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Oakland Diary 2: The Mission and Going Postal
by Larry Lynch
Sunday, 25 June 2000, 11:22 a.m.
I’m sitting on the porch of our little blue house in Stan’s rolling chair, in which he likes to sit and read and watch the world go by. I was doing the same, reading David Cohen’s account of Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, in One Year Off (which I am thoroughly enjoying and which inspired me to write to y’all in diary format), when I decided now is the time to catch up with my reporting.I have to say that the little green bump on this laptop that purports to be a mouse is for the birds. Stan has a later Toshiba model and claims he has no trouble with The Bump, but for the life of me I can’t make any progress with it and always hook the mouse back up. This helps some, but the cursor has a habit of disappearing for long stretches. For the nonce, I have the mouse and mousepad perched on the narrow ledge of the porch while I peck on the computer in my lap. I have noticed, by the way, that people just leave their front doors or balcony doors standing open. There are no screens on any of our windows, no screen doors, nor does Brian have one. I guess bugs must not be a problem; I haven’s seen many. No mosquitoes and only a fly now and again. Wonder why.
I am attaching a photo of myself Brian took yesterday in front of his apartment. The purpose is to show off my new Taqueria La Cumbre T-shirt with the voluptuous revolutionary femme on it. More on that later.
It is another beautiful day. Every day starts out cool and a little overcast, but by mid-morning it is warm (70 or better), sunny, and gorgeous. The ubiquitous flowers I reported apparently are bougainvillea, apparently introduced since they are not in any of the California flower guides.
Day 6, Thursday, 22 June 2000: The Mission
My main order of business was to attend the job fair at the Embarcadero Center in San Francisco. I was shocked to see it was 9:30 a.m. when I woke up, owing no doubt to the fact that I was up until 2:00 a.m. writing the first installment of this diary the night before. It took me awhile to get moving, but I managed to get dressed, eat breakfast, and drive to the BART station a few blocks east on College (near the bookshop I went to Wednesday night). This is the Rockridge station, and it is only 19 minutes from there to the Embarcadero station in San Francisco. I think it was about $2.50 each way. What you do is park your car and remember your numbered spot, because you have to validate it for free parking when you get inside the station. Then you stick some money in the ticket machine slot--like a five- or ten-dollar bill. You press the button for a new ticket and a little white card with a black electronic strip is issued with the amount printed on it. You walk to an entry gate, insert your card with the strip up, and it immediately pops up out of a slot on top. You grab it and the restraining louvers retreat allowing you to pass. When you get to your destination you do the same to exit and this time your fare is deducted and a new balance printed on the card. Pretty neat, although the ticket machines can be both intimidating and confusing until you get the hang of it.
The job fair was 11-3 and I got there about 11:45. For some reason it wasn’t as productive as the one in Oakland on Wednesday, though I did make a few new contacts, mostly job placement companies. A tall incredibly beautiful African American woman with Stuart Staffing named Nilka was the most positive and enthusiastic and asked me to email an electronic copy of my resume to her after I got home. My new one-page resume seems to be doing the trick. Recruiters study it a few moments and apparently get my drift fairly quickly.
[Ohhhh, there’s a hummingbird hovering about eight feet to my right, taking a break from suckling nectar from the vivid purple bougainvillea in the next yard.]
I was basically through at the job fair by 12:45, so I decided to take the BART up to the Mission District for a burrito. Consulting my Lonely Planet guide to San Francisco, I determined that Taqueria La Cumbre originated the famous Mission burrito in 1969 and was still possibly the definitive place to get one. I walked over to Valencia on 16th, and then up a short way to La Cumbre. I was immediately struck by a large and garish but fetching painting of a female Mexican revolutionary with twin bullet belts crossed under her ample and highly noticeable bosoms. She carries a bugle in her left hand and holds a billowing Mexican flag aloft in her right; a sombrero leans against her left thigh. Mexican peasants wave guns in front of a church in the background. It’s wonderful.
As I enjoyed my carne burrito with the hotter sauce on it ($3.50) and Dos Equis I noticed they sold T-shirts with the picture for only ten bucks. Need I say more? It is now my prized possession. Slightly inebriated I stumbled across Valencia to a used bookstore where I found a copy of A Rare Benedictine by Ellis Peters. This is the book of short stories about the medieval sleuth from Shrewsbury, Brother Cadfael, to whom Renee and I are addicted. I seem to be collecting all of the Brother Cadfael mysteries.
Back on 16th I walked a few blocks to the Mision San Francisco de Asis, known popularly as the Mission Dolores. It was completed in 1791 and is the mission that originated the city of San Francisco. This is the oldest intact mission, managing to survive all the earthquakes, including the awful one in 1906 that tumbled the basilica next door, which was rebuilt in 1913. Both the mission and the basilica are beautiful and peaceful, the latter in a very ornate colonial Spanish baroque style.
Then it was time to get back on the BART and return home. That evening I went to both Albertson’s and Safeway on College to pick up a few more groceries. I had thought it was primarily the housing costs (and until recently gasoline prices) that made this area so expensive, but I can now see that groceries are higher too. For example, at Lammer’s supermarket in Menomonie we can buy a roll of paper towels for $.65 but the cheapest here is about $1.25. Likewise, you can’t seem to buy a few rolls of TP inexpensively and I had trouble finding a tube of toothpaste for under $3.00. Eggs are typically over $2.00 a dozen. Fortunately vegetables and fruit are delicious and not expensive and milk doesn’t seem too high. Kmarts and Wal-Marts are scarce in this part of the Bay Area. Mystifies me--you’d think there would be a lot of money to be made by having more discount stores around. In Brian’s area it is easier to find shopping malls.
Day 7, Friday, 23 June 2000: Going Postal
Today was the day to get serious about sending packets of writing samples to two of the guys I met at Apple on Tuesday. My friend Kathy at UWEC had sent me a PDF version of the Introduction to McIntyre Library workbook that Richard and I created in 1996, and I was able to forward that on to Apple a couple of days ago. This time I pored through my Columbus article, the Menomonie sesquicentennial book, some of the abstracts I wrote for Selected Water Resources Abstracts, an analysis I did of an early 17th century manuscript of a book by Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, my article on the Candlelight Ski for the Friends of the Red Cedar Trail newsletter, etc. Odd assortment, but maybe at least they will see I’m versatile.
With fear and trembling I called the one and only 800 number to access all the post offices in the Oakland area. I knew I was going to get grief if I even mentioned general delivery and sure enough the sweet little lady on the other end wanted to know why I needed to talk to the Temescal branch on north Telegraph. I replied I just needed to talk to the supervisor. But why she insisted. I said I guessed she wasn’t going to let me talk to them unless I bared my soul and so said I needed to talk to him about a box I had addressed to myself at that branch care of general delivery. She must have been the same one I talked to a couple of days earlier because she repeated, "I’m sorry sir but we can’t give out information over the phone about mail." That did it, and I practically shouted at her, "@@##??!!, I have been driving all over this damned burg for five days trying to locate my &#$@* box and I need to talk to the supervisor at the Temescal branch whom I have already talked and you are ?"+*&%-well going to connect me!"
"Just a minute sir and I will see what I can do. I will personally introduce you when I get them on the line."
"Thank you," I said meekly but triumphantly.
After much folderol I finally did get my old friend Mr. J. S. M. on the line, who checked once again for my long-lost box. He asked when I had last checked at the main Oakland post office, and I said it was a couple of days ago. "I can assure you it will be there now," he said. (Why was I starting to feel like I was in some third-world country?)
With total confidence I got back in my silver bullet and headed down Telegraph once again, joining Broadway, and then turning left on 13th. Parking in front of the big impressive classical façade of the P.O., I went inside. After mailing my two fat envelopes to Apple, I went to the now-familiar General Delivery window and was greeted my other old friend, the nice black woman who now was on fairly familiar terms with me. She looked at me dubiously, though, and said she had still seen no such box, but would check. Nuts! As you can suppose, it was still not there and now she informed me that parcel post can take up to 30 days to arrive at its destination. So I’m relegated to wearing the same three pairs of pants (cream jeans, black jeans, and white painter pants) for the foreseeable future and to live with my current small assortment of books and no sport jackets. I’m getting by fine, of course.
Since I was back in my old stomping grounds of downtown Oakland, I drove south to the waterfront and parked next to Jack London Square. Signage is not one of this area’s strong points. In the nice new parking lot adjacent to the Amtrak station signs importune you to pay in advance for your parking but neglect to tell you what it costs. I walked around the ticket box three times hoping some additional text would miraculously appear on the cold metal but none was forthcoming. I asked a man and his son if they knew how much it was and he seemed surprised that you had to pay. "I never pay anything," he said, looking just a little worried. I thanked him and decided to stick a dollar bill in the slot on speculation. Voila, it informed me I had signed up for two hours and issued me a permit to put on my dashboard. Shaking my head, I now realized I was separated from the square by a cyclone fence cordoning off the railway tracks. Trudging up a rather high set of stairs to the passageway over the tracks, I was treated to a magnificent side-lit view of the docks and harbor. Crossing over, I came down to Jack London Village, a rather quaint dark, rough-boarded complex of shops and restaurants populated by a few morose-looking shopkeepers since it seems the city of Oakland is fixing to tear it down and put up a hotel. At that point I realized this was not the whole of Jack London square, which extends on to the west and contains such oddments as the bar he used to frequent back in the early part of this century (still serving) and his Yukon log cabin transported here by local enthusiasts. I poked around in the shops for awhile and then drove home.
I thought of going to a movie, but decided Richard would kill me if I didn’t do my bibliographic instruction stats, so that’s how I spent my Friday night :}
Day 8, Saturday, 24 June 2000: Motorcycles and Museums
Brian decided he didn’t like his Honda motorcycle dealer in Milpitas and resolved to take his machine up to a more promising dealer in Fruitvale not far SE of Oakland. I agreed to meet him there at 9:30 a.m., whereupon we would join his friend Trudy at the Oakland Museum of California at 10:00. I duly arrived at Pineapple Honda to find Brian in earnest discussion with a very competent-looking youngish woman in cycle-working-upon clothes who was gesticulating knowledgeably and animatedly at his Valkyrie. Brian was smiling happily, even though he knew this was going to probably cost him some money. He had a slow leak in the rear tire of the cycle, which he had had for only four months. (We found out later he had indeed picked up a nail, so no warranty coverage.) After a few more minutes in which Brian salivated at the Kawasakis and Hondas in the showroom, we headed for the museum.
This is one great place, fans. Brian and I had coffee and tea in the restaurant until Trudy arrived, and then we bought our tickets and headed straight for the art collection again. I had only seen about half of it on Wednesday; this time we took our time absorbing this wonderful collection of quintessentially California art. What really caught my attention were the tonalist paintings and carved and painted wood frames and furniture of Arthur and Lucia Mathews from about 1910 in Arts and Crafts Movement style. The paintings are rather flat, two-dimensional, with a muted palette but richly drawn. In contrast the frames and furniture feature vivid stylized flowers and Egyptian motifs. I loved it! When I get rich I’m going to buy the museum’s catalogs for two previous exhibitions on the California Arts and Crafts movement and on the tonalist painters.
We took in the traveling exhibit on the fossils of the La Brea tar pits (in Los Angeles) next, which was fascinating, and then had lunch outside on the terrace. I had all three of their vegetable and pasta salads AND a bowl of their fruit salad. Brian and I reminisced about our summers in the ‘50s on the Lynch farm in Illinois for Trudy’s benefit, then visited the museum shop, said goodbye to Trudy, and toured the nature and ecology section. Great dioramas. I bought a field guide to California wildlife and then Brian and I drove up to Berkeley to a ceramics store. He has bought every book in print on ceramics and is thinking about making decorated ceramic tiles. He’s got some neat ideas.
He had invited me to his house for grilled salmon, so we headed east on Hwy 24 through Walnut Creek and down the east side of the foothills to Fremont. Got the salmon, some asparagus, strawberries, Haagen-Dazs, had a fabulous meal on his balcony, and then hightailed it up to Union City to watch Gladiator. I really liked it, apparently better than Brian did, though he allowed as how it was "pretty good."
Well, that best be all for now. I can’t believe it’s 2:30 p.m. already. I’m hungry, need to finish Ricardo’s BI stats, and hope maybe I can take a jaunt somewhere yet this aft. See ya!
Larry