Travel Advisory:
Out and Back
30 March 2015
The flight home was not fun. The turbulence wasn’t too bad until we approached New York, but I found it excruciating. Then the pilot switched on the Fasten Seatbelts sign, and announced that, as we should be making an instrument landing, all computers must be turned off. The forepart of my brain could deal with this information, but it wasn’t much help, because the primitive posterior of that organ, stiffened by the horrible surprise of the Germanwings crash just days before, remained unsubdued by two Xanax tablets. In the anxious empire of my helplessness, the announcement of an instrument landing had never been heard, for the good reason that, as my brighter self was perfectly well aware, such disclosures were unnecessary before in-flight Wi-Fi. As we rocketed in descent, I expected the plane to fly apart at any moment. (Visibility was indeed very low — three or four hundred feet at the most.) I have been on flights where landings were greeted by the passengers’ applause. This was not one of those. Everyone seemed quite calm. It was only me.
Otherwise, it was, if not a great trip, then an exceedingly interesting one. And we got to spend a lot more time with my daughter and her family than we had expected to do. On our last full day, Megan met us for lunch at Louis’s Diner, overlooking the ruins, shown in today’s photograph, of the Sutro Baths. Then she drove us up to the top of Twin Peaks, which neither Kathleen nor I had been to before. The weather was cool and crystal-clear. On our way home to Megan’s, we drove through an enclave that we’d never even heard of, St Francis Wood, a residence park of Westchestery substance.
Before that, there was Palo Alto. We stayed at an inn on Stanford Avenue, just off El Camino Real. The university campus began across the street. Four blocks along the main drag in the other direction lay California Avenue, where there were some quite nice restaurants. (I also had lunch one day at the Jack in the Box somewhere in between.) There was every inducement to leave the premises. No window in the bedroom; a conference table in the “living room,” no proper reading chair, a bizarre (but clean) bathroom. When it was warm enough, I sat in a flowery courtyard and tried to keep out of the sun. But it was usually too chilly.
I attended Kathleen’s panel at the Blockchain Workshop, but it was rather disappointing, owing to the unexpected presence of a cyberlibertarian cattleranching rock star. The man never sank to bloviation, but he did talk an awful lot. Kathleen looked a wee bit annoyed. The next day, we showed up for a panel on Burning Man, catching the end of another panel, this one on the Internet of Things. The Burning Man talk was lively, and I wish I could tell you about the panelists, but the acoustics were terrible, and I never did figure out who anybody was. Larry Harvey was there, but I had him mixed up with Peter Hirshberg and Stuart Mangrum. No matter, no matter; the stories were very good. You may be wondering what “blockchain” means, or you may be wondering why there was a Burning Man panel at a convocation of the Bitcoin Space. Don’t look at me!
It was disappointing to discover (as reason would have foretold) that there is no sand, nor any dunes, on Sand Hill Road, which runs up into the mountains from El Camino Real along the northern edge of the Stanford campus. I had enjoyed imagining that the venture capitalists to whom the name of the road refers, just as “Wall Street” refers to the stock market, hived in concrete bunkers on windswept beaches, desperately outbidding each other for real estate on the moon.
At lunch one day, we were having a nice talk with some younger people at a table by an interesting pool. Then I put my foot in it, by saying that San Francisco used to be a much more formal town, and I wasn’t only going on Vertigo or The Birds but remembering my own first visit, fifty-three years ago. The conversation shifted to local matters about which I could be expected to have nothing to say. The young people were very nice but very firm.
Megan and I had two very interesting conversations — interesting to me, anyway — and I’m going to write about the substance of each in a little while, letting things settle, and avoiding the risk of appearing to report on a discussion that Megan may remember differently. The first conversation was about the application of robots to farming, and it was touched off by Megan’s intriguing remarks about soils and mycorrhizal fungi. The second conversation was about “people skills” and sexism.
Will is beginning to discover that time is bigger than he is. When he airily told me that his “great-great-great-grandmother” was a famous doctor, I had to tell him to lose two of the greats; Martha Yow would not have been pleased to be shoved into older generations. But those greats meant little to Will. He needed more vivid constructions. Later, when Megan and I were talking about stuff and clutter and getting rid of things, I mentioned a photograph album, full of old photographs of people who were dead before I was born, that belonged to my father’s parents. “Your father’s parents!” exclaimed Will, shocked by this temporal stretch. You can tell that he both wonders where these ancestral figures are now and knows that he won’t like finding out.
***
On Friday, I went down to collect packages, mail, and the laundry, and brought up a small box that turned out to contain the sheer curtains for the living room and dining ell windows. I had expected a more voluminous arrival, but glass curtains aren’t voluminous. Ray Soleil came up after work and hung them all. Now, I had been saying for over a month that, as soon as the sheers were up, I’d regard the apartment as done, but instead the latest development set me off on an unforeseen tangent — although Kathleen did say that I’d been talking for “quite a while” about getting rid of the piece of furniture that, as a child, I was taught to call “the buffet.” We emptied the drawers and the cabinets, distributing contents on every available surface, and carted the sideboard to the service elevator room, whence, at some point on Saturday, it was taken away. Did I really do that? It was an iconic thing, that “buffet.” But it was in need of work, and it took up much more room than it contained. It was too big for the dining ell, and there was no sense in finding another place for it.
Instead of a compleated home, then, gracefully sheltered by gauzy draperies that concealed the black window frames together with the black night, I now had a royal mess. Napkins here, pitchers there; the platters I did manage to fit into the kitchen, where they belong. Once again, there are book boxes in the foyer — nine of them. It turns out that the arrival of the curtains signaled the end of a lot of provisional, temporary arrangements that I made in the high heat of the move. The apartment is not done.
But it looks great, and it was great indeed to come home to.