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
22nd 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 23rd. 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 5th 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!
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