I've been staying in Oakland, taking care of my cousin's house and garden as he and his partner Becca visit family in New Mexico. The other night, I ordered a carnitas burrito from a taco truck in a parking lot at midnight, just after some Mexican-American teenagers who talked to each other in English but ordered in Spanish. They breakdanced in the parking lot as other people, middle-aged men with their toddler sons, young pregnant women with their young husbands or boyfriends. I felt very blessed to be there, under the flickery yellow lights with the smell of many kinds of grilled meat wafting out from the taco truck: lengua, carnitas, cabeza. The burrito was delicious; I ate it as I walked home. *** Today, as I watered the garden, two young women drove up in a van full of picnic supplies. They turned out to be next-door neighbors I hadn't met yet. I was watering the green beans, occasionally munching a succulent, sweet green pod. When I initially said hello, they didn't respond; I thought maybe they didn't speak English, so I told them in Spanish how good the beans were and offered them some. One of them answered in English and accepted a pod, but didn't like it very much. *** Yesterday morning, I left their house at 7:30 so I wouldn't be late for a meeting at HP Labs in Palo Alto at 10:00. I stopped at the 16th and Mission stop where I'd left Becca's bike the night before, with both wheels and the frame locked to a parking meter, in between all the other bicycles. When I arrived, it was the only bike left; the others had all left the night before. Nothing was missing from it, not even the pump and polyethylene water bottle. But I missed my connection at the 16th and Mission station, and I arrived at the meeting at 10:45. Unbeknownst to me, I had ruptured the rear inner tube riding it up to HP Labs, and I had neglected to carry a tube repair kit with me --- although there was one on the living room coffee table and one on the shelf in the bedroom. My friend Rohit gave me a ride to downtown with the bike, where I bought tire levers and a patch kit, repaired the tube, and broke the pump. *** The other day, I wanted to make capresse sandwiches to share with my friend Josh. I picked fresh basil from the back yard and cut up some tomatoes and mozzarella, but then discovered no bread. But I had made pancakes for breakfast with my friend Linley that morning. So Josh and I ended up having capresse sandwiches on cold pancakes made with vanilla soy milk, on a rooftop plaza in the new San Francisco Public Library building, accompanies with a garden salad from Ben and Becca's garden, with nasturtium flowers, oxalis, arugula, purslane, and I think a little mint, on top of some store-bought lettuce. *** One day, on the way "home", I stopped at the 16th and Mission station to buy a phone card. The $5 La Leyenda card I bought has provided about 45 minutes of talk time to Beatrice in Argentina over the course of more than a week. I called her immediately before leaving the phone-card store and talked for 15 of those minutes, because we hadn't heard each other's voices in days.
