th Avenue between 49th and 50th street is a smoke stack twelve foot high or more and about a foot in diameter painted the familiar alternating bands of international orange and white, with smoke or steam wafting up. You see them in the video intro to “Saturday Night Live.” Is this why 6th Avenue was converted into a street faire so that New York City Public Works could perform maintenance without the distraction of traffic?

At 45th Street we leave the faire and head west toward Times Square. Before I left the room this morning, I had gone on line and purchased theatre tickets to “Curtains” at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre for a matinee performance on Sunday. We made our way toward the theatre, which sits at the corner of 8th Avenue and 45th Street, to claim the tickets waiting for us at the will-call window. The overcast that had begun the day persisted casting a somber atmosphere to an otherwise upbeat, frenetic one.

Each time we pass through Times Square I’m reminded of earlier visits to Manhattan and the appearance of the place at that time compared to now. The last time was the spring before the September 11th attack. Back then NBC had a hit program entitled “The Weakest Link” hosted by Anne Robinson, and her image towered above Times Square. On this visit corporate brands had replaced the pop star. Sony was promoting its screen super hero, Spider-Man.

We found the theatre and collected our tickets at 2:55 PM, a grand total of $223.00 including a restoration fee of $3.00 and unspecified expense by Telecharge.com for processing the order. The cost of live theater like that of every other good and service we purchase has gone up.

October 29, 2007 - Receipt #8 – Coffee & Danish from Associated Supermarket, 225 W. 57th Street

2007-10-30T22:19:00.001-07:00

October 30, 2007 - Receipt #8 – Coffee & Danish from Associated Supermarket, 225 W. 57th Street

It’s Saturday morning May 19th and we’re two days into our four-day stay in Manhattan that I’m reliving through my accumulated paper receipts. We awake just before 9:00 AM to the sound of a city enjoying the first day of a weekend. Outside, the sound of construction can still be heard as well as felt from the vibration of heavy equipment wrestling steam beams into place. The chaotic sound of horns punctuate the earning morning as traffic along 57th Street and 6th Avenue struggle to make its way faster than conditions will allow. New Yorkers talk a great deal more than Californians and perhaps the horn is a surrogate for vocal chords when you’re wrapped in a cocoon of steel, glass, and rubber. We’re right next to the elevator in the Buckingham Hotel, which reminds me of the residential hotels my family and I lived in when I was a boy in Ponce, Puerto Rico and Portland, Oregon; though the Buckingham was a couple of stars above those of my childhood.

You turn left out of the elevator and walk a few steps to reach the door or our room, number 11A. When you enter, to your left is a small closet size kitchenette with stove, refrigerator, sink and cupboards with dishes and silverware. In front and to your right is the living room with couch, on the wall opposite the entrance and television on the wall across from the couch. From the doorway, to the right of the couch is a window that provides a peek-a-boo view of 6th Avenue and the wall of an adjacent building. The Peak-a-boo view not only provides a view of traffic on 6th Avenue but the back of a nightclub featuring a year-around Halloween theme. From our vantage point you can see the props that keep the façade standing, thus spoiling the illusion of the building when we view it from the front.

On the wall across across the twelve-foot space from our room, an elderly woman occupies the rightmost of the two rooms facing our wall. Her bed is near her window and we’ve seen her sitting in her dressing gown on the bed watching television: an Edward Hopper painting, with just as much poignancy. We keep out blinds closed to provide her privacy except at night when we turn off the lights and open the window to air out our room. Our queen size bed is off to the left of the couch viewed from the doorway. Another window behind the headboard of the bed gives us a view of the wall of another tall building. To the left of the bed is a closet. At the foot of the bed adjacent to the closet is a small bathroom, about the size of the kitchenette. A desk sits on the wall next to the bathroom entrance across a small walkway from the foot of the bed. Despite being a bit cramped, the room does have a high ceiling, thus making it feel less claustrophobic.

The Buckingham has no restaurant and thus no bed and breakfast accommodations. After my morning toilet, I leave IM checking her e-mail on the iBook G4 portable we’ve brought with us at the desk at the foot of the bed and go out of the hotel in search of a morning breakfast. I head west on 57th toward 7th Avenue. We had passed a supermarket on our way back from the theatre last night and I’m en route there now to purchase breakfast for the two of us. I reach Associated Supermarket at 225 W. 57th Street just before Broadway and I enter. It’s sparsely filled with early morning shoppers. There is a deli section and a few patrons are enjoying coffee and pastry while reading the paper at small tables set up inside. I purchase two Danish and a cup of coffee. IM prefers tea and we have Lipton tea bags and hot water in the hotel room. I pay cash at one of the two checkout counters going this early on a Saturday. I’m the only one in line but a lady comes up after I’m rung up. The bill comes to just over $5.00 and I add sugar to my tall coffee, put a lid on it, and take my purchases out into a slightly overcast Saturday morning—the rising sun peaking beneath a persistent cloud cover that threatens to enshroud the day in a pall.

On my way back to the Buckingham, I walk beneath scaffolding of a building under repair. We’ve seen quite a bit of construction everywhere we’ve walked in the city since we’ve arrived. Manhattan resembles a living organism that is constantly repairing its damaged body, replacing aging parts of its anatomy with new construction or renovating structures that have elements worth preserving—this appeared to be the case with building I’m walking beside. When I return to the room, IM has heated water for her tea and she and I sit down to have our Danish before heading out into to the increasingly overcast Saturday.

October 28, 2007 - Receipt #7 – Candy Before Performance of “Monte Python and the Holy Grail”

2007-10-28T15:17:00.000-07:00

October 28, 2007 - Receipt #7 – Candy Before Performance of “Monte Python and the Holy Grail”

Back in the room, IM surfs the Internet while I write in my Reporter’s Notebook and read the May 21st issue of the New Yorker. I’m absorbed with Peter Hessler’s “Letter From China: Walking the Wall” describing David Spindler’s fascination with China’s hundreds year old defense against the marauding Mongols. Spindler is an independent scholar of the Great Wall and pursues his scholarship with a Quixote zeal that borders on obsession. I’ve visited Shanghai several times in the past year and a half and never gotten beyond a two-mile radius of the Hotel Sofitel Jin Jiang Pudong, the distance I can comfortably walk in the small amount of time my business reasons for visiting China allows. The author and Spindler hiking the little known sections of the ancient wall in remote areas of China I will probably never visit makes for a compelling read.

Curiously, the Great Wall has kept foreign cultures out all these many hundreds of years in contrast to America that has embraced continuous waves of immigration since the first Europeans set foot on this land. And nowhere is this influx of cultures and ethnicities more evident than in Manhattan, where north, south, east, Middle East, and west come together—a trip round the world experienced in a walk through the city’s neighborhoods. After over half a century watching the rest of Asia prosper by engaging the West, the gates of China’s Great Wall have been thrown open and the world is flooding in. I get the impression that if you understand the Great Wall you might well understand China.

Rested and refreshed, we leave the Buckingham at a quarter after seven in the evening, and walk down 6th Avenue to 44th Street, where we turn right, join the throng of theater-goers all making their ways to their play or musical, and proceed across Broadway and 7th where the two cross one another. We make it through the mass of humanity and arrive at the Shubert in plenty of time before the performance begins. The musical was vintage Monty Python, bits and pieces of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” a tune from “Meaning of Life”, all begun with a musical version of the fish face slapping skit from the original “Monty Python Flying Circus” BBC Series. It’s the joke that starts the play.

The audience at the Shubert for the play was unique in that most were fans of Monty Python comedy, much like the audience for “Jersey Boys” and “Mama Mia” are fans of the music in each play. Perhaps the uniqueness of the audience owes more to my observing its members more closely than when we attended musicals and plays in the past. Perhaps the audience for “A Class Act” the musical based on the life and work of Edward Kleban, which IM and I saw in 2001 were there to see life of the lyricist who created the songs to “Chorus Line” or the audience for “Aspects of Love” which I saw alone in 1991 were fans of Andrew Lloyd Webber, its creator. Neither garnered the Broadway acclaim of long running hits “Chorus Line” or “Cats”, perhaps because they lacked the fan base that causes one musical to succeed beyond expectations and others to sink into oblivion after a few performances.

I’m reminded of a musical playing during the time Irene and I were dating back in the 1960s. “The Roar of the Greasepaint, The Smell of the Crowd” book, music, and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley. The musical had posters plastered throughout Penn Station and at every train stop on Long Island and in Manhattan. It failed after a few months on Broadway, despite producing the hit song “Who Can I turn to,” that every singer of note in the 1960s recorded. IM and I chose to see “Funny Girl,” with Barbra Streisand. It too produced the popular hit “People” but enjoyed long running success as well. On reflection, perhaps neither the Broadway plays nor the audiences have change, perhaps I have.

We are seated in the Mezzanine in row H seats 112 and 113 one in from the aisle. After we get settled, I want something sweet and venture to the concession stand at the a few rows up and behind us. There I purchase a box of junior mints for IM—her favorites—and a roll of Mentos mints for me. The attendant was so busy that I didn’t want to ask her for a receipt which she didn’t offer when providing me change for the five dollar bill I tendered for the purchase, which I dropped into a tip jar.

The aisle seat on our row is occupied by a lone male in seat 114, ten to fifteen years my junior, putting him in his fifties or late forties with thinning graying dark hair. Spreading in the middle, he fits uneasily in the narrow theater seat with so little leg room in front that those seated must stand up to allow others to pass. Throughout the play he squirms restlessly trying to get comfortable but to no avail, bumping into me in the process—the one reason I took notice of him. He is dressed in a white shirt and dull gray slacks and carries a white plastic shopping bag packed roundly with stuff—hard to tell if its recent purchases or belonging he’s carrying around for lack of a backpack or briefcase. Once I noticed him, I couldn’t help trying to fathom how he came to be at the play alone. Perhaps the simple answer was he wanted somewhere to spend a couple of hours and be entertained

The play had some funny bits, though the gay humor did get old after a bit. The female, who kept reminding the audience in typical Monty Python style that she was the female lead, was funny. The play ended to considerable audience applause and IM and I made our way out of the theater and headed for 8th Avenue for our return walk to the Buckingham Hotel.

October 25, 2007 - Receipt #6 - The Long Manhattan Meal

2007-10-25T20:56:00.001-07:00

October 25, 2007 - Receipt #6 - The Long Manhattan Meal

I’m recounting four days in Manhattan through the written receipts we’ve amassed during our stay. This is the sixth. After paying for our purchase we leave the store and find a bench across from the museum store entrance to sit for a second to gather all our purchases in a single large plastic bag. All around us is a steady stream of pedestrian entering and leaving Rockefeller Center Plaza, many stop on either side of where we are sitting and attempt to take photos of sculptor Paul Manship’s famous gilded statue of Prometheus bringing fire to mankind. Prometheus guards the Rockefeller Center Plaza subterranean patio as you enter from 5th Avenue. The statue was commissioned in January 1933 for this quintessential Art Deco center built in the depths of the Depression. It was the ultimate statement of capitalist optimism in the darkest period of modern history—“let them eat cake,” and why not?

Purchases all packed into a single bag, we head back to the hotel along 5th Avenue, passing at 55th Street, the St Regis Hotel, which was the preferred Manhattan staff lodging during the year and a half I spent in the late 1970s working for Regis McKenna Public Relations in Palo Alto—himself having a penchant for staying at the hotel that bore his name. It was a late night arrival on the occasion of my first visit to Manhattan in the agency’s employ that the St. Regis Bellman introduced me to the Brasserie Restaurant at 100 East 53rd Street. “It’s open 24 hours a day, has modest priced, great food, and it’s where everyone who work nights in Midtown go for dinner when they get off,” he enthused. I had a product marketing manager from Apple Computer Inc. in tow at the time and the two of us had great steaks and pommes frites, accompanied by a California red. Back then the Brasserie was the kind of egalitarian hang out with the 1960s décor that resembled its Paris namesake.

A block further north, we pass Trump Tower; the first three stories of the building’s face wrapped in a bright red advertisement for Gucci—the wrap art style of Christo and Jeanne-Claude commandeered for a completely commercial purpose. How could you ignore all that red adorned with glamorous women, made-up and coifed to look perfect in Gucci designed apparel? IM and I certainly couldn’t. A block further north and we turn left onto 57th Street intending to return to the Buckingham, but hunger sets in and the two of us realize we’ve not had anything to eat since getting up this morning except a glass of orange juice. On the south east corner of 6th Avenue and 57th Street, we spy the restaurant Rue 57 and determine there is where we’ll sate our appetite. The restaurant’s entrance is on the 57th Street side of the corner and we enter to a full room of diners—the midtown lunch crowd finishing up before heading back to their offices to finish off their workweek. Being in a big city on a weekday when everyone else is committing themselves 9 to 5, I always have the impression of being truant from school. All around you the conversation is shoptalk, except for the smattering of tables with other truant tourists like IM and me.

Just as we give our name to the hostess, a corner table comes available at the back of the restaurant opposite the entrance. We follow our hostess to our table snaking between diners’ chairs squeezed so compactly together that it was hard not to brush the back of each chair you passed. Once seated IM orders a Margarita, and I order a glass of champagne. The three tables to our right, toward the reception desk, were being bussed and made ready for new patrons when we were seated and by the time our drink order arrives, the two tables next to us are squeezed together for a party of four. The one lone third table accommodates of a couple that arrive just after the foursome is seated. Our neighbors are a young couple and an older couple—son and significant other being treated by Mom and Dad—or vice versa to lunch in midtown. The older couple speaks French to one another and English, with little accent, to the younger couple, with the conversation eventually becoming all English. I’m not terribly observant when it comes to other peoples’ conversations except when their body language conveys tension that compels me to listen. The foursome’s conversation resembled white noise to me, sounds beating against my consciousness but nothing registering. IM and I discussed the day, what our kids back in California were doing now, how bad the plane ride was and how great it used to be, and what New York used to be like when we were younger.

IM and I met at the Page Two, a nightclub in Oceanside on Long Island in February 1964, which had dancing on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I was looking to meet someone and IM was dumping her boyfriend. She was sitting alone at the bar drinking a rye and ginger and I asked her to dance, She accepted and we spent the rest of the evening dancing and talking. She had come with girlfriends and left with them later but not before I had asked her out the upcoming Saturday to tour the city doing tourist things. She accepted and I spent the rest of the week trying to plan out the day, without much success.

The next Saturday I picked her up at her place, without a clue as to what we were going to do for the day. We walked to the train station near her place, and took the train into the city, getting off at Penn Station, where all the commuter trains disgorged their loads. Our first stop was the United Nations, which I had wanted to tour. IM had already been but was eager to do it again. The UN was a major topic of discussion during my current affairs class at Clover Park High School in Tacoma, Washington—taught by a retired military officer, who had been stationed all over the world and had turned the whole class on to getting out and seeing what had excited him so. He was one of the reasons I joined the Navy rather than going on to college. You could say he contributed to my being where I was at that instant.

Secretary-General U Thant headed the institution back then, but I was more familiar with Dag Hammarskjöld, the man who preceded him. I was struck by his untimely death in a plane crash on a peace mission in the Congo. Men like him were larger than life characters and to have one of them die accidentally made you realize that death didn’t make exceptions for standing in the community. I recall during the tour how small the rooms appeared. On television during the evening news broadcasts, the rooms all seemed larger and more spacious. It was especially large when black and white video showed Nikita Khrushchev banging his shoe on his desk in the General Assembly during the fall of 1960. Did the camera lie or did my mind make these places and events larger to fit their purpose in the world? I suspect the latter. The other impression I left the UN with was the diversity of people working there. It was my first encounter with black Africans, Europeans, and Asians in such numbers, more than I had ever come across in all the travels the Army provided my family and me. IM and I toured the UN again during our visit in 2001. The revelation then was the increased diversity of people over our first visit, not only working at the UN but among the visitors touring it as well.

Our lunch arrives, IM has a chicken salad and I have veal scallopini and another glass of champagne. On our first date in New York IM and I left the UN in the afternoon and took in a movie—Goldfinger—Sean Connery playing James Bond, a young Dame Shirley Bassey singing the title song during the opening credits. After the movie we walk around midtown riding up the Empire State Building elevator and looking out over the city, wandered about Rockefeller Center and eventually ended up in a little Italian restaurant on one of the streets in the Theatre District. All I remember of the place was our table had a checkerboard tablecloth in the center of which was a bulbous-bottom Chianti bottles wrapped in basket with a candle burning and candle wax encasing its neck and bottom. IM and I talked about our families, her mom and dad, her married older sister and two bachelor brothers in Scotland. I described my Filipina mother, Southern Baptist father, and three younger school-aged sisters. Here we were two people from the opposite ends of the earth having dinner in an Italian restaurant in Manhattan—what were the chances? Our lunch at Rue 57 was memorable because we were both very hungry; our dinner at the little Italian restaurant 47 years ago because it was the first, because the day had been perfect, and, except for a few other tables of early-bird diners we had the place to ourselves.

The waiter returns after we had finished our meal and asked if we wanted dessert, which we both decline. I offer him my credit card and he returns a few minutes later with the credit card slip, which I sign. The bill came to just under $112 with tip. It was just coming on 3:00 PM and sated, we snake our way back to the front of the restaurant and out onto 57th Street. We walk back to the Buckingham and take a rest before the performance of Spamalot at 8:00 PM that evening.

October 24, 2007 - Receipt #5 – Souvenir Shopping in Rockefeller Center

2007-10-24T22:21:00.000-07:00

October 24, 2007 - Receipt #5 – Souvenir Shopping in Rockefeller Center

I’ve come to the fifth receipt that I’ve collected since my wife IM and I started our four-day trip to Manhattan. After collecting our tickets at the Shubert Theatre box office, we exit the theater and walk along Shubert Alley between 44th and 45th streets toward 45th to the theater gift shopped named after the alley. We had given this shop plenty of business over the years—t-shirts from Cats, Chess, My One and Only, A Chorus Line and cast recordings of Nine, Starlight Express, Aspects of Love, Les Miserables, among other items. IM was looking for T-shirts for the grand kids, but realized that they would not recognize any of the shows pictured on the shirts on display. We leave the shop in search of a store with t-shirts showing action heroes—Buzz Lightyear, Spiderman, to be specific—two favorites of our young grand sons.

We walk back toward Times Square, picking our way through the crowds spilling off the sideways into the street and turn left on 7th Avenue sure we’ll find a souvenir shop overflowing with the types of T-Shirts IM wants. How the mass of humanity and stream of car, truck, motorcycle, and bicycle traffic manage to move and not collide with one another in the confined space of the square is nothing short of amazing. IM leads the way as we walk up 7th, heading directly into the oncoming flow of pedestrian, which give way just enough to allow her passage. I follow along in her wake occasionally averting the throng approaching me by walking in the street mindful of the IM’s blue-jacketed back off to my left. We reunite at 46th street and stand fast as other pedestrians dash between east-bound traffic along the street. When the light changes and traffic stops, we resume our trek seeing off to our left the souvenir store with the shirts we’re after on display in its window. Weaving our way through the flow of people coming towards us, we enter the store and IM finds the shirts she’s after.

After looking for something for the grand daughters, however, she becomes frustrated and decides to look elsewhere for everything. We return the shirts to their rack and exit the store merging into the flow of northbound pedestrians heading north on the west side of Broadway. On the east side of the street, Virgin Mobile has an drive-in theater size screen mounted one and a half stories above street level playing a rock video. Just south of Virgin Mobile, Planet Hollywood beckons pedestrians to escape the hustle and bustle of the sidewalk and join the hustle and bustle within. We continue on until we reach 49th where we turn right heading east to escape the crush of humanity we’ve been struggling against for the past five block. Moving along 49th toward 6th Avenue, the amount of pedestrian traffic has diminished to a far more reasonable amount: plenty of room on the narrow sidewalks along either side of the street. As we walk, we pass restaurants filled with diners—it’s the lunch hour—and make our way around patrons loitering in conversation on the sidewalk after finishing their meal or couples eyeing the menu posted outside before committing themselves to enter. It’s still dull and overcast and occasionally we feel drops of rain that abruptly come and go.

When we reach Rockefeller Center we walk around the subterranean patio restaurants below, tables and umbrellas deserted in the face of an overcast and chilly day. Diners in the enclosed Sea Grill Restaurant and Roc Center Café on either side of the open-air patio below deprived of a view to accompany their meal. We enter the Metropolitan Museum of Art store on the south east side of Rockefeller center and spend time looking at the paraphernalia the store had for sale. IM finds a doll for our eldest grand daughter and a T-shirt with a ballerina on it for our youngest grand daughter. I buy IM a Kaleidoscope and a DVD tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The store receipt shows the purchase took place at 1:49 pm on Friday May 18th. Another moment in time documented in print.

October 22, 2007 - Receipt #4 - New York City Rhythm

2007-10-23T22:57:00.001-07:00

October 22, 2007 - Receipt #4 - New York City Rhythm

In the Chronicle of our four days in New York last May documented in receipts, we picked up our fourth of the day—it’s Saturday May 14th—at the Shubert Theatre (sic—New Yorkers spell the word in the British form) at 225 West 44th Street: two tickets to Monty Python’s Spamalot for the May 18, 2007 8:00 PM performance. The tickets showed that the Internet transaction was completed at 12:48 PM on May 18th, charged to an American Express card belonging to me—the sales clerk printed the tickets after we arrived and I showed my card.

To reach the Shubert Theatre we had made our way through the throng of humanity swarming about Times Square. I use the terms “throng” and “swarm” to describe the tens of thousands of people who populated the collection of blocks between 48th Street to the north and 42nd Street to the south and 9th Avenue on the west and 7th Avenue—including Broadway the transverse boulevard that disturbs the orderly Manhattan Midtown street grid of north-south avenues and east-west streets—on the east. There is an kinetic energy that permeates the crowds that collect at intersections waiting for the light to change and grant them right of way. And when the red light changes to green there is a surge as that pent up force is released and given freedom to move.

Contributing to that intensity of purpose that pedestrians in large cities, in general, and Manhattan, in particular, possess is the constant sounds of a teaming metropolitan center. The noise of accelerating cars and buses, the strain of brakes pulling these vehicles up short, the blare of horns exhorting the slow, the timid, the lost, to move. And there is the constant rhythm of human voices straining to be heard over the turned up volume of the city: some exhorting others to climb aboard a bus, enter a shop, purchase goods of indeterminate origin; others calling to one another encouraging them to come this way, look at that, hurry up…; others yelling into cell phones while straining to hear the response… And there are the recorded sounds of rock music blaring from stores, recorded voices of talking heads looking out earnestly from television screens.

As most all major metropolitan areas, New York has become a tourist theme park. This was clearly punctuated by the tour buses lining Broadway—their conductors urging the stream of pedestrians to board their conveyances for tours of every piece of the city’s real estate that has some view-worthy site. Tours cater to the reluctance each of us has to decide what to do, especially when you’re on vacation and want a respite from decision making. Tours satisfy the pressing need to be doing something on your time off so you don’t feel guilty about wasting time. And there is no better proof of this than the London-model double-decker tour buses packed with humanity—young, old, and every age in between: those on the uncovered upper deck clothed in foul weather gear as insurance against the menacing grey sky that spat periodically to maintain its threat.

All about the intersections at and around Time Square, every available piece of building surface space is covered with huge electronic displays filled with animated commercial messages to influence the teaming multitude below, all of it looping continuous. Buildings not covered with displays are painted over with huge print ads, the entire two faces of one building painted in bright red with an ad for Target. Panning a full 360 degrees in Times Square at 45th and Broadway, the whole area appears beset by gangs of pin stripped hoods who have tagged every bit of visible space with their gangs’ graffiti. No one walking though this part of the city would have any doubt about who owns what.

October 21, 2007 - Receipt #3 - Buying a New Cell Phone

2007-10-21T22:10:00.000-07:00

October 21, 2007 - Receipt #3 - Buying a New Cell Phone

Chronicling our four-day vacation in Manhattan through the receipts we’ve accumulated during our stay, I’ve come to the third, the purchase of a cell phone. I had left my own at home in San Jose as had IM—she usually doesn’t bring her phone relying on me to have mine. I had been toying with dumping Sprint for some time, largely because their network was not GSM and when I travel abroad GSM is the network I usually encounter. I was determined to end my several-years relationship with Sprint and now was the opportune time since I needed a new phone and the cost of getting one was to sign on with a new provider.

After we left the Buckingham, still full from the late night hamburger feast, the third purchase we made in Manhattan was two new Nokia GSM phones from the AT&T Store at 1330 Avenue of the Americas, between 53rd and 54th streets. The store is on the ground floor of the tall office building at 1330 near the corner of 53rd. The store was filled with an assortment of wireless handset, packaged in clear plastic containers containing details about each phone, features such as digital camera, MP3 player, etc. The other patrons of the store—a man and a woman, not together—were decidedly younger than IM and me, and their queries ran more to the features than the function IM and I were after. The young woman wanted help downloading ringtones. The young man wanted a new phone and was engaging the sales clerk in earnest conversation about the features of the various phones he could purchase.

I have to ask the question why do we need a portable phone besides the obvious reasons of being able to ring anyone in the world at will as long as you have their number. The question is better stated as why do we spend time calling one another to discuss the minutiae of everyday life. Is it because we have all become alienated by a world filled with so many people that we’ve become lost in the sea of humanity that surrounds us on roadways and especially the sidewalks and street corners of Manhattan. Lost and lonely amid teaming crowds of people, you can call someone you know and hear a familiar voice comfort you and ease the anxiety impressed upon you by the modern world.

The sales clerks were dressed in corporate wear, dark Docker slacks and solid blue and brown pressed shirts bearing the AT&T logo. The dark haired sales clerk helping IM and me was a native to the greater New York area, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island, New Jersey—one of those. My ear is not discriminating enough to place him based on his speech. The second light haired sales clerk behind the counter was East European, which became obvious when a third customer—the other two having been helped and sent on their way while IM and I waited for our phones to be activated—an attractive light haired young woman entered the store and began conversing in a language that sounded East European, the origin of which I haven’t a clue, and the second sales clerk responded in kind, obviously the young woman was a friend or co-worker on a busman’s holiday. When our sales clerk rang us up, the register receipt said 12:25 PM. We had entered the store a few minutes before noon, a half hour transaction, which cost us nothing up front but committed us to two years of AT&T wireless phone service. Why do we need cell phones?

As IM and I left the store and resumed our walk down 6th Avenue, I could see every third or fourth pedestrian approaching us talking earnestly into their wireless handset and the conversation were the banality of everyday life. “I’m running a few minutes late…”; “Can we make it a hour earlier…”; “Did you get the kids to school on time?”; “Remember to pick up the laundry…”; “We have to stop seeing each other…” In a multitasking world why waste time walking when you can walk and talk at the same time. Our two phones were stuck away in pockets though both were on in case any of our friends and family wanted to get in touch. No one called. We weren’t on anyone’s must call list. And being together we didn’t feel alienated in the imposing world surrounding us.

October 20, 2007 - Receipt #2 - Working Late at McDonald's

2007-10-20T22:07:00.000-07:00

October 20, 2007 - Receipt #2 - Working Late at McDonald's

I’m recounting a four-day vacation in Manhattan through the receipts I’ve accumulated during the stay. Yesterday I covered my first receipt and today, I describe my second, one from the McDonald’s on 57th Street near the corner of 6th Avenue. As I walked out of the Buckingham lobby and onto 57th Street I was struck by a sense of déjà vu. The last time IM and I came to Manhattan, we stayed at the Parker Meridian across 57th and a half block west of the Buckingham. We had come in the spring of 2001 when New York still possessed a sense of innocence and invincibility, before the terror of September 11th put an end to both and the city joined Pearl Harbor as the second place in the United States to be attacked by a foreign enemy. The street didn’t feel any different as a result of that horrific event—time having a way of dulling the emotions that had once been a sharp unrelenting pain. Time has a way of burying misery and suffering. It has a way of burying everything.

As I waited for the signal to change, at the intersection of 57th and 6th Avenue, I looked left and saw the entrance to Central Park and on the right corner of Central Park South and 6th what once was the St. Moritz Hotel. During the 1980s IM and our two daughters stayed there nearly every time we visited the city. Back then, the place was own by Leona Helmsley, the “Queen of Mean”. We liked it because of it being near the Park and away from the crowds surrounding the hotels within and around Times Square. It’s now the Ritz Carlton. Gone or at least less obvious are the ladies of the night that once graced the sidewalk across 6th from the Café de la Paix, the bistro on the ground floor of the St. Moritz with its outdoor patio tables. From our room on the 6th Avenue side of the St Moritz, IM and I spent the evenings after dinner or the theater watching the ladies ply their trade on the pedestrians and motorists along the block between 58th and Central Park South: reality TV without the electronic medium.

I recalled one evening after taking the girls to the theater during a trip in the summer of 1984, we were all a bit hungry and I decided to pop down to the convenience story on the St Moritz side of 6th a half block south of the hotel and pick up sodas and chips. As I was returning from my errand, one of the ladies decided to follow me back into the hotel and to pretend she was with me as I entered the elevator. The house detective watching the entire scene unfold blocked the lady’s way and politely asked if she were a guest of the hotel. As she made eye contact with me to appeal for help, the elevator doors closed and I was spirited away—Deus ex machina.

The desk clerk at the Buckingham had said I’d find the McDonalds just across 6th Avenue east on 57th and he was right on the money. Neither IM nor I have eaten a McDonald’s hamburger in so long I can’t remember when nor how the food tasted, but the smell of deep fried potatoes and hamburger patties sizzling on the kitchen griddle brought it all back to me as if it were yesterday. When IM and I first got married, we moved to Landover, Maryland where I had a day job at Bendix Field Engineering located at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. All we had to our names was a brand new Buick Regal—GMAC owned most of it; which we had brought before leaving El Paso, where we had just gotten married; our clothes; and a radio. IM was pregnant and we didn’t have medical insurance. I took a second job to pay the doctor and hospital bills. The first of my evening jobs was at a McDonald’s competitor called Hot Shoppes, owned by the Marriott Corporation. The place was right across the street from the Landover Garden Apartments, at 7254 Landover Road, apartment D, where we lived. I would come home from my day job ten miles north and west of Landover, go across Landover Road to the hamburger restaurant and put in six hours before coming home with a bag of leftover hamburgers and French fries. That lasted a month before I got a much better paying job fixing television sets. The money I made during that month though paid the doctor’s initial fees and the leftover hamburgers and fries saved us money on food. Standing at the counter of the McDonald’s waiting to order, I knew what it was like to be working in a hamburger restaurant at 47 W 57th St. an hour and fifteen minutes before midnight serving the last die-hard customer before shutting the place down for the night at 11:00 o’clock.

Having flown coach and gone without anything to eat all day, IM and I were starving. I ordered a cheeseburger for me and a hamburger for IM each with an order of fries and a large orange juice. Paying the bill and picking up my order I returned to the hotel suppressing the urge to eat the fries as I walked. Back in our room I opened the bag and to our surprise we find two hamburgers and two cheeseburgers, which turned out great since each individual burger was so small. We gulped down the burgers and fries washing them down with orange juice. Surprisingly our hunger was sated and neither of us felt so stuffed we couldn’t sleep. However, being the first day of a vacation and only 7:00 PM by our biological clock, we opted to stay up and watch the “Tonight Show with Jay Leno” to give the burgers time to settle. The monologue turned out to be quite funny, though none of the jokes were noteworthy enough to remember.

October 19, 2007 - Receipt #1: The 47-Year Drive from JFK to Midtown

2007-10-18T22:23:00.000-07:00

October 19, 2007 - Receipt #1: The 47-Year Drive from JFK to Midtown

As I said yesterday, I’m recounting a four-day vacation to Manhattan through the receipts I’ve accumulated during the stay. Receipts are what time discards as it moves on. You could say that about photographs or movies, are written words jotted down to capture a feeling, a locations, a thought. Unlike all these things, however, a receipt is something someone or some thing gives to you acknowledging a transaction. The first receipt for our Manhattan trip, which I didn’t take though it was offered, was for the taxi ride from JFK to the Buckingham Hotel at 101 West 57th Street, two blocks south of Central Park at the corner of West 57th and Avenue of the Americas.

Though I didn’t take the taxi receipt I did take instead the official Port Authority of NY and NJ Taxi Information form. It recorded that a taxi with Medallion number 9K32 picked IM and I up at Terminal 8 of JFK at 21:27 hours (9:27 PM). On the reverse side it says that the fare from JFK to Manhattan is $45 plus tolls. Our cabbie was from Asia, my guess, Korea. He spoke so few words it was tough to fathom his country of origin, but he understood my request and took the Midtown Tunnel into Manhattan, traveling the Long Island Expressway, Interstate 495, West off the Grand Central Parkway. Most cabbies would stay on the Grand Central past La Guardia Airport and over the Triboro Bridge into Manhattan entering the city at 125th Street and then take the FDR into Midtown. It’s slightly longer and more fare. It was the route I drove my rental car heading to Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, when I commuted monthly between the coasts for a weeklong stay in the home office of the publication I edited. Instead of heading into the City from the Triboro, I would drive north on the Major Deegan Expressway, pick up Interstate 95, and head for the George Washington Bridge and New Jersey beyond.

When I was right out of high school and through less than a year of my tour of duty in the U.S. Navy, I was stationed on Long Island for a four month stretch starting the first week of 1964. Two other sailors and I arrived by bus from Dam Neck, Virginia where we had spent the good part of the last half of 1963 learning computer science. Back then, the Navy taught recruits as much as you might receive in college courses on the function of just about anything electronic. We were assigned to a factory school in New Hyde Park run by Sperry Rand. I only bring this up because it put me on Long Island from January 1964 to early June that year. And it was a most memorable time in my life. I would meet my wife of this many years since. I had just turned 18, the legal age to drink in New York back then—in Dam Neck all you could get at 18 was kiddie beer. The Navy was supplementing my meager pay—hardly enough to subsist upon outside of a Navy base—with a daily room and board per diem, which made for a pretty big payday each month considering I was renting a room in a private home.

Our Cabbie smoothly made the transition from the Grand Central onto the Long Island Expressway and headed into Midtown. Off to our right as we made the turn we could see the two observatory towers of the 1964/65 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows. IM and I had gone to the fair during the time we first started dating in the spring of 1964. I don’t know how many times I’ve driven or have been driven past this sight and not reflected back on those early days of our youth and marveled at how quickly the four months we spent together in the Spring of 1964 past and how fast those four months telescoped backward in time as our lives plummeted pell-mell forward. All of us spend our lives passing places that hold special memories of our past. IM and I were about to spend three days revisiting a few of them.

IM had a Japanese camera backed—since stolen in a burglary of our home some 11 years later—and she took photos of our time together back then. When you look back on old pictures the first thing you notice is the hair styles and fashions that clearly place the people captured in the frame at a era in the past. IM is shown in one with a lime green button-front knit sweater worn over a white lace blouse atop a pleated heather green wool skirt. Her lovely blond hair is coiffed in a slight beehive style with a light green ribbon, holding down the front of her beehive and accenting her bangs, tied at the back of her neck. She facing the camera straight on smiling, her blue eyes beaming, her left shoulder forward to the camera and her right shoulder receding slightly toward the background. It’s a sunny spring day. She’s standing on a perfectly manicured deep green lawn in front of the single-story, suburban 1950s home where she’s renting a room. A three-step concrete stair leads to the front door off to her left and just out of the frame. Immediately behind her is a lamp pole with a large egg-shaped glass enclosure hiding the high-wattage incandescent bulb inside. In that picture she is just over half the age of our oldest daughter. She’s carefree, unmindful of the future awaiting her, concerned only with the here and now. When we were that young there was only tomorrow.

Once in Manhattan, the cabbie took 3rd Avenue north until 57th and then headed west, crossing Park, Madison, 5th and finally arriving at the hotel, which none of us could see from the street. A truck was parked at the curb and was partially obscuring the view. The cabbie eased the cab forward to the middle of the block asking again for the address, which I relayed. I asked him to swing around again and stop at the corner of 6th and 57th, which he did and sure enough behind the truck was the Buckingham. I tipped him $10 bucks and wished him a good evening. We checked into our room and tried to decide what to eat at 10:45 at night. We hadn’t eaten anything all day. I asked the desk clerk what was nearby and he rattled off a couple of restaurants. I asked him what fast food was close by and he said a McDonalds on West 57th across 6th Avenue from the hotel.

October 18, 2007 - Grasping at Fleeting Moments at JFK

2007-10-17T22:06:00.000-07:00

October 18, 2007 - Grasping at Fleeting Moments at JFK

Sitting in the new American Airlines departure lounge at John F. Kennedy Airport on Monday morning May 21st 2007 at about 10:45 AM Eastern Standard Time, the only reminder my wife IM and I have that this is New York is a food kiosk called the Brooklyn Deli across the way from us. We could be in any airport in any large city anywhere in the world. I have been in several over the past few months—Ben-Gurion International outside Tel Aviv, Chiang Kai-Shek outside Taipei, Pudong International Airport outside Shanghai, and Narita outside of Tokyo—where all my outbound and inbound Asian flights connected. These giant gateways have a sameness to them that seeks to sooth the travelers’ anxiety over being displaced and in limbo between home and their final destination. Airports are also time portals where the traveler leaves the routine of Eastern Standard Time, in our case, and returns to the far more familiar realm of Pacific Standard Time. We’re all time travelers, us humans. Our lives move from one second to another, one minute to another, and so on from conception to extinction, each of us marking time in our geographic region. The airplane is the magic conveyance that allows us to jump from one region to another to experience life as someone far removed from our time zone.

As each second, minute, hour, and day passes we leave who we were in that past time behind. You can see your bygone selves and the state of the world around them in the still and moving pictures we make of those departed seconds. Four days in the Big Apple have zoomed by and all that remains are pictures and the credit card receipts documenting what we did while we were here. They are the only proof to ourselves and anyone else that we actually spent time in this big city. Furthermore, how much of what we believe happened actually happened and how much has our memory been embellished by what we want to believe the experience to have been.

About 25 years ago, I struggled to stay awake on a summer evening in 1982 during Zoe Caldwell’s performance of Medea on Broadway with Mitch Ryan playing Jason at the Cort Theater, 138 West 48th Street. I knew that the play featured Dame Judith Anderson as Nurse; but learned afterwards that the director Robert Whitehead had directed a younger Dame Anderson as Medea in a landmark 1947 production; and that both this and the earlier production were based on the play by American poet Robinson Jeffers, who adapted Euripides’s work for the modern stage. All those associated with the production now well along in age or deceased—Dame Anderson passed away in 1992 at the ripe old age of 94; Robert Whitehead lived another ten years dying in 2002 at the age of 86. I had inadvertently been privy to a once-in-a-lifetime event and learned about it after the fact. The realization made the experience of far greater import now than it had been at the time of the performance. In my older age, I realize that too many experiences of my life were far more enjoyable on reflection than when they occurred.

Our outbound flight from San Francisco International on Thursday May 17, 2007 at 11:30 AM, lasted around five and a half hours. All of that time I spent curled up in a coach class window seat in row 34 on the port side of the Boeing 767 aircraft wishing the time would past faster. I disembarked that many hours older, having flown 2586 miles from one side of the country to another, viewing below me, when I glanced out my window and cloud cover permitting, the landscape of the United States. For a matter of seconds I saw the peaks of the Rocky Mountains, the sprawl of Chicago, the ribbon of the Mississippi, some of it I recognized, some of it I guessed at. I could no longer hold onto the moments we passed over Chicago than I could grab the seconds of time that it is taking for me to write these words. Pictures and written records documenting our movements through time are our only proof of what we’ve done.

I’ve always collected receipts, not methodically, but folded and crammed into my wallet: receipts for cash purchases because I can’t bring myself to throw them away and they explain why I have paper where greenbacks used to be; credit card receipts to refresh my memory about something I’ve bought but don’t remember what when I see the statement at the end of the month; and more recently ATM receipts—I’m given the option to take cash without one but I always demand to have it—because I typically don’t record the withdrawal in my checkbook until much later. We live in a world driven by the acquisition and disposal of money. The system of finance that regulates our lives in all the advanced nations is analogous to water in nature.

Where water is in abundance, lush natural growth occurs. In all monetary societies, where an excess of wealth accumulates, you see the extravagant development in places like New York, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Dubai, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Moscow, and the list goes on. Shinning, glass, steel, and concrete skyscrapers shoot up like stands of giant sequoias: every bit of the development documented in the form of financial transactions, once recorded on paper but in the 21st century in the form of binary data stored on hard drives, magnetic tape, and optical media in a multitude of storage farms scattered throughout the world. There is a record of everything everyone does in our advanced society. I want to recount the past four days through the receipts I’ve stashed away in my wallet. Tomorrow, we’ll start with receipt #1.

May 19, 2007 - A Walkabout in Manhattan

2007-09-09T01:58:00.001-07:00

May 19, 2007 - A Walkabout in Manhattan

It’s ten minutes before four o’clock on May 19, 2006. I’m sitting in the Buckingham Hotel on West 57th Street and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. The day is overcast with periods of light rain. We had left the hotel early this morning after an in-room breakfast of donuts and coffee (for me) and tea (for my wife IM). Our quest was to pick up tickets for the musical “Curtains” at the Al Hirshfeld Theater on West 44th Street near 8th Avenue and to visit the exhibition of photographs by photographer Stephen Shore at the International Center of Photography at 1114 Avenue of the Americas. Along the way we remind ourselves to find a Wells Fargo Bank ATM to keep from paying the fees for withdrawals from another bank’s ATM.

We exited the Buckingham and head a few steps east on 57th to 6th Avenue then turn south for a block to where we were confronted with a street faire that had closed 6th Avenue to vehicular traffic along its length from 56th south beyond 44th Avenue—as far as IM and I would venture today. We joined the crowd ambling down the busy thoroughfare that would otherwise be teaming with a continuous stream of traffic. Our progress was interrupted by traffic signals that enabled cross-town traffic to traverse the closed off main south-to-north one-way artery. Lining the broad boulevard were street vendors serving an array of foods of the kind found in abundance on the streets of the city any day of the week. These vendors now congregated along Avenue of the Americas. The smells fought for the attention of your olfactory glands, while the barkers at various booths attacked our tympanic membrane, and the makeshift and professionally-made signage screamed at your eyes: “free samples of kettle corn!” “Fresh-made Gyros!” “New York souvenirs!”…

It’s overcast and the temperature is somewhere between 50 and 60 degrees Fahrenheit. I have my Panasonic digital video camera recording our slow amble down the Avenue of the Americas. I’m trying to record the stream of pedestrians coming toward us as we walk to capture the essence of the scene. It’s as if the skyscrapers along 6th Avenue were a block of houses belonging to wealthy homeowners and they had sealed off the street running in front of their homes for a combination block party and yard sale. And all the neighborhoods around came streaming in to celebrate and buy the proffered goods. Viewed from the upper floors of any one of the skyscrapers along the broad thoroughfare, the sea of humanity that streamed along this massive boulevard appeared as insignificant as a trail of ants. In the midst of this teaming crowd, IM and I felt as insignificant as a couple of marching workers in a long steam of others making their way to and from their colony.

We reach 44th Street and we turn right heading toward time square and the theaters beyond. It’s started to drizzle as we make our way through the light pedestrian traffic running between the avenues. Umbrellas have sprouted up among some on-coming amblers, but we carry on relying on our water-resistant jackets to ward off the light sprinkles. Crossing Times Square we are enveloped by an ocean of humanity spilling off the sidewalks and onto the streets. Our ears are assaulted by a cacophony of horns from the traffic in the street and the sound of conversations from the thousands of people surrounding us as we stream across this heavily congested intersection. Some are talking loudly to one another and others are screaming into cell phones. Add to the sound of human voices is the amplified recorded music blaring from storefronts and passing cars. Mix this with the smell of food wafting from pizza parlors, hamburger shops, the scent of humanity pressed close together, and the odors wafting off the concrete and asphalt and your senses are completely overwhelmed. Now I know how the wildebeest feels as they ford a stream with predators laying in wait for the weak to fall.

We pass beyond Time Square winding our way among clusters of people assembling in front of theaters as we head toward 8th Avenue from Broadway: the Belasco for Journey’s End, The Shubert for Spamalot, the Majestic for Phantom of the Opera, the Broadhurst for Le Miserables, and the Helen Hayes for Xanadu. By the time we reach 8th Avenue, we realize we have come too far south and need to walk up 8th to 45th Street turn right to reach the Al Hirschfeld Theatre where we retrieve the tickets for the matinee performance of Curtains on Sunday.

First objective accomplished, we continue east on 45th Street heading back to Avenue of the Americas in search of the International Center of Photography. We turn right on Avenue of the Americas retracing our steps to 44th Street. Just beyond on the right we arrive at our destination, enter the building at 1133 Avenue of the Americas, pay for our senior-discounted tickets and proceed into the museum. I say museum because the interior was a simple maze leading off to the right after you enter with nothing in the center of any of the walled off sections. The walls on the inside of the maze are lined with photos at eye level.

The exhibition we first encounter comprises photographs of notable African Americans under the title “Let your Motto be Resistance: African American Portraiture from 1865 to the Present.” Photos on display are from a variety of different photographers, some anonymous. The photographers—James VanDerZee, Berenice Abbott, Edward Weston, Gordon Parks, Irving Penn, and Carl Van Vechten—are not known to me. But, the subjects they photographed are major figures in black history, from Sojourner Truth and Marion Anderson to Martin Luther King, the poet Langston Hughes, the writer James Baldwin, and Nat King Cole to name but a few.

The second exhibition and the one that bought us to the museum is entitled “The Biological Landscape: The Photography of Stephen Shore 1968-1993.” The images are compelling because they cast light on the everyday things in life, a street scene in downtown El Paso, Texas, where I grew up and IM and I were married, a dirt road in the town of Presidio, Texas, where my mother and father often visited their favorite priest Father Benito, transferred to the town south and east of El Paso from Our Lady of Assumption Catholic Church in El Paso, where he tended his flock long enough to convert my father from Southern Baptist to Catholic—no mean feat. A room full of additional photographs in the collection showed other place he had visited on a road trip across the country in the late 1960s and early 1970s—a sort of Jack Kerouac in photos. There is somber melancholy exuded by each of the images captured on paper, perhaps because they picture life out of the mainstream of the popular culture that suggest mainstream America. Perhaps the images, all strikingly beautiful, reflect the photographer’s own sense of alienation and melancholy, clearly visible in the artist’s own self-portrait.

The museum had two other collections, one devoted to the photographs of Amelia Earhart and the other to the photographs of Crum. The first collection were of interest because IM and I grew up in the era immediately after the famed aviatrix met her untimely death, attempting a round the world flight, a handsome woman taking on a man’s challenge long before women were considered capable of such feats. I often thought she resembled Charles Lindberg in appearance, an female version of the Spirit-of-St-Louis hero. I wonder why pop culture icons that bend gender are attractive to both sexes. She was the one of the few who defied the conventional wisdom of the place of women in a male dominated world, perhaps another reason for the fascination she held for the multitude. The fact that she was photographed constantly and her image appearing in magazine articles, print advertisements, and newsreel footage also contributed to her fascination by the masses. Finally, that she died young and the remaining images are freeze frames such as those on these walls of an attractive young woman captured in time contributes to her mystic.

Our journey back in time complete, we resume our walk about Manhattan midtown on a overcast Saturday afternoon.

September 19, 2006 – Intersection of Laoshun Lu and Zhang Yang Lu

2006-10-03T22:26:00.000-07:00

September 19, 2006 – Intersection of Laoshun Lu and Zhang Yang Lu

I’m in Pudong Shanghai sitting on a low concrete wall at the entrance to a Starbucks on the northeast corner of the large shopping complex called Times Square across from Nextage, the second largest department store in the world. Times Square is a building only slightly smaller than the over five story high, block-long Nextage. The two giant structures sit on the eastern corners at the intersection of Laoshan Road and Zhang Yang Road. The intersection is alive with pedestrian and automotive traffic. The air is filled with the sounds of blaring horns, the shrill of intersection crossing guards whistling to chastise the constant stream of foot and auto infractions that continue to occur despite their shrill commands to cease.

There is a cooling breeze blowing making the late summer day quite pleasant to be out of doors in a long sleeve print dress shirt and a pair of $12 Costco jeans. I’ve just been told by the guard outside Times Square that I cannot sit on the wall but can take an outdoor chair in Starbucks’ patio dining area: three round tables each with a nondescript umbrella and four web vinyl metal frame chairs. The entire exchange was carried out in Chinese but I understood the body language. I had initially considered sitting in the chairs but felt I needed to buy a Caffe Latte to earn the privilege, but obviously not. How much is a double Caffe Latte in Shanghai? I learn after inadvertently ordering two that they cost 25 RMB each ($3.16), the pair about the cost of a packet of underwear at Nextage.

I sit at the table with my plastic bag purchase from Nextage beside the two cups of latte I just purchased, one capped the other open so I can sip as I write in my Reporter’s Notebook the impressions of the busy intersection. Looking diagonally across the intersection, there is a nine story building on the right. The corner of the rectangular building facing me comprises a cylindrical structure that extends a floor above the main structure. The cylinder is wrapped in a metal mesh that hides a structure of equally spaced vertical beams with horizontal beams crossing between the vertical ones at equally space distances. Sitting atop the cylinder is what appears to be a crown, but is in reality the vertical and horizontal beams without the metal mesh covering. Two rectangular structures flank both sides of the cylindrical crown, everything painted a gray with the slightest hint of brown. The entire corner reminded me of a castle. The skyline of Shanghai is populated by buildings with characteristics that demand to be noticed.

As I write a young couple takes the table next to me and the man begins to talk loudly in Mandarin to his female companion. What strikes me about the exchange is the amount of talking the young man does. He goes on and on with short responses from his companion. It’s the opposite of most conversation involving a man and a woman. It’s as if he were giving a dissertation on some topic and she were interjecting comments on the points he’s making.

I notice that the wind has begun to gust and the stiff plastic bags containing my purchase from Nextage are flapping about. As I continue to write, a sudden burst of wind is strong enough to abruptly move the bag with enough force to send the second cup of latte tumbling off the table. It hits with a “plop” and the contents spill onto the concrete between my table and the table where the couple is seated. Luckily none of the liquid spills on me or my neighbors and I take the handful of napkins and begin to soak up the mess. The talkative male asks if he can help and I smile and shake my head no. I take soaked napkins and empty cup and cap into Starbucks. The lady attendant is already on her way out with a mop to clean up the spill. If I were into portends, I would think that the wind was telling me to move along, which I decide to do.

The older I’ve gotten the more pleasure I derive from walking about new places taking in the life on the street. When I was a young child, walking about each new place my family and I moved became part of my getting to know my new surroundings. It was the only thing I could afford to do. As a young boy, I recalled running about freely through the streets of Biloxi, Mississippi near our house. When I was old enough to be in school, I explored the streets of Morningside Heights in El Paso, Texas where I went to grade school a few blocks from our house. As a nine-year old I explored the suburban neighborhood of Ponce Puerto Rico somehow managing to communicate in pidgin Spanish with the neighborhood kids. As an older pre-teen I delivered papers on the streets of Lawton, Oklahoma. As a high-school senior, I walked the streets of downtown Tacoma and Seattle, Washington. The street life of a city tells a great deal about its economic and political health and much about the character of the place too.

Now as then, walking the streets of a city, I see the spectrum of humanity from the lowest economic strata to the highest. What strikes me about the byways of Pudong is that I didn’t see any souls who had given up. Perhaps they were there just as they are in any major metropolitan area living in boxes on the sidewalk, feeding themselves from the discards of others, but hidden away from the gaze of passersby. Along this stretch of Laoshun Road, I didn’t see evidence of them anywhere. Every soul along the blocks I walked seemed to be engaged in some kind of work, the lowest on the economic strata collecting recyclables, the highest collecting cash from the sale of goods and services. The character of this stretch of Laoshun Road was rampant entrepreneurship, mixed with an energy that was palpable. It was almost electric, a whole community of overachievers, all wanting to do something faster than their neighbor. This was the energy of a people suddenly grasping their own potential and being propelled by the realization.

I’m reminded of another time 43 years ago when as a young man I disembarked the train that had carried me from Yokosuka to Tokyo at Shimbashi station. It was mid afternoon as I recalled on a Saturday and I found my way to the Dai Ichi Hotel nearby the train station. Back then it was the “Holiday Inn” of Japan, a comfortable hotel with Japanese and Western accommodations. Dressed in a suit that I had made in Yokosuka, I checked in, dropped off my overnight case in my room and returned to lobby and out the front door to explore Tokyo. Walking along Chuo Dori to the Ginza, I recalled that same electric energy of people in a hurry to get their work done. As in Pudong, I kept coming upon high rise buildings under construction; this at a time when you could look out from Tokyo tower and not see any building over six or seven stories in height. When I returned to Tokyo twenty five years later the entire skyline was filled with skyscrapers. I had arrived in Pudong well after the start of this incredible building boom that continues around me as I walk, surrounded by skyscrapers and round the clock construction.

Three days later I’m in a taxi being driven to Pudong airport for a flight back to San Jose with a change of planes in Tokyo. It’s around 8:00 AM right in the middle of the morning rush hour and the traffic along Yanggao Road, a wide high-speed boulevard that is teaming with traffic and the constant sound of horns as drivers exhort one another to move along or get out of the way; our cab driver aggressively moving from lane to lane making headway against the slower moving traffic. The air is filled with the exhaust of countless cars, trucks, and buses as polluted if not more than LA during the worst of the smog in the 1950s and 60s when pollution laws were nonexistent. This is the social cost of progress and you could argue to price a society pays to pull itself in line with other wealthy nations.

What strikes me, however, is the infrastructure. The roads are newly built, pothole free and made for high speed travel. The traffic lights at intersections are new and the computer system controlling them efficient enough to keep traffic moving in all directions. Everywhere you look the infrastructure has kept pace with the runaway development: roads, airports, communications, airlines—the planes are some of the newest I’ve traveled in a while. This is a place in its ascendancy, a sharp contrast to the U.S. with its once envied highway system cracked and pocked full of patched potholes; an airline industry that running in bankruptcy, an electrical grid that strains under the weight of extreme heat and cold.

The contrast is startling and it makes me a bit sad that we no longer seem to have the will to maintain our crumbling culture. I’m reminded of an aging fat cat with clogged arteries, a mind that beginning to loose intellectual sharpness, a body that would rather languish on a couch in front of a TV rather than compete in some strenuous activity. I guess cultures like people grow old. Old as I am, I can relate, though I refuse to become sedentary in my declining years—death will have to catch me, I don’t plan to sit about waiting for him.

September 17 2006 – Reflections on a Shanghai Sunday Morning

2006-09-17T14:02:00.000-07:00

1030 HRS: Lobby Restaurant (Get Name) breakfast buffet—bacon and eggs over easy with croissants and butter (I get the last of the chocolate croissants). Outside the high ceiling restaurant, peppered with last minute diners, the sky is overcast on this Sunday morning.

1100 HRS: Out of the hotel and crossing Yanggao Nanlu (lu “road” nan “south”), I begin walking down Lan Chun Lu on my way to Nextage, the second largest department store in the world. As soon as I cross Yanggao I pass an upscale wine shop, no doubt frequented by the guests at the Sofitel. I look inside as I call my daughter RF to wish her happy birthday. I let the phone ring for a bit then leave a message and turn from the wine shop heading west on Lan Chun. About a half block along the way, I pass four men squatting on the sidewalk playing cards, their bicycles—parked on either side of the foursome—are loaded down with cardboard. I surmise that they recycle cardboard and have taken a break to see if they can supplement their earnings at their fellow workers’ expense. A short while later, RF calls me back and we have a chat as I walk. I describe the wine shop—RF and her husband AF are into wine, my encounter with the gamblers, and my destination. She recounts her Saturday birthday celebration, which has just concluded with dinner. I ring off wishing her happy birthday and telling her to kiss the grand kids for me.

1120 HRS: I had stopped at the intersection where Lan Chun crosses Dong Fang Lu, which is a wider boulevard teaming with pedestrians. I had found an eddy in the stream of pedestrian traffic to stand and talk not wanting to hazard a crossing while conversing. Once across the intersection, Lan Chun has grown more congested with pedestrian and street traffic. I’m now walking along a tree lined sidewalk with vendors showing their wares on any space they can spread a cloth and not completely obstruct foot traffic—pirated DVDs, watches, handbags, fruits and vegetables from wooden carts, cooked foods, etc. My senses are overwhelmed with: the smell of engine exhaust and cooking food from street vendors and the restaurants lining Lan Chun Lu; the steady stream of young and old faces coming toward me; the sound of honking horns and chatter of conversations all around me—buyers and sellers bartering, men and women speaking earnestly into cell phones, conversations between friends catching up on the latest gossip, news, or personal experiences; the sea of Chinese characters filling my field of view advertising everything a shopper might want to buy. The shops along Lan Chun Lu are small businesses, not outlets of well known chains—stores selling small consumer appliances, barbers, beauty shops, small retailers selling mostly women’s fashions, a shop offering chairs—hard to tell if he made the finished goods on site…

What I’ve noticed walking west along Lan Chun Lu is that the street is narrower than the wide boulevard Yanggao Nanlu and Hua Mu Lu where I ran earlier this morning. Traffic is more congested with cars competing for space with bicycles and motorcycles, and motor scooters. On the sidewalks, two wheeled motorized or manually propelled cycles vie with pedestrians for right of way. The sidewalks serve as parking as well for all the forms of transport, with pedestrians weaving their way among the beached machines. When I reach the intersection where Lan Chun Lu crosses Nan Quan Lu, for some reason I think it’s time to turn right and head north if I’m to reach Nextage. The route along Nan Quan has a mix of high rise residential—one named the Golden Pool Garden—as well as store front businesses and the occasional big business—the Bank of Shanghai, which is open on Sunday. Just before I come upon the bank, I’m struck by a young boy, pre or early teens, walking toward me with his grandmother, holding her arm—both about the same height. He is speaking rapidly to her and she is listening intently to his every word. As I cross a canal that runs beneath Nan Quan Lu, I see Feiyu Printing, which is on the opposite side of the road from me and across from Fortune Securities in a larger building that befits its lofty name at the intersection of Nan Quan and Bei Zhangjiabang Lu. Next to this enterprise with the upscale name is another commercial structure that has one tenant sporting the English name East Day Bar and another proclaiming itself Hainer Health & Fit Keeping with the slogan “By Our Hands.” I find the juxtaposition interesting—financial well being next to sensory alteration and physical therapy.

1200 HRS: Beyong Bei Zhangjiabang Lu, Nan Quan Lu becomes Laoshan Lu, which is a commercial corridor similar to what I’ve been passing through. I see in the street bicyclist loaded down with cardboard. This time I notice that they have a bell they ring as they ride, no doubt asking the merchant to bring out their discarded cardboard. The one establishment that makes me stop and take note is a restaurant along the way with the unlikely name of “Smart Noshery Makes You Slobber.” Now if that isn’t a name to conjure I don’t know what is. It appears to be doing a good business. The brisk breeze and the shade from the trees keep the walk comfortable until Laoshan Lu crosses the wider boulevard of Zhang Yang Lu. There across the boulevard is my destination, the huge Nextage Department store. I join the pedestrians massed on this side of Zhang Yang waiting for the traffic light to change. I see crossing guards on all for corners of the intersection in light blue uniforms, whistles at the ready to chastise pedestrians and motorists alike for any infractions. They have their jobs cut out for them for motorists routinely run red lights and weave in and out of the stream of pedestrians crossing the intersection, who likewise taunt the lights and the crossing guards. The pedestrians resemble water flowing around obstacles that are also moving. I manage to make the crossing without any close calls and momentarily look back at the chaotic corridor before going into the southeast entrance to the huge shopping complex that is Nextage.

Inside the door, I pass a very large Haagan Daz Ice Cream shop which is across the way from a restaurant that I don’t remember the name of. Beyond these two eateries lies aisle after aisle of cosmetics with every designers’ name I know and many that I don’t. I continue down the aisle that confronted me as I entered looking on either side for an escalator to the next floor—this is not the place to buy men’s running shorts. I find what I’m looking for and proceed to the next floor, which is ladies fashions, up to the third floor which is linens and things as well as more ladies clothing. The fourth floor is devoted to men’s fashions and I get off the vertical treadmill and walk about among the aisle after aisle of men’s suits and casual wear all sporting high price tags and well known designer names. I see shirts that I really would like to buy but not at the prices shown. I realize that what I’m looking for is not here and take the escalator up one flight to the fifth floor and find my quest: athletic attire of every kind. I find two pair of white running shorts, two tee shirts just over 100 RMB. What a deal. I make my selection and the sales clerk and I communicate through body language and hand signs. She checks to make sure I want both pair—they are different sizes—large and extra large—but I figure for the price it didn’t matter if one didn’t fit. I reassure her that I want both and then select a packet of large tee-shirts. She writes up my purchase on a sales slip and I hand her a 100 RMB note, but she points to a cashier and hands me the sales slip. I realize that I have to pay the cashier and return with the paid receipt to collect my goods, which I do.

1225 HRS: Purchase complete, I begin to rethink whether I might really want to buy those shirts I had seen on the fourth floor. Off the escalator I begin looking at all the different counters and get stopped at the shoes where I see the familiar Playboy brand on men’s shoes. (If you want to build a brand, start in a newly affluent place where all brands start off equal.) I like the shoes and am about to buy a pair or two but think better of it. Start off to buy a shirt, get distracted into buying shoes, and once that purchase is made, end up with a suit. Spending RMBs didn’t seem like spending money. I content myself with the running togs and leave the way I came in. Once outside I notice that the building across the street is called Times Square, which I remember from my previous sightseeing tour through here in July. At the entrance to Times Square is a Starbucks and I decide I need a Caffe Latte. Taking my life in my hands I cross with the current of pedestrian to the other side of Zhang Yang, enter the coffee shop and purchase my latte, which I bring outside to drink at the outdoor tables set up in front of the shop.

1245 HRS: Latte consumed, I begin my return trip to the Sofitel retracing my route. As I reach the canal that Nan Quan Lu crosses just beyond its intersection with Bei Zhangjiabang Lu, my progress is arrested by the sound of a saxophone. At the top of the bridge over the canal I spy the lone male musician with an audience of one sitting beside him one of the several benches beneath a crawling plant covered trellis on the northern side of the canal. Nearer the bridge on the same side are two fishermen lines dipping into the pea soup colored waters. The melody that made me stop and listen had the familiar sound of a Chinese melody, nothing I could name but distinctly Chinese. He ends the piece and I wait for him to play another only this time when he begins, it’s the quite familiar melody of Greensleeves. Emotionally, I’ve been transported from one world to another in the matter of minutes. As I complete my journey to the Sofitel, I’m renewed and my steps seem lighter.

September 4, 2006 – Spending the Day with the Scots

2006-09-04T20:27:00.000-07:00

September 4, 2006 – Spending the Day with the Scots

IM and I drove over to visit our daughter MS, her husband GS and our grandkids ES and JS, in Pleasanton this Sunday morning just before noon. IM and I spent the afternoon with MS at the Scottish Highland Games running at the Alameda County Fair Grounds over the weekend. It was one of those perfect summer days in the East Bay, temperature in the mid 80s Fahrenheit, an on shore breeze blowing a cooling wind off San Francisco Bay over the East Bay hills and cooling the cloudless summer day to the point that it felt just the slightest bit chilling when sitting in the shade, where we spent the afternoon watching Scottish Highland Dancing, which concluded with the Sailor's Hornpipe. After the dancing concluded at around 4:00 PM, we walked over to the grandstand of the fairground's horse racing track where the last of the Highland Games were concluding. We watched men attired in kilts heft briefcase shape 175-lbs lead weights along a course that rounded a cone and reversed to a starting cone. The trek was repeated until their muscles and/or will gave out. The man who went the furthest before dropping his load won. The same competition followed for women who had to heft 85-lbs loads. There is something compelling and absorbing about watching someone straining every muscle in their body after all their strength has seemingly been exhausted to carry on beyond their limit. We were less than twelve feet from one end of their short track and we could see the exertion and determination in their expression as well as the disappointment and relief when they quit their pursuit. Watching their struggle was more compelling than who won or lost.

The Scots have been coming together in these gatherings longer than anyone can remember. In the Highlands, every year members of a clan would assemble to celebrate and strengthen bonds. The practice continued in the U.S., Canada, and elsewhere in the British Empire when large numbers of clans were forced to emigrate from the highlands after the Battle of Culloden and legislation of 1746 that led to the destruction of the traditional clan system in Scotland. Many of the displaced arrived in Nova Scotia—the largest settlement of Gaelic speaking Scots outside of Great Britain, other parts of Canada, the United States—especially in the South, and Australia. A large number of Scots found their way to California during the Gold Rush. One newly arrived Scot was among the 48 members of the first State Convention in Monterey, California that drafted the first California Constitution on October 10, 1849. Formed in 1865, The Caledonian Club of San Francisco, sponsors of the Pleasanton Highland Games, started the first Highland Games, in 1866 and the tradition has continued to this day

The competition concluded at about 5:00 PM at which time nearly everyone at the fair began to converge on the grandstand and the macadam standing-room-only area in front of the grandstand that extended to the railing fencing in the racetrack, where we had taken up position. Everyone was awaiting the fair’s finale which concludes with massed pipe and drum bands from all over the Western states and Canada. The U.S. Marine Corp. band was also scheduled to perform. The program began with the large pipe and drum band from Los Angeles, winner of the band competition at the fair this year, marching in front of the grandstand to much applause and cheering. The song they were playing “Scotland the Brave” was what MS had been wanting to hear since she entered the fair. The sound of bagpipes and drums playing one of the most stirring melodies of Caledonia, made everyone assembled here Scottish and very proud of it. After ten minutes of play in front of the reviewing stand, the band marched off and the announcer with great fanfare introduced the 29 Palms U.S. Marine Corp. band massed on the dirt field of the racetrack to the left of where the three of us stood. Every man and woman of the ensemble was decked out in spit-shined shoes, white trousers, and ceremonial blue coat with anodized brass buttons running from waist to neck collar emblazoned with the USMC insignia.

With the introduction, the band struck up a march that after a few notes became the familiar sound of “Scotland the Brave,” an intro designed to please the audience. Moving past our position and reaching the reviewing stand, the band put on a show including an homage to New Orleans complete with the band reproducing a New Orleans jazz funeral. Various sections of the band—brass, woodwinds, tubas, and drums each took turns showing their virtuosity, ending with drums clowning and a couple of players loosing their sticks. At this moment the band master descend from his raise conducting stage, and assuming the strident authoritative voice of a drill instructor demand the screw-ups drop to the ground and deliver ten pushups, which they immediately do to great clamor from the audience all now engaged in the comedy going on before them. This over, the band reassembles and the announcer made known that the band would play music from Disney’s hit movie “Pirates of the Caribbean.”

When the Marine Corps band left the field, every pipe and drum band that had made the trip to Pleasanton to compete in band competition over the weekend massed on the field in front of the reviewing stand in preparation for one last performance before the Games officially came to an end. With one drum major leading and several other drum majors spaced in front of and along the ranks of assembled bands, the orders were given for all to begin play and we heard “Amazing Grace,” begun by a lone piper on the reviewing stand and accompanied by all those assembled on the field behind him. The Marine Corps band which had joined the assembled musicians, played a few more selections, including another Scottish standard “Auld Lang Syne." The band concluded by playing the anthems of each of the four military services, starting with the “Anchors Away,” then going to “Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder,” followed by “The Caissons Go Rolling Along,” and concluding with “From the Halls of Montezuma.” As each anthem was played veterans from that branch of the service were asked to stand and be recognized by the assembled audience. The Scots have been recruited for military service ever since there was a Scotland and they’ve filled the ranks of Britain, France, the United States, and many other nations over the centuries and will continue to do so.

With the bands marching off the field the stands began to clear and the three of us started our walk out of the fairgrounds and back to the car and the ride home. I was getting hungry as I hadn’t had anything since a late breakfast this morning, while IM and MS had stood in a long line just after we arrived at the fairground to get their serving of fish and chips for IM and Bangers and chips for MS. On the way home we scored Pizza at the New York Pizza on Main Street in Pleasanton at its junction with Spring Street then rushed home to eat our dinner in the backyard on MS’s and GS’s place watching the last rays of the late summer sun drop in the Western sky lighting the darkness over Asia: the end of a memorable day.

August 30, 2006 – Watching Grandkids Grow

2006-08-30T21:17:00.000-07:00

August 30, 2006 – Watching Grandkids Grow

Sunday morning at around 9:30 IM and I get a call from our youngest daughter RF who lives in Irvine, where she decided to stay after graduating UC Irvine too many years ago. She works Sundays and she semcalls us on the way to work or during a slow spell at the office—Sunday mornings are typically slow. Some while back she bstarted working in the home building industry and took a break to have her oldest, a lovely girl, three-year old AF, named after a character in a Willa Cather novel, and her youngest—two-year old TF,ch named after one of King Arthur’s knights of the round table. stShe’s back working now that the two kiddos are off at preschool, though today they’re home sleeping in with their dad.

These two provide no end of amusement for IM and me. AF is a thin, wiry dynamo of a girl who talks a mile a minute—we’re often asking her to slow down so we can keep up with her endless stream of conversation. Waist high, AF has straight dark brown hair that reaches below her shoulders, a high forehead covered by her bangs that her right hand continuously removes from her smiling eager brown eyes. Those eyes are a marvel with a thin ring of autumn green around the pupils’s circumference—the right eye looks to me ever so slightly smaller than the left, and its easy to get lost in her lush brown eyebrows. She has her mom’s straight nose that points without drawing attention to itself. Her rosy full lower lip complements her thin upper one and both reveal her top four front teeth when she smiles, which is often and always when you’re pointing a camera at her, something that happens quite a lot. From an early age, she has understood the function of a camera and has presented it with a varied repertoire of poses: coy, serious, devilish, playful, head cocked pensive, straight on saying hello to the future... She very much reminds us of her mom’s older sister, Auntie MS, who would strike a pose as soon as a camera was brought out. She shares much in common with her auntie.

TF, by contrast is a man of few words but when he does speak or more accurately when he acts, you know there is something very clever behind that handsome face of his, probably the result of a cranium size in the 80 percentile among his peers, his doctor declares. TF has a wide face, the same brown eyes as his sister, both arc slightly downward at the two extremes another feature he shares with his sister and both share with their dad. While his sister’s chin comes to a point in a slightly “V” shaped, his is a “U” with its arms pried apart at the top. He too has a high forehead that gives way to a head of brown hair a little lighter than his sister’s. It’s being lightened by exposure to the Southern California sun. Dressed in khaki shorts, a Hawaiian shirt, and sandals you can see the surfer dude he’ll one day become. His thin lips cover his baby teeth, both lorded over by a 2-year-old’s pug nose.

I put the phone on speaker as IM comes back into the room and we both ask for an update on the latest with the grandkids. RF starts by relating the latest installment in getting AF to sleep properly. AF has always had a hard time settling down at night. She is not content with her own company. From the time she was an infant, she has had to have a DVD continuously playing in her room while she sleeps—Baby Einstein at first, now Sponge Bob and a large assortment of Disney videos. (I can think of no more insidious marketing monster than the Disney Company. It begins building brand loyalty from the time a child can focus its eyes and tune its ears to hear outside stimulus.) AF resembles her auntie MS in that way. When MS was a baby, I would spend a good hour or more every night getting her to doze off—it was our quality time together. (In retrospect, I was abetting her dependency.) IM and I speculate that both AF and MS need continuous stimulation.

I think the techno-nerds I grew up with and their progeny have created a generation of kids that for lack of a better word have become stimulation-addicted. They require music playing or the television playing when they are doing some other activity, reading a book, typing away on a computer, walking, running, exercising, eating… A weekend getaway in a cabin without electricity would incur some serious withdrawal symptoms. Certainly, AF and her auntie MS fall into that category—as does MS oldest daughter ES. Curiously, all of them are first children, could that also be a factor? As a first born, I certainly craved stimulation from radio, television and movies—though we lacked the 24/7 access common today—TV stations would shut down at midnight. TF and his cousin JS don’t seem to suffer the addiction to the same degree. Both can immerse themselves in play with nothing else going on around them. Why is it that the later born children need less stimulation? Is it because the first born are their parent’s trial and error experiment in child rearing and the kid knows that the adults are clueless and have good reason to worry?

In an attempt to wean AF off her continuous-loop DVD dependency, RF describes putting a timer on the player hoping that after a couple of hours of endless play, AF would have drifted off into a deep enough sleep that she won’t realize that the stimulus is no longer there. But, in every instance, as soon as the player shuts off, AF wakes up asking for it to be turned back on. We keep speculating that AF is over stimulated and she’s learned that she has to have something always going on around her. Perhaps the great curse of modern times is that we’re teaching successive generations of children that life is to be lived 24/7. Or perhaps some of us like AF don’t want to spend much time sleeping because they are afraid they are missing something.

On the other hand, TF is one of those kids who are a blessing to his Mom when it comes to sleeping. First, he has always been the kind of kid you could put down in his crib and he would go to sleep without complaining—much like his mom. Both enjoy their own company. Now that he’s a bigger kid, he will go into his room at bedtime and fall asleep in no time. When he awakens he likes to lounge. Even as a baby, you would go into his room and find him lying on his back wide awake daydreaming for lack of better description. And if he’s not ready to get up, he’ll continue lounging. I’ve picked him up when he’s just woken up and he’ll lie peacefully in my arms until he’s lounged enough before full blown activity. It’s one of my favorite things to do as a grandfather.

From birth, you could tell TF gave the impression he was going to grow into a stout, big frame lad. One indication was his appetite and palate. He has always eaten a lot and when he started taking solid food, his diet was just about anything adults would eat, fruits, vegetables—even olives and garlic, salsa, fish, and the staple meat and potatoes. The one thing he loves but can’t have is dairy—cheese, whole milk, and ice cream. Watching him eat when he went on solid foods was a treat. He would take great delight in a mouthful of food, and when he wanted something especially, he would bang his hands to get more. Remarkably, when he’s sated, he stops eating. Now, he signifies by saying “all done.” And he means it. You can’t tempt him with anything else. What kind of kid is like that? Must be the excess of gray matter he possesses.

RF relates stories that shed light on TF’s relationship to his older sister and provides insight into his nature. One day last week RF says the two of them were inside on a beautiful sunny day and she finally asked the two of them if they didn’t want to go outside and play. Both say yes and she tells them both to put their shoes on. TF complies but AF become petulant and refuses. A classic mother-daughter stand off occurs. TF sensing the tension between the two, dashes up the stairs to his sister’s bedroom saying out loud “Ana’s shoes, Ana’s shoes.” Finding them he comes back down the stairs and places them in front his sister. His mother is beside herself with pride in her young caring son. AF on the other hand pitches a fit. Unfortunately, he chose the wrong side in the battle and had to suffer his sister’s wrath. To her defense she normally doesn’t hurt his feeling in this manner. She’s usually in a good mood and divine more devilish ways of upsetting the little guy. Asked why she was so mean to her brother, she replied that it was must be because she was sleepy.

Our conversation is interrupted abruptly by a customer. RF is beside herself happy to have some work for the rest of the morning. We ring off wishing her good luck.