Homes...for the Holidays

I had one real meltdown during the final sweep of my parents’ house before it was sold. That was when I noticed a small, white-painted hanger embedded above the kitchen door.  This was where Dad hung the mistletoe at Christmas.

If the holidays don’t give you the homing instinct, nothing will. It’s a season to drop the defenses and be shamelessly drawn to the porches, kitchens, hallways, scents, tastes, and faces we’ve loved and left.

In our family, homes carry their own holiday traditions, each so brined with meaning that the memories refuse to move on, even when we do.

Accordingly, I can’t drive by 311 West Clay without thinking we could be met at the door by a blast of warm air and the scent of my grandmother’s cloverleaf rolls. A Thanksgiving there meant asparagus and oyster dressing alongside cranberry sauce in the improbable form of a shimmering ruby gel.  In my grainy, hand-held memory there's my mother unloading pumpkin pies she's brought, spooning coffee into the percolator, wiping sudsy hands upon her apron. 

So last week when I was looking for a jar of mincemeat at the San Francisco Safeway I was really trying to find the Thanksgiving of my childhood. Someone should tell you when it's about to be left behind: the last time you'll gather in a certain room for sweet potato casserole, or sit around the table with every chair full. This announcement could begin with the sharp chime of a spoon against the rim of a water glass and the words, "Look around you. Freeze-frame this moment because years later you'll wonder when, exactly, it came to an end."

Dad’s mistletoe was ribboned high in the doorway between the kitchen and dining room of the house where I grew up, and beneath it passed the strawberry jam,  homemade bread, the grapefruit halves with maraschino cherries, the platters of scrambled eggs and Harper’s Ham that composed our Christmas morning breakfast for family and friends.

The actors have changed now, but the setting is still intact. The homes of our holidays can be rented, leased, sold, foreclosed, or renovated beyond recognition, but as long as they stand, time is contained. They give us a place to store the past.

 

Sculptural Forms

Five hours south through the Central Valley and we're approaching Los Angeles for a weekend catch-up with Ira's son, who's in school there. Traffic in this sprawling city lives up to its reputation; blocky Land Rovers and sleek, bullet-shaped Porsches dart in and out of lanes and swallow up parking and no-parking spaces. Where the U-Turn is San Francisco's signature move, the "Left on Red" belongs to LA. Hesitate a beat too long and you'll be honked at, mouthed at, pursued and punished in a manner that far outranks the crime.

Walking's not an option in Los Angeles so we drive everywhere, mostly in search of interesting ethnic food. Korea Town provides a nothing-like-Nicky's barbecue, mounds of way too much red meat, lightly grilled, and arranged in diagonals with spicy kimchi on the side. At a bakery called "Toast" we munch crispy triangular quesadillas stuffed with avocado, and in Little Armenia we try smoked eggplant and green-onion salad, defined and brightened by parsley and lemon juice, and by their melodic names: baba ghanoush and fattouch.

 

Francisco Zuniga

George Rickey

   









As a counterpoint to street madness we walk through the Murphy Sculpture Garden on UCLA's campus. It's incredibly quiet.  A relief sculpture by Pietro Consagra invites us to run our fingers over its shallow recesses and topographic contours. George Rickey's kinetic sculpture, similar to one on the University of Kentucky campus, shimmers in the breeze above an earth-bound bronze nude by Francisco Zuniga. These two figures seem to symbolize a human paradox: on one hand we reach for freedom. On the other, we yearn for all that binds us to earth and place.

Late Sunday night as we're traveling back to San Francisco, four lanes of surging traffic slow to a creep and we watch the green digits of the dashboard clock as an hour crawls by.  Braced for a scene of carnage, we nose our little Subaru closer and closer to orange cones and cruisers. Finally a dozen pulsing blue lights telegraph the facts: an overloaded hay transport has flipped, scattering hundreds of golden bales in their own random, sculptural forms across the median, the exit ramp, the shoulder, and four broad lanes of highway.

The Fuyu

It's always been my opinion that the persimmon didn't have much going for it. And then I met a Fuyu at the Richmond Market down on Geary.

The Fuyu and the Pomegranate

The Fuyu is a cousin of the Hachiya persimmon, the astringent variety that grows in Kentucky back yards and tastes like you've bitten into a Brillo Pad. The Fuyu and Hachiya are roughly the same size and the same glorious muted sunshine color. But there the resemblance ends.  The Fuyu is firm, slices like an apple, and is light, crisp, and sweet.

Fuyus are great in salads, and when combined with spring mix and a handful of jewel-like pomegranate seeds, you can almost forget who their relatives are.

The Orange Crush

A month ago I was unacquainted with The Beard, and I thought The Machine was kept in the basement.  But that didn't stop us from joining in the tickertape celebration of the Giants' first World Series win since the 50s.

Ira and I sprinted up the hill and caught the Number Five as soon as we could hop out of bed and get dressed.  Our first taste of Orange Crush was when we climbed on the bus...we got the last two seats, even though 21st Avenue is near the beginning of the route. 

In another stroke of luck we got the last two chairs in the balcony level of Boudin's Bakery. Located at the intersection of Montgomery and Market, our seats were level with the pigeon perch and perfect for hanging out and snapping pictures. 

Along with everyone else we cheered, sipped cafe au laits, and tore into loaves of sourdough while the crowd below us grew.

Voices

Sitting behind two Mandarin-speakers on the bus, I'm transfixed. They are chatting softly, and their language has a sound I don't hear often, a swish-swish sound--as graceful as French. It seems appropriate that Mandarin is the Chinese language of diplomacy--it has a certain dignity and subtlety.

Most of our Chinese neighbors speak Cantonese, the primary language of Hong Kong, the jumping-off place en route to San Francisco. In its native form it's highly tonal, easy to identify and wildly interesting to my Western ear.

Voices/ink&wc on silk

Our friend Claudia speaks German-accented English. I can imagine her as a child, conjugating verbs at the knee of her linguist father. Claudia's husband John speaks Russian-accented English, and lapses into Russian when he can't find the right English expression.

Our contractor's booming voice is Irish. "Ay! She's a fine hound," he says to Cleo as he enters the front door. It's the exuberant sound of John Campbell's Pub on St. Pat's Day, rollicking and rough.

John's workmen all speak Spanish. They communicate in smiles and broken English, and I've tried to bridge the gap with what little Spanish I've picked up along the way. They know how to acknowledge my questions and thanks, and I know how to express some approximation of, "please don't hurt yourself doing that."

With everyone speaking his own brand of English, it's a maze of accents. If the conversation stalls, someone in the crowd jumps in to fill in the blanks. Everyone uses certain untranslatable American words. Background noise--a conversation in Cantonese-- suddenly takes shape when the term "traffic school" leaps out of the verbal maze.

Even with its wealth of conversational color, we don't hear much African-American speech in San Francisco, and I miss that. Walking in sunshine on lower Fillmore--the jazz district--I hear the lively, syncopated cadences that were a part of my childhood. These voices wrap around me like a well-worn shawl.

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass

Between Sets

It's never too late to have a happy childhood, or in my case, adolescence. The first weekend in October proves that every year.  At the crack of dawn on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday we walk up the hill to Fulton Avenue, cross into Golden Gate Park, and stake out our two square meters of Speedway Meadow. Thus begins San Francisco's biggest annual music fest: Hardly Strictly Bluegrass.

First financed in 2001 by venture capitalist Warren Hellman, attendance during the 2009 weekend of HSB was estimated by Rolling Stone Magazine at 800,000.

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings are regulars, like T-Bone Burnett and Elvis Costello. Emmy Lou Harris is practically the patron saint of HSB.

This year's best musical discovery: The Secret Sisters, from Mussel Shoals, Alabama. Best moment of nostalgia? When Joan Baez sang "Long Black Veil" as the fog rolled in.

Joan Baez at the Banjo Stage

Along with sets and stage visits, we have a basket with grapes, cheese, hummus, and a couple of bargain wines. The people-watching is world class. It's a three-day Derby infield minus the horses.