How to Spend Your Last Two Days in Oakland Outside of Time

First, go to a movie at the Grand Lake Theater. Make sure to go to a showing that the organ will play at. Get there half an hour before the listed show time so you can watch the organ rise up out of the place it lives in the floor. The man who’s going to play it is already seated at its bench. He and the instrument rise together, and then they begin.

Sit in the opulence of that movie palace that managed to survive the rise of the multiplex and listen to that organ that sounds more ballpark than cathedral.

Reading Telegraph Avenue on Telegraph Avenue

Sometimes it feels like I’m traveling just so I can learn the context for more stories, my own–I want to collect as many things to weave into the stories I’m going to tell as possible–and other people’s as well. 

I remember what a difference studying abroad in Ireland had on my understanding of The Dead and how the second time I read it–after having been there–felt like reading it for the first time because there were so many new layers that had been hidden to me before. I remember reading the line “The gentle rain was trying not to fall” in Murphy and being blown away by how exactly it described something I’d experienced there many times. If I’d read that turn of phrase before I went to Ireland it might have pleased me but I wouldn’t have understood it nearly as completely.

It’s for that very reason that I waited to read Michael Chabon’s latest book, Telegraph Avenue, until I was in Oakland.

An Inter-Generational Experience of San Diego

San Diego was the first place I stayed with a family, the kind of family you’d see on a census that is; with a mother and a father and two kids and a pet guinea pig. Since my experiences of the places I’m visiting have been heavily defined by who I’m staying with I may have, arguably, experienced a wider array of things in San Diego than anywhere else.

(It was also one of the few places where I didn’t stay with people from Michfest–my connection to this couch was that my mother and the mother of this family went to college together–which means there was a lack of communal experiences to draw on.  I basically had to start from scratch in my conversations here, like most people do most of the time. It was an interesting change from the experience I’ve been having.)

I did the adult things: went to museums; attended a free Flamenco Guitar concert; listened to the second-largest outdoor pipe organ in the world. I even went to church. Actually, “adult” is probably the wrong label for this category. Most of the things I did with the matriarch of this family feel like the sort of activities I would’ve done as a homeschooler–except the church bit–in DC. This probably has something to do with the fact that said matriarch is a teacher. She loves to expound on anything she knows about, to anyone. While wandering around the Natural History Museum, she would explain exhibits to children standing nearby.