There’s No Place Like Home. Or Home Base.

Well, I’m back from back east, and there was a lot of “home” on the trip.  First of all, I had to go back to New York City — where I was born — for some business meetings. The meetings were in an office in Rockefeller Center — where my first post-college job was located.  We ate lunch in three different restaurants around and in the Center over the course of the several days of meetings; each one of them had been places I had frequented years and years ago.  Walking through the various Art Deco lobbies and corridors of Rock Center took me back to when I used to emerge each morning from the subway, marveling at how I got to walk through these gorgeous buildings on my way to work.  It always made the day seem, I dunno, important, and made me feel very grown-up.

I was staying with my old friends Joan and Peter across the Hudson in Weehawken, right next to the ferry landing, and I got to take the ferry to work for the week.  Cool.  Marysville is the first land-locked place I have ever lived in, and I realized I did miss that unique aromatic blend of salt air and floating fish that is New York Harbor.  I got home each night in time for a game of Scrabble on my friends’ tiny terrace, where we battled on the board while betting which ferry passengers would respond to our friendly waves.

Weehawken, in case you were wondering, is next door to Hoboken, which is famous for two things:  Frank Sinatra was born there and so, it is argued, was baseball.  (Abner Doubleday can take a hike.) Joan and I had lunch in a casual place called the Elysian Cafe. Its baseball-fanatic owner named it after the Hoboken field where the New York Knickbockers took on the New York Nine in the first officially scored match-up, which took place on June 19, 1846.  As it turns out, it was June 19th of this year when we were lunching in Hoboken, and we could tell something was up when Abbott and Costello came out of the pub. Costello was brandishing a bat and they were heading down the street to where we had seen some chairs being set up earlier.  We followed and joined the audience for a ceremony to unveil a refurbished plaque commemorating that first baseball game.  The Mayor of Hoboken was there, Abbott and Costello did their famous Who’s on First routine, and bartenders dressed like peanut vendors were tossing peanuts and crackjacks to the crowd.  We pledged allegiance, sang the Star Spangled Banner and finished off with a rousing round of Take Me Out to the Ball Game.  For a baseball lover like me, there couldn’t have been a happier piece of serendipty. Maybe Marysville and Hoboken can start a sister city deal — two small towns with a great baseball heritage.

Home was also the theme when I drove into Penna. over the weekend  of my visit to visit Nanticoke, the small town where most of several generations of my family were born.  I took pictures and met the current owners of the house my great-grand uncle built for my grandparents, and the one down the street where they had rented before my mother was born, went by the old church on Main Street, and the site of the old high school, then visited the family plot to place flowers and do a little gardening, and finally drove up the road to the small lake where my family went every to fish and canoe and swim, every summer for about 60 years. 

And now after this very satisfying trip, I am here….in Marysville….back home.  No place like it.

Read Full Post »

That Was the Week that Was.

Whew.  It’s finally Friday! What a week. Saturday through Monday, I was up on a houseboat at Seven Crown Resorts at Bridge Bay, Lake Shasta, so you’d think I would have come home on Monday all relaxed and rested.  But it was hotter there than here: I think it went to 109 and at one point the thermometer in my car registered the outside temp at 117 after it had been sitting in the sun for a few hours.  I thought a jet boat ride on the Sacramento River would cool me off, but aside from a few pockets of cold air and the wet spray during some 360s, it was like speeding through a pizza oven.  A few of us took a patio boat out on the lake to try a catch a breeze, and with the shady canopy and the cold drinks, it was quite pleasant.  We also went over to Whiskeytown Lake for a picnic one evening.  The Shasta area is really beautiful and I got there and back on just one tank of gas.

I left Jet behind with Mom, although I could have brought him on the houseboat at no charge. My friend Nina did bring her wonderful black Lab, Echo, on the houseboat next to mine, so there was still canine companionship to be had, although I kept wishing Jet had been with me. I’ve known Echo since he was a puppy and he and Jet are pals; problem is, Echo still thinks he can fit on my lap!  Down, boy!

Monday, I got home in time to go to the last session of my collage class and have been out and about ever since.  Tuesday was the annual meeting and dinner of the Friends of the Yuba County Library over at Wonderful Restaurant.  (Sat across from the Library’s own Kathleen Stewart and her daughter Kim, who is getting married in a few weeks.) Wednesday, a meeting of the Yuba-Sutter Dog Park volunteers. Thursday Jet and I went to D Street for the ribbon-cutting ceremony at the new pet shop, His and Hers. Jet was very much a gentleman and scored two gourmet home-baked biscuits from owner Samantha Gush. 

Yesterday also was CSA food box distribution from Farmer Jim and I had to go get a flag.  Having never lived in a house as an adult, I have never needed a big, mount-on-a-pole flag before.  It’s always been a small flag on a stick in a flowerbox.  Now I really feel like the house is complete!  Except for the plywood wall and no lawn, of course.  Oh, and the unfinished shower upstairs and no porch light.  And the missing doorknob, the packing boxes in the dining room and a TV stand from Target that I still have to assemble one of these days.   Never mind, Merry Finch brought by about a bushel of Bings from her trees, so life is indeed a bowl of cherries.  

Read Full Post »

It’s a Small, Small, Small World

Last Tuesday I was in San Francisco, enjoying a performance of Irish music and dance in Union Square, part of a celebration for the start of Aer Lingus service from SFO to Dublin. A great local band, Culann’s Hounds, played traditional songs to which a dozen brightly costumed girls from the Healy School of Irish Dance did jigs and reels.  In the audience that had gathered in the square were visitors and residents from not just Ireland, but Brazil, Austria, Hong Kong, Australia, Italy, France and the Ukraine. And those are just the accents I overheard myself.  Of course, San Francisco is a very international city, but the very next day back in Marysville, I was reminded that our “twin cities” are no slouch in the multi-cultural department.  The mural on the wall of the Mary Covillaud School says it all. 

Marysville, the state’s “oldest little city,” may also lay claim to currently having the smallest Chinatown, whose jewel is the historic Bok Kai Temple.  (Not to mention the Beef Chow Fun lunch special at Szechuan.)  There has been a Chinese community in Marysville since the 1860s.  And, of course, we have one of California’s 43 identified Japantowns.  It includes the hondo  built in 1938, although the Buddhist Church of Marysville held its first service 100 years ago in 1907. The First United Methodist Church of Marysville has a Hmong-language service on Sundays, and Hmong join Latino volunteers to tend the community garden across the street from my house.  (The garden belongs to the elementary school and according to principal Doug Escheman, the volunteers care for it from planting through harvest since school is closed during our hot, dry summers.  If you ever call the Covillaud School, you’ll hear voice prompts in three languages, English, Spanish and Hmong.)   

And all this in a town with 12,000 inhabitants and a downtown only ten blocks by ten blocks.  And I haven’t even mentioned the large and vibrant Punjabi-American community just across the bridge. More on our diverse neighborhood and the Mary Covillaud School later. In the meantime, I am keeping my ears open for more accents I haven’t heard yet.

Read Full Post »