Life is sweet

Charlie (BofA), Marv (BofA, and now CCSF),
and Lisa (met her and her husband Tristan folk dancing)

µ, Ted (BofA), and Oded (BofA)

    Saturday, August 12 witnessed the first party at Wood Street in nearly 4 years.  It was a total improvisation.  Original concept: need help with the orchard, so invite a couple of friends over to pick as much fruit as they wanted.  And then came "scope creep," as we called it at BofA wire transfer.  Of course I needed to include the Friday lunch gang, my dear old friends and colleagues from BofA.  And so of course I needed to offer comestibles besides apples and pears.  And of course other old friends should come too, and so on … until I had to stop because, of course, I was in over my head.

Charlie, Lisa, Ted, Nick (friend from '70s),
and Carol (new friend)

    If I invited them, would they come?  And if so would the guests enjoy themselves?  A dozen of us sat on the deck for hours, eating and drinking lustily, while conversation flowed richly.  My elder son Gabe gets much credit for the food, by coming early and rescuing my attempt at home fries.  Charlie, that pillar of the Friday lunch gang, brought a copy of Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, and we took turns reading the part where Willy and Linda Loman brainstorm Willy's end-of-career options.  May not sound like fun, considering the option Willy eventually picks, but we had a great time with it.

Nick and Charlie.  There weren't enough hats to go around,
so we had to get creative

    At first I'd thought Charlie brought the play as a bow to nostalgia.  In the old days, we had a little club at BofA called Radio Theater.  We would take weekly breaks from developing software for wholesale banking (massive $$ transfers) to read plays that often took a jaundiced view of ambition and riches — this is really true.  But Charlie was clearly interested in a revival, and some of the partygoers agreed to reconvene in September to read a Sam Shepard play.  Shepard, who passed at age 73 on July 31, was such a favorite of Radio Theater that we read three of his works: True West, Tooth of Crime, and Curse of the Starving Class.  It only seems right that we begin a new season with another.

    The occasion was shadowed by a sinister rumor — summer ends in August.  That rumor is true: the F'17 semester at CCSF starts the 21st, same day as the

More hat creativity

solar eclipse — the first act of the prof/TA routine Marv and I have been honing is scheduled to debut at an Introduction to Java class at 3:10 pm. But at Wood Street that Saturday, summer was still going strong.  At one point the conversation threatened to drift toward the T-word, but for just this once we changed course.

    We picked bags of fruit instead, I showed off the glorious Wood st. Rain Garden, and the conversation wandered from literature to the plight of hearing impaired profs. (Unanimous, if unsolicited, advice to the host: tell the kids on 8/21 that

Tristan and Lisa's sons Theo and Milo,
picking apples in the orchard

you have this little problem).  And from there to gender politics in the classroom. The typical classroom speaking voice of a female CCSF students is so soft, even when providing the correct answer, that a prof with normal hearing could be forgiven for overlooking them.  Why would that be, in 2017, in enlightened San Francisco?  In Carol's opinion, it's because girls still lack suitable role models.  She spoke from her experience growing up in Port Arthur, Texas (like Janis Joplin), when girls had no prospects for refinery jobs, let alone college.  Her two brother did get refinery job, and worked their way into R ? D without college degrees, while Carol somehow found her way to a Master's in zoology from UT Austin.

    And of course we also talked about our kids and ourselves.  Turns out that Nick, like Carol, was the first person in his family to get a college degree, and

The lads with their dad Tristan

was actually the valedictorian at his working class Italian Chicago high school. Tristan plans to complete his zoology dissertation in December, on wild life corridors in East Africa.  Ted's son Noah is looking at colleges, and Charlie's daughter Guille is starting med school. (Time does fly: knew them both from before they they had children).  Gabe is engaged in important writing projects.  And I was delighted to have them in my life and let the summer moments expand.  Sometimes you've just got break down and admit it, life can be so sweet.
   

The Rain Garden, drought tolerants on the rim, bog lovers in the basin