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November 15, 2009 - Reflections on my Mississippi Genesis

2009-11-16T00:03:00.000-08:00

“What Fifty Said” by Robert Frost

When I was young my teachers were the old.
I gave up fire for form till I was cold.
I suffered like a metal being cast.
I went to school to age to learn the past

I began life in the care of my grandparents—more precisely, my grandmother and my step grandfather. With them, I was an only child living in Mississippi in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Those first few years were lived in two worlds. One was in a farmhouse six miles outside of Brooklyn, Mississippi, even today a small one-street rural town, near the train tracks of the Gulf and Ship Island Railroad and Black Creek. The house had electricity but no indoor plumbing. Water came from a hand-pump well and food was cooked over a wood-burning cast iron stove. An icebox kept perishables from doing so for a day or two. The second world was Biloxi, Mississippi a thriving, fast-growing city with a population of 37,000—20,000 more than it had ten years earlier. Biloxi was on its way into the 20th century but holding on to its 19th century wink-at-the-law ways.

On the farm, there were chickens, pigs, milk cows and a horse or mule—I can’t remember which (perhaps both). I do recall following along behind the horse- or mule-drawn plow guided by a relative of my grandmother or step grandfather as it slowly turned the field making a tearing sound as the roots of grass and weeds laying claim to the land were ripped from their mooring. I remember the horse or mule—eyes blinder-bound—straining to pull the plow through the resistant ground and I remember the smell of the newly exposed earth dark and moist, its edges drying from the heat of the sun. The fields on either side of the house were under cultivation at various times with potatoes, okra, string beans, watermelon, cucumbers, corn and sugar cane. I remember my step grandfather cutting and presenting me a sugarcane stick to suck on, which in addition to potatoes and watermelon were about the only things we grew that I wanted to eat. I was compelled to eat the rest.

The foundation of the farmhouse sat atop large tree stumps all around the perimeter of the rectangular shaped wooden structure. The stumps were arrayed underneath the house at stress-bearing points. On the occasions I venture among the stumps, I found the cool dark area filled with spider webs, lizards, field mice, and a wide variety of insects, the damp smell of mildew and no doubt mold. It was just another mysterious place to explore. It never occurred to me back then that raised foundation was a precaution against flooding. My grandmother’s homestead (it was hers) was near Black Creek, which ran behind my grandmother’s property though a good walk down a hill from our back door. It rained a lot in Mississippi and the creek would overrun its banks. The property, which lay on the edge of the De Soto National Forest, was constantly being overgrown by native pine trees and brush and it was muggy. Land was often purchased simply to harvest the trees that covered it.

Daily chores I recall included collecting eggs from the chicken coop in the morning, an enclose affair with a wooden roost with nests for the chickens to lay their eggs. An enclosed surrounded the roost where under the watchful eye of the rooster the hens ambled about during the day pecking the ground for unexpected tiny prey or spilled grain that came under foot, all accompanied by the sound of their continuous clucking. Outburst of bird songs and the grunting of pigs mixed with the chatter of the chickens created the cacophony of the barnyard. The sound of crickets, filled the evenings and nights, which were completely pitch black during the new moon, but countless stars filled the sky. On such nights, I had the feeling that I was completely alone with my grandparents and that there was no world beyond the farm. I knew that there were other families living in the surrounding countryside as we would visit them or they would come to our place for Sunday dinner; the women folk catching up on all the gossip that had transpired since they were last together, the men sitting smoking and erupting in sporadic conversation interrupting stretches of silence.

There was a length of time, perhaps a year, when my parents returned with my sisters to live with us—my father intent on earning a living farming after a tour of duty in the Army. He had re-enlisted after the war so he could return to the Philippines and bring my mother and me to the states. Rather than take me to Ft Benning, Georgia, where my father was ordered upon returning from the Philippines, my parents left me with my grandmother, who had asked to have me stay with her. From Ft. Benning, my parents moved to Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, where the oldest of my three sisters was born. From there, they moved to Camp Stoneman, California, near the city of Pittsburg, where my second sister was born and where my father was discharged from the service.

That was when my father returned to the farm with my mother and my two sisters. It took a year for him to realize that farming was a hard way to earn a living for someone who had spent his working life, outside the Army, in construction. He re-enlisted and reported for duty to Camp Stewart, Georgia, where my third sister was born. My life with my grandparents continued after my parents and sisters left, though we moved from the farm to a rented place in Biloxi, 55 miles south on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. After a short stay at Camp Stewart, my father was ordered to a tour of duty in Germany and my mother and three sisters returned to live on the farm during my father’s absence. One of my father’s army buddies, drove my mother and three sisters back to the farm on his way to his next assignment. As I would discover the enlisted man’s Army produced countless acts of kindness that were repaid in kind. My father’s sergeant’s salary went a longer way when there was no rent to pay and only electricity and groceries to buy each month.

While my mother and sisters lived on the farm, my grand parents and I lived in Biloxi and visited them on the weekend. My grandmother worked in a restaurant on Beach Blvd, Highway 90, which hugs the coast from Pass Christian through Biloxi to Pascagoula in Mississippi. My step grand father worked in construction at Keesler Air Force Base. We rented a wood frame house in the colored part of town that has since been torn down. I went to school with neighborhood playmates and in the evenings we ran free along the sidewalks and backyards of the neighborhood, a striking contrast to my solitary escapades on the farm with only the animals and my adult relatives to interact with.

Biloxi on the Gulf of Mexico, in 1720 was the capital of French Louisiana until it was moved to New Orleans three years later. Though not as well known, the former has much in common with its Louisiana neighbor. Tourist came to Biloxi because, much like New Orleans and other Gulf Coast cities of the 1940s and 1950s, it was wide open with illegal gambling widespread. The city resembled Las Vegas as hotels such as the Pine Hills, the Edgewater Gulf, the Tivoli, the Buena Vista, and the White House openly offered roulette wheels, dice tables and slot machines. Slot machines appeared in grocery stores and other businesses and, though the act of using them was illegal, owners paid federal and state tax on all slot machine that operated anywhere in the state.

Roadhouses for the white population offering gambling were called “honky-tonks,” and for blacks the roadhouses were called “juke joints.” I don’t recall being in a juke joint but I do remember sitting at what seemed to be a bar, kneeling on a stool eating fried chicken and French fries with my fingers from an oval red plastic basket lined with wax paper. The bartender laughingly remarked to my step grandfather how much the boy seemed to be enjoying his fried chicken—funny the things you remember from childhood. I also recall driving with my grandfather at night along the coast road, the bright lights of the restaurants, motels, and other businesses along either side of the road a joy to behold as I knelt on the front seat looking out the window—better than television and so unlike the solitary, moonless nights on the farm.

To visit my mother and sisters over the weekend, my grandparents would drive the 55 miles from Biloxi to the farm seven miles east of Brooklyn—a one-block town with drug store—one where the pharmacist actually mixed the prescriptions himself, post office, and a few other stores—along the Brooklyn-Janice Road. It’s funny that I don’t have vivid memories of my time spent with my sisters other than to recall my mother feeding my youngest sister hominy grits mixed with egg yolk and fresh churned butter. Sometime during his tour of duty in Germany my father was involved in a car accident that shattered his hip. After recuperating in Germany, he was flown back to William Beaumont Army Hospital in El Paso, Texas. My mother’s uncle, who lived in San Francisco drove out, picked up my mother and sisters and drove them to El Paso, where my father was assigned during his rehabilitation. I stayed behind in Biloxi with my grandparents, their relationship of over 20 years beginning to strain. My step grandfather was a good timing man and my grandmother had gotten tired of being a good-hearted woman.

The break finally came a year or so after my mom and sisters reunited with my father in El Paso. My father had completed his rehabilitation and was given the option to receive a medical discharge or continue his tour of duty. My father back on his feet and with little or no residual affects from the crash decided to remain in the service and the army assigned him to Ft. Bliss. When he received the call from my grandmother that she had divorced my step grandfather, she told him she needed a medical procedure and didn’t have the money to afford it. My father said he would bring the two of us to El Paso, where he would claim her as a dependent. She could have the procedure done at William Beaumont.

And that’s what happened. He took the bus out from El Paso loaded my grandmother and me and our belongings in the Pontiac that my grandmother got out of the divorce settlement, and drove us west. Back then my father didn’t believe in breaking up a road trip and drove the entire 1100 miles stopping only for gas. We arrived in El Paso in the early morning and I remember waking up later in the day inside my parent’s rented house. The first thing that struck me about El Paso was the absence of the lush green that engulfed us in Mississippi. There were no shade trees and the sun seemed incredibly bright. The ground was dry, hard, and rock strewn. Small houses on 9000 square foot lots looked out on the gravel road my parents’ house was on. The street rose for about two miles heading west at a good grade to the foot of the Franklin Mountains. The further up the street you went, the fewer houses lined the street, which eventually dead-ended. One thing you could say about the neighborhood, there were no two houses that looked alike and all of them looked in need of some repair or another. The desert is hard on man made structures.

Shortly after my grandmother and me arrived, my father found a larger house for us in Ysleta, Texas on the outskirts of El Paso. Less than a mile from the Rio Grande, the house had trees in the yard and lots of bedrooms. I remember going into first grade at an elementary school near the house. I recall being put into a class that had already started the school year and having to catch up with my studies as well as make friends with a room of strangers, most of them white. The students in the school I had attended in Biloxi and Brooklyn had been black, though the color difference wasn’t something I remember. I felt equally alienated in both, though over time I blended in with the others, just another kid struggling to recognize, articulate, and write letters, numbers, and words.

While I was acclimating to school (my sisters still too young had not yet started), my grandmother was being examined and prepared for the medical procedure she had come El Paso for. The plan was that when she left the hospital, she and I would return to Mississippi, no doubt back to her life with my step grandfather. She couldn’t live with him but she absolutely couldn’t live without him. I can’t remember how I felt about being one place or the other. I only knew that I would be going with my grandmother where she chose and that was okay by me.

But life is never a matter of clear alternatives as the two roads in Robert Frost’s poem suggests. It chooses its own direction and the protagonist in his life story suddenly finds himself in an alternative universe. My grandmother died on the day she was to be released from William Beaumont Hospital and we went into mourning as my father made arrangements for the funeral. My grandmother and I made the journey back to Mississippi, she within her coffin, on a train; me in the Pontiac with my parents and my sisters. She was buried in the cemetery next to St. John Baptist Church near our farm in Brooklyn. I returned to El Paso with my family and began a life completely different than the one I knew before. And as Frost so eloquently pointed out “…that has made all the difference."

October 6, 2009 - Trapped in a enclosed space at Stanford Radiology MRI Lab for 90 minutes

2009-10-06T12:31:00.000-07:00

It’s Monday morning, October 5, 2009 and I’m being shot up with gadolinium in my left arm as I lay strapped onto a sliding table the width of my shoulders and over seven feet long. I’m in the home stretch of a procedure that will eventually run for around 90 minutes. Having arrived here at 7:00 o’clock this morning and voluntarily submitted to this procedure, I’m in a room that reminds me of the sterile inside of a UFO as abductees describe it. Set to accommodate the huge white General Electric MRI machine, the temperature makes me feel chilly, dressed as I am in flannel one-size fits all open-front hospital gown and baggy pants. The long table I’m on is at the mouth of a tunnel that is three-feet in diameter. (Freud would have a field day.)

I began the day at 5:30 this morning, outside still dark with the temperature in the low 50s Fahrenheit. It’s the ideal coolness for my morning run that I’m delaying to drive to Stanford Medical Center in Palo Alto for an MRI of my heart my doctor has ordered. I have a heart muscle that has shown signs of wall thickening as a result of 30 years of daily running. Though this occurs in everyone who regularly exercises vigorously, doctors are looking at heart wall thickening as a possible cause of athletes, who appear perfectly normal, keeling over from heart failure. This can occur for a whole host of reasons: leaking heart valve, undetected heart damage from disease or injury or a genetic heart defect, among others. Considering the over-60,000 miles I’ve put on my heart over the years, I’m expecting this MRI angiography to eliminate all of these culprits.

The drive north from San Jose to Palo Alto retraces my commute in past years, having worked in offices at Waverly and Lytton and Emerson near Hamilton: North on Monterey Highway to just past East Alma Avenue, there a right turn and then left onto Third, north to East Reed Street and right for a block and right again on South Fourth Street and the on-ramp to Interstate 280. On 280 west for less than a quarter mile, a San Jose Police Cruiser merging into the lane just ahead of me as we both begin the 50-MPH right curve atop the elevated on-ramp from 280 to Highway 87, the Discovery Museum barely visible off to our right and on our left two separate lines of headlights streaming to confluence with us at the San Carlos Street off ramp from 87. Cars from the two left lanes wanting over to the right; most of the cars in our lane wanting over to the left to avoid having to exit the freeway. Finally, the police cruiser—on its way to the police garage‎ on North San Pedro Street at the end of its shift—and I merge into the slow lane of 87 and begin the northward run to Highway 101. All of us spend our lives going somewhere, the stream of traffic on the main arteries a metaphor for the flow of blood racing through our veins.

The MRI procedure began with me getting out of my civilian clothes and donning hospital attire. I’m told to use the facilities before we begin because it will be a long time before I get another chance. I take the point. Pattering into the sterile room in white running socks, I’m struck by the size of the MRI machine, how white it is, and the size of the tunnel I will be rolled into. The attractive lady lab technician asks if I’m claustrophobic. I gulp, smile, and answer that I didn’t think so. As I lay on the table, my legs extending into the machine’s open mouth, she explains the drill I’ll be required to perform during the time I’m in the tunnel.

On her command, I’m to take in a breath, let it out and refrain from taking a breath until she says inhale—15 to 20 seconds tops, she says. She asks if I want a blanket and I quickly accept—I’m chilled by the air conditioning set to cool the equipment. After placing four electrodes on my chest in the general area of my heart, she straps me onto the table, wraps another sensor around by diaphragm—to monitor my breathing. Because the machine is imaging a moving object, instead of a relatively static one such as the brain or a knee joint, it needs to compensate for breathing and heart movement to create the 3-D image. The final apparatus is a curved plastic breastplate—I’m told it helps align the image—which she straps across my chest before we begin.

The drive north on Highway 101 from the Highway 87 on-ramp in San Jose to the Embarcadero Road exit in Palo Alto moved at the limit this morning, just before the full stream of northbound commuters floods the artery. Like my own arteries, the asphalt and concrete thoroughfare bearing the load of 101 traffic has deteriorated over the past 30 years, the analogy not lost on me as I travel toward the MRI that will reveal how well mine have fared over the same number of years.

One last thing, she says, stuffing my ears with plugs. You’ll need these as it gets noisy inside the machine. I’m not to be alarmed as it’s the sound the machine makes as it pulses a magnetic field through me to first align then flip the magnetic orientation of hydrogen atom protons in the water, comprising 75 percent of lean muscle in the heart. The protons’ rotation produces a miniscule magnetic flux that the MRI detects, thus creating a three-dimensional picture of the heart. Incidentally, these machines exert a magnetic force around 60,000 times the earth's own magnetic field effects—though nothing to be concerned about as magnetic flux produces no ill affects in tissue and cells or so they say.

A few seconds after she leaves the room, I hear her disembodied voice from speakers inside the dimly lit tunnel, that I now find myself in, and quickly close my eyes realizing I am going to freak if I keep them open. Just as I get my momentary panic under control and my breathing less labored, she asks if I’m comfortable and I say I am—liar, but I can’t admit to being a wimp. She says if I’m ready we would begin. I prepare for the sound and as soon as it starts that labored breathing returns. The sound is the shrill alarm of a truck backing up, but at a faster rate, two or three pulses a second it seems, and a different pitch. The sound reminds me of the staccato screeches accompanying the shower scene in “Psycho”—that rhythmic intensity but at a different pitch. I resist the flight response the sound invokes in me and will myself to relax. She’s no doubt aware of how I’m reacting to the machine. My breathing slowly becomes normal as I become accustomed to the sound.

When we begin the breathing drill, the tempo of the machine’s sound changes: same staccato beat, but slower. I count 15 to 16 repetitions as I hold my breath and wait for her to allow me to inhale again. Then she periodically changes the routine, telling me that the next time I must hold my breath longer and I count 20 repetitions before I breath again.

When I’m pulled out of the tunnel halfway through the procedure, I open my eyes and take in the bright light and expanded space of the larger room. She asks for my left arm for the gadolinium injection. According to Wikipedia, solutions of organic gadolinium—symbol Gd and atomic number 64 in the periodic table of the elements—are the most popular intravenous MRI contrast agents to enhance images. However, for anyone with impaired kidneys gadolinium side affects include hard, shiny, darkened skin that tightens and becomes extremely painful, joint inflexibility, loss of movement, yellow-colored eyes, painful joints, and lung, heart and organ damage. My kidneys are pretty healthy so I’m not concerned though I should have been informed rather than finding out from a google search.

Sliding back into the tunnel the second time was a piece of cake. I had become accustomed to the confined space. We finished the series of breathing drills and concluded with the same sequence of loud staccato pulses that began the procedure. And then like every event in life it’s over and I look forward to the prospect of caffeine, something I’d been denied for 24 hours before the procedure. As she removes my constraints and unhooks the electrodes, I ask her how long before the results are in and she says my doctor will have them within the week. I thank her for getting me through the process and return to claim my civilian clothes and start my day. It’s 9:00 o’clock on a beautiful October morn. What could be better than that?

October 1, 2009 – Pain

2009-10-01T22:58:00.000-07:00

Pain is primeval and integral to every life form on the planet, since life began. There is much to learn from Pain. Its wisdom is likewise as old as life itself. On Saturday night November 3rd, 2007 all the clocks in most of the United States fell back by an hour to return to standard time after an extended period of daylight savings time. Like most of my fellow citizens, I have come to regard this aggravating ritual as an unarguable fact of life. My biological clock like those in everyone else was suddenly out of step with the officially recognized time of the country. The entire nation was living under jet lag that would take a few days to sort itself out. In the meantime, our collective judgment was befuddled: car and pedestrian accidents would spike as would every other kind of calamity—near misses at airports, on the job mishaps, you get the idea.

The return to standard time meant one extra hour of sleep on Sunday morning November 4th, which I happily accepted. And it meant rising on Monday would be easier because my body really thought I should be waking and hour earlier. As expected, I awoke at 4:30 Monday morning and thankfully fell back to sleep for another hour. Roused by my alarm clock at 5:30, I dressed and started my morning jog, now with the morning rays of the sun illuminating the ridge of the Hayward Mountain Range east of San Jose much sooner in my run than the previous week. Last Friday I would be completing my run at the time I’m beginning it now.

Monday’s run went off without incident. However, Tuesday’s run at 5:30 started off badly. Unlike on Monday, San Jose was enshrouded in a blanket of fog that dropped visibility considerably. I could see less than a quarter mile in any direction and the streetlights had that balloon glow resulting from light colliding with water vapor as it seeks to escape its source. The fog also intensified the cold permeating my tee shirt and shorts blown by a persistent 25 to 30 mile an hour wind that pushed me along as I headed west on Branham Lane from Snell Avenue. It was right around 50 degrees Fahrenheit though the wind chill factor was considerably lower.

The exertion of running was staving off the cold for most of me but I had to continuously flex my fingers and move my neck side to side to force blood flow to my digits and to my ears to keep them from complaining of the cold. When I reached the Highway 87 overpass on Branham, the sun’s rays should have begun spilling over the crest of the Hayward Mountains, but the blanket of fog was concealing any advancing sunlight and keeping visibility down to a half mile at the most. As I crested the overpass, I lost the dual cones of headlights bursting from cars racing north beneath me on 87.

Fifteen minutes later I had ran from Pearl Avenue to Chynoweth Avenue after turning left off Branham at its intersection with Pearl. I was on the home stretch rejoining Branham at Vista Park Drive and heading toward Snell. Now, the wind that had been at my back was blowing against me increasing the chill factor of the fog. My sweat-soaked tee shirt had now lost any of its protection against the cold. My only source of warmth was now my sustained exertion: head swinging side-to-side, fingers on both hands continuously flexing.

Pain caught up with me at Mia Circle just after I had passed Kingpark Drive. Despite my exertion, the cold had numbed my fingers and begun to chill my arms and chest. I had increased my pace to escape its discomfort. There’s a round-leaf Eucalyptus tree at the corner of Mia Circle and Branham between the sidewalk and Branham Lane. Its roots have raised the sidewalk, something I knew as well as every other obstacle along the six-plus-miles of my morning circuit. However, for whatever reason: my jet lag still not caught up to official time—putting my timing off just enough to miscalculate the height of the raised concrete; my preoccupation with escaping the cold and/or the fog—obscuring my judgment just the small fraction needed for the concrete to ensnare my right foot long enough time to interrupt my forward motion... In any event, I found myself being propelled forward by a force not of my own making. My body flooded with adrenalin straining every muscle to slow my accelerating advance.

My left foot managed to get under me enough to keep me upright for an instant longer. In retrospect that exacerbated my plight because it allowed my forward momentum to gain force. Balanced on my left leg and my own accelerating weight making it impossible for my right foot to catch me from falling, I went crashing down, both knees contacting the cement first, followed by both hands—the heals of each taking the brunt of the impact. Then, the inertia of the fall was trying to flip me over my hands and knees—like a gym teacher trying to teach a reluctant student to do a summersault—my every muscle straining to resist. I watched helplessly as the contest played out between my body’s forward motion and the physical brake my muscles applied to halt its advance. In the end the latter lost and my forehead staining backward to avoid the collision kissed the concrete with a light thud, breaking the skin between the bridge of my nose and my right eye.

I could see the entire sequence in slow motion, like a car braking and almost managing to stop before finally colliding with the rear bumper of the car in front. The endorphin rush kept me insulated from sensation for just enough time for me to get to my feet, reclaim my unbroken glasses thrown free of the collision, appraise the damage: bleeding silver-dollar size raspberries on both knees and right hand where the torn skin hung loose from a hinge near my wrist. The only damage to my left hand was gouged out quarter-inch-square patches of skin on the knuckles just above the fingernails. The gouge on my left pinky finger was the deepest and it leaked blood in a slow steady stream reappearing shortly after I wiped it clean. A similar deep gouge on my right thumb also kept seeping blood. The bump on my head complained the least. It bled slightly at first then stopped.

Realizing I had dodged a more dangerous bullet, I slowly resumed my run home, testing my legs by walking a couple of steps before easing into a slow lope then moving to a sustained run. As soon as I increased the pace, all the insulation from the pain and cold the endorphin rush afforded during the fall had vanished. Now I was completely aware of the pain in my knees and in my right ribcage. But the pain and cold in my digits—refusing to move as I tried to clench each fist—created the greatest discomfort of all. Hurt and in flight all I could think of was getting home and tending to my wounds. And that concern only lengthened the apparent time it was taking for me to complete the final mile of my run.

When I finally arrive back at home, my hands were so unresponsive that I had a difficult time grasping my door key, getting it into the lock, and turning the tumblers to allow me into the warmth inside. Once inside and in the bathroom, I turned on the hot water faucet full blast impatient for the feel of warm water to thaw my frigid fingers. As the water warmed I lathered both hands washing away the dirt and dried blood from each open wound, pain screaming from each one—the large opening on my right hand shrieking loudest—warm soapy pink water coloring the white porcelain wash basin. Blotting both hands dry with paper towels, I sterilized my Swiss Army Knife scissors in alcohol and cut away the loose skin hanging from the large open wound on my right hand, wrapped bandages around the deep wounds on my right thumb and left pinky finger that refused to stop bleedings. All the others including the large one on my right hand had stopped bleeding and had started sweating a clear liquid tinged pink by small amounts of oozing blood.

In the shower I used my left hand to clean the small wound on my forehead and the two round skin avulsions on my knees both crying out in pain from the soap and my rigorous scrubbing. The entire morning routine took nearly an hour to complete but in the end, I had replaced the water soaked bandages from the two wounds still bleeding with clean ones and place a large square patch bandages on the skin avulsion on my right hand and two knees. I noticed a slightly darkened patch beneath the skin of my right hand filling the area to the right of my palm’s Mars line to the base of the thumb. The hand was sore and had little gripping strength.

In the aftermath of the fall, I took a perverse satisfaction in knowing that I had survived the mishap with only superficial wounds that would scab over in a day or two and be gone within a week. I was also reassured that my survival instincts were still sufficiently intact to protect me from a fate far worse. And Pain once again reminded me of what it means to be living creature having to cope with the vagaries of nature and the world around me.

September 30, 2009 - Boom in SMS digital mobile phones depositing and dispensing electronic currency

2009-09-30T23:02:00.000-07:00

The international financial services industry is beginning to leverage the enormous subscriber base mobile network operators (MNOs) command, 4 billion in 2008 according to Wireless Intelligence, the GSMA (the GSM mobile phone operators trade association) research arm in London. Banks are initially targeting consumers in the third world by converting their mobile phones into a mobile wallet where cash can be deposited to and spent from. The mobile wallet has generated great excitement and has demonstrated a huge potential in the third world. Electronic currency enables the mobile handset to dispense cash and accept deposits through a bank-affiliated merchant or MNO airtime reseller, thus enabling customer savings and even microloans. The capability leverages the short message service (SMS) on nearly every mobile phone.

Today, most electronic currency successes have been within national borders, but enabling the 190 million migrant workers—3 percent of the world population—to send electronic currency home via mobile phones is the next application financial institutions and MNOs are targeting. And for good reason, according to the World Bank, in 2008, migrant workers sent $433 billion to their home countries, most in the third world.

What’s surprising is how rapidly electronic currency is taking hold in the third world. At the Mobile Money Summit 2009 from June 22 to 25 in Barcelona, Caroline Pulver, FSD (Financial Sector Deepening) Kenya, an independent trust developing inclusive financial markets reported on the impact M-PESA (mobile, PESA money in Swahili) has had on the country. Pulver’s research found that by May this year, 40 percent of Kenya’s adults had used the service. The table below shows what Pulver found Kenyans spent their electronic currency on.

Usage Percentage
Store/save money for everyday use 14 percent
Store/save money for emergencies 7 percent
Pay bills 2 percent
Send money 25 percent
Receive money 28 percent
Buy airtime for someone else, 8 percent
Buy airtime for myself 14 percent

According to the central bank of Kenya, at the start of 2009, there were over 7000 M-PESA agents. This represented substantially more points of service than the combined number of bank branches (887) and ATM (1,435) in the country—serving 6 million customers or 15.3 percent of Kenya’s 39 million population. Since the program’s launch in March 2007 until February 2009, the cumulative value of M-PESA money transfers had reached $1.5 billion. As of February 2009, the monthly value of person-to-person transfers was $190.3 million.

Sponsored by the UK-based Department for International Development, M-PESA began by using Safaricom’s (a subsidiary of UK-based Vodaphone) airtime resellers to issue microloans that borrowers would repay at an interest rate reduced by eliminating the overhead conventional microloans carried. However, the tech-savvy, skilled worker in Kenya began using the facility to transfer cash from working husbands in the city to their families in the country: Safaricom had unintentionally become a bank with its handset providing a teller function and it airtime resellars dispensing cash. Today, according to Stephen Rasmussen, technology program manager at CGAP, an independent policy and research center housed at the World Bank, 70 percent of M-PESA subscribers are banking customers, not the unbanked customers originally targeted.

The service’s popularity drew the attention the Western Union Company, which has a 17 percent share of the international remittance market. (The World Bank estimated that Sub-Saharan Africa received around $20 billion in remittances in 2008, with Kenya accounting for $1.3 billion.) In December, last year, Western Union partnered with Vodafone, parent of Safaricom, to pilot a cross-border Mobile Money Transfer (MMT) service between the U.K. and Kenya. The service would enable customers to send remittances directly to Safaricom mobile subscribers in Kenya in minutes from the UK. The World Bank estimates the fees for transferring $200 cash from the UK to Kenya at $26.64: $15.25 for the money transfer and $5.69 for the currency conversion. It will be interesting to see if the cost comes down or is increased by $0.11 charge for the SMS message charge for an electronic currency transfer.

In June this year, Western Union expanded its reach in international remittance signing a deal with Zain, owned by Kuwait-based Mobile Telecommunications Company KSC, to enable Western Union currency transfers to Zain handset with the Zap platform. Zain’s service is available in Tanzania, where it’s larger than Safaricom, and Kenya where it’s smaller. Zain other distinction from Safaricom is enabling consumer-to-merchant purchase eliminating the need for a cash transaction. For the unbanked the additional fee will makes the transaction uneconomical. However, for business-to-business transactions, the service will have great appeal.

Celpay, owned by South African FirstRand bank, is the another service that has gotten a substantial following in Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo where the DRC government uses Celpay to distribute government payments to former soldiers who have turned in their guns. Registered customers can use their electronic currency for merchant transactions, monthly bill payments, and fund transfer between participating phones. The company’s model is unique first because it provides solutions to businesses rather than end customers. Second, its nascent P2P model reaches unbanked customers without mobile phones, by sending the payment to agents with phones who perform money transfers or dispense cash. In June this year Celpay was processing $25 million per month in gross transactions.

One common element that permeates these successes is that all flourished because they were plowing a green field. Nothing existed before they emerged to provide the service. Another is that each found regulatory agencies willing and able to permit the services to take hold and flourish. In the case of M-PESA, once its popularity got notice, the conventional financial services sector attempted to derail the project only to be rejected by the Kenyan government. In the case of the DRC, electronic currency was an effective means to pacify a military force surrendering its arms.

According to the GSMA, the successes in Africa are being attempted elsewhere in the world. A greenfield deployment in Indonesia, the AXIS mDUIT project, is due to launch in December, 2009. In the Philippines, the SMART Communications’ Island Activations Program hopes to bring electronic banking to isolated customers on remote islands. Mobile network operator Roshan hopes to build an M-PESA-like service in war torn Afghanistan. Electronic currency is taking hold in the third world and in won’t be long before it will get a foothold in the developed world as well.

September 13, 2009 - A short history of consumer driven technology development

2009-09-13T14:26:00.000-07:00

We’re in the midst of yet another evolution in communications. This one is the social networking transformation in which mobile devices are not merely used for voice and E–mail but now Internet terminals for the many social networks we all belong to. It’s yet another example of an activity that began on our desktop and notebook PCs that have migrated over to our handsets, just as text messaging and e-mail did before. And as with every disruptive social phenomenon, those trying to serve this fast moving trend have been caught unawares and are trying desperately to catch up.

In the early part of this decade, users in the 100s of millions outside the U.S.—Asia, the Pacific Rim, and Europe—began to use instant text messaging as a lower cost alternative to voice. The carriers supplied this data service in the spectrum unused for voice calls, which cost them next to nothing and for which they reaped large profits. Instant and short text messaging became its own social phenomenon, with a use model unique from voice and e-mail. The messages were likened to whispering in someone ear—especially during meetings or when you didn’t want anyone but the recipient to know what was being said. In The Philippines text-messaging, citizens-organized daily protests resulted in the ouster of Philippine President Joseph Ejercito Estrada in 2001.

While instant text messaging continued building a following in the U.S., Internet-base social networking on a PC started taking off in early 2004 with the debut of MySpace. Membership went from zero to a million users from January to February of that year and the numbers kept rising from there. Social networkers were now hanging out on MySpace with their PC, talking on their cell phone and/or texting on their cell phone. Cellular service providers in the U.S. were oblivious of the trend. They continued making it more expensive to text than talk, while in the rest of the world service providers did the opposite. Is there any wonder European cellphone users were texting more than twice as much as U.S. users (according to Forrester Research reporting in 2005)?

By mid century, U.S. service providers finally realized that data service was a viable business model. In 2005, CTIA-The Wireless Association, cited an installed base of 190 million cell phones and 90 percent could send text messages and 60 percent of those texting were aged 18 to 27. (A great many of the texters were voting for their favorites on “American Idol.”) By this time, too, the Blackberry demonstrated to telephone service providers that there was a business providing e-mail access via a mobile handset for enterprise users. But, who would want to surf the web with a mobile handset?

In January 2007, with the advent of the iPhone, the notion of providing total Internet browsing on a handset took hold. The idea wasn’t entirely foreign to service providers as they had dabbled with the notion by supplying radios you could plug into your laptop and access the Internet over the cellular infrastructure. And the Blackberry could be pressed into surfing duties, but the experience was painful and cumbersome. However, service providers had no idea of what it was going to take to keep up with millions of iPhone users accessing and moving large media files around the 3G network, something they are now reluctantly coming to terms with.

It took a year but the rest of the smart phone vendors with the service providers excluded from carrying iPhones finally caught on to how to provide web browsing and similar handset functionality—a compelling user experience. This is where service providers find themselves today, facing growing numbers of smart phone users disenchanted with the slow response from the web. And it’s only going to get worse as Apple is no doubt on the verge of introducing an iPhone with full 1080p HD video capture and playback, 20-megapixel still image capture, and no doubt higher fidelity audio capture and playback.

For wireless service providers the once the wireless spectrum is completely utilized, there is nowhere to go except to offload traffic onto the wired infrastructure. The handsets and wireless infrastructure will have to contain increased intelligence to route wireless connections so as to preserve bandwidth while still providing a responsive experience to the user. It’s conceivable that, like toll lanes on congested highways, wireless service providers will begin charging a toll for a faster browsing experience. Those unwilling to pay will be subject to operating speeds that will begin to resemble dial-up 64 kbits/s or less as large numbers of users flood the system during prime usage time.

The more things change the more they stay the same.

September 11, 2009 - Augmented Reality, Do I Want to Join in?

2009-09-10T23:44:00.000-07:00

I’ve been interested in the next big enablers of the mobile Internet and I keep reading that they are likely to be LTE—the 4G wireless replacement for 3G and location technologies—augmented reality (much more intriguing). LTE is simply next generation technology replacing the previous and we can take that as a given. Everything will run faster; you’ll be able to move large files around quicker, etc.

Augmented reality, on the other hand, suggests something unique. According to Wikipedia, AR is a “real direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are merged with, or augmented by, virtual computer-generated imagery.” Your phone knows where you are using its on-board GPS and by accessing Google maps, it can determine what’s around you and can—with a touch-enabled screen—tell you about what’s around you.

I connected the term, which I heard today, with the Apple iPhone 3GS ad "Travel" in which the voice over asked if you want your own personal tour of Paris and declares “there’s an app for that” at which time the iPhone articulates “you’re standing at the center of Paris…” with a picture on the iPhone of the front of Notre Dame and the legend below “Point Zero & Notre Dame.” The iPhone app has a series of sites installed which pops up when the phone comes within range of the landmark (using its onboard GPS location finder) and voila!

I get the impression that the ultimate realization of AR will be a phone that is tied into a cloud-resident data base of all landmarks—not a preselected few a free app on the iPhone can store away. With the right app on your portable device, you will be able to ask the phone about anything you’re in the vicinity of—natural or man made—and it will give you all the relevant facts.

The reason AR will be successful is because of the enormous commercial potential the technology affords. The system that knows the exact location of Notre Dame in Paris will also know the location of nearby coffee shops, restaurants, and every other commercial establishment. Furthermore, the software that can tell you about the world around you is also cleverly evaluating you to determine whether to present you an offer for 10 percent off on a Latte from a nearby merchant or a special deal on a French author the software has determined you might like.

The great problem of becoming an integral part of an AR is that you’re being marketed to by the behavior you exhibit in the augmented reality. And the phone is the device that’s enabling it to happen. The device has not become big brother yet. All it currently has is GPS—the network knows where you are at all times (ironically, the average honest citizen is better monitored than nearly every parolee from a correctional institution), a compass—so the network knows which way you’re going, and an accelerometer which could detect if you’re moving or stationary. In the future, the plan is to attach biometric monitors—great for detecting medical emergencies, but wonderful for marketing to you if your blood sugar is low and you need a sugar fix—the patisserie is offering croissants at 10 percent discount with coffee purchase.

I begin to feel as if I’m part of a closed loop feedback system in which I respond to stimuli that are then readjusted to achieve some kind of behavior in me. The Stimuli are marketing incentives and the response from me is the purchase of a good. Great, I’ve become an element in a machine works that’s designed to endlessly cycle virtual coinage.

September 8, 2009 - Presenting our lives for the social graph to view in full 1080p HD

2009-09-08T23:28:00.000-07:00

Presenting our lives for the social graph to view in full 1080p HD

I’ve had a chance to read through a number of articles this Labor Day Weekend on the next generation of smart phones. I’ve been struck by the innovation that chip suppliers and mobile handset makers are cramming into these small portable devices. All this innovation aims to serve users increasingly employing handset as a terminal into the “social graph.” I love the term social graph as it connotes a collective consciousness: what all the connections on all the on-line social networks have become.

And what are we putting into our on-line social networks: pictures, video, audio, and lots of text. These multimedia and text files provide tangible evidence of the significant as well as trivial moments of our lives: reminding ourselves as well as our connections of that trip to London, Paris, Taipei…; the birth of our first, second,… child; the Duran Duran, Grateful Dead,… concert…; the minutes and seconds of our lives.

Up until the first decade of the 21st Century, most of these memories resided in our mind, on paper, or stored away in boxes of photographs, 8-mm film, or VHS cassettes and DAT tape. Now, all of that emotional memorabilia has found a home in the social graph, stored away for as long as we keep our accounts active and available for others to view.

What’s making all this possible is the continuing availability of low cost silicon. This eighth most common element in the universe by mass, a tetravalent metalloid with the symbol Si, atomic number 14, and atomic mass 28.0855, has become to the information age what coal was to the industrial revolution. For the social networker silicon is providing the continuous improvement in the fidelity of these captured moments.

Texas Instruments’ new OMAP chip is promising to allow HD quality image and video capture and playback. The specs call for 20-megapixel photographs and 1080p HD video capture in handheld smart phone. How incredible is that! You will be able to capture an unheard of amount of visual detail to share with your connections. Though the images and moving pictures will only be as good as the eye that captures them, the detail will be there in every frame.

What’s propelling the continuing drive to electronically capture and share these transient moments? Are we all modern day Robinson Crusoe’s stranded on planet earth and needing the affirmation of our man Friday that our lives are meaningful, that what we do is contributing to some collective good for the world around us, and—most important of all—that we’re not alone in our small part of the infinitesimal huge universe?

Or maybe we just need to hangout and brag about what we've done.

August 23, 2009 - In search of painkillers in Taipei

2009-08-24T11:46:00.000-07:00

It’s around eight in the morning on Wednesday June 3rd at the Grand Hyatt Taipei and my cell phone is ringing. I answer to find TP at the other end of the line in a voice tinged with pain. “I need something stronger than Tylenol, the pain has gotten to be too much,” he intones in that deep bass sounding voice of his that sound like Hans Solo’s sidekick Wookie from Star Wars. With his thick mane of blond gray hair and droopy mustache and matching height he also resembles the hairy hero in bearing and gait. He’s a guy my age but a full-time geek, unlike me who is at best a part-time geek.

TP and I are in Taipei attending the Computex 2009 Conference, “the” PC and consumer show in Asia—CES in size and importance, especially for the 2009 Christmas buying season (whatever gets sold during this week will appear in products this year). We’re here with a bunch of other folks from our California high tech company pitching audio enrichment software. TP is an audio mastering engineer who used to work for the Grateful Dead and other rock legends. How he came to be at the tech company we both worked for is another story on its own. And no, TP, is not into elicit drugs, nor alcohol—not even beer and wine, though he is addicted to Red Bull—I know because our PR firm AccessPR scored every last case the Taipei Costco had in stock along with several jumbo bags of Mars miniature candy bars and a half dozen jumbo jars of nuts. Red Bull was no longer being stocked because of the misguided suspicion that the beverage contained trace amounts of cocaine. It does have lots of caffeine, though.

I tell TP there has to be a pharmacy close by that we can get a prescription filled, “can you call your doc in California and have him fax a prescription to the business office of the Hyatt.” That’s where I am when his call comes to my cell phone bouncing stateside to AT&T Wireless and relayed back to Taipei to the local wireless carrier here—roaming charges Cha-Chinging away. It’s just past five in the evening on the West Coast but TP has his doc cell phone number. As a backup plan I check the front desk halfway across the sprawling lobby of the Grand Hyatt to ask if they have a doctor on duty to check TP out and write a prescription in Chinese. The clerk directs me to the nurse station, where I find that the only way TP is going to get any prescription painkillers is to go to the hospital and have a doctor examine him.

I check back with TP and sure enough he got hold of his doc, who will fax the prescription. I tell him it’s no good we have to go to the hospital. The kind of painkillers TP needs are controlled substances and you’ll get mandatory jail time if you’re caught with them in your possession without a doctor’s prescription. I tell him to suit up and meet me in the lobby as soon as he can. In the meantime, I find CS our PR account exec at AccessPR and ask if she’ll accompany Tom and me to the hospital. “No problem,” which is the response I always get when I make a request from AccessPR. I just ask for something to happen and it does. CS tells the cab driver where we need to go and we’re off.

TP came to his state of pain as a result of something that happen on Saturday May 30th. I met him inside the International Terminal at SFO. I was to be his mule as he brought with him two large Pelican cases filled with audio “stuff”—cables, keyboards, PCs,… Since the airlines have begun limiting the amount of checked baggage per person, I’m checking in one and he’s checking in the other. We’re joined by CS who will carry a third Pelican he’s brought along similarly crammed full of gear. These three Pelicans represent what didn’t make the shipment from San Francisco to Taipei two weeks earlier—something like 12 Pelicans flown by a freight forwarding provider and awaiting us in Taipei. There are two EVA Airways flights leaving SFO within an hour of one another this Saturday night. The one TP and I are on, BR0007 lifts off just after midnight and the one CS is on, BR0017 departs about an hour later.

During the process of unloading the two Pelican cases from his ride to the airport, TP “does something” to his back and he’s not throwing the cases around as nimbly as he usually does. CS and I know he’s having trouble and though it irks him not to be able to manhandle the bulky black boxes, he’s content to let the two of us do the heavy lifting. Once we arrive we check in at the Grand Hyatt Taipei and TP unloads every Pelican we’ve shipped over in his corner suite on the 15th floor. He gets busy putting together over a half dozen demos for our two demo suites at the Grand Hyatt five floors below.

We arrive at the hospital and the three of us exit the cab and I’m so focused on getting TP into the hospital I neglect to pay the cabbie, who is speaking frantically in Chinese to get my attention. CS realizes the problem at the same time I do and I beat her to the punch paying the cabbie, tipping him profusely for the mistake—five bucks U.S. including tip. We enter the hospital and CS learns quickly we need to go to the second floor and sign in at reception. Remarkably, upon arriving, the whole registration process takes place in English with TP providing all the information without needing CS to translate. We wait a half hour and TP is finally taken into an examining room where, we learn later, the doctor is fluent in English and proceeds to lecture TP on the evils of companies exploiting their workers and causing them work related injuries. To be sure, TP’s trouble was work related.

While TP is in the examining room with the doctor, CS and I wait, making small talk about the event, how TP came to be in the state he’s in… I’m surprised by the number of westerners in the waiting room: adults, kids, and older folk. At the reception desk with its four clerks serving the slow but steady stream of arrivals, I hear nearly as much English as Mandarin spoken.

TP appears forty-five minutes later. He’s smiling and relieved to be done with the visit. He’s got his supply of prescription Vicodin-equivalent painkiller and it’s cost him less than sixty bucks. No, this is not the co-pay, it’s the total cost. We take the cab ride back to the hotel and back to the grind.

May 7, 2009 – A Ride Downtown on the San Jose Light Rail

2009-05-07T21:01:00.000-07:00

It was about 20 minutes before 8:00 AM on a Friday morning in early March. I had just dropped off my car with Franklin at his garage on Winfield Blvd in the Blossom Valley neighborhood of San Jose, California for its periodic service. Franklin dropped me at the Almaden Station of the Santa Clara Valley Transit Authority (VTA) light rail spur (also called the Almaden Shuttle), which runs between Almaden station and Ohlone/Chynoweth station, named for the Ohlone Indian tribe that settled California before the Gold Rush and Mary Folsom Hayes Chynoweth owner of Hayes Mansion. I boarded the two-car electric train about to depart. The trip took less than five minutes and stopped only once at the Oakridge Shopping Mall station. No sooner had I disembarked at Ohlone/Chynoweth station—and the shuttle reversed and headed back to Almaden Station—than the VTA’s Alum Rock-Santa Teresa light rail train pulled into the station and I boarded, along with a couple dozen others, for the trip north.

My light rail trip had begun, a ride along Highway 87 through a part of San Jose I seldom get a chance to see. Instead of letting someone else drive, I’m usually zooming by though never during compute hours unless it’s a holiday or on the weekend, eyes glued to the road. Taking public transportation is giving yourself over to an automated system that you cannot control. Trains arrive and depart at prescribed intervals and you are responsible for being at a terminal at the appointed time of departure or face a 15-minute wait for the next train in the schedule: the concern of the many over that of the individual. Public transport is a form of socialism where everyone is treated equal. I board without buying a ticket at the station kiosk because my company has provided all its employees with light rail passes.

The VTA, which Santa Clara County residents voted into being on June 6, 1972, is relatively young as mass transits systems go. It came into being under the stewardship of 59th Mayor of San Jose, Norman Yoshio Mineta, the first Asian American ever to head a major U.S. city. The mass transit’s rolling stock came from three financially strapped local bus lines—Peninsula Transit, San Jose City Lines, and Peerless Stages. VTA, then called Santa Clara County Transit District (SCCTD) acquired the assets on January 1, 1973. In 1982 the federal government funded the preliminary engineering phase for the County’s first light rail line during Mineta’s tenure in the U.S. House of Representatives as Santa Clara County’s congressman.

The ride north passes by the San Juan Bautista Hills on the east, atop which sits Communications Hill, the large Kaufman-Broad high density housing development that began covering the hillside a little over a decade ago. The name Communications Hill comes from 11 large microwave towers located on top of Oak Hill. The development sits between the Capital Expressway and Curtner Light Rail Stations. The station before Capital is Branham, which follows Ohlone/Chynoweth. Every morning I run across the earthen bridge that carries Branham Lane over the rail station and Highway 87, and watch for a few moments the light rail and the early morning commute traffic on the freeway zooming by at the limit below me. Beyond, Curtner is the Tamien Station—named for the Tamien Indians that inhabited the Santa Clara Valley. There passengers seeking an even smaller carbon front prints disembark the light rail board Caltrain to stations north along the Peninsula or to stations south toward Morgan Hill and Gilroy.

The light Rail parallels Highway 87 just after leaving the Ohlone/Chynoweth station for five stops—the last of which is Virginia. From there it cuts right under the freeway and meanders left by the Children’s Discover Museum on Woz Way. Of the two Steve’s forming Apple, Wozniak got the street in front of the Museum named for him. Jobs, by far the more famous of the two, didn’t, perhaps because Woz was the largest private donor funding the museum. My wife and I took our grandkids to the museum. We found it thoroughly engaging.

If I were homeless, the underpasses the light rail lines runs under just before the museum would be decent shelter from the elements, though I’ve never seen obvious signs of habitation as the train passes by. I find it curious how hope—the museum—and despair—the underpass—reside side by side.

Once the light rail leaves Virginia Station, the 60 MPH speed it clocks between the stations along Highway 87 slows to a crawl approaching and beyond the museum, where the rail makes a hard right turn onto San Carlos Street, the metal wheels squealing until the length of the two cars have straighten and the train rumbles over the Guadalupe River bridge, past the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts, over Almaden Boulevard to stop at the Convention Center Station. Look south from the station and you’ll see the original San Jose Martin Luther King Library, a gathering place for our young family when we first moved here in 1974, now abandoned for newer digs at San Jose State University.

The convention center, which sits behind the abandoned library and runs the entire block from Almaden Boulevard to Market Street was named for Tom McEnery, San Jose’s 61st mayor from 1983 to 1990. It was during his tenure that the light rail system was constructed and a good amount of downtown San Jose was developed, from the early 20th Century California agricultural town architecture to the high-rise urban area is has become.

Once you leave Convention Center Station, the train takes a leisurely pass through that San Jose of old. The first landmark is the six-story Sainte Claire Hotel at 302 South Market Street opened in 1926 offering all the big city luxuries of the time. Furnishings from Czechoslovakia still fill the antique lobby. The lounge and lobby are adorned with a hand-painted ceiling. Wealthy San Jose landowner Thomas S. Montgomery contracted the San Francisco architectural firm Weeks and Day to build the hotel. The firm had built the Mark Hopkins, the Sir Francis Drake, and the Huntington Hotel on Nob Hill. Now dwarfed by the towering new Marriot across the street and the Three Sixty Residences, a 23-story luxury downtown San Jose condo complex under construction behind it, the hotel continues to bring the turn-of-the-century French beaux arte look and feel to the South Bay

Next to the hotel is the Sainte Claire Building at 301 S 1st Street on the corner of Market, another Montgomery property Weeks and Day built. Opened in April 1925, local architect Herman Krause designed the ground floor for Appleton’s Clothing Store, while numerous medical professionals offices occupied the floors above. Spared the wrecking ball, the building has been turned into condominiums for residents who prefer early 20th Century milieu with 21st Century amenities. The recently renovated ground floor is home to Original Joe’s, a spin off of Original Joe's that the Rocca Family opened in San Francisco in 1937. The San Jose version opened its doors May 24, 1956 and has been at the same location ever since still owned and operated by the Rocca Family and its associates.

The light rail turns left at Original Joe’s and heads north along South First Street, passing on the left the Montgomery Hotel at 211 S 1st Street, an 86-room boutique hotel and another landmark downtown building that opened in 1911, a boutique European style hotel back then as it is today. Designed by local architect William Binder, it was also owned by T. S. Montgomery. The hotel was originally located where the new section of the Fairmont Hotel sits today. The old hotel was moved 186 feet south of its original site on January 29, 2000, with a large number of spectators on hand to watch the historic event, at a cost of over $12 million. The relocation broke a record as it was the heaviest building, at 9.6 million pounds, ever moved. Special equipment built for the project included remote controlled machinery placed under the structure, which inched along for more than 3 hours before reaching its destination.

The hotel now rests across the street from the Paseo de San Antonio light rail station and on Friday nights, my wife and I join dinners at the Mosaic Restaurant and Lounge—previously the Paragon Restaurant and Lounge—and watch the parade of buses, lightrail trains, cars and pedestrians as they enter and leave the open air station. Paseo de San Antonio is near ground zero for the founding of San Jose. In 1777 Don Felipe de Neve selected Lieutenant Jose Moraga to command nine soldiers skilled in farming, five pobladores (settlers), and their families—66 people in all. He directed Moraga to establish the pueblo San Jose de Guadalupe along the banks of the Guadalupe River. By 1797 after being flooded out each winter by the river, the settlers moved to the corner of what is now South Market and West San Fernando Streets—a half block north and a block west of the Paseo.

Near the Paseo de San Antonio station, at 210 S. 1st Street is the historic Twohy building an office space constructed in 1917 for Judge John W. Twohy. Now renovated into a mixed commercial/loft-housing complex of 36 apartments. Curiously, a recent attempt at large scale redevelopment in downtown San Jose near the site of the turn-of-the-century success failed. The Palladium Company a leading national developer of mixed-use projects in urban centers proposed to redevelop a five-block area in downtown San Jose, that the train I’m on cuts through: Mitchell Block—bounded by St. John, West Santa Clara, North First and North Market; Fountain Alley—along First Street; Zanotto's parking lot; a parcel at First and San Fernando; and Block 3—at South Second and West San Fernando.

In total the project would have built 500,000 square feet of retail space, a 350-room hotel, 350,000 square feet of office space and more than 1,000 downtown homes. On March 25, 2002, in the aftermath of the dotcom bubble implosion, Palladium pulled out after investing more than $3.5 million in the project. The Palladium proposal would have required approximately $1 billion in private investment. The massive complex at Santana Row, which was as ambitious as the downtown project, had begun a few years earlier and was nearing completion. It coasted through the recession to great success in its aftermath. In the process, Santana Row diverted the commercial trade that might have been captured downtown had the Palladium project completed. Timing is everything.

May 2, 2009 Hanging out on Moonstone Beach Listening to the Surf

2009-05-05T22:40:00.001-07:00

Moonstone Beach, Cambria California, May 2, 2009 I’m sitting in the Sea of Japan Suite of the newly renovated Blue Dolphin Inn listening to the surf crashing rhythmically against the shore just across the two-lane blacktop. Below a sporadic cluster of pedestrians make their way north along the shoulder of the macadam lane toward the Moonstone Beach Bar & Grill. There is hardly any breeze and the temperature is in the upper 50s but it feels like mid-60s. I’m sitting with the window wide open and feeling comfortable in a tee shirt. From where I sit, indistinct bits of conversation waft up occasionally from those strolling by below. It’s half past eight in the evening and the sun has finally succumbed to night after struggling most of the day to break through the dense fog hugging the coastline and spilling over into most of the West Village of Cambria.

The inns along this stretch of road are filled with members of a Porsche car club this weekend. Every space in a parking lot at the inn next to ours is nearly filled with the slick racing machines. The Porsche’s link to the Central Coast was firmly established on September 30, 1955, when James Dean driving west on Highway 466—today’s Highway 46—crashed into a car driven by Cal Poly student Donald Turnupseed that was turning left off 46 onto Highway 41. Highway 46 connects the California Central Valley—Interstate Highway 5 and California Highway 99—to California Highway 1, the Pacific Coast Highway, that hugs the rugged California coast from just south of Orange County to just north of San Francisco. Highway 46 T’s into Highway 1 about three miles south of Cambria. The movie star was driving a rare Silver Porsche Spyder, one of only ninety built in 1955, his mechanic Rolf Wuetherich in the passenger seat was thrown free of the car and survived as did Donald Turnupseed.

Most of the Porsche club members temporarily populating the artist community certainly know of Dean’s unfortunate mishap. If this gathering is in any way connected with the doomed movie star, it’s hard to say. This assembly included a wide range of model years. It’s possible that among those visiting the village there was a rare 1955 Silver Porsche Spyder. However, this group is not unique. Cambria is host to clubs of Corvette affectionados, vintage car buffs—one time there were some many in the village, it was as if we’d been taken back in time to the days of William Randolph Hearst— among many others. The explanation for the gathering is more likely that Cambria is one of many stops club members make as they motor the length of the Pacific Coast Highway.

We’ve just returned from an early dinner at the Black Cat on Main Street in East Village of the seacoast artist community with a population of just under 6000. The Black Cat is one of the newer restaurants in the East Village, having come on the scene in 2002. The place is the creation of Chef Deborah Scarborough. A refugee from television production in Los Angeles, she’s turned the place into one of, if not, the best eatery in the seaside resort. Our meal tonight consisted of a main course of pheasant for me and abalone for my wife IM, preceded by blue cheese and goat cheese salads, respectively all accompanied by a glass each of Piper Heidsieck Champagne—the only way to celebrate a Saturday.

March 4, 2009 – A Walkabout San Francisco’s Barbary Coast

2009-03-04T22:06:00.001-08:00

It’s Friday morning, November 8, 2008 at 8:00 o’clock. I’ve parked in the Golden Gateway Garage at 250 Clay Street in San Francisco several blocks from the office building near the Transamerica Tower where I have an appointment at 10:00 o’clock. I’ve come early to meet someone for breakfast but I’m not expected until 9:00 o’clock. I’m going to use the time until then to enjoy this part of the city. Where I am is what was the southeastern boundary of the Barbary Coast, that notorious section of the city that erupted when the first crush of gold seekers overran the small village of Yerba Buena toward the end of 1848. Being here is being at the epicenter of an explosion long after it detonated and time has covered over all trace of the initial event. In 1848, the small village of Yerba Buena, population 900, erupted into San Francisco, population 56,000 in 1850 and accelerating.

I exit the parking garage and turn right heading west on Clay toward Battery Street and the financial district further on. The office and residential towers of Two Embarcadero Center are on my left. Embarcadero Center sits atop what was Yerba Buena Cove in 1850 when everything southeast of Sansome from Jackson to California was underwater. The four large rectangular shaped building, between Clay and Sacramento Streets from The Embarcadero to Battery Street, and two hotels command 9.8 acres of the most prime real estate in San Francisco. The 45-story One Embarcadero Tower that I’ve just past was completed in 1971. The center’s rising happened just before my family and I found our way west to the Bay Area.

Embarcadero Center is the latest covering time has layered over the big event of 1849; the two towers of Three and Four Embarcadero Center are behind me. The brainchild of M. Justin Herman—the city named a plaza after him—the center began in 1967 when according to Time magazine, David Rockefeller President of Chase Manhattan Bank and his brother Arkansas Governor Winthrop Rockefeller proposed the $150 million project to San Francisco Redevelopment Agency Director M. Justin Herman. John Portman was the architect—think hotels like the Hyatt Regency with Atriums that soar skyward. Manhattan-based builder George A. Fuller Company would build the structure, with wealthy Dallas realty investor Trammell Crow participating in the deal, too. At the time the development was called Rockefeller Center West.

Running parallel to Clay and Sacramento and entirely covered over by the huge complex are five blocks that was once a notorious San Francisco thoroughfare, Commercial Street, which continues as little more than an alley from Sansome Street to Grant Avenue. In 1912 the 700 block of Commercial Street between Kearney Street and Grant Avenue had 15 houses of ill-repute—including the Parisian Mansion, the Lively Flea, and The Red Rooster—a year before the April 1913 Red Light Abatement Act became law in the state of California, officially shuttering the illicit trade of the notorious Barbary Coast though it would take a California Supreme Court ruling in 1917 before an organized police action on Valentine’s Day to close just over eighty houses of prostitution and evict over a thousand lady boarders from the establishments. San Francisco had come kicking and screaming into the 20th Century. However, the illicit trade didn’t stop; rather it moved to the San Francisco Tenderloin—today, the area between Polk Street, Sutter Street, Mason Street, Market Street, and Golden Gate Avenue—and went underground.

The Hyatt Regency San Francisco, sitting amidst the right triangle formed by Drumm and Sacramento Streets with Market Street as the hypotenuse, began welcoming guests in 1973. The hotel’s atrium lobby would be featured in “The Towering Inferno,” a year later. Two Embarcadero Center reached its full 30-story height in 1974. Three years later saw the completion of the 31-story Three Embarcadero Center and in 1982, the 45-story Four Embarcadero Center opened its doors for business. It would take until 1988 before the 25-story Park Hyatt Hotel—now the Hotel Le Méridien—at the corner of Battery and Clay Streets received guests. I stand out front of the hotel lobby for a moment remembering the times I had dropped off and picked up executives from my employer, a Cleveland-based publishing company. They liked staying here when visiting because the hotel chain bartered room accommodations for ad space.

I turn left at Sansome, walk halfway to Sacramento, and find the narrow asphalt thoroughfare that is Commercial Street leading west toward Montgomery Street. Beneath the concrete and asphalt of Embarcadero Center across Sansome are the hulks of many ships that brought the Argonauts—after the Greek mythological seekers of the Golden Fleece—and all merchandise they would consume. By the summer of 1850, over 500 vessels were recorded in the vicinity of Yerba Buena Cove. Most had been abandoned as passengers and crew struck out for the gold fields. The abandoned vessels were converted into warehouses, hotels, saloons, and jails or dismantled for their timber used in building construction by the San Franciscans who stayed behind to mine the miners. The history of the ship Niantic describes the fate of many.

Under command of Captain Henry Cleaveland of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts and his sons James and Daniel as first and second mates, respectively, the Niantic rounded Cape Horn from Rhode Island en route to the Pacific Northwest. Stopping in Panama to drop cargo, it picked up 250 Argonauts who had crossed the Isthmus of Panama racing to the California Gold Fields. The Niantic dropped anchor in San Francisco Bay on July 5th 1849. All passengers and most of the crew hastily disembarked and went in search of wealth. Without a crew Niantic’s owner, Burr & Smith, instructed Captain Cleaveland to sell the ship. Upon carrying out the order, Captain and his two mates did not succumb to the siren call of the gold field but sailed away on another ship. The Niantic was hauled to where Montgomery and Clay streets are today, covered with a shingle roof, sub-divided into stores and offices and painted over with signs of the various occupants. It earned its owners $20,000 a month in rent, returning far more on land than it could ever have produced at sea. The great fire of 1852, one or more of the six that ravaged the area from December 1849 to June 1852 destroyed the structure. It was rebuilt on the hull of the ship as the Niantic Hotel, the finest hotel in San Francisco back then.

The Barbary Coast would survive nearly 70 years until genteel society finally determined to rid the city of its Dionysian soul. The task of dismantling the Barbary Coast fell to James Rolph Jr. the 38th mayor of San Francisco. He was a banker, shipbuilder, and California governor from 1931-1934. But, even he and the California Red-Light Abatement Act could not shut it down for good until 1920. Afterwards, the area became San Francisco's Produce District where the area's narrow streets were lined with vendors selling fruits and vegetables.

If you look back on the years that this piece of ground has hosted large-scale human habitation, the time seems remarkably brief. I wonder if a hundred years from now these high-rise towers will likewise be torn down by developers or natural disasters and built over once more. Civilization continues to build upon the past and nearly all the memories in that past are locked away waiting for some curious soul to dig them out and give them an airing. I resume my walk along Sansome heading toward Sacramento where I turn left and head toward the Hyatt Regency and my first meeting of the day. I’m reminded of the Emily Dickinson poem.

Forever—it composed of Nows—
'Tis not a different time—
Except for Infiniteness—
And Latitude of Home—

From this—experienced Here—
Remove the Dates—to These—
Let Months dissolve in further Months—
And Years—exhale in Years—

Without Debate—or Pause—
Or Celebrated Days—
No different Our Years would be
From Anno Domini's—

February 22, 2009 – The Dichotomy of Social Networking

2009-02-22T23:45:00.001-08:00

Walking into Faz’s Restaurant in Mountain View—near where Highways 101 and 237 intersect—at noon on Thursday last week, the din of conversation, the line at the maitre d’s podium, the energy in the dining room as my companion Irving and I were seated; you’d never suspect that there was a full-on recession going on outside. Upon being seated I launched into the benefits of social networking, particularly services such as LinkedIn that help in finding job opportunities, in these precarious times of layoffs. Irving was reserved, expressing concern about the amount of everyone’s personal information being made public in such forums. But, it’s only your resume, I persist to a still unconvinced lunch mate.

I must confess to an earlier reluctant to dive into social networking over the same concern. And, my reservations have resurfaced in light of the recently rescinded attempt by Facebook to mine the personal information of its billion or so subscribers. The cautionary tale in Orwell’s ‘1984’ and a more up-to-date version in John Brunner’s “The Shockwave Rider” still resounds in my mind. However, my wife and I and both my daughters are on Facebook and everyone except my wife is on Linkedin. We all enjoy the benefits that derive from our participation: reconnecting with middle school, high school, and college schoolmates as well as with professional colleagues; sharing information with network connections that informs, entertains or helps one another day to day.

Having a place—where everyone knows your name—within the World Wide Web to hang out and commune with others provides incredible synergy. I liken it to the human race forming a collective intelligence with each user serving as a neuron in this virtual brain. And like the real brain, when an impulse hits somewhere within the consciousness of this intelligence, a wave of activity explodes outward across the entire network: the recent terrorist rampage in Mumbai as an example. Images, descriptions, video, and even recordings of what was transpiring were being broadcast real time throughout the network, always ahead of the international news gathering organizations.

However, the benefits come at a cost. I cite the example of “25 things about me” I recently received on Facebook and dutifully completed and posted. I chose to reveal more about my observations on life and the world around me than things that would have more commercial value to a data miner, such as age, physical description, taste in clothes, preference for automobiles, type of soul mate being sought or already found, taste in music, movies, food, drink, and entertainment. The type of information such an innocuous diversion collects is even more revealing than revealed by the discarded AMEX and MasterCard statements a dumpster diver might find. In the case of Facebook, this information is restricted to a select group of friends. Nevertheless, it is recorded and certainly available to enterprising hackers—not to mention the owners of Facebook.

The argument in favor of using this information is that advertisers can be more selective in what they bombard you with. The advertising dollars are not wasted and you are not subjected to what you have no interest in receiving. The economy, as a whole, benefits from resources being more efficiently consumed, e.g. eliminating tons of unopened catalogs and pieces of direct mail.

But, in the process the privacy of the individual is compromised, which leads to the question: what is the value of the average law-abiding citizen’s privacy? For many, the value is nil as they post a great deal about themselves and others on blogs and webcams. By contrasts, participants in reality television do receive compensation for their personal information. Ultimately, each of us determines how little or how much of ourselves we make public. In general, today’s young adults are inclined to share far more than their parents or grandparents, but the older generation is being increasingly conditioned by their young offspring to let it all hang out.

At the end of our lunch, Irving remained firmly opposed to the idea of large-scale disclosure. I would describe his LinkedIn page as minimalist. If Facebook decides to begin selling the vast amounts of its users information to ad agencies and large corporations, he may be right.

December 12, 2008 – The Moon Is My Companion

2008-12-15T19:54:00.001-08:00

Tonight we will be able to see the largest moon of the year, this according to the website Space.com. Editorial Director Roy Britt writes that the moon will be a mere 221,560 miles from earth. That’s 17,295 miles closer than the average distance the moon is from the earth throughout the year. This accounts for the increased size of La Luna on this particular day of 2008.

The moon and I are on familiar terms as she often greets me in the morning during the workweek when I leave home on my morning jog at 6:00 AM. And I see her frequently at this time of the year as I leave work at 6:00 PM rising in the northeast sky. We both share a syncopation in life. She orbits the earth every 29.5306 days. She rises and sets at a prescribed time each day. Her actions are as predictable as clockwork. My daily ritual is very similar, though lacking in the timely precision of the celestial body: up every morning just before 6:00 AM and returning from work around 6:30 PM.

A few months into the new millennium, the moon and I came to know one another on our present terms: I bidding her farewell after rising each morning and greeting her as I leave work each evening just after sunset during this time of the year. In the old century I was a nocturnal creature working until midnight and up after the sun had risen even during the winter. I still take comfort in this new cadence of life. During the time each morning I spend alone from 6:00 to 7:00 before the sun has risen, I observe the inhabitants that share the world with me at this early hour.

I don’t see them all the time but on occasion they make their appearance like the critter—I want to think it’s a raccoon—that scavenges the garbage cans on Wednesday mornings, our garbage pick up day. On one such occasion I recall hearing him or her tip over a can and for some reason I imagine the animal feeling foolish, much as I’ve felt the more than once I’ve tripped trying to avoid a pedestrian coming toward me in the dark dressed in dark clothing that makes him or her hard to see.

The other animals I come across are mostly cats peeking out from under cars to use the protection and what little stored heat they find. They occasionally cross my path. Then there are the geese flying in formation overhead, their honking—not an accurate description of their call—occasionally startling me as I concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other, after having given myself over to the monotony of my rhythmic pounding. They typically fly over toward the end of my time alone during the homeward stretch and ole Sol is peeping over the Diablo Mountain Range that sits astride the Hayward Fault.

I occasionally come across others bipedal creatures walking the sidewalk along Branham Lane where I run. They appear on odd days, sometimes passing at the same hour for a stretch of days then absent for a time. We pass without speaking. We each have our destinations and somehow saying “good morning” before the sun has risen doesn’t seem right. I pass this short, heavy-set fellow—of indeterminate age, though I surmise him to be older than 40 for some reason—coming east on Branham, a few blocks west of Snell Avenue. Dressed in a dark coat and typically carrying a bag in one hand he walks past me wordlessly. One morning I heard him speaking on a cell phone as we pass and somehow his voice matched his body shape.

There is a woman who jogs that same stretch of Branham and we pass infrequently. For some reason, she runs in the bicycle lane against the flow of traffic along Branham. She is taller than me with a Rubinesque figure—perhaps that is why she runs. She does say hello and I respond in kind. Our meetings are sporadic, either because she only runs certain days or she varies her time earlier or later day to day.

About a quarter mile west of the Carlton Plaza of San Jose assisted living facility at the intersection of Branham and Vistapark Drive, I occasionally come upon two women conversing as they walk past me. Their voices carry over the distant roar of traffic on nearby Highway 87; their conversation made indistinct by the intermittent car hurrying along the otherwise empty three lanes of Branham. Occasionally, I pass a man and woman at about the same place and I wonder if one of the women couldn’t make it and the husband of the one intent on walking filled in.

There is plenty of activity at the northeast corner of the Branham and Pearl Avenue intersection. An all night Arco station is typically busy with motorist filling up on the cheapest gas in South San Jose. We pay one another no mind. They belong in the world of automobiles and I belong in the world of pedestrians. Sometimes, one or more teenagers wait at the bus stop in front of the Arco station on Branham Lane for their school bus. What’s curious to me is that I saw them for a stretch of time and now they’re gone. Did the bus stop move or did their class schedule change?

Left onto Pearl, I pass a 7-11 convenience store, which like the Arco station, is busy at this early hour with patrons picking up coffee, breakfast foods, and cigarettes. They all seemed to be in a hurry to get into the store and get out. Further south on Pearl is a coffee shop in an L-shaped strip mall. It’s a Starbucks wannabe, offering Java City coffee though not a licensee. Occasionally, I’ll see a car pull in for coffee but most mornings the only person I see in the shop is the owner or employee. The welcome smell of coffee wafts across the dark morning fills me with a sense of warmth and satisfaction.

The rest of the way along pearl is residential until the intersection with Chynoweth, where on the southeast side of the intersection is the large Ohlone Chynoweth Commons Apartment Complex and the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) Ohlone Chynoweth Light-rail Station. On the rare mornings I pass another soul it’s one or more backpack-laden students on their way to the station or to nearby Gunderson High School, though it seems awfully early for classes to begin.

Turning left on Chynoweth Avenue, I jog down a slight decline that allows the street to duck under the concrete overpass of the Guadalupe Freeway (Highway 87) terminus where concrete flyovers sort traffic between Highway 87 and Highway 85 and Santa Teresa Boulevard.

Underneath the spaghetti maze, I pass two huge concrete columns supporting the off ramp from 87 to Santa Teresa Boulevard. Next, I come upon three large round columns supporting 87 as it shuttles traffic east and west onto 85. Next, I pass a single large oblong shaped column supporting the light rail tracks taking the one-, two-, or three-car Santa Teresa Train in and out of Ohlone Chynoweth station. I come next to three more large round columns supporting the three-lane convergence of two on ramps bringing traffic from east and west bound 85 onto 87. Finally, I pass two more large round column that support the 87 on ramp from Santa Teresa Boulevard.

Even at this early hour, the sound above me is that of cars accelerating and decelerating and the screech of the steel wheels of a light rail train slowing as it enters the light rail station. The lights within the cars illuminate a few early morning riders en route to start their day.

After emerging from the underpass Chynoweth climbs to its level before its descent. Over the eight years I’ve been making this early morning journey, only one person have I seen once or twice a year with regularity. She’s a young woman, short, medium build, with glasses that jogs alone. She too insists on acknowledging our passing with a greeting to which I respond in kind.

This stretch of Chynoweth comes to a dead end at Barron Park Drive, but I turn left on Hyde Park Drive past Vista Park and begin the last fifteen minutes of my solitary contemplation. The moon is at my back and the sun is making its appearance ahead of me. A lone plane—its landing lights shining—cuts a straight line from Morgan Hill to my right and Mineta International Airport at my left. I’m about to begin my work day along with everyone else in the Santa Clara Valley.

December 4, 2008 – Commuting Past a Life in the Balance

2008-12-06T01:09:00.000-08:00

It’s Thursday morning, December 4, 2008 just around 8:00 AM. I’ve dropped off some laundry at San Jose Laundry on Winfield Boulevard and exited the industrial strip mall—this stretch of Winfield is lined with them—turned right and headed toward Coleman Avenue where I turn right at the traffic light and drive over Almaden Creek to Almaden Expressway, the six-lane thoroughfare that everyone in Almaden Valley relies on to access Highways 85 if they are commuting north and west to high-tech campuses in Santa Clara, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, and further north to Palo Alto and Menlo Park. For those of us heading into San Jose, our choices are Almaden Expressway or Highway 87—great if you’re car-pooling but as slow as, if not slower than, Almaden Expressway—with all its traffic lights during the morning commute.

Joining the stream of traffic on the expressway at Coleman, I accelerate to the speed limit but then begin to slow as I approach the Blossom Hill Road intersection where the light has turned green for us but the queued traffic is taking its time getting started. By the time I come abreast of the traffic light, the fast lane has begun to clear as cars merge right readying to exit onto Highway 85 less than a quarter mile ahead. By the time I reach the 85-underpass, my lane is clear and I make the lights before and after the underpass, as well as the light at Branham Lane further on. Now, moving at nearly 50 MPH the traffic cluster I’m in races toward the Capital Expressway overpass and the traffic light at Foxworthy Avenue. There the light is also green for us but we have to slow to accommodate traffic merging on from Capital Expressway as well as commuters from the sprawling high-density Communication Hills Community coming on from Old Almaden Road. The community is that development covering the bronze colored hill you see landing at San Jose Mineta Airport from the south off the port side of the plane.

Beyond this bottleneck the traffic picks up speed again as we lose commuters in the left lane peeling off onto Lincoln Avenue—I always wonder who works in Willow Glen—but begin to slow as we approach the intersection at Ironwood Avenue, on the right, and Almaden Road, on the left. The light is green for us and we race onward. I’m in the middle lane and speed up to merge into the right lane just as a late model Toyota Celica merges on in front on me from Curtner Avenue. He accelerates and moves into the middle lane as I pass him in the right lane and slow to allow a red BMW 350 to merge on from the Canoas Garden Avenue on-ramp a few hundred yards down the road. By now, everyone going to Highway 87 is in the far left lanes and everyone going into downtown San Jose is in the right two lanes as we speed over the 87 overpass and begin to slow as we approaches the traffic light at the San Jose Avenue intersection.

This stretch of Almaden Expressway from the Highway 87 overpass to just beyond the San Jose Avenue intersection has remained unchanged since my family and I arrived here in the mid-1970s. On either side of the highway are industrial strip malls of long single story buildings, separated by open space to accommodate parking and traffic, that cater to collision repair, automotive maintenance, brake and tire repair and replacement, etc. Immediately on my left after I crest the overpass over Highway 87 is the South Valley Automotive Plaza with its rows of shops and the Enterprise Rent A Car handy for providing transportation after you’re dropped your car off and need a ride. The mall is accessible by Villa Stone Drive, which runs parallel to the expressway. Just north and west of the mall on Villa Stone drive at its intersection with Orto Street is a block of residences mixed in among the industrial park—single story 1950s-1960s homes if I were to guess. Further on is Almaden Body and Paint Shop with its sprawling parking lot of cars in various stages of repair along Stone Court: a side street that “T’s” into Villa Stone Drive. On the right side of the expressway is a sign for AAA Furnace on Stone Street which also parallels the expressway on the north east side.

The backup at the traffic light on San Jose Avenue, where I’m stuck three cars back, extends rearward toward the overpass to Orto Street—about four or five blocks. The light changes and the cars rush through the light and have to slow behind the backup at the next light along Almaden Road—the expressway ended just after we passed through the intersection at San Jose Avenue. The light holding us up now allows the residence of a large apartment complex on the right of Almaden Road to leave. The sprawling community of three story multi-unit apartment buildings occupy a large right triangular plot of land with Almaden Road forming the hypotenuse, La Rossa Circle, the next street up from San Jose Avenue—without a traffic light—forming the shorter leg and Little Orchard Street, to the north and east, the longer leg. The community was built in the 1980s when my daughters were in high school. We drove past the area en route to school every weekday for most of the six years it took the two of them to get their diplomas. A similar triangle of apartment dwellings occupy the plot of ground on the left side of Almaden Road with West Alma Avenue forming the larger leg and Shadowgraph Drive the other leg.

Beyond the light at the apartment complex entrance, the traffic moves to the next backup at the West Alma Avenue intersection with Almaden Road, where I eventually make the right off Almaden and onto West Alma heading toward Monterey Highway about 600 yards—around a quarter mile—away. I drive past new town homes on the left, a large commercial office building on the right—newly built and unoccupied as are a number of the new homes across the street. Further on I pass the DMV office at Plum Street before arriving at the intersection at Monterey Highway where the West Alma Avenue traffic can turn left from the two left lanes. I move into the left most which is shorter but I’m still back about five or six cars. As the light turns green for us, the two lanes begin the curve around only to find that the right most lane of the three on Monterey Highway—it’s officially South First Street—is block by a fire engine. The traffic slows to a crawl as cars slowly interleave in the middle lane just in front of the Denny’s Diner at the corner of Monterey and Alma. As I creep past the fire engine blocking the lane, I see a fireman on his knees besides a man lying on the sidewalk in front of the large AutoMart used car lot—the sign has a model T beneath the words AutoMart. The fireman is administering CPR on the fallen soul, who is completely inert. Just beyond the fire engine, I see a car—Japanese make, possibly a Nissan—and an SUV—first impression is a late model GMC. Both vehicles are pulled up onto the sidewalk. The scene suggests a minor fender bender but that shock of the accident drove one of the drivers—or possibly a passenger—to a heart attack.

I drive on, the scene receding in my rearview mirror as I ponder the reality for the poor individual lying on the pavement, his life hanging in the balance as the medic attempts to forestall the inevitable until another day. What’s going through the patient’s mind? That he’s having a heart attack and his spirit is hovering over his body looking down watching as the medic attempts to coax life his life force back into the inert shell of skin and skeleton. Is his will to live greater than the urge to leave all the suffering and pain that the inert body will administer if he returns? I leave the scene realizing that I will never know the outcome of the drama. Does the hero manage to hold on returning to his body and bearing the pain and panic of an ambulance ride to the Santa Teresa Community Hospital—West Alma Avenue to Highway 87, south on 87 to Highway 85, west on 85 to the Cottle Road exit then to the emergency room all traveling against the commute, 10 to 15 minutes at most. Or does the poor soul expire on that sidewalk, his life becoming part of the past, and the world around him like me leaving him in the wake.

November 24, 2008 – I-280 into San Francisco

2008-11-24T21:40:00.001-08:00

Friday morning, November 8, 2008, 0630 hours, traffic is light on Monterey Highway northbound just south of downtown San Jose and the Interstate 280 interchange, my intermediate destination. Once beyond the congestion around the new shopping complex called The Plant, (built on land that once housed the giant General Electric campus at the intersection of Monterey Highway and Curtner Avenue), traffic moves at the 40 MPH limit past the SIMS Metal recycling center on the east side of Monterey and the Department of Immigration and Naturalization office on the west side of Monterey. The cluster of traffic I’m in stops at the Alma Avenue traffic light, about where Monterey Highway ends and the street we’re on becomes South First Street. The Windy’s fast food restaurant where the infamous finger in the chili was found sits unoccupied off to my left while diagonally across the intersection and just ahead on my right the Denny’s Diner is beginning its breakfast rush.

Through the intersection I follow the traffic veering off South First right onto Keyes Street for one block then left onto South Third Street, which is one-way northbound. I follow this to East Reed Street, where the traffic congestion around all-girl Catholic college prep Notre Dame High School is not yet underway thanks to the early hour. Turning right on East Reed one block and making another right at the South-Fourth-Street traffic light where South Fourth becomes the on-ramp to I-280, I’m soon merging onto the freeway that will take me into San Francisco. It’s just before 0650 hours. Sixty minutes from now, this stretch of I-280, where the freeway passes the Highway 87 and Bird Avenue interchanges in quick succession, will be bumper to bumper with cars exiting at both off ramps while others attempt to enter the highway from the two on-ramps. For now the traffic is moving at the limit and I’m anticipating no delays until 280 crosses Highway 17 and thereafter a slight slowdown where I-280 crosses Highway 85 and the Foothill Expressway.

I-280 after Highway 85 is one of the most scenic drives you’ll experience—with the exception of California Highway 1 from Monterey to San Simeon. I-280 rises gently off the floor of the fertile Santa Clara Valley as it passes through Cupertino. Once, before high tech became its major commodity, This stretch of land was called the “Valley of Heart’s Delight” for the cornucopia of fruit it produced. Beyond Cupertino, I-280 climbs onto the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains—the seaward bulwark holding back the Pacific Plate’s relentless geological assault on the North American Plate with the San Andreas Fault forming the battle line between the two. In this hundreds-of-millions years war the former is winning as witnessed by the gradual uplift of the Santa Cruz Range. The four- and five-lane wide concrete and asphalt freeway climbs and traverses tree- and brush-covered rolling hills sparsely populated with custom homes on large lots within the cities of Los Altos and Los Altos Hills off the Magdalena Road and El Monte Road exits from I-280. Beyond these exits the road curves left and descends to just beyond the Foothill College campus on the left before beginning to climb once again gradually veering right for nearly a mile. Traffic on the now-four-lane road has thinned considerably allowing the frustrated traffic to speed at 70 to 80 miles per hour using the right- and left-most lanes to pass slower cars and trucks in the middle.

Just over the hill north of Foothill College, the Interstate begins a fast descending gradual right curve then bending more sharply to the left with the grade diving, driving the speed of traffic above 80 until the highway bottoms out at Page Mill Road and begins to slowly bend right and rise once again. We loose the Palo Alto commuters here. Beyond the exit off to the right cattle graze beneath a handful of large tall microwave dishes scattered about dirty brown acres of open grassland spotted here and there by a lone tree. Land on both sides of the freeway, which has continued to climb gradually, is fenced-off with no sign of settlement until near the Alpine Road exit, where trees and shrubs once again populate the landscape. Just before Alpine Road, the road starts to descend again and off to the left custom homes on large lots follow Alpine Road as it meanders south and west. Just beyond the Alpine Road exit, the roadway begins a steep ascent crossing over the 2-mile long Stanford Linear Accelerator just before cresting the rise and curving left as the traffic passes the Sand Hill Road exit. The colony of low-rise office buildings on the northeast side of the Interchange signals an enclave of Silicon Valley venture capital companies and the surrounding residential community of tree-enshrouded Sharon Heights to the east and north. The golf greens of the tony community’s Golf Club follows I-280 north.

Beyond Sand Hill Road, traffic has thinned even further as we lose the Menlo Park and Stanford University commuters. Now, the freeway descends before passing the wealthy community of Woodside, west off the Highway 84 (Woodside Road) exit. After the Woodside Road exit, the freeway climbs once again. As it nears the crest of the rise, the road curve left passing the Farm Hill Road exit. A half mile north of Farm Hill Road on either side of the I-280 all the way to Highway 92, the landscape is as unsettled as in the time of Father Juniper Serra for whom I-280 is named. The subdivisions have been blocked from encroaching and the land of either side is covered over by trees and brush browned by accumulation of dust and grayed by the dearth of rain that California’s long dry season has wrought. The Bayberry, Pacific Madrone, California Bay Laurel, Coast Live Oak, Coastal redwood, and Douglas Fir that claim this landscape are all impatient for the next overdue winter storms—one that occurred a little while back merely teased this area with an unkept promise for more.

Approaching the Highway 92 exit, I-280 dips and rises before curving left and steeply diving toward the interchange, where CHP Radar are typically waiting to catch drivers hurtling down the hill at 90 to 100 miles an hour. On the western side of the roadway is a spectacular view of Upper and Lower Crystal Spring Reservoir, featured in the Bond movie “View to a Kill”—the last in the series featuring Roger Moore. Taking 92 west brings you to Half Moon Bay; taking it east carries you through San Mateo to Foster City—built off land reclaimed from San Francisco Bay—and further across the bay via the San Mateo Bridge to Hayward—the first suburban Bay Area town I spent time in during my nine-month stay in the Bay Area in 1963 to 1964.

The Upper and Lower Crystal Spring Reservoir flood the base of the San Andreas Rift Valley. The San Andreas Fault, which runs through the heart of this valley, created it. Further north and not clearly visible from the freeway is San Andreas Lake, which gives its name to the fault line. However, it was Father Francisco Palou, the diarist and historian to Captain Gaspar de Portola, governor of Baja California who named the lake and valley on November 30, 1774, to honor the feast day of Saint Andres, the younger brother of Saint Peter. I’m fond of this saint as his feast day falls on my birthday. In the late 1800s, the city of San Francisco purchased the lands within the watershed to provide a source of water for the growing city. Unable to satisfy the voracious thirst for the city’s inhabitants, in the second decade of the 20th Century San Francisco built a reservoir in Hetch Hetchy Valley to supplement the supply from Crystal Springs.

Beyond highway 92, the road traverses upscale Hillsborough, one of the wealthiest suburban enclaves in America with a population of around 10,000 and the highest income of anywhere in America. Seventeen miles south of San Francisco, the city looks east at San Francisco Bay. Just past Bunker Hill Drive the next exit after Highway 92, the highway slopes downward toward a bridge that takes I-280 high over San Mateo Creek. The gorge created by the creek serves as a moat between vast expanses suburban Hillsborough on the north and San Mateo on the south. Just over the bridge on the edge of the gorge is a house that looks like something out of a Flintstones cartoon. The home has graced the side of the freeway since we arrived in California in the early-1970s.

On the western side of I-280, just north of the Haynes Road exit, is Crystal Springs Golf Course. Within the city limits of Burlingame, the links run along and high above the Lower Crystal Springs Reservoir (which is north of Upper Crystal Springs Reservoir). From the golf course northward the right hand side of I-230 is lined with expensive homes some with striking views of San Francisco Bay off to the east and below. Just north of Haynes Road, Highway 35 intersects I-280 then traverses beneath. Here the concrete freeway—tree-lined on the west with an expanse of apartments on the east—begins a rapid decline curving right as it races toward sea level. Careening down the grade, you get a dramatic view of San Francisco Airport as I-280 rushes toward its interchange with I-380 the short stub of a road that carries I-280 traffic to Highway 101 and to the northern hangers and long term parking and the newly-built rental car facility at San Francisco International.

Beyond the interchange I-280 passes the expansive 161-acre Golden Gate National Cemetery, home to 138,542 souls as of the end of 2007. Rows of uniform-shaped white marble headstones bearing the name of each interred below run for as far as the eye can see. The Pete Seeger song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” comes into my head every time I pass this place: “…gone to graveyards everyone. When will they ever learn…” (It’s the song I sang when visiting my Scottish in-laws decades ago and the custom after a few rounds was each person within the party graced the gathering with his or her song.) When viewing the thousands laid to rest alongside the highway, the last line of the Funeral Oration of Pericles from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War seems appropriate: “And now, when you have duly lamented, every one his own dead, you may depart.”

Beyond the cemetery, Interstate 280 becomes another urban freeway bearing its burden of 100s of thousands of commuters in cars and trucks all rushing some where to get some thing done. I’m one of them and I’m going to be an hour early for my appointment so I’m in no rush.

November 2, 2008 - Conversation with Dad

2008-11-02T22:24:00.000-08:00

I called Dad today and learned that he was not well, having come down with a cold recently and was just getting over it. The subject of our conversations typically revolves around his health. He went to William Beaumont Army Medical Center to have his lungs checked. They were clear. The hospital has been caring for him and my mother until her death in January 2006. In fact, the hospital has given care to my father since the 1950s, when he convalesced there after a car accident in Germany almost left him paralyzed. The hospital gave him antibiotics in case what he had was bacterial and sent him home. The fever broke yesterday and he was now over the worst and planning to have his flu shot on Tuesday—the ounce of prevention his fragile lungs requires.

For a man three years shy of ninety, he’s in remarkable shape, considering all the insults his lungs has suffered. He started smoking when he joined the Army at the outbreak of World War II. He was twenty. He gave it up, cold turkey, forty years later when he was turning sixty. He worked around asbestos and other hazardous materials during his twenty-three years in the military and during the twenty some years afterwards working at the ASARCO copper smelting plant in El Paso—you see its tall smokestack heading into El Paso from Las Cruces on Interstate 10. You can’t miss it on your right.

He is still able to get around and is clear-headed, though a bit hard of hearing. I tend to speak softly, a complaint that goes back to my speech class in high school. When we converse by phone, I yell into the mouthpiece to make myself heard. He drives himself about town—to the hospital, to Ft Bliss Army Base, and to most places around El Paso. He tells me he’s voted at Northgate Shopping Center last week—first time for him to vote a straight ticket along a single party line. I won’t divulge which party.

We talk about the Filipino community where he still belongs. Father Benito, the retired priest that my father credits with bringing him to the Catholic faith continues to proper in the care of one of his parishioners—a widow who befriended him during his time at Our Lady of Assumption Church on Byron Street and took him in rather than have him live out his life in the care facility provided by the Catholic Diocese of El Paso. The wife of one of my high school friends, a Filipina who came to El Paso as a nurse, is now in poor health. The daughter of my mother’s closest friend, who passed away recently, had a stroke and is being cared for in a city health facility. Thus, goes the small dramas that beset the community I left forty years ago.

Finally, he tells me he’s received some literature from the Veterans Administration informing him he’s eligible for a low-cost loan for home improvement or to purchase a home. He’s thinking of building a new place on property he owns nearby. His lifelong friend Charles Upton willed the property to him a few years back. It has a small one-room house on it and Dad is thinking about expanding the building or raising it and putting up a new house. He’s 87 and still thinking about building, a pretty optimistic statement. It’s the sort of guy he is.

We’ve been on the phone for an hour and he’s getting hungry so we ring off.

January 16, 2008 - Receipt #10 – Angelo’s Pizza, 117 West 57th Street

2008-01-16T22:02:00.000-08:00

January 16, 2008 - Receipt #11 – Angelo’s Pizza, 117 West 57th Street

Sunday morning May 19th was living up to its name as sunlight brightened the inside of our room on the 11th floor of the Buckingham Hotel. This would be the last day of our four-day weekend in the Big Apple and we would fly westward to our work-a-day world in Silicon Valley, which would be no different that the same work-a-day world in Manhattan had we lived here. A vacation always put me in mind that somehow the world that exists when I’m not working is better than the world when I am. Of course, it’s an illusion no different than that of time itself. What happens to those happy moments you experienced some time ago when things were so much better than they are now? Those moments lost in the past make me realize how fleeting and transient human experience really is.

My wife IM and I have tickets to a matinee performance of the Broadway musical “Curtains”, which features the actor, David Hyde Pierce, who played Niles in the television sitcom, “Frasier.” I suspect the transient nature of human experience is why we so enjoy a good play and can return to see them over and over—if any of Shakespeare’s play or for that matter Andrew Lloyd Webber’s in our time is any indication. Plays are more engaging than cinema or video because the actors are real. They strut about an imaginary landscape that our minds make real for the couple of hours we suspend belief. They provide an unframed three-dimensional illusion rather than the two-dimensional framed one of film or video—always restrained by the limited range of a lens. In a play we are able to see a period of time reanimated over and over again as if we were watching the events unfold in life—somewhere in Boston in 1959 for the setting of “Curtains.” We watch Boston Police Detective Frank Cioffi try to unravel the mystery of who in the cast of a Broadway-bound western musical is killing the other cast members. In the process, he helps rewrite the play and wins the heart of the leading lady. How nice to see life’s most overwhelming problems solved before our eyes and why isn’t real life like that?

The great problem we confront in our lives is that our memories lose that three-dimensional quality captured in badly framed photos and video. It’s as if you were looking at the past through a keyhole that won’t let you see anything except what’s in front of the hole. It’s that way with the video I took during our stay in the Big Apple. Hours of recorded footage and all I have to show for it are minutes at most of various street scenes taken around midtown—up and down 6th, 7th and 8th Avenues; Times Square; and 8th, 5th, Park, and Madison Avenue and east and west along 43rd, 44th, 45th and 57th Streets. We’re too busy confronting the present to spend much time reconstructing the past, though I have tried by editing those hours of footage into 3 to 5 minute clips that I’ve uploaded to YouTube.

One clip is of the Sunday morning of which I’m writing. It begins with us walking along West 56th Street between 5th Ave. & 6th Avenues. The camera is capturing the storefront on the side of the street opposite to where we’re walking. Pictures of the front of the Judge Roy Bean Pub at 39 West 56th and further down the block the dark green awning of D & S Market Place and finally a red and blue stripped sign before a building with “Nails…” (fingernails) centered on the red stripe and “Torino” centered on the blue stripe. The scene segues to a slow motion sequence of us walking west on 56th Street toward 5th Avenue where we come upon Trump Tower at 725 West 5th Avenue. The building is encased in a vinyl canvas four-story—at least—high and extending from the 56th-Street/5th-Avenue-corner to the building entrance on 5th wide. Upon this humongous canvas is printed a bright red Gucci ad with several giant skinny models dressed in elaborately patterned red print frocks looking down on the pedestrians passing beneath. As you might guess, Gucci has a large very upscale retail store inside Trump Tower. Advertising has managed the illusion of stretching a perfect minute out for as long as the viewing public is held captive. Another perfect moment replaces the first once the first fails to capture public attention.

As we turn right and amble down 5th Avenue, coming upon the Disney Store on our left, we pass a young couple coming toward us. The young woman is draped in a gauzy green-patterned ankle-length dress flowing in the gentle breeze blowing down the avenue. Sensibly, she is wearing a long sleeve green woolen turtleneck sweater beneath the dress—it’s cool in the shade of the tall buildings along 5th. Her companion walking on her left—guarding her from the traffic along the street—is attired in a blue pullover vest worn atop a short sleeve T-shirt—a red left sleeve and collar and a blue right sleeve—atop a pair of jeans. The man was forgettable; the brownish-blond woman, with deep-set eyes and distinctive Celtic nose was not because of her features, her outfit, and the figure she cut walking down 5th avenue.

The video segues to six seconds of video shot across Madison Avenue from the entrance to the Sony Building at 555 Madison. Hanging upside down from the top of one of the first floor display windows partially hiding a “Sony Style” sign is Spiderman, straight stands of his spider web shooting down the window toward the street—kitsch to say the least. At a stationary position away from the street and out of the line of pedestrian traffic on the sidewalk, I zoom my Panasonic video camera all the way to maximum magnification until Spiderman fills half the frame from top to bottom then slowly zoom back out. Spiderman is the hero of both grandsons.

The video ends with a slow-motion very jerky walk—as recorded by in the video—along 57th Street to the Buckingham Hotel just beyond 6th Avenue. The most compelling features of the remaining 45 to 50 second of video is the cacophony of traffic sounds along the street and the busy pedestrian traffic coming toward us and crossing in front of us at 6th Avenue. All the while Bobby Darin is wailing the lyrics of “Sunday in New York” over the ambient sounds of the city. “You can spend time without spending a dime watching people watch people pass. Later you’re pausing and in one of those stores there’s that face next to yours in the glass…” That song always comes to mind when I think of the times my wife and I spent in the city during the first months of 1965.

We return to the hotel and rest until it’s time for the afternoon matinee of “Curtains.” As Broadway musicals go, it was entertaining, but it lacked that one piece that followed you out of the theater and stayed with you for months on end. In the first months of 1965, the song was “People” from “Funny Girl” and “Who can I turn to” from “Roar of the Greasepaint, Smell of the Crowd.” The song lasted far longer than the play, which closed in less than a year. During our children’s theater going years, it was “What I did for Love,” from “A Chorus Line”; “Memories” from “Cats”; and “One Night in Bangkok” from “Chess”; among others. Still, “Curtains” was enjoyable; talented actors bringing to life a play we in the audience wanted to see. It was a good mystery and love story and had enough song and dance that the theatergoer didn’t fall asleep.

At the end of the performance we made out way out amid a river of people flowing out each of the theater’s exits. Out on the sidewalk we joined an even larger stream of theatergoers all trying to make their way to the cars or hotel rooms. We managed to cross 45th on 8th Avenue heading toward 57th and let ourselves be swept away by the current of pedestrians moving up the avenue. Turning right on 57th we headed toward the Buckingham and just before arriving, we came upon Angelo’s Pizza, where we decided to have our last dinner in the city before our return trip home. It’s your family style pizza place that also serves pasta, which is what we had. It sated our hunger sufficiently that we decided to walk along Central Park South back toward Columbus Circle. By the time our walkabout brought us back to the hotel, the sun was setting and we were ready to call it an early evening.

November 25, 2007 - Receipt #10 – Brasserie 8 ½

2007-11-25T22:33:00.000-08:00

November 25, 2007 - Receipt #10 – Brasserie 8 ½

May 19th, Saturday evening, my wife IM and I decide to spend having dinner at a nice restaurant nearby the Buckingham Hotel where we’re spending a long weekend in Manhattan. I’m recounting the four days in the Big Apple through the receipts I’ve collected during our stay. I’m on the 9th receipt, which we acquired Saturday evening at the Brasserie 8 ½ Restaurant at 9 W. 57th Street—just over a city block from the hotel. The towering 725-foot high 49-story black and white building occupying 70 percent of an acre of prime Midtown Manhattan real estate where the restaurant resides is a landmark on 57th Street. A large red sculpture of the number “9” smack in the middle of the wide pedestrian travertine marble sidewalk in the front of the building announces its address.

What makes the building—designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill—unique is its shape. Viewed from a distance looking east or west you can see a distinct bell-shaped 40-degree slope on its north and south face as the building descends from the 19th floor to street level. Looking at the east or west side of the building, you see two white columns of travertine marble separated by a dark area slightly wider than either column. The white marble frames the dark area at the top. Within the dark glass covered center column you can make out three huge “x”s—the width of the center column—equidistantly spaced between the roof and ground floor of the building. The north and south façade of the building is likewise covered from top to bottom in dark-colored glass framed on the sides, top and bottom by a width of the same white travertine marble.

Brasserie 8 ½ occupies the basement of 9 West 57th Street. You get there by descending a red-carpeted spiral staircase that curves around a red-carpeted lounge within the center of the spiral, passing a long bar—about as long as the diameter of the lounge with a slight bow in its middle—and ending at a Maitre ‘d at the end of the stairs. At the bottom of the staircase, the long bar is on your right and you’re facing a smaller bar just ahead and in front of the 250-person capacity main dining room—one bar is smoking; the other non-smoking. At the end of the room opposite the staircase is the kitchen.

Patina Restaurant Group owns the restaurant along with many others scattered on the east and west coast of the country. One of the restaurants the company owns in Manhattan is the Brasserie, located in the Seagram’s Building at 100 East 53rd between Park and Lexington Avenue, where my wife IM and I have dined on many occasions starting back in 1979 when I first started traveling to New York as a PR account executive.

The Brasserie derives its name from the French word brasseur, meaning brewer. Refugees from the Franco-Prussian War in the late 1800s found their way to Paris from the Alsace Region. Some Alsatians started breweries like those they owned in their region. In the breweries they also served the food typically found in a hofbrauhaus in Germany—sauerkraut with sausages of various kinds, which the French called choucroute garnie—as well as the dishes Parisians demanded.

Patricia Wells writing in the December 4th 1992 issue of the Herald Tribune described the quintessential Parisian brasserie, “Le Train Bleu” founded at the turn of the 20th century. She writes “the two giant dining rooms—with their eclectic, "neo-renaissance baroque" décor—are adorned with signed paintings by more than 30 provincial artists, each selected to depict the glories of his region. The paintings fill the walls, curling up onto the ceiling, and their cheeriness is particularly welcoming on gray Parisian days.”

The Brasserie was the place where the classes mixed: shift workers showing up before or after the morning, swing, or graveyard shifts for a quick, inexpensive, good, and filling meal; rubbing elbows with artists, professionals, politicians, and every other occupation found in a thriving metropolitan city. That’s how I came to first find my way to the Brasserie on East 53rd in the late 1970s. Landing at Kennedy at 8:00 PM on a Sunday evening and wanting to grab something to eat after a long flight from the west coast, my companion—a product marketing manager from Apple Computer—and I ended up there having dinner and wine at 10:00 PM.

The Brasserie 8 ½ couldn’t qualify for the description Patricia Wells attributed to “Le Train Bleu”, though the original Brasserie in the late 1970s certainly fit the mold of egalitarian eatery. Both restaurants today tend toward the avant-garde in décor. The banquette of the 1970s in the original Brasserie replaced by plush leather booths—the bench seat backs of which extend to the ceiling providing a floor to ceiling barrier between diners in adjacent booths.

We had arrived at 7:30 PM and the Maitre ‘d showed us to our table and the waiter showed up with menus and we each ordered a glass of champagne, Veuve Clicquot Yellow Label. We ordered a dish of Escargot—the evening’s appetizer special—to split between the two of us. The evening’s fish was a halibut, something IM couldn’t resist. I, for my part had my heart, set on steak frites. Before the snails arrived, the waiter showed up with a complementary appetizer, a bite of something special he had come up with to surprise each guest. The main course came and I ordered a glass of Chianti to go with the medium rare steak. IM opted for another glass of Veuve. We finished off the meal with chocolate cake that we shared and latte for IM and regular coffee for me. The receipt came to $222.41 with tip. Up the stairs a little after 9:00 PM, we decided to walk our dinner off along Central Park South.

November 1, 2007 - Receipt #9 – "Curtains"

2007-11-17T17:10:00.001-08:00

November 1, 2007 - Receipt #9 – "Curtains"

In recalling four days in Manhattan earlier this year through the receipts I collected during the stay, I’ve arrived at the ninth one, which was acquired during the middle of a day of walking through midtown with no other goal than to get some exercise and experience the city on its first weekend day. It's Saturday morning May 19th and most of the Manhattan’s weekday workers have abandoned their jobs and those living in the city have started enjoying themselves. Mayor Bloomberg or someone in the city’s bureaucracy had issued a permit that turned 6th Avenue from 56th Street south for a good 15 blocks or more—we didn’t walk the entire length—into a street fair. We stumble upon the festival after leaving our room at the Buckingham Hotel and walking out into the now overcast Saturday morning south on 6th Avenue.

At 56th Street, NYPD-blue painted wooden horses with white lettering blaring “POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS” blocked southbound vehicular traffic on 6th Avenue. Once behind the police line, we joined pedestrians filling the center of the avenue. On either side of the wide thoroughfare along the curb stood a line of mostly white tents, each occupying a 10-foot square space. Supporting each were four poles, one at each corner holding aloft a four-sided pyramid top. Beneath each top, vendors offer everything imaginable for sale: ethnic foods, tee shirts—lots of tee shirts, Big Apple souvenirs, etc. As we walk, a blue- or green-topped tent intermittently disrupts the uniform pattern of white. And nearly every block has its flat, square-topped, red or yellow tent with huge “Gyro” sign painted on each side of the square. As we walk, a loud speaker somewhere to our right blares out entreaties to “step right up for a free sample of fresh made kettle corn.”

As we reach Radio City Music Hall, we see one vendor who has broken the uniform mold of his conformist neighbors. He has constructed a complete emporium of ladies decorative shirts hanging from pipes within his unusual tent. This structure is unique in that the pipes supporting each 12 ft tall sidewall form the shape of the Greek letter pi. At the top of the tent, a pipe running between the two pi-shaped structures at the front and at the back keeps the sides upright. A large blue tarp drapes over the top and hangs down both sides. Hangers on the pipes contain the large variety of women apparel being offered for sale.

Next to this large tent in a simpler one with a shallow inverted “V” tent top and no sides. It has a huge “OILS” sign hanging in the front. Next to it is a red tent the size of the white ones we’ve passed along the way. It carries a large sign reading “psychic”. In the center of 6th Avenue between 49th and 50th street is a smoke stack twelve foot high or more and about a foot in diameter painted the familiar alternating bands of international orange and white, with smoke or steam wafting up. You see them in the video intro to “Saturday Night Live.” Is this why 6th Avenue was converted into a street faire so that New York City Public Works could perform maintenance without the distraction of traffic?

At 45th Street we leave the faire and head west toward Times Square. Before I left the room this morning, I had gone on line and purchased theatre tickets to “Curtains” at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre for a matinee performance on Sunday. We made our way toward the theatre, which sits at the corner of 8th Avenue and 45th Street, to claim the tickets waiting for us at the will-call window. The overcast that had begun the day persisted casting a somber atmosphere to an otherwise upbeat, frenetic one.

Each time we pass through Times Square I’m reminded of earlier visits to Manhattan and the appearance of the place at that time compared to now. The last time was the spring before the September 11th attack. Back then NBC had a hit program entitled “The Weakest Link” hosted by Anne Robinson, and her image towered above Times Square. On this visit corporate brands had replaced the pop star. Sony was promoting its screen super hero, Spider-Man.

We found the theatre and collected our tickets at 2:55 PM, a grand total of $223.00 including a restoration fee of $3.00 and unspecified expense by Telecharge.com for processing the order. The cost of live theater like that of every other good and service we purchase has gone up.

October 29, 2007 - Receipt #8 – Coffee & Danish from Associated Supermarket, 225 W. 57th Street

2007-10-30T22:19:00.001-07:00

October 30, 2007 - Receipt #8 – Coffee & Danish from Associated Supermarket, 225 W. 57th Street

It’s Saturday morning May 19th and we’re two days into our four-day stay in Manhattan that I’m reliving through my accumulated paper receipts. We awake just before 9:00 AM to the sound of a city enjoying the first day of a weekend. Outside, the sound of construction can still be heard as well as felt from the vibration of heavy equipment wrestling steam beams into place. The chaotic sound of horns punctuate the earning morning as traffic along 57th Street and 6th Avenue struggle to make its way faster than conditions will allow. New Yorkers talk a great deal more than Californians and perhaps the horn is a surrogate for vocal chords when you’re wrapped in a cocoon of steel, glass, and rubber. We’re right next to the elevator in the Buckingham Hotel, which reminds me of the residential hotels my family and I lived in when I was a boy in Ponce, Puerto Rico and Portland, Oregon; though the Buckingham was a couple of stars above those of my childhood.

You turn left out of the elevator and walk a few steps to reach the door or our room, number 11A. When you enter, to your left is a small closet size kitchenette with stove, refrigerator, sink and cupboards with dishes and silverware. In front and to your right is the living room with couch, on the wall opposite the entrance and television on the wall across from the couch. From the doorway, to the right of the couch is a window that provides a peek-a-boo view of 6th Avenue and the wall of an adjacent building. The Peak-a-boo view not only provides a view of traffic on 6th Avenue but the back of a nightclub featuring a year-around Halloween theme. From our vantage point you can see the props that keep the façade standing, thus spoiling the illusion of the building when we view it from the front.

On the wall across across the twelve-foot space from our room, an elderly woman occupies the rightmost of the two rooms facing our wall. Her bed is near her window and we’ve seen her sitting in her dressing gown on the bed watching television: an Edward Hopper painting, with just as much poignancy. We keep out blinds closed to provide her privacy except at night when we turn off the lights and open the window to air out our room. Our queen size bed is off to the left of the couch viewed from the doorway. Another window behind the headboard of the bed gives us a view of the wall of another tall building. To the left of the bed is a closet. At the foot of the bed adjacent to the closet is a small bathroom, about the size of the kitchenette. A desk sits on the wall next to the bathroom entrance across a small walkway from the foot of the bed. Despite being a bit cramped, the room does have a high ceiling, thus making it feel less claustrophobic.

The Buckingham has no restaurant and thus no bed and breakfast accommodations. After my morning toilet, I leave IM checking her e-mail on the iBook G4 portable we’ve brought with us at the desk at the foot of the bed and go out of the hotel in search of a morning breakfast. I head west on 57th toward 7th Avenue. We had passed a supermarket on our way back from the theatre last night and I’m en route there now to purchase breakfast for the two of us. I reach Associated Supermarket at 225 W. 57th Street just before Broadway and I enter. It’s sparsely filled with early morning shoppers. There is a deli section and a few patrons are enjoying coffee and pastry while reading the paper at small tables set up inside. I purchase two Danish and a cup of coffee. IM prefers tea and we have Lipton tea bags and hot water in the hotel room. I pay cash at one of the two checkout counters going this early on a Saturday. I’m the only one in line but a lady comes up after I’m rung up. The bill comes to just over $5.00 and I add sugar to my tall coffee, put a lid on it, and take my purchases out into a slightly overcast Saturday morning—the rising sun peaking beneath a persistent cloud cover that threatens to enshroud the day in a pall.

On my way back to the Buckingham, I walk beneath scaffolding of a building under repair. We’ve seen quite a bit of construction everywhere we’ve walked in the city since we’ve arrived. Manhattan resembles a living organism that is constantly repairing its damaged body, replacing aging parts of its anatomy with new construction or renovating structures that have elements worth preserving—this appeared to be the case with building I’m walking beside. When I return to the room, IM has heated water for her tea and she and I sit down to have our Danish before heading out into to the increasingly overcast Saturday.

October 28, 2007 - Receipt #7 – Candy Before Performance of “Monte Python and the Holy Grail”

2007-10-28T15:17:00.000-07:00

October 28, 2007 - Receipt #7 – Candy Before Performance of “Monte Python and the Holy Grail”

Back in the room, IM surfs the Internet while I write in my Reporter’s Notebook and read the May 21st issue of the New Yorker. I’m absorbed with Peter Hessler’s “Letter From China: Walking the Wall” describing David Spindler’s fascination with China’s hundreds year old defense against the marauding Mongols. Spindler is an independent scholar of the Great Wall and pursues his scholarship with a Quixote zeal that borders on obsession. I’ve visited Shanghai several times in the past year and a half and never gotten beyond a two-mile radius of the Hotel Sofitel Jin Jiang Pudong, the distance I can comfortably walk in the small amount of time my business reasons for visiting China allows. The author and Spindler hiking the little known sections of the ancient wall in remote areas of China I will probably never visit makes for a compelling read.

Curiously, the Great Wall has kept foreign cultures out all these many hundreds of years in contrast to America that has embraced continuous waves of immigration since the first Europeans set foot on this land. And nowhere is this influx of cultures and ethnicities more evident than in Manhattan, where north, south, east, Middle East, and west come together—a trip round the world experienced in a walk through the city’s neighborhoods. After over half a century watching the rest of Asia prosper by engaging the West, the gates of China’s Great Wall have been thrown open and the world is flooding in. I get the impression that if you understand the Great Wall you might well understand China.

Rested and refreshed, we leave the Buckingham at a quarter after seven in the evening, and walk down 6th Avenue to 44th Street, where we turn right, join the throng of theater-goers all making their ways to their play or musical, and proceed across Broadway and 7th where the two cross one another. We make it through the mass of humanity and arrive at the Shubert in plenty of time before the performance begins. The musical was vintage Monty Python, bits and pieces of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” a tune from “Meaning of Life”, all begun with a musical version of the fish face slapping skit from the original “Monty Python Flying Circus” BBC Series. It’s the joke that starts the play.

The audience at the Shubert for the play was unique in that most were fans of Monty Python comedy, much like the audience for “Jersey Boys” and “Mama Mia” are fans of the music in each play. Perhaps the uniqueness of the audience owes more to my observing its members more closely than when we attended musicals and plays in the past. Perhaps the audience for “A Class Act” the musical based on the life and work of Edward Kleban, which IM and I saw in 2001 were there to see life of the lyricist who created the songs to “Chorus Line” or the audience for “Aspects of Love” which I saw alone in 1991 were fans of Andrew Lloyd Webber, its creator. Neither garnered the Broadway acclaim of long running hits “Chorus Line” or “Cats”, perhaps because they lacked the fan base that causes one musical to succeed beyond expectations and others to sink into oblivion after a few performances.

I’m reminded of a musical playing during the time Irene and I were dating back in the 1960s. “The Roar of the Greasepaint, The Smell of the Crowd” book, music, and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley. The musical had posters plastered throughout Penn Station and at every train stop on Long Island and in Manhattan. It failed after a few months on Broadway, despite producing the hit song “Who Can I turn to,” that every singer of note in the 1960s recorded. IM and I chose to see “Funny Girl,” with Barbra Streisand. It too produced the popular hit “People” but enjoyed long running success as well. On reflection, perhaps neither the Broadway plays nor the audiences have change, perhaps I have.

We are seated in the Mezzanine in row H seats 112 and 113 one in from the aisle. After we get settled, I want something sweet and venture to the concession stand at the a few rows up and behind us. There I purchase a box of junior mints for IM—her favorites—and a roll of Mentos mints for me. The attendant was so busy that I didn’t want to ask her for a receipt which she didn’t offer when providing me change for the five dollar bill I tendered for the purchase, which I dropped into a tip jar.

The aisle seat on our row is occupied by a lone male in seat 114, ten to fifteen years my junior, putting him in his fifties or late forties with thinning graying dark hair. Spreading in the middle, he fits uneasily in the narrow theater seat with so little leg room in front that those seated must stand up to allow others to pass. Throughout the play he squirms restlessly trying to get comfortable but to no avail, bumping into me in the process—the one reason I took notice of him. He is dressed in a white shirt and dull gray slacks and carries a white plastic shopping bag packed roundly with stuff—hard to tell if its recent purchases or belonging he’s carrying around for lack of a backpack or briefcase. Once I noticed him, I couldn’t help trying to fathom how he came to be at the play alone. Perhaps the simple answer was he wanted somewhere to spend a couple of hours and be entertained

The play had some funny bits, though the gay humor did get old after a bit. The female, who kept reminding the audience in typical Monty Python style that she was the female lead, was funny. The play ended to considerable audience applause and IM and I made our way out of the theater and headed for 8th Avenue for our return walk to the Buckingham Hotel.

October 25, 2007 - Receipt #6 - The Long Manhattan Meal

2007-10-25T20:56:00.001-07:00

October 25, 2007 - Receipt #6 - The Long Manhattan Meal

I’m recounting four days in Manhattan through the written receipts we’ve amassed during our stay. This is the sixth. After paying for our purchase we leave the store and find a bench across from the museum store entrance to sit for a second to gather all our purchases in a single large plastic bag. All around us is a steady stream of pedestrian entering and leaving Rockefeller Center Plaza, many stop on either side of where we are sitting and attempt to take photos of sculptor Paul Manship’s famous gilded statue of Prometheus bringing fire to mankind. Prometheus guards the Rockefeller Center Plaza subterranean patio as you enter from 5th Avenue. The statue was commissioned in January 1933 for this quintessential Art Deco center built in the depths of the Depression. It was the ultimate statement of capitalist optimism in the darkest period of modern history—“let them eat cake,” and why not?

Purchases all packed into a single bag, we head back to the hotel along 5th Avenue, passing at 55th Street, the St Regis Hotel, which was the preferred Manhattan staff lodging during the year and a half I spent in the late 1970s working for Regis McKenna Public Relations in Palo Alto—himself having a penchant for staying at the hotel that bore his name. It was a late night arrival on the occasion of my first visit to Manhattan in the agency’s employ that the St. Regis Bellman introduced me to the Brasserie Restaurant at 100 East 53rd Street. “It’s open 24 hours a day, has modest priced, great food, and it’s where everyone who work nights in Midtown go for dinner when they get off,” he enthused. I had a product marketing manager from Apple Computer Inc. in tow at the time and the two of us had great steaks and pommes frites, accompanied by a California red. Back then the Brasserie was the kind of egalitarian hang out with the 1960s décor that resembled its Paris namesake.

A block further north, we pass Trump Tower; the first three stories of the building’s face wrapped in a bright red advertisement for Gucci—the wrap art style of Christo and Jeanne-Claude commandeered for a completely commercial purpose. How could you ignore all that red adorned with glamorous women, made-up and coifed to look perfect in Gucci designed apparel? IM and I certainly couldn’t. A block further north and we turn left onto 57th Street intending to return to the Buckingham, but hunger sets in and the two of us realize we’ve not had anything to eat since getting up this morning except a glass of orange juice. On the south east corner of 6th Avenue and 57th Street, we spy the restaurant Rue 57 and determine there is where we’ll sate our appetite. The restaurant’s entrance is on the 57th Street side of the corner and we enter to a full room of diners—the midtown lunch crowd finishing up before heading back to their offices to finish off their workweek. Being in a big city on a weekday when everyone else is committing themselves 9 to 5, I always have the impression of being truant from school. All around you the conversation is shoptalk, except for the smattering of tables with other truant tourists like IM and me.

Just as we give our name to the hostess, a corner table comes available at the back of the restaurant opposite the entrance. We follow our hostess to our table snaking between diners’ chairs squeezed so compactly together that it was hard not to brush the back of each chair you passed. Once seated IM orders a Margarita, and I order a glass of champagne. The three tables to our right, toward the reception desk, were being bussed and made ready for new patrons when we were seated and by the time our drink order arrives, the two tables next to us are squeezed together for a party of four. The one lone third table accommodates of a couple that arrive just after the foursome is seated. Our neighbors are a young couple and an older couple—son and significant other being treated by Mom and Dad—or vice versa to lunch in midtown. The older couple speaks French to one another and English, with little accent, to the younger couple, with the conversation eventually becoming all English. I’m not terribly observant when it comes to other peoples’ conversations except when their body language conveys tension that compels me to listen. The foursome’s conversation resembled white noise to me, sounds beating against my consciousness but nothing registering. IM and I discussed the day, what our kids back in California were doing now, how bad the plane ride was and how great it used to be, and what New York used to be like when we were younger.

IM and I met at the Page Two, a nightclub in Oceanside on Long Island in February 1964, which had dancing on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I was looking to meet someone and IM was dumping her boyfriend. She was sitting alone at the bar drinking a rye and ginger and I asked her to dance, She accepted and we spent the rest of the evening dancing and talking. She had come with girlfriends and left with them later but not before I had asked her out the upcoming Saturday to tour the city doing tourist things. She accepted and I spent the rest of the week trying to plan out the day, without much success.

The next Saturday I picked her up at her place, without a clue as to what we were going to do for the day. We walked to the train station near her place, and took the train into the city, getting off at Penn Station, where all the commuter trains disgorged their loads. Our first stop was the United Nations, which I had wanted to tour. IM had already been but was eager to do it again. The UN was a major topic of discussion during my current affairs class at Clover Park High School in Tacoma, Washington—taught by a retired military officer, who had been stationed all over the world and had turned the whole class on to getting out and seeing what had excited him so. He was one of the reasons I joined the Navy rather than going on to college. You could say he contributed to my being where I was at that instant.

Secretary-General U Thant headed the institution back then, but I was more familiar with Dag Hammarskjöld, the man who preceded him. I was struck by his untimely death in a plane crash on a peace mission in the Congo. Men like him were larger than life characters and to have one of them die accidentally made you realize that death didn’t make exceptions for standing in the community. I recall during the tour how small the rooms appeared. On television during the evening news broadcasts, the rooms all seemed larger and more spacious. It was especially large when black and white video showed Nikita Khrushchev banging his shoe on his desk in the General Assembly during the fall of 1960. Did the camera lie or did my mind make these places and events larger to fit their purpose in the world? I suspect the latter. The other impression I left the UN with was the diversity of people working there. It was my first encounter with black Africans, Europeans, and Asians in such numbers, more than I had ever come across in all the travels the Army provided my family and me. IM and I toured the UN again during our visit in 2001. The revelation then was the increased diversity of people over our first visit, not only working at the UN but among the visitors touring it as well.

Our lunch arrives, IM has a chicken salad and I have veal scallopini and another glass of champagne. On our first date in New York IM and I left the UN in the afternoon and took in a movie—Goldfinger—Sean Connery playing James Bond, a young Dame Shirley Bassey singing the title song during the opening credits. After the movie we walk around midtown riding up the Empire State Building elevator and looking out over the city, wandered about Rockefeller Center and eventually ended up in a little Italian restaurant on one of the streets in the Theatre District. All I remember of the place was our table had a checkerboard tablecloth in the center of which was a bulbous-bottom Chianti bottles wrapped in basket with a candle burning and candle wax encasing its neck and bottom. IM and I talked about our families, her mom and dad, her married older sister and two bachelor brothers in Scotland. I described my Filipina mother, Southern Baptist father, and three younger school-aged sisters. Here we were two people from the opposite ends of the earth having dinner in an Italian restaurant in Manhattan—what were the chances? Our lunch at Rue 57 was memorable because we were both very hungry; our dinner at the little Italian restaurant 47 years ago because it was the first, because the day had been perfect, and, except for a few other tables of early-bird diners we had the place to ourselves.

The waiter returns after we had finished our meal and asked if we wanted dessert, which we both decline. I offer him my credit card and he returns a few minutes later with the credit card slip, which I sign. The bill came to just under $112 with tip. It was just coming on 3:00 PM and sated, we snake our way back to the front of the restaurant and out onto 57th Street. We walk back to the Buckingham and take a rest before the performance of Spamalot at 8:00 PM that evening.

October 24, 2007 - Receipt #5 – Souvenir Shopping in Rockefeller Center

2007-10-24T22:21:00.000-07:00

October 24, 2007 - Receipt #5 – Souvenir Shopping in Rockefeller Center

I’ve come to the fifth receipt that I’ve collected since my wife IM and I started our four-day trip to Manhattan. After collecting our tickets at the Shubert Theatre box office, we exit the theater and walk along Shubert Alley between 44th and 45th streets toward 45th to the theater gift shopped named after the alley. We had given this shop plenty of business over the years—t-shirts from Cats, Chess, My One and Only, A Chorus Line and cast recordings of Nine, Starlight Express, Aspects of Love, Les Miserables, among other items. IM was looking for T-shirts for the grand kids, but realized that they would not recognize any of the shows pictured on the shirts on display. We leave the shop in search of a store with t-shirts showing action heroes—Buzz Lightyear, Spiderman, to be specific—two favorites of our young grand sons.

We walk back toward Times Square, picking our way through the crowds spilling off the sideways into the street and turn left on 7th Avenue sure we’ll find a souvenir shop overflowing with the types of T-Shirts IM wants. How the mass of humanity and stream of car, truck, motorcycle, and bicycle traffic manage to move and not collide with one another in the confined space of the square is nothing short of amazing. IM leads the way as we walk up 7th, heading directly into the oncoming flow of pedestrian, which give way just enough to allow her passage. I follow along in her wake occasionally averting the throng approaching me by walking in the street mindful of the IM’s blue-jacketed back off to my left. We reunite at 46th street and stand fast as other pedestrians dash between east-bound traffic along the street. When the light changes and traffic stops, we resume our trek seeing off to our left the souvenir store with the shirts we’re after on display in its window. Weaving our way through the flow of people coming towards us, we enter the store and IM finds the shirts she’s after.

After looking for something for the grand daughters, however, she becomes frustrated and decides to look elsewhere for everything. We return the shirts to their rack and exit the store merging into the flow of northbound pedestrians heading north on the west side of Broadway. On the east side of the street, Virgin Mobile has an drive-in theater size screen mounted one and a half stories above street level playing a rock video. Just south of Virgin Mobile, Planet Hollywood beckons pedestrians to escape the hustle and bustle of the sidewalk and join the hustle and bustle within. We continue on until we reach 49th where we turn right heading east to escape the crush of humanity we’ve been struggling against for the past five block. Moving along 49th toward 6th Avenue, the amount of pedestrian traffic has diminished to a far more reasonable amount: plenty of room on the narrow sidewalks along either side of the street. As we walk, we pass restaurants filled with diners—it’s the lunch hour—and make our way around patrons loitering in conversation on the sidewalk after finishing their meal or couples eyeing the menu posted outside before committing themselves to enter. It’s still dull and overcast and occasionally we feel drops of rain that abruptly come and go.

When we reach Rockefeller Center we walk around the subterranean patio restaurants below, tables and umbrellas deserted in the face of an overcast and chilly day. Diners in the enclosed Sea Grill Restaurant and Roc Center Café on either side of the open-air patio below deprived of a view to accompany their meal. We enter the Metropolitan Museum of Art store on the south east side of Rockefeller center and spend time looking at the paraphernalia the store had for sale. IM finds a doll for our eldest grand daughter and a T-shirt with a ballerina on it for our youngest grand daughter. I buy IM a Kaleidoscope and a DVD tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The store receipt shows the purchase took place at 1:49 pm on Friday May 18th. Another moment in time documented in print.

October 22, 2007 - Receipt #4 - New York City Rhythm

2007-10-23T22:57:00.001-07:00

October 22, 2007 - Receipt #4 - New York City Rhythm

In the Chronicle of our four days in New York last May documented in receipts, we picked up our fourth of the day—it’s Saturday May 14th—at the Shubert Theatre (sic—New Yorkers spell the word in the British form) at 225 West 44th Street: two tickets to Monty Python’s Spamalot for the May 18, 2007 8:00 PM performance. The tickets showed that the Internet transaction was completed at 12:48 PM on May 18th, charged to an American Express card belonging to me—the sales clerk printed the tickets after we arrived and I showed my card.

To reach the Shubert Theatre we had made our way through the throng of humanity swarming about Times Square. I use the terms “throng” and “swarm” to describe the tens of thousands of people who populated the collection of blocks between 48th Street to the north and 42nd Street to the south and 9th Avenue on the west and 7th Avenue—including Broadway the transverse boulevard that disturbs the orderly Manhattan Midtown street grid of north-south avenues and east-west streets—on the east. There is an kinetic energy that permeates the crowds that collect at intersections waiting for the light to change and grant them right of way. And when the red light changes to green there is a surge as that pent up force is released and given freedom to move.

Contributing to that intensity of purpose that pedestrians in large cities, in general, and Manhattan, in particular, possess is the constant sounds of a teaming metropolitan center. The noise of accelerating cars and buses, the strain of brakes pulling these vehicles up short, the blare of horns exhorting the slow, the timid, the lost, to move. And there is the constant rhythm of human voices straining to be heard over the turned up volume of the city: some exhorting others to climb aboard a bus, enter a shop, purchase goods of indeterminate origin; others calling to one another encouraging them to come this way, look at that, hurry up…; others yelling into cell phones while straining to hear the response… And there are the recorded sounds of rock music blaring from stores, recorded voices of talking heads looking out earnestly from television screens.

As most all major metropolitan areas, New York has become a tourist theme park. This was clearly punctuated by the tour buses lining Broadway—their conductors urging the stream of pedestrians to board their conveyances for tours of every piece of the city’s real estate that has some view-worthy site. Tours cater to the reluctance each of us has to decide what to do, especially when you’re on vacation and want a respite from decision making. Tours satisfy the pressing need to be doing something on your time off so you don’t feel guilty about wasting time. And there is no better proof of this than the London-model double-decker tour buses packed with humanity—young, old, and every age in between: those on the uncovered upper deck clothed in foul weather gear as insurance against the menacing grey sky that spat periodically to maintain its threat.

All about the intersections at and around Time Square, every available piece of building surface space is covered with huge electronic displays filled with animated commercial messages to influence the teaming multitude below, all of it looping continuous. Buildings not covered with displays are painted over with huge print ads, the entire two faces of one building painted in bright red with an ad for Target. Panning a full 360 degrees in Times Square at 45th and Broadway, the whole area appears beset by gangs of pin stripped hoods who have tagged every bit of visible space with their gangs’ graffiti. No one walking though this part of the city would have any doubt about who owns what.

October 21, 2007 - Receipt #3 - Buying a New Cell Phone

2007-10-21T22:10:00.000-07:00

October 21, 2007 - Receipt #3 - Buying a New Cell Phone

Chronicling our four-day vacation in Manhattan through the receipts we’ve accumulated during our stay, I’ve come to the third, the purchase of a cell phone. I had left my own at home in San Jose as had IM—she usually doesn’t bring her phone relying on me to have mine. I had been toying with dumping Sprint for some time, largely because their network was not GSM and when I travel abroad GSM is the network I usually encounter. I was determined to end my several-years relationship with Sprint and now was the opportune time since I needed a new phone and the cost of getting one was to sign on with a new provider.

After we left the Buckingham, still full from the late night hamburger feast, the third purchase we made in Manhattan was two new Nokia GSM phones from the AT&T Store at 1330 Avenue of the Americas, between 53rd and 54th streets. The store is on the ground floor of the tall office building at 1330 near the corner of 53rd. The store was filled with an assortment of wireless handset, packaged in clear plastic containers containing details about each phone, features such as digital camera, MP3 player, etc. The other patrons of the store—a man and a woman, not together—were decidedly younger than IM and me, and their queries ran more to the features than the function IM and I were after. The young woman wanted help downloading ringtones. The young man wanted a new phone and was engaging the sales clerk in earnest conversation about the features of the various phones he could purchase.

I have to ask the question why do we need a portable phone besides the obvious reasons of being able to ring anyone in the world at will as long as you have their number. The question is better stated as why do we spend time calling one another to discuss the minutiae of everyday life. Is it because we have all become alienated by a world filled with so many people that we’ve become lost in the sea of humanity that surrounds us on roadways and especially the sidewalks and street corners of Manhattan. Lost and lonely amid teaming crowds of people, you can call someone you know and hear a familiar voice comfort you and ease the anxiety impressed upon you by the modern world.

The sales clerks were dressed in corporate wear, dark Docker slacks and solid blue and brown pressed shirts bearing the AT&T logo. The dark haired sales clerk helping IM and me was a native to the greater New York area, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island, New Jersey—one of those. My ear is not discriminating enough to place him based on his speech. The second light haired sales clerk behind the counter was East European, which became obvious when a third customer—the other two having been helped and sent on their way while IM and I waited for our phones to be activated—an attractive light haired young woman entered the store and began conversing in a language that sounded East European, the origin of which I haven’t a clue, and the second sales clerk responded in kind, obviously the young woman was a friend or co-worker on a busman’s holiday. When our sales clerk rang us up, the register receipt said 12:25 PM. We had entered the store a few minutes before noon, a half hour transaction, which cost us nothing up front but committed us to two years of AT&T wireless phone service. Why do we need cell phones?

As IM and I left the store and resumed our walk down 6th Avenue, I could see every third or fourth pedestrian approaching us talking earnestly into their wireless handset and the conversation were the banality of everyday life. “I’m running a few minutes late…”; “Can we make it a hour earlier…”; “Did you get the kids to school on time?”; “Remember to pick up the laundry…”; “We have to stop seeing each other…” In a multitasking world why waste time walking when you can walk and talk at the same time. Our two phones were stuck away in pockets though both were on in case any of our friends and family wanted to get in touch. No one called. We weren’t on anyone’s must call list. And being together we didn’t feel alienated in the imposing world surrounding us.