Rare Wines, Rara Avis
Sweet
Junie and I engaged in a whirlwind tour of California last week, starting with a
flight to San Diego to visit with my parents. They both bemoaned the fact
that we were only there for 24 hours and promptly began to stuff us with fare
from their favorite local restaurants, which included a small Greek bistro in
Rancho Bernardo and the Original Pancake House in Poway. I've been to both
many times, but Junie had to get used to the senior Dr. Bahr deciding what
everybody was going to eat, and in what order. The next day, we ran down
to San Diego and boarded the Pacific Surfliner, picture to your left. The
seating was airplane style and the view of the ocean quite nice most of the way
to Grover Beach, where BIL Roy was picking us up. There was this weird
stop at Lompoc, which was actually a stop at Vandenberg Air Force Base, where
one person got off and one back on and just behind the train stop was chain-link
fence that stretched for miles. A half dozen missile gantries dotted the
horizon, presumably dating back to the 70's. After a wonderful stop in
Grover Beach/Arroyo Grande/Casa Rawlings in the mountains east of Pismo Beach,
which included meeting up with my brother Mike, her daughter/my niece Laura who
is studying to become a veterinarian at CSU, and Daly, my grand-niece or
something and progeny of my sweet niece Dana whom I used to hold in my arms and
rock to sleep, Roy and Linny dropped us off at the SLO Amtrak station to take
the Official Amtrak Bus to San Jose. This because there is only one train
from there and it would have put us in too late to meet up with the Paulsens for
our Fabulous Dinner at Maurizio's in Morgan Hill. Lin and Roy left and the
bus arrived and the new driver mounted The Seat of Authority and turned over the
ignition and nothing happened except prolonged grinding. This went on for
10 minutes and then for another 10 minutes I chatted him up and found out that
this is not the first time and he is Really Ready to quit and go drive tourist
carts at the local zoo or something. I rebooked us on the Amtrak train
that I had thought would get us in too late and Junie and I jumped on and were
on our way to Silicon Valley. Both of our cell phones were low on juice
and there were no outlets ready-to-hand, so we used all available mobile
resources to a) find a rental car, since we would be late for the one we
reserved, b) call Casa Paulsen and regret that we would not be able to make
dinner, c) call a zillion motels to find one with a spare room. My cell
phone ran out of gumption before all this completed, but Junie's valiant little
Samsung Jazz hung in there and we ended up in a new Holiday Inn by the SJC
airport. It turned out that it was also the venue for the Bay Area
Firefighter's Olympics, so the entire facility was on tilt with buff young men
in various garb: customized baseball suits, iron-pumping sleeveless T's,
even a team of seemingly normal people with dart-champion logos all over their
tops. There was probably a number of bowling teams, too, but I didn't
notice. I had a meeting with an Important Client in Menlo Park, so
of course Junie and I took the opportunity to cruise the main drag there after
wandering past vast walled enclaves with houses the size of medieval walled
cities. We did have a wonderful prix fixe lunch downtown and then wandered
over to Important Client, at which point Junie read Proust or something in the
rental while I had meetings. Oh, the rental, right. It turns out
that the rental that I had secured was unavailable, due to my untimely Amtrak
incident. So, that morning I took a shuttle to the airport from the
fireman-obsessed Holiday Inn, got out at Terminal C, grabbed a cab, and headed
to the same off-airport Budget Rental Car where I had made my initial
reservation. The Budget turned out to be a combination rental car agency,
office supply store and upscale junkyard as far as I could tell, but the lady at
the desk took pity on the fact that I really needed transportation. She
suggested the Ford pickup, seeing as how the actual car I had rented wasn't
available, and then dropped the price by 20%, and then did a walk-around and
noticed the bugs on the windshield and the Camels in the ashtray and gave me
another 20% and we had a deal, except she also apologized that the pickup only
had an eighth tank of gas. But, I digress. Junie and I bullyed our
way from Menlo Park to SF in this big mess of American engineering and drove
around SF and for the 4th time I wondered if I should try to call CDY but didn't
and then we headed to North Beach and found a place to park. We wandered
around and found Mangorosa, which is North Beach on Brazilian steroids, but they
didn't open until 6. Next up was The Rose Pistola, which we loved the last
time here, but they were also closed. We had a plane to catch at 8 at SFO,
so we settled for something lesser after cruising Chinatown and declining to
take home a Peking Duck. The flight home was uneventful, but as I drifted
off, as I often do on planes, I still had this pang that, yet again, I had
avoided CDY, when I would really like to take him to lunch or something.
~~~
I was amusing myself by looking at a link to rare wines today. I get a
lot of wine email and this one was having a sale on half-bottle of the
2000 Lafite Rothschild for $920. I've owned a lot of wine in my life and
drank most of it. I'll never forget the night when Dave P, Kevvy and I ran
through four bottles of wine that could probably put my kid through a year of
state college if I still had them. Then, there was the case of 1986
Penfold Grange Heritage that somehow disappeared. It's now retailing at
$600 a bottle. Oh, and the case of 1982 Château Margaux which went by the
by (now retailing at $800 a bottle). What's happened, if you haven't
noticed, is that the rich are getting richer. And they now include
Russians, Chinese, and sundry other industrialists (and, perhaps, the occasional
mafia) who roll into Las Vegas and point their finger at the bottle of 1982
Château Petrus for $5,000 (and that's retail, God knows what they actually
charge at Bellagio). The dollar is getting weaker by the week and, like
the late 70's, it's beginning to look like you should have your money in
something other than money. Well, at least, our money. Euros might
be a safe bet or Swiss francs or RMB. There was a time when people thought
it might be better to buy a spare Ferrari than open a savings account (I was one
of them, but I ended up buying rare stamps).
Dima came up for coffee and ruined my day by telling me that, now that I have my
baseboards nicely situated against the blue walls, I need to spread some foamy
goo on the top of them, after TAPING of course, and neaten everything up and let
it dry and paint it blue, just like the walls. Sheesh, is there no end to
living room perfection?
I received a copy of Zone 3 today, a literary journal out of Clarksville,
Tennessee (of all places). I was previously very impressed by their choice
in their book contest, which doesn't happen all that often, actually.
Somebody is doing a hell of a good job of editing, because there is the same
eloquent edginess in the volume that I have seen in everything they're involved
in (hey, Jilly, you're in that neck of the woods, ever heard of them?)
~~~
Derek arrived from his epic 6-week trip across the US and Canada, which entailed 10,000 miles of travel at $4 a gallon. More on that later, but he showed up today and painted large swaths of my middle kingdom Pale Gold I.
~~~
I've been reading Charles Simic's new The Monster Loves His Labyrinth.
Like most of Simic's work, I love some of it like I do Arkady Renko, and some of
it is just plain dumb. This book is distinguished by a colon after which
it says : Notebooks. Here's a sample:
- In Charon's boat, I intend to give up my seat to the first lady that comes along.
- Short poem: Be brief and tell everything.
- At the tanning salon on Route 9, Regina, the Pizza Hut girl, lies naked with shades on.
- The poet sees what the philosopher thinks.
- Death passing my door, jingling his passkeys.
- An angel pinned in a box of dead butterflies.
- I'm everywhere and nowhere. A passenger on a ghost ship.
- I dreamt that God asked me for a blurb for his creation.
~~~
You have probably heard that Kay Ryan is our new Poet Laureate. Kay showed up as a featured speaker in 2004 at the Napa Valley poetry thing I was attending. At that time, I had never heard of her, which is probably more a matter of my ignorance than her lack of prominence. That year, she garnered the Ruth Lilly prize, and then every time I picked up an APR or Poets & Writers, I heard about Kay. All of a sudden, she was in every odd-numbered Poetry issue. I'm not sure how these things happen, but I'm glad they do. Kay is a gay high school English teacher and she is our Poet Laureate. I don't know why that makes me so happy, but it does. I don't even care overly much for her epigrammatic verse, but that's not the point. She is a talented person and she has succeeded without what I would like to imagine is undue attention to PoBiz politics. She also wrote the singly most hilarious prose piece I have ever read about her venture to AWP.
~~~
More tomorrow. Really. Well, perhaps, my idea of tomorrow.