Ron's Big Life Update - November 2005 Part 1

Exchange between my brother, Kenny, and a little girl, as the little girl was playing with a beer keg at a 2002 party:
Kenny: “You can only have some of that if you’re old. Are you old?”
Little girl: “No.”
Kenny: “Do you know how old you have to be to be old?”
Little girl: “I dunno. Thirty-seven?”

And so I’m now old, according to my sources. I don’t think I like 37, because there’s no logical way to round down anymore. I’m practically 40. 37 is practically 40, any way you look at it. Heck, if you squint your eyes, 37 is practically 40, which is practically 100! Nope. Not enjoying this one bit.

I celebrated my passage into “old” in a thoroughly low-key manner, as one would expect from an old person. Liz and I had just gotten back from a few days in San Francisco (more on that in a minute…), and since we ate so much for so long out there, the idea of a fancy sit-down dinner just didn’t appeal. Instead, we split a medium pizza at Fat Lorenzo’s, or should I say, I ate 75% of a medium pizza and Liz just wished she could eat as much as I did. That’s right - I can still eat with the best of them, only more often than not, I choose not to. Once properly stuffed with pizza, we picked up a gooey, all-artificial dessert concoction with cookies and frosting, then smuggled it into the new Wallace & Gromit movie. Excellent movie, mighty tasty pizza, great company, and overall, a perfect birthday celebration. Except that now I’m old.

Back in September, a friend of mine turned (9*pi) years old, or about 28.274 years old. This is a big milestone, as irrational birthdays go, so we rounded off to the nearest day (28 years and 100 days), then three of us went to Baker’s Square and had nine pieces of pie. Also a perfect birthday celebration.

So I mentioned a trip out to San Francisco. I only have two first cousins in the whole world, and one of them got married in mid-October in SF! Good times! Liz and I flew out on a Friday, and flew back on a Tuesday. That turned out to be exactly the right length.

The flight out was uneventful, thank goodness. We picked up our rental car - a Chevy Cobalt, which is a little thing about the size of a Ford Focus. It handled much better than I would have expected out of a Chevy. (I can criticize fairly, having being stranded in my 1979 Caprice Classic on many occasions.) The wedding was well north of the city, so we headed straight over the Golden Gate Bridge and had a bite to eat in Sausalito, a well-to-do suburb with an old-timey feel and a nice waterfront, just north of SF proper. Marinas, antique-y shoppes, expensive jewelry shops, and a few restaurants with great views. Overall, Sausalito is a very pleasant place to spend an hour.

Then on to wedding site to meet up with the rest of the family. The whole shebang was in Olema, a teeny little dot on the map near Reyes Point, about an hour northwest of SF, right on the coast in the middle of a state park. Pretty, and nicely isolated from society. None of that nasty cell phone reception to gunk up your stay there.

We stayed at a bed & breakfast run by a lovely woman from England, who decorated the place like a little English cottage. It felt like we were staying in the guest bedroom of someone’s house, which was certainly a novelty for me. She also made fresh waffles for breakfast, along with granola & yogurt and fresh squeezed orange juice. A thousand calorie breakfast, and worth it.

The rest of the family was in good spirits, and it was great to see all of them - we’re all scattered all over the country, so we don’t all get together much. Nice wedding, and very tasteful - a word I don’t associate much with weddings.

They had the briefest ceremony I’ve ever seen, which was performed by a friend of theirs that was ordained over the internet. The ceremony was outdoors in the afternoon, with only a handful of chairs. The rest of us stood and took pictures. It must have been only ten minutes, tops, which was just long enough for some charming passages from Sam Keen, from To Love and Be Loved (“We come to love not by finding a perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.”) and from The Velveteen Rabbit (a kids’ book originally published in 1922). And then it was done, and we walked the ten feet back inside under a big tent at the inn in Olema. Good food, nice cake, and a cool acoustic guitarist, who played just enough to fill in the holes in people’s conversations. Classy. I liked it.

During our stay out in that part of the state, we went on a little hike through one of the park trails with most of the family, and drove out to one of the beaches, just so we could take pictures and stick our fingers in the Pacific Ocean. And ate. A lot. Surprisingly good restaurants up there, considering that cell phones didn’t even work.

Rather than retracing our steps back on the highways, we drove back on the wiggly two-lane road along the coast. Spectacular view, but after an hour of hairpin driving, my shoulders got kinda tense and we were both a little pukey. Good thing I was driving a little tin can - that would have been no fun in a giant SUV. We stopped a nice scenic overlook just on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge, and took some cool pictures of us with the bridge and the rest of the city in the background.

Then over the bridge to our hotel in San Francisco proper. We lucked out - I picked my hotel essentially randomly, not really knowing where things were in the city, but the location was pretty ideal. Close enough to walk to everything, but far enough away to have free parking for our car. We stayed two nights there, and didn’t use the car at all.

Our hotel was on Lombard Street, which has a notorious section of road that’s the wiggliest section of road in the world. Or something like that. If you look on a street map of San Francisco, they always draw that particular section of Lombard Street as a little lightning bolt. It’s cool. The section is down an insanely steep hill, and it’s a cobblestone road that traces out the exact serpentine path you would take if you were skiing down the hill. They are well aware that it’s a tourist attraction, so they limit the tour bus access in that part of town, so as not to tick off the residents. There are sidewalks on both sides of the cobblestones, so you can walk it. We walked it in both directions, a total of twice. And for the record, there are 249 stairs on each sidewalk on the twisty section of Lombard Street.

Walking in SF felt a lot like walking in Manhattan, only with insanely steep hills. We figured that if you had a city with San Francisco’s hills in a colder climate, it would be completely uninhabitable during the winter. Funny to think about, though. I just imagine the first ice storm, and a pile of cars at the bottom of every hill.

The first night there, we walked straight to Chinatown. We walked along the busy streets, which seemed the safest and had the coolest stuff to see. Chinatown is mighty cool. I found a Chinese bakery that had a dim sum favorite of mine - a warm, sweet, sticky bun with a sweet red bean paste inside. Mmm… And for 45 cents! I should have gotten a dozen of them, since they’re kinda hard to come by in Minnesota.

Liz found a cool purse in one of the nicer shops in Chinatown. As she was paying for it, it occurred to me that the guy behind the counter was in his early 20s, was obviously Chinese, and would probably know where the good restaurants are. I asked him where his favorite restaurant in Chinatown was, and he immediately answered “R & G Lounge on Kearney St.” He even drew us a map. We walked straight there, and boy was he ever right! Unlike most of the other restaurants we saw, which only had one or two people in them, this place was completely full, at 8:30 on a Sunday night! We order a beef dish, which was unquestionably the best thing I’ve ever had at a Chinese restaurant. Liz loved it, too, and she really doesn’t like Chinese food! We wound up sitting near the kitchen, and watched in amazement as they kept bringing out order after order of what must have been their specialty. It looked like they took a whole crab and deep fried it, because it still had the shape of the crab. No exaggeration - they must have brought out ten of these things during the course of our meal. It turns out that the guy’s recommendation was exactly right; later that night we checked our Fodor’s book (which we should have carried around with us), and R & G Lounge was one of only two recommended restaurants in all of Chinatown. I get drooly just thinking about it…

We spent the entire next day on our feet playing tourist, and wishing that our meals could have been as good as at R & G Lounge. Up over the wiggly block again to Fisherman’s Wharf. I don’t think either of us really liked Fisherman’s Wharf - too touristy. I was expecting some kind of gigantic fish market, where the guys were skinning, gutting, throwing, selling, and doing other whatnot to fish. If there was such a place, we didn’t see it. Pier 39 was an even more egregious tourist trap, as if some planning committee did a focus group study and slapped together some shops and weak attractions to placate everybody. I bought a hat, but only to keep the sun off my 37-year-old head.

From the Fisherman’s Wharf, we hopped a ferry to Alcatraz. Liz had never seen the inside of a prison before, or at least one with maximum-security. (I can’t vouch for any time spent in the klink before I met her! Tee-hee!) The Alcatraz tour was worth seeing, and was a fine way to spend two hours.

After Alcatraz, we were a little pooped from being out in the sun for so long, so we found a shady bench, and sat for a while. I closed my eyes while Liz returned a phone call or two. We sat for maybe a half hour, and were subjected to the marginally musical strains of a street musician that was playing to a crowd of people that were waiting in line to ride a cable car. He was bad. No, actually he was a few blocks beyond bad. We heard him mangle a few Pink Floyd songs (“Wish You Were Here”, “Money”), and one or two sixties rock chestnuts, with bum notes everywhere, horrendous timing, and completely tuneless singing, if you can even call it singing. It was funny, in an it-takes-guts-to-be-that-bad-and-perform-in-public way. He’d play about four songs, then he’d walk up and down the line with a hat for donations. He told the crowd, “It’s not the size of the donation, it’s the thought that counts. So think big.” Real chutzpah. And a few people coughed up a dollar for him. We joked that we should give him a twenty to go take guitar lessons. And then he’d start playing again - the SAME FOUR SONGS! Followed by the SAME “think big” JOKE! Over and over again! All day, apparently! It sounded like an eleven-year-old trying out a guitar in Guitar Center… for eight hours; he only knows four songs, and he’s going to play them over and over until someone tells him to stop.

Later in the day, when we actually rode the cable car, after we had to sit through another 45 minutes of Mr. Wish You Were Here, the conductor came by to collect the $5 riding fee. One of the other passengers thought that the ride was free, and Liz got the big laughs when she remarked that nothing’s free, except the horrible guitar music! We asked the cable car conductor how long the guy has been playing there, and he answered, 23 years. Well, THAT’s not a number I expected. After 23 years, you’d think he’d have learned more than four songs, or you’d think he’d have learned to at least play those four songs better than an eleven-year-old. Oh my. But in hindsight, plenty entertaining.

Liz and I had an ice cream sundae at Ghirardelli Square, which was pretty cool. It’s the first time I’d ever had a sundae where it was the hot fudge that was homemade, not the ice cream. Good stuff. (They used Edy’s ice cream, just for the record.)

We had dinner at an Italian restaurant, which featured a violinist playing on the street. He, unlike Pink Floyd guy, was pretty good. We then walked back to the hotel, took off our shoes, and watched TV for a little while. One of the local stations was showing reruns of “Sex And The City”, so we watched two of them. I was a big fan of the show when it ran on HBO, and I’d seen both episodes. But, they were so harshly edited for TV that they weren’t funny at all, and barely even made narrative sense. It’s nice that it’s finding a larger audience and all that, but those episodes had all the charm edited right out of them. It was more like “Making Out And The City”.

I turned on the radio in our rental car only once, so I could listen to KPFA, a high-profile, community-run station that’s almost identical in format to my very own KFAI in Minneapolis. San Francisco’s a huge market, and I was expecting greatness to be oozing out of the speakers. Well, I was a little disappointed. It really wasn’t very… good. The music was ho-hum, and the talk breaks were rather amateurish. Considering the prime time slot that I’d tuned in to, I expected quite a bit more. They certainly didn’t sound as good as some of the shows on my station. So I was both disappointed that this station with a stellar reputation sounded so mundane, and encouraged that my own station in Minneapolis sounded so good in comparison. Yeah! We kick butt! Or something like that.

Late October - Hurricane Wilma roared across south Florida. My grandmother’s fine now, and is staying with family in the DC area. That said, the events leading up to her being fine must have been pretty awful; she rode out the hurricane in her house, alone. I should point out that she’s 94, and many of the things that we younger folks take for granted are pretty difficult for grandma. Long story short - she’s OK, and will be moving back closer to family in the northeast. She’s done with Florida.

However, there remains the issue of her house, which sustained some severe damage during the storm. Severe enough so that we don’t think it will be worth fixing. So… my mother and I are heading down to Florida for a week to try and extract whatever small, irreplaceable heirlooms we can from the house. Family pictures, a lamp that came from my mother’s apartment in Queens, a few stained glass windows that came from my grandfather’s best friend’s house in New York, my first patent award, a set of flatware that grandma has been using since she got married, and so forth. It’s a safe bet that all the carpets are soggy and moldy, all the furniture is soggy and moldy, and, well, everything is soggy and moldy. If we can get the pictures out, I’ll be happy. Everything else is gravy.

So I leave for Florida tomorrow morning (11/9), and my mother will be meeting me at the airport. Both of us will be down there for 7 full days, battling insurance adjusters, FEMA bureaucrats, house inspectors, mold, and the loss of the house that my grandmother has lived in for the past 33 years. God help us.

Stay cool and dry,
Ron