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pameladeanThese events took place on Saturday, the 30th of August, 2003. You can't say I'm not stubborn, however dilatory I may be.
Edited to add the missing footnote; and --
Cut-tagged in order to provide equal-opportunity annoyance to all my readers:
Having never really unpacked, it did not take us long on Saturday morning to pack again. I felt very weird about leaving. We had originally planned to stay at the hotel for a week, and despite the vagaries of the kitchen, I was fond of the hotel room. It was all ours. The sublet would have other people in it, and I was feeling profoundly unsociable; if I had not had to speak to anybody except Eric, the cat, and my sweeties at home, for the entire duration of my stay, I would have been perfectly happy. Saturday, however, included the following itinerary: pack up stuff and cat, drive to Oakland, leave cat with Eric's mother and nephew (this inevitably involved meeting said mother and nephew), go on a brief tour of the area to fill in the time before four o'clock, collect cat, go to sublet, finding two other tenants deputized to be there to let us in and give Eric a key and take his check (this inevitably involved meeting the tenants; the landlord was out of town); move in; eat dinner; maybe look at Telegraph Avenue; fall over.
We had food and coffee; I don't perfectly recollect what we talked about, except that it probably included a description by Eric of thje route, and a peroration by me on how I was worried that his family wouldn't like me. Eric calmly said that I would get "big slack" cut for me just by being his sweetie, and that since he liked me, they probably would too; he couldn't imagine why they wouldn't.
After everything else was removed from the room, Eric having taken the last load down, I started to look for the cat. No cat. I called him. No cat. I looked underneath the armchairs, noting guiltily in passing that either Toliman or some previous feline inhabitant had ripped out a lot of the undersides. No cat. I looked in the kitchen cabinets, under the bed, in the bathtub. No cat. Eric came back and we moved the refrigerator to make sure he hadn't gotten behind it. No cat. In a familiar but unwelcome state, feeling that I must have lost my mind, or strayed into some alternate dimension, I gazed around the room, and saw the bed with its rumpled spread and blanket. I poked it here and there.
Cat, exhibiting his new hobby of burrowing.
Eric put him into the carrier; he grew some extra legs, but was not too obstreperous. We took him away; I made sure we were checked out, and found myself unpromptedly waxing enthusiastic to the desk clerk about the kitchen in the room. We drove away.
The weather was similar to the previous day's, with fingers of fog sliding between the hills, and the temperature dropping as we went towards San Francisco. Eric, who had been relieved to arrive uneventfully and transported to delight by Moss Beach, where he had only been twice before, now began to exhibit a great many high spirits about being back again, and poured upon my partly-comprehending head a wealth of information and memory, as we drove north for the home of his heart.
Much of what he said got repeated later, as we saw the same hills and towns from different angles. The main thing I remember that I think really did come from this first view of the Bay Area was the Port of Oakland, where the huge container-moving cranes reminded Eric of Imperial Walkers. They were almost completely covered in mist this time, and loomed out of it in what was indeed a very alarming fashion. If I recollect properly, there was a fair amount of fog, and Eric pointed out to me where various things would be if there were not. I saw most of them later on. I am sorry to say that I have a very vague recollection of water, hills, bridges, sunlight, fog, and buildings and landscape emerging from the fog briefly and then returning to it.
At some point the scale of things decreased abruptly, and we drove along streets full of small brightly-colored houses, utterly and improbable plants mixed weirdly with more familiar ones. Outside the front door of the apartment building where Eric's mother and nephew lived at that time were two lavishly-flowering rose bushes and a mad object that appeared to be a morning-glory tree, with purple and white flowers. I think it must have been some kind of mallow, but really I don't know. I was interested in the building, since Eric had lived there for a while just before moving to Minneapolis, and had talked to me about it. So I saw how the building formed an open courtyard, with a swimming pool and palm trees in it, and how the stairs overlooking the courtyard were open to the air, very clearly a product of people who do not have to worry about whether there will be ice on the stairs.
We lugged Toliman upstairs, and I met Eric's nephew and mother. We were all concentrated on the cats, bothToliman and the small whirlwind of a feral kitten named Miranda, which helped to break the ice a bit. Miranda snapped herself into a kind of Hallowe'en netsuke cat, all curved and wildly puffed up, hissing and cursing. Toliman went under the sofa. When Miranda felt it was safe to resume her ordinary shape, we admired her, a skinny leggy thing with patches of silver tabby on a white ground, and a few bits of brown for emphasis. She was purry, but tended to feel that petting was a waste of time, and that everybody should be her litter mate and allow a lot of biting and kicking and scratching. Casey, whose cat she is, said that under certain circumstances you could pick her up and pet her, but she had to be worn out first. Aside from that, I didn't have much conversation with Eric's nephew, but I felt very much at home with his mother right away. Despite being in ill health and having just been through a couple of family crises, she was very gracious and welcoming to me, and showed some nice gleams of humor in her small talk that reminded me of Eric.
We didn't stay for very long, since Eric wanted to show me the redwoods in Canyon before our four o'clock deadline at the sublet. So we went off, past the courtyard with the palms and the pool in it, past the crazily-blooming roses and the mad mallow tree. Eric gave me a lightning tour of Lafayette, where the person he stayed with lived when he first came to California; also San Mateo, where he worked. Apartment buildings, BART stations, more alien vegetation. The houses continued very small; the apartment buildings were of a size closer to what I think of as normal, but were low and sprawly for the most part, possibly because they all concealed swimming pools in their interior courtyards.
We drove up into the hills, and the trees closed in over the road. Eric pointed out eucalypts to me, and after a while I realized that I could smell them. It was a smell that until that point I had associated mostly with cough remedies and dried-plant arrangements and heavy-duty hand lotion. I had smelled it at Moss Beach, but mixed with the cedar scent and the smell of the ocean. Smelling it outside in an urban environment, mixed with dust and a bit of car exhaust, was strange and enlivening. The hill got steeper and steeper, and finally we pulled off and parked in a gravelled area just below the Canyon Post Office, where Eric judged the redwoods to be large enough.
Another strange sensation ensued for me. I've see pictures of giant redwoods, taken by people who must have been standing where I was, in very similar weather: you see the dark airy-needled tree rising and spreading overhead, filtering the sunlight, making a bright hazy cottony disk of the sun itself, going up and up and up and up into the blue of the huge deep sky. If you are there yourself, it makes your neck hurt, but you don't want to stop looking. After a while I did. We looked at the burl and the new shoots coming out of it, and I stroked the soft new needles, and gave the trunk of the nearest tree a pat. We walked around the edge of the parking area, in the deep shade. There was a pepper tree*, and Eric scratched a leaf for me so that I could smell it. Unlike the sight of the redwoods and the scent of the eucalypts, it was utterly unfamiliar. By the time I left, it would become evocative. There were spiderwebs in the undergrowth, catching stray sunlight. Across the road were more enormous redwoods; we crossed and admired them too. I felt a terrible compulsion to apologize for a picnic table we had had when I was a child. I remembered the small redwoods that were the first ones I had ever seen, in Bodnant Gardens in England, near the Welsh border, and how the trees had been fenced off because visitors insisted on peeling off their bark. I thought of Tolkien's description of the thoughts of the fathers of the fathers of the trees. I had once written those words on a piece of lined yellow paper and left it on the seat of a bulldozer that had been parked for the weekend a few lots down from our new house on old farmland, in Missouri. "... Things that go free upon the earth, biting, breaking, hacking, burning; destroyers and usurpers."
I can't remember what we said to one another, or how many of those thoughts I told Eric on the spot, how many I had told him already (Bodnant Gardens is in that category, I believe, however), how many he will be reading for the first time when he sees this. But he was the perfect companion, for this and for everything we did during our journey together.
We drove back to Oakland and collected Toliman, who had remained hidden the entire time. Then we drove into Berkeley to find the sublet. Eric continued very happy, pointing out landmarks and always letting me know where we were and how we were getting to the next place. I think we made a detour to Julia Street to see the house where he had lived for six years or so. The woman whom he lived with then still owns the house, and we had an appointment to have dinner with her the following day. The house was much smaller than I had expected.
In contrast, the sublet was a very tall off-white stucco house whose yard contained some tired-looking and intermittent succulent groundcover, a redwood or two, a vegetable garden with tomatoes and basil, and a spill of red-orange nasturtiums apparently planted to conceal a green metal box containing I don't know what, electrical junctures, the air-conditioning unit, whatever. An alley ran along the other side of the house, with a tall blank wall beside it, and later on I found several enormous clumps of pink scabiosa blooming profusely. I'd never had much luck with planting scabiosa in my garden, but I could see now what it really liked: good drainage, lots of reflected heat from stone or concrete, and poor soil.
The two tenants told off to meet us came out into the yard as we came cautiously through the metal gate. There was a wall around the yard; I think it was also stucco, but I can't recall. The tenants were appallingly young and appallingly cute, and I was even more appalled to realize that essentially I recognized them from literature -- a short very sturdy brunette, a willowy blonde, vying for the already overpopulated (at least in my brain) category of Cutest Lesbian Couple in the Universe. (The winner at the moment is that pair of women in a thirty-year-old relationship who were on the news in the wake of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts's recent lovely ruling.) I'll refer to the first as J and the second as L. They had only been in the house for a few days themselves, and had come to San Francisco from the East Coast to attend Stanford. L took Eric's check, showed us the room, and confirmed that we could borrow the futon from one of the sofas in the living room. She and J helped us drag it upstairs. We let Toliman out of his carrier and brought in the rest of our luggage. Toliman had promptly burrowed under the futon, which upset me tremendously, as I was afraid that one of us might become forgetful and sit on him.
At some point during the moving-in process L caught sight of the copies of my books that Eric had brought along, and remarked that J really liked reading fantasy. She also told me, very shyly, that she wanted to be a writer herself. I was as encouraging as I could be without being moronic, and ascertained that she hadn't actually written much yet (or didn't want to talk about it) and that genre fiction was not her ambition. J later interrogated me at considerable length about what I wrote and how I got published and what I thought about it; I think most of this was on L's behalf. We found common ground in Patricia MacKillip; otherwise I certainly recognized the names of the writers she liked, but either had not read them or had regretted it. Given the divide of age and culture we were talking across, this was not surprising. Before I left to go home, she did borrow The Secret Country from me -- I having temporarily lost sight of the fact that I had given Eric the new edition of the trilogy so he would have something to read that was not packed --and gave it an earnest try, but Eric reported to me later on that she had abandoned it for Kushiel's Dart, so he took it back in order to reread it himself.
The sublet was quite large, and beige and white throughout. It had a kitchen, dining, and living room on the first floor, with a small deck filled with a table and chairs opening off the dining room. There was a bathroom on the first floor too, which proved very useful during our stay, although it was perpetually out of toilet paper.
The second floor, where we were to stay, had another bathroom and four bedrooms. Eric's was a corner room, facing the same directions as his corner apartment had faced in Minneapolis, which was unexpectedly soothing. The room wasn't very large, but since we had no furniture and he was only going to stay until the 14th, this was not a problem except for Toliman. Eric later took to letting Toliman wander supervised about the house.
The third floor, which I visited only once when Toliman escaped, had yet another bathroom and either two or three bedrooms. I wondered briefly if it had been built for Mormons, but Eric said that very likely it had been intended for just the use it was being put to, housing for students who couldn't afford an apartment on their own. The kitchen was quite a good one and the living spaces pleasant.
Eric and I unpacked the sheets and made the bed, but this did not prevent Toliman from burrowing under the futon. I made him a little cave out of suitcases, but he was not impressed. We set up his food and water and litter box and went out to look at Telegraph Avenue, which was only a few blocks away.
*Eric adds, "Most people will know it better as California laurel, bay laurel, or Oregon myrtle. This is really one of those species that has enough apparently unrelated
common names that it's no wonder botanists are so fond of the Linnean binomial "Umbellularia californica". Remember Maturin trying to discuss the birds of the Hebrides with that Hebridean?"
The next installment, which will probably be done in May sometime, judging by my general progress, has bookstores in it.
I hope you all survive the festivities of the next week or so, and even flourish in them.
Pamela
Edited to add the missing footnote; and --
Cut-tagged in order to provide equal-opportunity annoyance to all my readers:
Having never really unpacked, it did not take us long on Saturday morning to pack again. I felt very weird about leaving. We had originally planned to stay at the hotel for a week, and despite the vagaries of the kitchen, I was fond of the hotel room. It was all ours. The sublet would have other people in it, and I was feeling profoundly unsociable; if I had not had to speak to anybody except Eric, the cat, and my sweeties at home, for the entire duration of my stay, I would have been perfectly happy. Saturday, however, included the following itinerary: pack up stuff and cat, drive to Oakland, leave cat with Eric's mother and nephew (this inevitably involved meeting said mother and nephew), go on a brief tour of the area to fill in the time before four o'clock, collect cat, go to sublet, finding two other tenants deputized to be there to let us in and give Eric a key and take his check (this inevitably involved meeting the tenants; the landlord was out of town); move in; eat dinner; maybe look at Telegraph Avenue; fall over.
We had food and coffee; I don't perfectly recollect what we talked about, except that it probably included a description by Eric of thje route, and a peroration by me on how I was worried that his family wouldn't like me. Eric calmly said that I would get "big slack" cut for me just by being his sweetie, and that since he liked me, they probably would too; he couldn't imagine why they wouldn't.
After everything else was removed from the room, Eric having taken the last load down, I started to look for the cat. No cat. I called him. No cat. I looked underneath the armchairs, noting guiltily in passing that either Toliman or some previous feline inhabitant had ripped out a lot of the undersides. No cat. I looked in the kitchen cabinets, under the bed, in the bathtub. No cat. Eric came back and we moved the refrigerator to make sure he hadn't gotten behind it. No cat. In a familiar but unwelcome state, feeling that I must have lost my mind, or strayed into some alternate dimension, I gazed around the room, and saw the bed with its rumpled spread and blanket. I poked it here and there.
Cat, exhibiting his new hobby of burrowing.
Eric put him into the carrier; he grew some extra legs, but was not too obstreperous. We took him away; I made sure we were checked out, and found myself unpromptedly waxing enthusiastic to the desk clerk about the kitchen in the room. We drove away.
The weather was similar to the previous day's, with fingers of fog sliding between the hills, and the temperature dropping as we went towards San Francisco. Eric, who had been relieved to arrive uneventfully and transported to delight by Moss Beach, where he had only been twice before, now began to exhibit a great many high spirits about being back again, and poured upon my partly-comprehending head a wealth of information and memory, as we drove north for the home of his heart.
Much of what he said got repeated later, as we saw the same hills and towns from different angles. The main thing I remember that I think really did come from this first view of the Bay Area was the Port of Oakland, where the huge container-moving cranes reminded Eric of Imperial Walkers. They were almost completely covered in mist this time, and loomed out of it in what was indeed a very alarming fashion. If I recollect properly, there was a fair amount of fog, and Eric pointed out to me where various things would be if there were not. I saw most of them later on. I am sorry to say that I have a very vague recollection of water, hills, bridges, sunlight, fog, and buildings and landscape emerging from the fog briefly and then returning to it.
At some point the scale of things decreased abruptly, and we drove along streets full of small brightly-colored houses, utterly and improbable plants mixed weirdly with more familiar ones. Outside the front door of the apartment building where Eric's mother and nephew lived at that time were two lavishly-flowering rose bushes and a mad object that appeared to be a morning-glory tree, with purple and white flowers. I think it must have been some kind of mallow, but really I don't know. I was interested in the building, since Eric had lived there for a while just before moving to Minneapolis, and had talked to me about it. So I saw how the building formed an open courtyard, with a swimming pool and palm trees in it, and how the stairs overlooking the courtyard were open to the air, very clearly a product of people who do not have to worry about whether there will be ice on the stairs.
We lugged Toliman upstairs, and I met Eric's nephew and mother. We were all concentrated on the cats, bothToliman and the small whirlwind of a feral kitten named Miranda, which helped to break the ice a bit. Miranda snapped herself into a kind of Hallowe'en netsuke cat, all curved and wildly puffed up, hissing and cursing. Toliman went under the sofa. When Miranda felt it was safe to resume her ordinary shape, we admired her, a skinny leggy thing with patches of silver tabby on a white ground, and a few bits of brown for emphasis. She was purry, but tended to feel that petting was a waste of time, and that everybody should be her litter mate and allow a lot of biting and kicking and scratching. Casey, whose cat she is, said that under certain circumstances you could pick her up and pet her, but she had to be worn out first. Aside from that, I didn't have much conversation with Eric's nephew, but I felt very much at home with his mother right away. Despite being in ill health and having just been through a couple of family crises, she was very gracious and welcoming to me, and showed some nice gleams of humor in her small talk that reminded me of Eric.
We didn't stay for very long, since Eric wanted to show me the redwoods in Canyon before our four o'clock deadline at the sublet. So we went off, past the courtyard with the palms and the pool in it, past the crazily-blooming roses and the mad mallow tree. Eric gave me a lightning tour of Lafayette, where the person he stayed with lived when he first came to California; also San Mateo, where he worked. Apartment buildings, BART stations, more alien vegetation. The houses continued very small; the apartment buildings were of a size closer to what I think of as normal, but were low and sprawly for the most part, possibly because they all concealed swimming pools in their interior courtyards.
We drove up into the hills, and the trees closed in over the road. Eric pointed out eucalypts to me, and after a while I realized that I could smell them. It was a smell that until that point I had associated mostly with cough remedies and dried-plant arrangements and heavy-duty hand lotion. I had smelled it at Moss Beach, but mixed with the cedar scent and the smell of the ocean. Smelling it outside in an urban environment, mixed with dust and a bit of car exhaust, was strange and enlivening. The hill got steeper and steeper, and finally we pulled off and parked in a gravelled area just below the Canyon Post Office, where Eric judged the redwoods to be large enough.
Another strange sensation ensued for me. I've see pictures of giant redwoods, taken by people who must have been standing where I was, in very similar weather: you see the dark airy-needled tree rising and spreading overhead, filtering the sunlight, making a bright hazy cottony disk of the sun itself, going up and up and up and up into the blue of the huge deep sky. If you are there yourself, it makes your neck hurt, but you don't want to stop looking. After a while I did. We looked at the burl and the new shoots coming out of it, and I stroked the soft new needles, and gave the trunk of the nearest tree a pat. We walked around the edge of the parking area, in the deep shade. There was a pepper tree*, and Eric scratched a leaf for me so that I could smell it. Unlike the sight of the redwoods and the scent of the eucalypts, it was utterly unfamiliar. By the time I left, it would become evocative. There were spiderwebs in the undergrowth, catching stray sunlight. Across the road were more enormous redwoods; we crossed and admired them too. I felt a terrible compulsion to apologize for a picnic table we had had when I was a child. I remembered the small redwoods that were the first ones I had ever seen, in Bodnant Gardens in England, near the Welsh border, and how the trees had been fenced off because visitors insisted on peeling off their bark. I thought of Tolkien's description of the thoughts of the fathers of the fathers of the trees. I had once written those words on a piece of lined yellow paper and left it on the seat of a bulldozer that had been parked for the weekend a few lots down from our new house on old farmland, in Missouri. "... Things that go free upon the earth, biting, breaking, hacking, burning; destroyers and usurpers."
I can't remember what we said to one another, or how many of those thoughts I told Eric on the spot, how many I had told him already (Bodnant Gardens is in that category, I believe, however), how many he will be reading for the first time when he sees this. But he was the perfect companion, for this and for everything we did during our journey together.
We drove back to Oakland and collected Toliman, who had remained hidden the entire time. Then we drove into Berkeley to find the sublet. Eric continued very happy, pointing out landmarks and always letting me know where we were and how we were getting to the next place. I think we made a detour to Julia Street to see the house where he had lived for six years or so. The woman whom he lived with then still owns the house, and we had an appointment to have dinner with her the following day. The house was much smaller than I had expected.
In contrast, the sublet was a very tall off-white stucco house whose yard contained some tired-looking and intermittent succulent groundcover, a redwood or two, a vegetable garden with tomatoes and basil, and a spill of red-orange nasturtiums apparently planted to conceal a green metal box containing I don't know what, electrical junctures, the air-conditioning unit, whatever. An alley ran along the other side of the house, with a tall blank wall beside it, and later on I found several enormous clumps of pink scabiosa blooming profusely. I'd never had much luck with planting scabiosa in my garden, but I could see now what it really liked: good drainage, lots of reflected heat from stone or concrete, and poor soil.
The two tenants told off to meet us came out into the yard as we came cautiously through the metal gate. There was a wall around the yard; I think it was also stucco, but I can't recall. The tenants were appallingly young and appallingly cute, and I was even more appalled to realize that essentially I recognized them from literature -- a short very sturdy brunette, a willowy blonde, vying for the already overpopulated (at least in my brain) category of Cutest Lesbian Couple in the Universe. (The winner at the moment is that pair of women in a thirty-year-old relationship who were on the news in the wake of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts's recent lovely ruling.) I'll refer to the first as J and the second as L. They had only been in the house for a few days themselves, and had come to San Francisco from the East Coast to attend Stanford. L took Eric's check, showed us the room, and confirmed that we could borrow the futon from one of the sofas in the living room. She and J helped us drag it upstairs. We let Toliman out of his carrier and brought in the rest of our luggage. Toliman had promptly burrowed under the futon, which upset me tremendously, as I was afraid that one of us might become forgetful and sit on him.
At some point during the moving-in process L caught sight of the copies of my books that Eric had brought along, and remarked that J really liked reading fantasy. She also told me, very shyly, that she wanted to be a writer herself. I was as encouraging as I could be without being moronic, and ascertained that she hadn't actually written much yet (or didn't want to talk about it) and that genre fiction was not her ambition. J later interrogated me at considerable length about what I wrote and how I got published and what I thought about it; I think most of this was on L's behalf. We found common ground in Patricia MacKillip; otherwise I certainly recognized the names of the writers she liked, but either had not read them or had regretted it. Given the divide of age and culture we were talking across, this was not surprising. Before I left to go home, she did borrow The Secret Country from me -- I having temporarily lost sight of the fact that I had given Eric the new edition of the trilogy so he would have something to read that was not packed --and gave it an earnest try, but Eric reported to me later on that she had abandoned it for Kushiel's Dart, so he took it back in order to reread it himself.
The sublet was quite large, and beige and white throughout. It had a kitchen, dining, and living room on the first floor, with a small deck filled with a table and chairs opening off the dining room. There was a bathroom on the first floor too, which proved very useful during our stay, although it was perpetually out of toilet paper.
The second floor, where we were to stay, had another bathroom and four bedrooms. Eric's was a corner room, facing the same directions as his corner apartment had faced in Minneapolis, which was unexpectedly soothing. The room wasn't very large, but since we had no furniture and he was only going to stay until the 14th, this was not a problem except for Toliman. Eric later took to letting Toliman wander supervised about the house.
The third floor, which I visited only once when Toliman escaped, had yet another bathroom and either two or three bedrooms. I wondered briefly if it had been built for Mormons, but Eric said that very likely it had been intended for just the use it was being put to, housing for students who couldn't afford an apartment on their own. The kitchen was quite a good one and the living spaces pleasant.
Eric and I unpacked the sheets and made the bed, but this did not prevent Toliman from burrowing under the futon. I made him a little cave out of suitcases, but he was not impressed. We set up his food and water and litter box and went out to look at Telegraph Avenue, which was only a few blocks away.
*Eric adds, "Most people will know it better as California laurel, bay laurel, or Oregon myrtle. This is really one of those species that has enough apparently unrelated
common names that it's no wonder botanists are so fond of the Linnean binomial "Umbellularia californica". Remember Maturin trying to discuss the birds of the Hebrides with that Hebridean?"
The next installment, which will probably be done in May sometime, judging by my general progress, has bookstores in it.
I hope you all survive the festivities of the next week or so, and even flourish in them.
Pamela
