A tale of two cities

Detroit is the city that played a major role in changing the world for the worse. And in the end, the world got back at it, leaving it one of the most troubled – and troubling – cities in the hemisphere. Ann Arbor, I learned today, is the fantasy complement to the hard core reality of Detroit.

I started my day in lively Ann Arbor. It’s a small city, and it would feel too small for me to live there today, but its riverside parks and greenways and plazas around the University of Michigan campus provide a quintessentially college town setting. Before I moved there to go to college, I thought about why they would name this place Ann Arbor. I always pictured two young women sitting under a gazebo (I don’t know why I didn’t think of an arbor), and one of them was named Ann. I didn’t give a name to the other woman, but for purposes of reminiscing about a memory I don’t really remember, we’ll call her darling Deirdre. In my mind, they would meet every day and sit in a swing or on a bench under the gazebo. Ann was very kind and very smart. When Deirdre died suddenly in childbirth, Ann insisted to her father, the farmstead administrator, that he rename the gazebo for Deidre, perhaps calling it Deirdre Arbor. But nobody in the unnamed community liked it – so difficult to pronounce, they worried it would be called Deer Drarber – and they asked the administrator to name it after his daughter, Ann, because it was Ann who was so kind to want to name it for Deirdre. And when Anne died, they went ahead and named the whole town after that gazebo.

I don’t know why I thought of this story but it was one that made some sense to me. And today, my friend Robin and her mother Pam – the famed Guenzels of Ann Arbor for whom the town should later be renamed by Bob, the county administrator, accompanied me on a tour of their fine village. The streets were lined with artists manufacturing merriment, selling their Panera pan and Greek Chili dogs, but also woodcutters and whimsy-makers, fairies and painters, but mostly stern looking women from the Midwest with that look that would be accepted as lesbian anywhere else in the country, but here it’s perfectly normal to walk around without makeup and have your hair chopped into a hairstyle that looks unpleasant to touch. These women, and a host of retired men, toted marketing bags and pocketbook purchases from the Art Fairs of yore. They sought a perfectly executed painting or a colorfully felted bag or a wood block print or a block of wood or a local guitarist’s DVDs to play when one seeks harmony in the afternoon summertime heat. I bought a wood block with an old woman sprayed in black paint onto its pink flowery surface.

I always crave a good street fair and am often left disappointed by the trashy street closures that claim to be street fairs in San Francisco every weekend during the cold summer and balmy fall months. But this Ann Arbor fair was a spectacle with lots and lots of terrible art, some good art, bad [very, very bad] Splenda-covered microwave popcorn that Pam and I sampled, and lots of good looking and smelling food. I should also mention the booths filled with socialists and foreskin reclaimers and bunny rescuers and those freaky sad Jews for Jesus.

In downtown Ann Arbor, I discovered the fairies really do live there, and a few goblins, with many buildings having hidden entrances for fairies or goblins only. It’s a bit inspiring, especially for the children, but it also reminds me a little bit of the crap one would buy at a Mole Hole or Gold Crown Hallmark Store.

After Zingerman’s Road House and art and terrific hospitality at the Guenzel Inn, dining with renowned LEED-certified architect Dave Richardson and child language expert/author Debbie Feit, not to mention low-humidity 75-degree temperatures, it wasn’t easy to sneak away from a town that once was home, but now is a series of strange memory flashes. At one point, we walked along the side of a downtown building, and there I remembered hearing about vaginal discharge from a friend of mine in college. At another corner, I remembered meeting someone for a blind date. As we walked by Cottage Inn Pizza, my salivary glands remembered the flavor of Spicy Mediterranean pizza, and as I looked into storefronts that are not as they once were, I remembered what was there when I was there before. To me, Ann Arbor is a fantasy of what it was, and even when I see new buildings and restaurants, I still am unable to update my mental inventory of buildings and businesses and keep them current. I think they will always slip back to recollections rather than reality, like a person with short-term memory loss or Alzheimer’s.

Ann Arbor progresses; Detroit falls. Detroit is something different. I often read news stories about Detroit; I hear NPR features on Detroit. I remember spending some time in Detroit, being afraid for my life to see so much decay and inept political ruin. Detroit will always be America’s shame, and could fade to ghost status. Or it could become something remarkably different and special if it were undertaken as a special project to create something that matches the memories of how it once was. In every story I hear of Detroit, people talk about what used to be there: the successful hat shop, the glamorous restaurant, the remarkable lobby of a building downtown, a full block of houses. Young people working hard in good jobs. Neighbors who didn’t set the neighborhood on fire every October.

Unlike most American cities that have grown away from what they once were, with new housing developments and new urban communities, Detroit could recreate itself as it was: the classic, successful, robust American City built on manufacturing. Our country still needs to manufacture things: solar panels, computer components, water filtration systems, wind mills, building materials, energy-saving materials, transit rail cars, and buses. Even cars. But Detroit will have to get over itself to return to itself. New technology center? I don’t think so. The tech people will be happier in other cities. Union bosses? Probably not. They are to share some of the blame for what happened to Detroit, and a break from the promises of the Big Three would be needed to manufacture everything else our country needs. What Detroit needs is restoration, not progress. Restoration of good schools, low crime, good transportation, nice neighborhoods. With these in place, Detroit can change. Without them Detroit will wither.

Even if Detroit disappears, it will still have an airport. I ended my Ann Arbor afternoon at the Detroit-Wayne County Airport, major hub of what was once Republic Airlines and then Northwest Orient and then Northwest and now Delta. A center for reinvention if I’ve ever seen one. It was my first time in the airport for a long time, and I had never experienced the immensity and efficiency and cleanliness and self promotion of this marvelous airport. With Northwest’s nearly 40 year-old DC-9s, one of which I just flew, the only thing the airline had going for itself was its hub, and now it’s a Delta hub. Another point for Atlanta business management, another loss of what once was in Detroit. Detroit takes another step toward losing something that signified it.

Selling frutas

There is a discussion in our house that one day we’ll recount for our children those rough days during the recession of2009 when people were so poor, they had to sell fresh fruit on the street.
This week I have had the opportunity to experience Houston, San Diego, and of course, my own home town, San Francisco. I’ve given each city an urban planning check-up and decided that San Francisco is the most Latin American of any of them, because of the fruit.

Although I spent the earlier part of this week in Houston – which is not unlike a large Latin American city in that it sprawls, has lots of poor people on the fringes, is incredibly hot and has a collapsing infrastructure of incomplete sidewalks, dangerous intersections without traffic signals, and oddly pieced together parcels of land with lots of gates around them – San Francisco has the fruit sellers. And I spent five hours in North San Diego County, which is just over the border from Tijuana, has popular radio stations broadcasting from Mexico, and has lots of signs in Spanish, but I didn’t see any fruit sellers.

In fact, in San Francisco, it is more than only fruit sellers. It includes a cotton candy man and a couple of churros sellers and paletas hawkers in Dolores Park. But it is the fruit sellers who have made their way into all of San Francisco’s neighborhoods, including neighborhoods where the only people typically heard speaking Spanish are the construction crews and landscapers, and perhaps school children being sent to schools outside of the Mission District, the heart of San Francisco’s Latino community.

Growing up in Georgia. There were often some old white southern people who would park their truck on a bridge on Johnson Road and sell watermelons and peaches. Over the years, the old white people were replaced by younger black people who sold the same things in the same location.

I remember being in our bright orange station wagon, my mom driving, as we approached the produce-packed parked truck. My mother would remark, “Oh, there’s a farmer selling fruit. I wonder how their peaches are?” She would drive to the next block and turn around in someone’s driveway and return to the truck, pulling up behind it. She would get out and my sister and I would follow, standing there beside my mom, who was busy picking up peaches, looking at them for worms, and sniffing them. “They’s Georgia peaches ma’am,” the farmer person would say. My sister and I would look at each other, filled with pride that our state produced these little furry fruity gems, but knowing that they often didn’t live up to their reputation. We had learned several years earlier, while driving through Aiken, South Carolina, that South Carolina peaches are supposedly more flavorful than Georgia peaches. A South Carolina farmer had told us that, and we had felt like it was a truth to be reckoned with because those peaches we bought in Aiken from the farmer were better than anything the crappy Winn-Dixie ever sold.

At the truck on Johnson Road, I would gently squeeze a peach and smell it too. My sister would do the same. “Get this one mommy,” my sister said as she handed it to my mother. My mother added it to the pile the farmer was gathering for us.

“Mommy.” I had noticed something. “Look they sell corn, too.”

The farmer would say something like, “Yes ma’am. The corn’s real fresh. Just picked today.”

My sister and I would glance at each other again, knowing that if this corn had been picked earlier in the day, it could not possibly be good. Our family planted about 12 rows of corn in our backyard garden and we only picked it moments before we were prepared to eat it. My mother would insist on getting the water to a rollicking boil. Only then, when the pot was bubbling and the kitchen filled with steam, would she dispatch us to the garden to pick four ears of corn. My sister and I scattered into the towering stalks of corn, moving as fast as we could, to find four perfect ears: our hope was to pull back the husk at the top to reveal a wig of brown covering a glow of bright worm-free kernels. Once we had the booty, we’d dash as fast as we could back into the kitchen to shuck the ears and drop them into the boiling water. We had been taught from a very young age that these hurried hysterics were the only way to ensure the enjoyment of fresh corn and that anything picked earlier in the day would most certainly be a tremendous let down.

Although we didn’t buy corn from the farmer person on Johnson Road, we would gather the peaches and perhaps thump the watermelons, and with the old man’s assistance put the items into paper bags to carry to the car. My mom would pay the few dollars it cost for the produce and we would return to the station wagon for our drive home. When we arrived home, we’d sample the fruit. The peaches from the farmer person’s truck were really juicy and sweet, much better than those South Carolina Peaches any day. My shame of the Georgia peach faded away.

Street corner produce shopping. It’s different in San Francisco. You might expect people to sell fruit from small stands in the Mission District, or perhaps even from the back of their truck in the Excelsior District along busy commercial strips. But today in Cole Valley, Noe Valley, the Castro District – some of San Francisco’s core middle and upper-class neighborhoods – fruit sellers stand at the corner of two residential streets with a dozen flats filled with crimson, glistening California strawberries. Some also have a few large boxes of mangos. And lately, I’ve seen a few with oranges and cherries. On the corner, next to the house owned by a couple of yuppies and across the street from the home rented to two college students and diagonally across the corner where the older woman lives alone, as she has since 1978 in the same house, the man stands there all day and sells fruit to the white people.

Their buyers’ market is not only the scattering of pedestrians found on virtually any residential street in San Francisco, but also the people driving their cars to pick up their kids or go to the orthodontist or on their way home from Whole Foods. These are the people the fruit sellers eye, waving a hand and flagging the driver of a Volvo or Prius or Subaru passing by. And sometimes, the drivers stop and pull into the adjacent driveway, or double park or angle up to the corner, rolling down the window to inquire, “Oh they look lovely. How much are the mangos?”

The fruit seller tells them the entire box is available for ten dollars. Twelve mangos for ten dollars. And then the fruit seller hoists one box of the bright squash-toned Philippine-style mangoes from the small stack on the sidewalk. The driver extends a ten-dollar bill through the window and tells the fruit seller to put them on the back seat. The back window moves down, controlled by a button or small lever next to the driver. The fruit seller holds the box and leans awkwardly through the window. He places the box of mangos on the back seat, next to the empty toddler seat belted into position on the opposite side of the car. The car pulls away with a box of fresh mangoes. The toddler will learn to eat mangos when the parent arrives home.

In the evening, the fruit sellers are no longer on the sidewalk. Perhaps their strawberries sold. Or the mangos became too soft, and their bright skin wrinkled and blemished in the sun. Maybe somebody picked the sellers up and drove them away with their meager earnings. Perhaps the police told them to move on. Or maybe they sold their fresh fruits and returned home, to small flats in the Mission District, packed with other families with children and other fruit sellers and day laborers, leaving Cole Valley, Noe Valley, the Castro District and the other neighborhoods without fruit for sale at night. The seven o’clock streets of San Francisco’s Noe Valley, not unlike those of any city’s pretty midtown or old suburban neighborhoods, remain quiet. The sun begins to set.

My feelings about Phoenix

Updates. It has been a while since I have been on a flight, so there has been a bit of a delay in updating www.splendasucks.com. But I am currently on a flight back to San Francisco from Phoenix, where I spent about seven hours today. It’s a 90+ minute flight in each direction, so the whole trip isn’t so unbearable. My dad is actually flying from Atlanta to San Francisco tomorrow for a two hour meeting and then returning home, which sounds much more unpleasant, if you ask me.

But even a short trip to Phoenix is not without its unpleasantries. One of those not-so-nice things is Phoenix itself. At a mild 106 degrees, I made the mistake of parking a couple of blocks away from where I was headed for my meeting and I walked. I thought I would pass out. I was so sweaty and so hot, it was a terrible embarrassment to walk into the meeting, but I made a quick stop in the gentleman’s room and refreshed enough to bury my smell beneath some liquid soap.

So much of Phoenix is about suburban development patterns imposed on a dry, dusty desert, where nothing really should have ever been built. I was trying to think that if the fine designers of the American footprint in Arizona had agreed to build everything in small villages and disallow wide flat straight roads, the state would be an amazing wonderland, but instead looks a bit more like a crumbling suburban parking lot. Wal-Mart has carried out its ever-destructive policy of building and abandoning stores all over the Phoenix region, keeping the notion of a deserted wasteland of dying suburbs.

Don’t get me wrong, not everything about Phoenix is bad: I once went to a wedding on a beautiful golf course in Scottsdale in the middle of July. The grass was remarkably green, even under the baking sun. The guests cheerily waited for delays in getting the wedding started because the anorexic bride’s family didn’t seem to care that the guests were all burning to a crisp on folding chairs on the golf course in the sun in the middle of the day in July. I don’t know that anyone passed out, but everyone looked really sweaty and awful on the golf course in the sun in the middle of the day in July. At least the reception was inside: my sister and I were seated with all of the bride’s friends from her eating disorders support group who collectively ate a radish.

One thing Phoenix has going for it are towns in the metro area with cool names like Surprise and Peoria and Tempe. And then there’s Scottsdale, but I always accidentally call it Scottdale, which was the name of the low-income suburb in DeKalb County, Georgia, where the poor kids at Druid Hills High School lived. There was one classmate of mine who was very, very poor and lived in a broken down house on the side of Scott Boulevard. He had a very heavy southern accent – extremely country, like the father Hillbilly Bear. I wonder what happened to him. I hope he’s living a happy life. But I always think of his shack and his torn clothes and his acne when I think of Scottsdale.

I had about 30 minutes to swing by a Mexican mall on my way to the airport and explore a nightmarish store called La Curacao which sold crappy Mexican things and a bunch of TVs with their volumes turned up so loud that they could hear the Univision broadcast next door in New Mexico. There was one of those dismal 99.99¢ Stores, too, that I walked into. I bought a book that makes fun of George Bush for 99.99¢ and some dental floss for 99.99¢. One day I would like to buy 100 items and see if the last one is actually only 99¢. Anyway, there was a slightly fermenting man standing behind me in line, a black man, which was unusual since everyone else in the place was Latino and he told me he really liked my purse. I thanked him. And then he continued:

“It’s a really nice purse.”

“Yes, it’s a good bag,” I said, with one of my charitable smiles.

“If I had one of those I could fill it up. You got it filled up with money? You need a big bag filled with money.”

I chuckled and said that I wish it were filled with money. “Ha ha ha.” The cashier also joined in with an awkward laugh. I still had not told him my purse was actually a $75 Timbuktu computer bag with a $2500 computer inside, and that I was carrying it around in this 99.99¢ store because I did not want it to melt in my Dollar rent-a-car in the 106-degree climate.

“I wish I had me a bag like that.” He continued as I handed the cashier $4.25, my purchase plus tax, which, I suppose technically should have been $4.249625. “My wife, they took her away and put her in the nursing home.”

“Oh no,” I said with sincere empathy.

He continued. “I’m 90 and my wife is 91 and they took her and put her in a nursing home.”

“I’m so sorry. That can’t be easy.” I collected my change from the cashier and she flashed me a smile showing her appreciation that I was being nice to the man whose purchases she would have to ring up next. “ I wish you the very best,” I said, like that insincere Christian woman who appears in the movie The Lost Boys of Sudan.

I dashed off to Sky Harbor airport, to catch my flight. I spent a bit of time in the dreary United Airlines Red Carpet Room and ate a few too many plastic-wrapped brownies before setting my butt in my seat on the plane. And here I am in seat 2C, next to someone who was irate that there wasn’t an outlet to plug in his computer, and who ordered a ginger ale and burped one of those belches that smells like bologna. Yuck. And then he burped again. And again. Bologna breath. Loud burps. Horrid. I hope he never finds an outlet.

And the woman in front of me talks incessantly – nonstop to the polite woman next to her – about living in Monterey and opening a congregant living facility for older single women because she has a language arts masters degree and another masters degree in gerontology and this is her passion and she’s been engaged three times and was married once but then had an affair and left her husband and her son is 31 and blah blah, talking much louder than the volume of the safety presentation video that was announced by the most excellent flight attendant I’ve encountered in a really long time (John), who keeps bringing me wine and cheese and fruit. It’s a little different than my crappy US Airways flight to Phoenix this morning, where they actually forgot to show a flight safety presentation (neither video nor live action), which may have been the first flight I’ve ever been on without a safety presentation. Given US Airways’ recent track record, they’d better be doing safety demonstrations.

I have relatives in Phoenix. I did not call them because there wasn’t time. If we win this project (I was there for a pre-bid conference) I will give them a call. And the project would be scheduled to take place during the fall, winter and spring months, so I’m hoping the temperature would all be a bit more bearable.

In the meantime, I’m off to Houston next week and then San Diego at the end of the week and then to Michigan the following week, and back to San Diego, so I’m hoping to stay out of the extreme heat for a little while and will be landing in my cool San Francisco in about 15 minutes.

Living in a studio apartment

Woe is me.
The temporary life in a studio apartment -- even a charming one -- is unpleasant for me...

...And for my spouse.

The highlight of our life is carrying out Puttanesca Pizza again from Gialina's

And taking trips to classy joints in Memphis each year.

And, of course, wandering around our house remodel, in progress, waiting for the return to a normal life.

Mobility

I’ve spent almost week in Atlanta working on my accessibility and mobility skills, which should help further build my qualifications for my work in this area. Rather than attending a conference or a TRB committee, this is about my mother, the woman who raised me and who now broke her ankle somehow while bending over the play with a two-year old at Mary Mac’s Tea Room. She undoubtedly moved hastily, something she does from time to time, and a trait I see in myself when I mindlessly move forward with my day to day actions. Her hasty actions meant multiple fractures and a few floating bone fragments in her ankle. As a result, she was drugged last Friday to have an orthopedic surgeon add screws and plates and release her back to a hospital bed at Emory Orthopaedic and Spine Hospital (yes, with the pretentious spelling of orthopedic, because this is Emory University, an institution that does whatever it desperately can to seem to be better than it really is). And this hospital is in Tucker, not exactly a posh locale.

Her bed was in a suite. A suite is what everyone in the hospital calls the place where your hospital bed is. It is the chamber where you recover and eat jello and watch a computerized TV that doesn’t work unless the facilities guy comes and signs in. A suite is a bland and dreary room that has no right to be called a suite. But once again, this is Emory, and they are all about marketing.

The nurses were very nice, although nobody adjusted the messed up sheets on my mom’s bed and most of them seemed pretty light on work, so they were chatting and chatting. The friendly dining service guy, Ricardo, came in and touted his amazing food options available to the hospital’s patients. I had already tried the soup downstairs and my mother told him that I thought it was awful. A hasty comment. After a night’s rest in the hospital and a day of checkups and physical therapy, I schlepped her home.

“It’s time to go. You’ll be more comfortable at home.”

And we were off, mom to her home for the next eight weeks and me to escape the confines of the hospital and the terrible food.

She’s recovering well. I don’t blame her for being worried about her recovery. I would be disappointed if I couldn’t walk on my right foot for eight weeks. It means she can’t drive, can’t walk out of the house, can’t go down to her mailbox, can’t easily get to work.

I dragged her out of the house on Monday. I told her we were going to the mall and Home Depot. After a few days of me running around and doing things for my mom, it was time to show her she could be confident enough to get out of the house and to do things in public. And she did, borrowing one of the mall wheelchairs at Lenox Square we went cruising all over and even bought a few shirts at Benetton. Then at Home Depot I ran in and got the wheelchair while she chatted with the temp employees out in front who were demonstrating the merits of Windex Outdoor Window Cleaner. Although she couldn’t move any more easily, she was out and about and people talked to her and were courteous. She’ll be able to do it again.

I’m now on my second flight of the day. My first flight was delayed because there were five wheelchairs on board, including one fairly overweight paralyzed man that took a crew of people to load on to the plane. The second flight was delayed due to thunderstorms, and an aircraft malfunction, but mostly due to a medical emergency. It looked like a man had a stroke in the back of the plane. The flight attendant made the man's wife move up to the front of the plane, in the seat in front of mine, and sit there by herself. Just as I was trying to strike up a conversation and let her know I was sorry and did she want a piece of chocolate or to use my cell phone, a friendlier flight attendant told her she could go to the rear of the plane while the doctor and nurse on board and the slew of EMS staff attended to the poor man. His wife told me they lived in San Jose. Instead they are spending the night in a Chicago hospital. And her husband will probably take a long time to recover.

A broken ankle is bad. But it’s not as bad as all of the other brain and kidney and stomach and heart things it could be. It’s not as bad as being completely paralyzed or having a stroke on a plane. I think my mom realizes that, but I know that when it’s your broken bone, it is the worst thing. I hope that she heals fast and walks faster and doesn’t let getting bummed out keep her from moving forward.

Random randomness

A little tipsy is what I am. No regrets. The flight attendant keeps refilling my glass and I keep missing the opportunity to politely say not so I keep saying thank you.

So I can’t write anything coherent, but I’m in the mood to share so this is how it’s done.

Tired of writing for work.
Done with editing for work.
Exhausted from work.

Bummed that I don’t get to spend my four-day weekend at home in San Francisco and an instead Joey Goldman from Atlanta, Georgia who is returning to Atlanta, Georgia for a week. Yay.

At 37,000 feet on a plane with new Somali immigrants being resettled in Atlanta. Makes being tired of work and tired of editing seem minor. No bombs or lack of government. Poor people will have to live in Atlanta. I guess it’s a better climate for them than Minneapolis. Why are there so many Somalis in Minneapolis? With Northwest being consumed by Delta, are the Somalis moving to Atlanta too?

Wine is good. I’m on my third glass. I plan to have my mom drink a lot of it. I’m on this plane to assist her while she convalesces post-ankle surgery. It sounds like she kind of shattered it. Poor thing will need pins stuck in there and won’t be able to walk for two months. So I’m taking the first rotation: the caring son to help around the house. To push her around in a wheelchair. To take her to surgery. To build a ramp in the backyard. To install some handrails outside. To give my mom more wine to go with her Percocet. Then my sister, the former Beth Goldman, now Mason, will swing by to provide her motherly/daughterly touches. Also to help: Aunt Kathi Miller and wonderful cousin Heidi.

Words that are not: Classy

Must shut down the computer now for landing. OK. Bye. Next time: more coherence is promised.

Yelling at terrible drivers

I’ve become very testy about bad drivers lately. One of the joys of driving is being able to cruise around with your windows closed while you scream things at people. Bad drivers. Slow drivers. Ugly cars. People with ugly faces. People with ugly faces who drive ugly cars badly. A car affords you the opportunity to blurt obscenities without others hearing you, avoiding the embarrassing confrontation you might otherwise suffer in a public locale. It’s a wonderful anger management contraption as long as you stay calm and focused on your own driving, channeling your aggression by tongue rather than the gas pedal.

My crabbiness in the car has been coming for a long time. I partly blame my father for this trait. When I was a child, he would drive us around Atlanta in our 1976 spitfire orange Dodge Aspen station wagon, with the CB radio cracking and squealing. He yelled at nearly everyone who drove by. Many of the comments were about women drivers, and my mom would give him a verbal wrist slap for those. He also called a lot of people “turkeys” and “rednecks” and I’m sure there were some “redneck turkeys.”

When you drive around in a spitfire orange Dodge Aspen station wagon, you are also recognized by a lot of people. Some of our friends and neighbors would always honk their car horns to say hi, which made matters worse, because the last thing my grouchy father wanted was people honking at him when he was on the road.

Sometimes, dad’s language was a bit rougher. I remember a bunch of “goddammits” and “shits,” again not warmly welcomed by my mother. However, he was reminded to watch his language not by my mother, but by my sister and me, from the back seat, telling him he should use better language – exactly what a cursing man wants to hear from his kids. My sister, Beth, coined the term “poopycat,” which she and I blurted every time my dad called someone a bad name.

Of course, when the CB radio was active, and it usually was, our language improved and we all spoke with heavy Southern accents. I don’t remember my dad’s handle, but I picked Bugs Bunny, like an idiot kid would, and later switched to Wild Child, enjoying the rhyme and feeling more like Willie Ames or BJ and the Bear. My dad relied on the CB radio to let us know if any smokeys were up ahead of the convoy blockading us on the right side of the interstate. My sister and I would take turns jabbering on the radio about smokeys and talking with truckers and getting that thrill of the open road. It was like the joy we experienced on school field trips, sitting in the last row of the yellow school bus and coaxing the truck driver behind the bus to honk his horn.

The CB was a wonder on the expressway, but not so great in parking structures. Yes, we were the dorks with the extraordinary antenna perched atop the spitfire orange Dodge Aspen station wagon: the antenna that made the loud scraping sound as we drove through the parking structure at Colony Square or Phipps Plaza.

Reliving my childhood. When I ditched the 1990 gray Honda Accord four years ago after 15 years of service and less than 60,000 miles, I was desperate for a station wagon. Fortunately for me, those spitfire orange Dodge Aspen station wagons are no longer made, and I would never opt for a Dodge unless I won it on a game show. I got the next best thing: a bright red Volvo wagon (if you don’t know what spitfire orange looks like, think bright red).

Now I drive around town in my red station wagon, cursing the frigging idiots who don’t know how to drive their Toyota Prius. (Have you noticed that a Toyota Prius is the new Volvo? People who drive them are horrible drivers. Volvo drivers have much improved and the people who would otherwise have bought Volvos have migrated to the Prius. That’s what allowed me to buy the Volvo in the first place, because I didn’t want to be one of those terrible Volvo drivers. I digress…). I yell at the people who don’t know that the car on the right has the right of way (there is a reason it is called “right of way”) in a four-way stop. I snarl at the people looking for a parking space, the people who drive 10 mph down a street signed for 25 mph. I am an asshole in the car. But I make sure my windows are rolled up. And the music is turned up.

It feels so good. It’s perfect anger management.

If only I could have a silencer wrapped around my mouth when I ride the Muni train. I would love to yell at my fellow passengers who block the doors when people are trying to get off or who wear their backpacks on the train, completely clueless that whatever the hell is making their bag stick out two feet behind their back is banging into me through the backpack fabric. I would love to tell the smelly people to get off the train. I would love to curse the terrible train drivers and tell them to do their damn job. But I cannot.

So, I save my comments for my car. In the four years I’ve had it, I’ve driven about 11,000 miles, which means I spend very little time behind the wheel. That doesn’t give me many hours to drive around yelling at people in my screaming box on wheels. I think that’s a good thing.

If I had more time, I’d have to edit myself to avoid becoming a bitter, belligerent driver. I would be stuck with poopycat. I prefer to grouse without those limitations.

Ten loosely related actions/observations from the last week

1. Walking in to the bathroom at work Wednesday and heading to the urinal. Standing there and thinking, ”Mmmm, something smells really good in here. I’m hungry.

2. Avoiding the olive oil and salt & pepper ice creams yesterday and opting for bourbon + cornflakes ice cream instead.

3. Thinking about oily hair/hair growth soap, Jabon Cacahuanache’s before and after images. Wishing I had bought more at the drug store in San Miguel de Allende.

before (antes) and after (despues)

4. Shopping in San Francisco Rite Aid stores, now that they will soon be sold to Walgreen’s. Noticing they are visited only by consumers who apparently don’t care about sale merchandise, because not a single item is on sale. Observing the only people in the store seem to be a handful of conventioneers and German tourists who don’t know that the locals don’t shop there anymore. Wondering where the older Chinese women have gone.

5. Watching older Chinese women lining up for matzoh ball soup during lunch hours at Bristol Farms.

6. Wandering through the Virgin Megastore liquidation sale and seeing old men and women leering in the 50% off porn DVD section.

7. Realizing that I am very old: that I absolutely must bend my knees when I sneeze to avoid throwing my back out and that I am appreciative of the cortisone shot that did a nice job on my bursitis.

8. Missing the prune Activia that I had in Mexico. And looking forward to getting it when I’m there later this week.

9. Knowing that the unfortunate acrylic shower pan that was just installed in our bathroom remodel will be ripped out this week and replaced with a much better tiled shower pan. Being relieved that it will look less like a nursing home.

10. Watching my grandmother as she tried to end our conversation about 50 times in 10 minutes. Watching my father continue to engage her. Hoping that if I am turning 99, I will be in good health and very alert and that if I’m not, somebody will push me off a cliff.

Muni, K Ingleside, Thursday afternoon from Powell Street to Castro Street

Springtime is fun because everything seems a little fresher.

I skipped out of the office a little early to meet a woodworker and burglar alarm installer (don’t ask). I grabbed my bag, went dashing out of our 13^th floor office, hopped on the elevator and headed out the office building doors. I tried to speed down the stairs into the Powell Street subway station. It was difficult, as usual, getting down the stairs quickly due to one of those squads of tottering Chinese women, each holding pink plastic shopping bags overflowing with bok choy, broccoli and bittermellon. I slowed my pace as I followed them from the street into the bright fluorescent-lit public space below and then made my move to pass them. I tagged my Translink card and ran down the next flight of stairs to the track where a K Ingleside train was approaching. I hopped on the train, thrilled to get a seat at this pre-rush hour and tapped away at my iPod to listen to the Neko Case album I downloaded.

Commotion begins. As I’m easing into the music, music I’m not sure I really enjoy, I look up to see a very large wheelchair make its way on to the train. It’s one of those deluxe cushy chairs with a beige padded seat and headrest, but it looks old and a bit tattered or unclean. The occupant of the mobility device eases the chair into the doorway of the train and the defiant teens who only seconds ago had taken the space, scatter to the front of train. The man in the wheelchair adjusts his seat to recline, giving him, presumably, a better grip on the enormous cargo is transporting.

Nobody on the train can take their eyes off the cargo. I look around at my fellow passengers and see other expressions of bemusement, like mine, as well as a few of indifference, and a couple of horror. The oversized terrarium he has in his lap (and up on the arms of the chair) has a single mirrored side, which rests on the man’s stomach, reflecting the four mice inside and the many faces of the subway train passengers. As the K Ingleside train pulls out of the Powell Street station, the four mice – two solid black and two with black and white splotches – scurry about in the terrarium, pink noses sniffing the side of their cage and beady eyes peeking at the passengers staring back at them. They fling themselves at the mirrored side and then retreat. Periodically, they dash for cover in a small FiberOne bar box, partly shredded, but providing enough of a hiding place for each mouse to avoid the stares. They leap and they run and they toss aside small scraps of paper and wood shavings. The chips of wood are like those left behind from a number two pencil, one that has been sharpened deliberately by a fifth grade girl seeking to prove to her cohort that her Hello Kitty knockoff plastic sharpener produces the longest peel of pencil wood possible.

As the train departs Van Ness Station, the man in the wheelchair loses his grip on the terrarium. It slides in his lap turning forward quickly before it is maneuvered back into his lap. As the train thrashes and speeds up, the giant glass box twists periodically. I shift my focus from the animation of the mice in the box to the face of a 50-something Filipino woman five rows away. She absorbs the spectacle not with passing interest, but with a terrorized look. Her eyes are open wide, her eyebrows are arched and she struggles to maintain consistent breathing. I think to myself, “that’s my mom if she were on this train.”

With each lurch, the woman looks like she’s ready to throw herself through the train window and onto the rail tracks. But her expression has some defiance, like she’s ready to complain to someone. She’s thinking to herself about how she can get the police to remove these mice and man from the train. And then she fans her face and looks away.

In my head, I am playing out my fantasy with this woman’s expressions. I think she is reading my mind: a sudden stop – known to happen on San Francisco’s Muni trains – wood shreds, glass, a FiberOne box and mice flying through the air. The mice would scamper about the subway train, providing me with a delightful story to tell, but instilling fear in the hearts of my fellow passengers. The doors would open, they would dash onto the platform (probably to be eaten by a subway rat) and the man in the wheelchair would scream and plead for the return of his precious cargo.

As the train approaches Castro Street station, the man shifts his wheelchair forward and the mice dance around in their shreds, waiting for him – and them – to leave the train. Another passenger – a young man with a camera around his neck – snaps a photo of the mice and zips out the train doors. As I walk up the stairs to the concourse level of the station, wishing I too had taken a photo to remember the experience, I remind myself that I am happy the mice are safe in their cage. And that the woman on the train avoided a full panic attack. And that it is all still perfect springtime entertainment.

The consultant's life: Sheila E had it right

I just 'did' West Michigan in 20 hours. Everyone wants to know how I can fly across the country and spend fewer than 24 hours in one place. Well, here’s how it goes….

Hour 1. I arrived in Grand Rapids, grabbed my car from Avis, and cruised over to the Meijer store to buy some water, pomegranate juice, and some apples. But I stole the apples. It was an accident. Really. I was holding the bag of apples in my hand as I passed through the self check-out line where I scanned both of my water bottles and my overpriced pomegranate juice and put them in the bag and walked out of the store. I drove away and that’s when I realized that I had not purchased all of my goods. I had three apples in a bag that I had not paid for. I was mortified. I wanted to drive back to Meijer but didn’t have time so I resolved that I would return to Meijer in one of the next 19 hours before I flew out with a few dollars in hand to repay the fine folks at Meijer.

Hour 2. I sat in the cell phone lot at GRR, otherwise known as General Ford International Airport, in my rental Pontiac Vibe. What makes it international? They may have an occasional flight to Canada. Or maybe they used to. It was warm and I rolled down the window waiting for Paul, my friend and colleague, to call to let me know that his plane – the Northwest Airlines DC-9 that I just saw fly over the highway – had landed and he was in Grand Rapids and waiting for me to pick him up. He called and I swept by the passenger pick-up area and we cruised off to Grand Haven.

Hour 3. We arrived in Grand Haven and decided to explore the town. And the neighboring townships and villages. We drove by the waterfront and then the Meijer – where I thought about running in and giving the manager three dollars for my stolen apples – and we drove by schools and Wal-Mart and a movie theater and the Holiday Inn where we would have to return in another hour. Then we stopped at a pasta joint in downtown Grand Haven and went inside to eat and rehearse our presentation for tomorrow.

Hour 4. I ate walleye, which sort of freaked me out because it tasted a bit like walls with eyes (and fish skin) and said thank you about 15 times to the waiter who seemed to want to leave but was very cheery while he was forced to wait on our table. Paul and I practiced what we would say over and over and then I got really tired.

Hour 5. We drove to Spring Lake to the gloomy Holiday Inn. Walked from the empty parking lot into the gray building and walked up to the night clerk at the front desk. Paul confessed we had a Hotwire reservation for our two rooms, and told the desk clerk we expected cots in the basement. The guy behind the desk had probably heard that one before, but he forced a laugh and said that wouldn’t happen. Instead, we got rooms overlooking the busy highway that was up on a steep hill, which meant that is was essentially right outside my fourth-floor window. The room had purple carpet and weird beige wallpaper. I ironed my clothes with the fancy Proctor-Silex and made phone calls to my friend Joshua who couldn’t talk because his mom was in the car and then Brad, who told me about his exciting day – oh it was so exciting – and I told him it was time for me to go to bed. Then I went on Facebook and befriended the woman I chatted with on my flight from San Francisco to Chicago. I’ll tell you more about her another time. And then I set two alarms and got into bed.

Hour 6. In that comfy Holiday Inn bed, I reviewed the proposal I would be discussing tomorrow and tried to talk to myself. After about 30 minutes I figured I sounded smart enough and decided to pop in my earplugs and turn out the lights. I slept.

Hour 7. I slept.

Hour 8. I slept.

Hour 9. I slept.

Hour 10. I slept.

Hour 11. I slept.

Hour 12. I slept. (I snore, by the way. I don't think it's sleep apnea, but I feel like my throat closes up when I sleep so I can't breathe. I think that's not really good. I think I need to see a doctor and have a sleep study.)

Hour 13. I slept. Just a little more.

Hour 14. I was awake. Both alarms went off at the same time. I showered and dressed and shoved my stuff back in my suitcase. I walked out into the dreary Holiday Inn hallway and Paul was there. Along with my free USA Today.* Does anyone really subscribe to this newspaper? We took the elevator downstairs, snagged the baggies of free muffins and apple juice, and drove to a diner downtown for breakfast.

Hour 15. We ate breakfast and practiced again what we would say if we were asked difficult questions about our skills. I made the mistake of asking the waitress if she could serve me a small portion of the whitefish pate, from the lunch menu, in a little container to accompany a bagel. And I wanted a sunshine fruit cup. Unfortunately, the smoked whitefish pate tasted a bit like smoked walleye smashed into a little tin and nearly made me hurl during our rehearsal.

Hour 16. We headed to the interview at the Community Center. We were seated on a stage and were asked a gazillion different questions by a panel of five people. We gave them a brief presentation, and showed them a short video of a groggy coworker talking about her skills (I made the video using Windows movie maker). And then we answered more questions.

Hour 17. We kept talking and answering questions. This is why we’d flown across the country: to answer questions and let these people know that we really did, in fact, actually know what we were talking about and would be the best damn team for this project. Who knows what they thought? They thought our project budget was too high.

Hour 18. We swung by the local transit agency to pick up the surveys they had collected for us. I promised I would take them home and make sure the data was entered. Then Paul and I drove to the Grand Haven beach and cruised around the parking lot (not in a creepy way or a teenager way). We didn’t park in it because we didn’t want to pay the $8 day use fee for a 20-minute parking bonanza , so we drove two blocks back and parked in a free parking space and walked back along the boardwalk until it got really cold and windy, and the water from Lake Michigan started to crash against the pier. We started to get wet and the man with one leg’s daughter continued to drag the puppy on the leash out toward the end of the increasingly wet pier and the puppy scampered and crawled away from the Lake that seemed to want to swallow it up. So we walked back to the car and drove north to Muskegon, to The Lakes Mall.

Hour 19. We stopped at Starbucks at The Lakes Mall because Paul wanted to pee and get a sandwich. But there were no sandwiches in this little Starbucks in front of The Lakes Mall, so while he went to pee I got some tea. And then we continued driving, up to Interstate-96, taking the freeway to Grand Rapids, passing back by the very smelly stretch of highway near Coopersville. The smell may be related to a sewage plant or a cow explosion. We weren’t sure.

Hour 20. Paul and I stopped for gas at the CITGO, a gasoline retailer I like to support because Hugo Chavez sort of owns it and made it illegal for CITGO employees to carry guns. Some Americans got up in arms (not literally, because they would if they could). So that’s why I get gas there. Not that I like Hugo Chavez at all. I just hate Americans who go berserk when people tell them guns should be outlawed. After getting gas, we drove to Gerald Ford Airport, returned the car to Avis, walked inside the airport and checked in. We went to the bathroom to put on jeans and stuff our interview clothes back into suitcases and get on our planes.

So that’s it. That’s the intriguing hour-by-hour of a consultant’s whirlwind trip from California to Michigan. Now you can see that I’m definitely not in the job for the money: it’s all about amazing experiences, exquisite cuisine, balmy beaches, luxurious hotels and those little perks.

I hopped on the plane and flew away, knowing that if I’d had only one more hour, I could have gone back to Meijer and apologize to a cashier and pay for the apples. The good thing is that even if we don’t win this project, I have another one in Michigan, so I will be back, and I will pay for those damn apples. I promise.

*Sure, they say it’s free, but if you ask to ‘refuse’ your paper, you get a 50¢ credit.