I spent the morning in Berkeley, poking around on Shattuck Avenue while my car got an oil change. I went out to breakfast in Walnut Square, then walked downtown to a bookstore and the library. I picked up the car around lunchtime, stopped off at the natural grocery for a few items, and then headed back out to the hinterlands. A lovely day, one that reminded me of what I appreciate about the city and the country. Berkeley is jam-packed with interesting things to see and do, and is truly on the cutting edge of good food and books. Love it! But I’m much happier not being constantly bombarded by the attendant sensory overload. Out here where the air is fresh and the pace of life slower, I can more fully savor material abundance. It’s the best of both worlds, and a very nice place to be.

Even though a giant liquidambar tree at the corner of the garden has leafed out so thickly it’s shading the vegetable bed – a situation I hope to remedy before next spring – certain plants are healthy and happy. In particular, three yellow zucchinis have started producing. It never ceases to amaze me how big those things can get how quickly. So far I’ve managed to nab them before they start reaching baseball bat size.

I made a delicious soup the other evening that was yet again a reminder of how simple fare can be the best. I sautéed an onion in olive oil, added freshly ground black pepper when it was nicely caramelized, then threw in the chopped yellow zukes and a pint of chicken broth I got at a deli in Berkeley. After it had simmered enough to soften up the squash, I grated in some fresh nutmeg and pureed the mix in the pot with a hand blender. The resulting soup was a creamy golden color that tasted like the essence of summer. Yum!

I made a donations run today, specifically to begin unloading some of the excess STUFF I’ve been carting around lo these many years. I am drowning in books, clothes, and extraneous household items, and it’s time to shed the things that fall short of William Morris’s dictum to “have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” Whew! I have my work cut out for me, that’s for sure. It feels as if I’m sloughing off a skin—the material objects no doubt reflect some inner psychological working, but I have no intention of bogging down in trying to analyze that. It’s just good to have the process underway. I even netted over $50 in cash and trade from Berkeley bookstores, so that’s a nice incentive to keep things moving along.

I took the dogs out for a several-mile ramble in one of our usual haunts Friday morning. Hiking in the regional parks while the dogs happily race and play is wonderful for clearing my head. The younger one is now almost two-and-a-half years old, and she has settled down considerably. It was a bit hairy for awhile there, because she seems to be an amalgamation of every high energy breed known to man and she developed a predatory drive at about nine months that needed to be broken out of her. I have her on an e-collar, which gives me a backup means of control over her behavior if she gets into an altercation with another dog and doesn’t respond to my commands. These days I rarely need to use it, but I appreciate the peace of mind of knowing it’s there as a last resort.

Near the end of our hike on Friday, we ran into a man walking his pit bull on a leash. Hesperia and the pit bull eagerly started frisking around each other, and I mentioned to its owner that she had some pit bull heritage. The two dogs clearly recognized a similar energy in each other. The pit bull’s owner was quite interested to hear about my experiences with the e-collar, and we talked for several minutes. I gave him the name of the trainer who recommended the e-collar. He seemed sold on the idea, primarily concerned about the cost. I explained that there’s a popular school of thought which says dogs can be trained using only positive reinforcement, but that my experience has been that it’s a naïve philosophy when it comes to pit bulls. Being a long time Berkeley resident, I used to joke about having to work on getting in touch with my inner fascist when I came up against the problems with Hesperia’s behavior. She literally needs the structure of knowing who’s boss and that there are consequences to her behavior. She responds beautifully to rewards, but she also needs a firm disciplinary hand when it comes to setting boundaries and letting her know what she’s not supposed to do. Without that, her energy and wild instinct are too much for her to handle. My older dog, Titania, has a much more gentle temperament, and doesn’t have the same need for disciplinary rigidity. The dogs are always teaching me about basic animal nature, lessons I continually find to be applicable elsewhere.

I have some upcoming things to celebrate, so I treated myself to a manicure & pedicure this morning.  I rarely do this, and I’ve only been once before to this particular salon in the small suburban town where I grew up. This time, I was prepared. The last time I was there, about a year ago, I was relaxing in the exceptionally comfortable chair they put you in for the pedicure, gazing out the window at a glimpse of the golf course where my father used to spend some of his happiest hours many years ago, when the woman working on my feet started making small talk. It was about something innocuous like if I had any upcoming vacation plans. I answered her question and then, in accordance with what I’ve learned from many years of living in Berkeley (where there’s a concerted effort to erase such cultural niceties as social class distinctions), I asked the same question of her. She sighed wearily, and mentioned something about her elderly parents, and her kids, and whatever, the gist being that she didn’t have time to take a vacation. I think she wasn’t expecting the reciprocity of the question. There was some reference to her home country, although I forget the specifics. So I asked where she was from.

I was completely unprepared for my reaction when she answered, “Vietnam.” My years in high school coincided with the most violent period of the Vietnam War, and my brother was over there as an Army paratrooper for two of those years. Almost immediately, I starting flashing back to incidents from that time, including petitioning against the war in front of the Safeway store across the street and fielding hostile and/or patronizing comments from privileged suburbanites who didn’t appreciate being confronted by anything as “unpleasant” as politics.

I awkwardly said something about how my brother had been over in Vietnam during the war, but there wasn’t really anywhere for the conversation to go from there. The woman was obviously thoroughly conditioned to be soothing and submissive. A younger woman sitting by the phone near the salon entrance flashed a look, and I figured she was probably the owner checking on the vibe. I shut up, and sat there thinking, “What the hell were we fighting for? So that a generation later Vietnamese women could be here pampering Orinda women?”

It was a stark reminder that I have a lot of unfinished business about all that. But that’s nothing new. I think the woman who did my manicure & pedicure today was the same one from last year. This time, when she asked about my plans for Memorial Day weekend, I answered pleasantly and didn’t reciprocate. She later chatted about what some of her other clients were doing. I’m schooled enough in multiculturalism to know that people’s personal comfort zones aren’t one-size-fits-all. So, I’m enjoying my sparkly mauve “Jewels of India” toenail polish for what it is, and channeling my political interests elsewhere. Capitalism is here to stay, and it’s important to conserve energy by picking one’s battles.

White sage, Salvia apiana, is a native sage that grows wild in the Southern California mountains. The dried leaves are intensely fragrant, and are used as a healing and cleansing incense. The aroma of one burning leaf can permeate an entire house. I had a bush in Berkeley years ago, grown from seeds that a friend of a friend got by hiking up into the mountains and harvesting them from a wild plant. I still have a stash of the dried leaves. But I moved on from the house, and I was never able to get the seeds I harvested from that plant to sprout.

Fortunately, these days white sage doesn’t seem to be as scarce a commodity as it was twenty or so years ago. I’d like to plant it in my new garden, and I’ve been scouting around for sources that might have it at retail. I found some seeds at a Native American shop in Berkeley a few weeks ago, but I haven’t had a chance to get them started. Today I lucked out — I found a thriving plant at the UC Berkeley Botanical Gardens. If I can succeed in getting it established here, it will be magical.

In college at UC Berkeley, I sang in a small women’s ensemble that performed music from the ‘30s and ‘40s in three-part harmony, Andrews Sisters-style. Five or six of us used to freelance on weekends by going over to Union Square, throwing a hat down on a street corner, and going through our song list. We rode the cable cars singing “San Francisco, open your golden gate…” The mimes Shields & Yarnell, who went on to become famous, were among our more illustrious colleagues working the sidewalks. There was a lively, bohemian feel to the city arts scene, and I always came home with enough money to buy a few meals and a load of laundry or two.

That experience got me started collecting vintage sheet music. The artistry of old sheets works on several different levels. Visually alone, some old sheet music covers are beautiful examples of the artistic style of earlier eras. The song titles often tell stories in and of themselves. It’s even better if the composer and/or lyricist is a well-known name, or if the song is familiar. Riches abound.

Among my collection is an old sheet for “The West, a Nest and You,” which shows a peaceful silhouette of a man, woman and child gazing through a window out onto a pastoral setting. Handwritten on the front is the name “Alta M. Bates,” and I’ve often wondered if it once belonged to the person for whom Berkeley’s Alta Bates Hospital is named. That would be especially meaningful, since my son was born there. At a flea market, I found an old sheet for the song “She Had To Go and Lose It at the Astor,” a classic example of provocative, double entendre lyrics from a sexually repressed age. I’ve discovered good music over the years from sheets I picked up simply on the basis of the cover artistry or the title.

In the past several years, I’ve seen more and more old sheet music that has been wrapped up in cardboard and cellophane and had the price jacked up astronomically. But I’ve recently discovered stashes in a few antique stores in out-of-the-way places. One of these days, I’ll dust off my collection and see about enhancing it. It’s an endlessly fun pastime.

We’re having a spate of splendidly sunny weather here, and the dogs and I have spent much of the day reclaiming the garden as our own turf (they have different issues than I do, but it’s all of a piece). I’m working on tuning into the energy of the plants. There is much to explore, but I could spend hours on end, if not days, doing nothing more productive than sitting out there with a good book and a cold drink, soaking up some rays. I have the lovely combination of a sunny, south-facing hillside up above the valley floor with breezes that blow in fresh off the bay. There are days when just breathing the air is like sipping a fine wine.

Back when the landscape project began a couple of months ago, I had several bags of riches from the earth in the shed that were intended for the compost heap: dried oak leaves and composted horse manure mixed with straw, the latter courtesy of the Tilden Park Stables in Berkeley. I was disappointed to find that they have disappeared somewhere in the midst of all the construction chaos. The landscapers commandeered the shed for the duration of the project, and moved some of my stuff aside. I expect that the bags probably got wet, and they tossed them out. Who knew they wouldn’t recognize and appreciate the value of dried oak leaves and horse manure compost? This is the kind of stuff money can’t buy – I collected it via good, old-fashioned sweat equity. What IS the world coming to these days?

I picked up a book in Berkeley last week that’s right up my alley in terms of getting under the hood of American culture. It has the rather unimaginative title What Really Happened to the 1960s: How Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy, and is written by a Pennsylvania political science professor named Edward P. Morgan. What immediately grabbed my attention was the book’s focus on how references to the ‘60s in contemporary culture and politics tend to be systemically hollowed out and cut off at the roots, resulting in powerful emotional symbolism being bandied about that somehow never gets integrated into a realistic evaluation of historical context.

From the preface: “…the mass media’s “Sixties” discourse is chiefly one of ghosts, accusations, and smoke and mirrors that has long played on audience emotions and diverted public attention to what is essentially a symbolic form of spectator politics… this political culture is both hyper-political and depoliticized; hyper-political because it is dominated by blame-them rhetoric heightened by imagistic media, yet depoliticized in two important ways: the nation’s political institutions too often serve up essentially symbolic solutions that fail to resolve deep-seated problems that have over time become worse, and a correspondingly disillusioned and disempowered public is drawn into a culture of consumption and entertainment that provides them with a compensatory but ultimately erosive sense of empowerment.”

We’re way overdue for a major reckoning on how the Vietnam era shook American culture and politics to the core. As a society we’ve come a long way, but we still have a long way to go. The nice thing about engaging with the ‘60s is that, no matter how dark and complex the subject matter gets, it’s always counter-balanced by the whole glittering, incredible, outrageous extravaganza that popular culture served up on a regular basis. As we learned back in the day, political and cultural activism can be both constructive and a whole lot of fun. Who knows? Maybe a revival of that idea will bring some healing balm to the bitter tensions of what passes for our current public discourse.

Berkeley has an old-fashioned magickal shoppe down on Fourth Street that looks as if it was plucked straight from Germany’s Black Forest. Castle in the Air is packed to the rafters with papers, books, pens, inks, stickers, stamps, ribbons, yarns, dolls, puppets, toys, old postcards, etc., etc., and, at this time of year, Christmas ornaments. I went there this morning to do some early Christmas shopping, and picked up several treasures, including a book called An Exaltation of Larks that was originally published in 1968. It’s a compendium of words used down through the centuries for collective nouns. Some of the terms are so common we don’t even think about them: a gaggle of geese, a den of thieves, a swarm of bees, etc. It’s only when they appear in the context of a large collection that you see the ingenuity and artistry involved (which is the point of this book). A murder of crows. A marvel of unicorns. A melody of harpists. It’s a living, ongoing linguistic exercise, and this book is lots of fun. Read more…