bittersweet

When Robin and I went to the SF Symphony a few weeks back, the lights that glowed on the Beaux-Arts dome and columns of City Hall were a peculiar copper-orange color:  Giants Orange.  Orange is not a color we wear a lot in College Station, particularly not Burnt Orange, but this other orange used to be my mother’s favorite:  something my mother, Marie Iverson Mitchell, called bittersweet.

It has been a bittersweet week:  this used to be Mom’s favorite time of year, and her birthday was the 26^th.  She has missed it now for the third year running.  People have told me they have been visited, somehow, by their beloved dead, but until recently I had felt nothing beyond a lingering horror.  Subtly, recently, I seem to feel companionable presence beside me as I drive again around her favorite places. 

The semester I spent teaching in Italy, in the fall of 2005, I was already worried about Mom’s health, and at this very time of year I went for a long walk up the Val di Chio, on All Saints’ Day.  The leaves in the vineyards were going a bright yellow, and the persimmon trees were losing their dark red, heart-shaped leaves, exposing the orange fruit hanging heavy on the slender boughs, and I thought of my red-haired mother, always a little delicate yet forging on regardless to one adventure after another as we travelled the world.  Persimmons ripen on the bough from inedible sourness and hardness to unbelievable softness and sweetness, something she had often remarked.  The bitter memories of 2010 are softening and sweetening, too.

The winter before she had the stroke that left her speechless and immobile, I took Mom on a drive to Point Reyes Peninsula, just as a treat.  Dad had trouble walking, she no longer felt safe driving, and she didn’t often get out.  We went at an easy pace, looking and talking about everything we saw, going out and coming back. We sat in the sunshine outside a cafe at Point Reyes Station, and later ate lunch together at the diner, taking our time and getting the pie.  She was so grateful to get out and about, to just be buddies, and it was the last time we ever did.

I adored my mother, but we didn’t do many things together like that, just she and I. My daughter Tia, though, has outlived my most irritating years still willing to do things with her Ma, still talk on the phone, still “hang out.”  When I was out here on my own, teaching at Sacred Heart, and again during my father’s long illness, we spent a lot of time together.  But last Thursday night – you might call it Mom Birthday Eve – has to be one of the most memorable of Tia Times. 

I had just straggled home late from the SF airport through a massive traffic jam what with the World Series game, right there by the Bay Bridge, and had one ear entirely deaf with a cold-plus-cabin-air-pressure, but had every intention of collecting the dog from Tia’s apartment and dashing off to church choir practice at FCCB, with dinner at some later time.  Tia disabused me of this foolish notion, however, insisting we go out to dinner.  How could I say “no” to the person who had dog-sat Oscar and who had been busy teaching all day?

So, though I ached a bit to be deserting my fellow Altos for this sweet chance for some family time, we adjourned to an unlikely enough place for it:  the Hotsy-Totsy Club (“tipsy since 1939”), a black box of a bar with good neighborhood ambiance and a taco wagon, and not usually a sports bar, but a notable exception was made that night.  We got our three tacos each (Pastor, Pollo, and Asada for me) and our drink of choice (dirty Martinis made with two gorgeous olives and local gin flavored with the herbs of Mt. Tamalpais) and made these last through the seventh inning of the second game of the series, watching the Bunt of the Century roll fair.  Giants Orange, and sweet, very sweet because spent with my Tia-pot.

Today I wore the salmon coral necklace my mother’s Aunt Til -- one of my favorite people, a business woman and a world-traveler – gave me a million years ago, a child-sized necklace brought back from Naples and originally strung on wire, which I restrung on silk and expanded with matching beads from Pompei, so that it is long enough now to throw on anytime one is ready for action.  And now whenever I wear it I will think not only of adventurous Iversons past but of this present grand-daughter of Iversons, my daughter Tia, who made me part of an evening I will never forget.  Thanks, Miss Peeps, and we raise our Martini glasses to you, Mom!

Into the Thesaurus

After a weekend back in Texas for Thomas Cowden’s wonderful Michaelmas wedding, a delicious frontal system of rain that has finally put a green blush on the sad lawns here and made a clear, cool autumn day as only Texas can do them, tomorrow it is time to return to that strange new world of 2012 Berkeley, CA.  At the wedding, I was heartened to learn that I have at least one loyal blog-follower, so for you, dear reader(s?), I will share another really fine weekend, from the Bay Area.

As all you students of Greek out there know, a qhsauroV is either a treasure-house or the treasure itself, so it is not just words that are the subject here.  And as (all of) you reader(s) of the last blog will recall, the San Francisco Bay Area is very much like Ali Baba’s treasure house.  Our weekend adventures of September 22-23 (the equinox and beginning of fall) were proof of this notion.

It certainly is fall there, by the way, all those from “four seasons” states who sneer at Mediterranean climates notwithstanding:  huge sycamore leaves are careening to the pavement and gathering along the sidewalks in rustling, untidy heaps, and the liquidamber trees along Piedmont St. are flaming red at the top or a mingled red and green.  The Tule fog is slipping into the Bay from the Valley some mornings, and nights are getting colder (even than summer).

But the 22^nd was gorgeous:  a perfect day to go to the City and see some art at the Palace of the Legion of Honor.  We dawdled around the apartment Saturday morning, apparently so as to be in the throng on the Bay Bridge at 11:00, the rush-hour of the weekend, as everyone goes to San Francisco for some fun.  After weeks of walking freely all over Berkeley, the traffic was an unpleasant shock, but the treasure was worth the wait.

We headed for Irving Street, which parallels Golden Gate Park, and a certain stretch of which – near where Tia takes her voice lessons – we know pretty well.  We were looking for lunch, and figured we would go with a familiar neighborhood.  But since Golden Gate Park extends across half the city, the part of Irving-near-the-Park in which we happened to land was blocks away from there and a whole new world to us.  Rather than grab the smartphone and look up “Pluto” or another familiar Irving Street restaurant, however, we took our chances where we were and struck gold, like many another Californian before us. 

There, among many exotic names, was Brothers Seafood Restaurant:  clean, trim and full of happy (and appropriately Chinese) customers eating what seemed to be the largest portions of dim-sum we had ever seen.  We sat and duly waited for a table, watching the doomed fish, crabs and lobsters move moodily about their bubbling aquaria, spying on what everyone else was eating and puzzling over the menu.  Once we were duly seated, we did our best (with the help of a photographic chart) to select 5-6 balanced dishes, and did not go too far wrong:  after all, how bad is it to order two desserts, especially when one is taro buns, covered with streusel and the other is fried mochi filled with sweet bean paste and covered with sesame seeds?  And truly, the buns and meat-dumplings and heaps of beautiful cooked greens were tremendously generous – I mean, was I wearing my reading glasses or were they really that big? – for $2 or $3 or $4.50 for a group of three (or a heap of veggies)…  Anyhow, you get my point: buried treasure!

The show at the Legion of Honor which followed this feast was a more expected treat: Man Ray and Lee Miller, purported to be a surrealist show but really an hommage to the long friendship of these two American artists.  It began in a red-hot love relationship in 1930’s Paris, but when she left him to work in New York (and went on to be a renowned war photographer), he continued to obsess over her, and not surprisingly:  she was not just an artist and intellectual but also a fashion model and about as beautiful as they come.  He saw her lips everywhere and made whole series of longitudinal collages and paintings to mimic them.  As for her eyes, he kept a photo of one of them in his wallet at all times, and attached them to the business ends of numerous metronomes, always meaning to destroy them but never bringing himself to do it.  The catalogue is not the sort of thing to leave lying around the Teacher’s Workroom at Saint Michael’s, but it was a fascinating show.  Perhaps best were the whimsical creations he made for her after the war, when the horrors she had seen threw her into deep depressions and he tried (usually successfully) to cheer her up with offerings of art.  The show, and the views of the Golden Gate Bridge and the City from the lofty perch of the Legion of Honor on an unusually sunny day were both worth the long, slow commute back to Berkeley.

That night we watched the dear old 1950’s film, “The Mudlark,” which is only available in a very odd reprint from “public domain” somewhere (unless you know a really good local rental place), but still worth buying if you are as big a fan of children and sentiment as I am, AND would love to see Alec Guiness completely own the part of Disraeli and a pudgied-up Irene Dunne conquer the role of Queen Victoria, AND see the fabulously Victorian (big surprise) home décor of Windsor Castle.  This made for interesting conversations for the next few days, and much sentimental satisfaction!

At the risk of creating a bloggone (imaginary Italian for “a really big blog,” –one being the suffix added to objects of great size), I must say something about Sunday the 23^rd.  After finally “nailing” the anthem “Precious Lord” (Thomas Dorsey version) for the 10:30 service at First Congregational Church Berkeley (so much so that the dratted Alto part was stuck in my head all week), we had a nice lunch with my father at the pleasant and tasty Villa Chinese restaurant in San Pablo, across the street from his assisted living apartment, then – after a suitable period of sheer laziness back at home – began our exploration of the Hill Paths of Berkeley.

Armed with the indispensible “Trails of Berkeley” map like any good tourists, we began at Codornices Park (the 5^th station, as it were, to use Mt. Fuji terms, being halfway up the 1000-ft. Berkeley Hills) and struck off on the first precipitous path, with stairs so long and steep we couldn’t see their top, climbing out of a redwood-shaded hollow where someone was holding a meditative jazz jam-session. 

The streets of East Berkeley wind and twist prodigiously across the face of this steep hill-face, and are thus difficult for pedestrians to navigate without much backtracking.  The solution presented by the long-dead fathers of Berkeley development was to provide paved paths with many ranks of steps, scaling the sheer drops between the streets.  They are generally named for the streets they continue or connect, but occasionally after heroes (e.g, “Billy Jean Steps”) or local patrons.  The quaky nature of the Hayward Fault which runs under these hills has made many of the original steps writhe, crumble and extrude in strange ways, and some paths are no longer passable.  Many more have been recently re-built by fans of the paths, in stout squared timbers of some iron-like wood, and spiral and wander acr0ss the face of the hill.

The aerobic exercise, going up, was terrific, and the stress on tender knee-joints, coming down, was sometimes painful, but the overall effect was exhilarating, especially as we rose higher and higher and the views on that gorgeous afternoon (the fog just stealing in at last through the Gate, and heading straight for Berkeley, as usual) that gradually opened up as we rose, tremendous. Sometimes the signs for the paths were nearly obscured by trees, and twice they required us to go up a private driveway for a few yards, but Robin was a perfect navigator, and we persevered.  We passed a house with a “Nobel Prize Winner Parking Only” parking spot, and many, many more houses that were interesting and unique, with variegated and lush gardens, as anything seems to be able to grow there with a little drip irrigation.

At the very top we could see over into the valley beyond, as well, and off as far as Mt. Diablo, while in the opposite direction Mt. Tamalpais rose clearly above her quilt of fog.  The houses up there were vertiginous in the extreme, often just pasted on the side of a cliff, with “Lots for Sale” that were nearly entirely vertical.  Up there we came across a fountain at the head of a small subdivision were we could water the pooch (Oski was a trouper from bottom to top and back again) and reflect that at a dance in a house on that street, we had first met, thirty-eight years ago.

Many more paths await, more memories, and more treasures.  Ciao for now!