cruising
I was sent out to Silicon Valley on President's Day weekend. Previously, I joked with the Consulting Director that my mom must have gotten a hold of her e-mail address as that had to explain why I kept on getting assignments within spitting distance of family. Fortunately, my folks accepted that the purpose of the visit was work and that they ought not take offense when I chose not to spend Saturday and Sunday playing golf with my dad and instead lingered in a glass lined conference room playing midwife to another software application birth. Still, the install and go-live went well and smoothly, and as I was wrapping up on Sunday night, the client told me that I didn't have to come in on Monday. He also told me that he was sorry about the timing and how I had to push off long weekend plans with silentq in order to make the trip. The apology was a couple of weeks late, but it was still welcome. As was the time off.
I had made tentative plans with mengwong and folks like msjen, yosh and tiny_chicken to meet up later in the week, and I was going to see my family later on as well, but I didn't really feel like coming up with a schedule on this one day of leisure, when I had no plans, no commitments and a rare 24 hours of freedom. Instead, I got in the rental car and drove north, following the 101 out to the city and the tomorrow that was today.
When my family left Manila, we initially made a go of settling in the Bay Area, living near Menlo Park and travelling on the 101 for movies, restaurants and visiting neighbors. I have an image fixed in my mind of the highway in its pre dot-com days, when the headquarters of Oracle was a children's park with captive killer whales and there were still drive in movie theatres in Redwood City so from the highway at night, you could see flashes of X-wings diving towards the Death Star if you looked at just the right time.
Eventually it turned out that my father could not gain residency in the States. The ladder was just too high if you were self-employed, had no family who were citizens, and were already married. So, instead of moving back to Manila, we went to Canada, and left the 101 behind. Still, we would visit from time to time, and after parents elected to spend in Christmases in the Bay Area, I would visit every year, and each time I would try to remember the 101 as it was when we left it. Every year it gets harder.
That morning, I stopped in Cafe Borrone, which we always used to refer to as 'Phoney Borrone' when we were growing up because it was a place that everyone loved to hate and hated to love. Selling overpriced sandwiches and coffee drinks to the nouveau riche since 1971; it is everything gloriously stereotypical of the Bay Area character -- a patina of Italian culture dressing up young prosperity, fully aware of its pretentiousness and revelling in it. As a teenager, I had spent more than a few evening in Borrone's plaza, catching up with old junior high classmates and watching the courtship rituals of my peers. Now, I was stopping for breakfast, because despite all of the pompousness of the place, they do serve a great quiche, and it tastes even better when someone else is paying for it.
I had also stopped by Borrone to pay my regular visit to Kepler's, the first great bookstore that I had known. While there, I had picked up Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road, and I realize now that I could've made an excellent day out of just reading that book at Borrone, but at the time I was in a mood for wandering.
I drove up to the City, stopping in Amoeba for CD and DVD trawling and over to the Castro for lunch, but nothing caught my appetite, and the quiche still lingered in my belly, so instead, I headed across the Bay to Berkeley and did some grocery shopping. I had booked a suite for this two week stay, mostly because I wanted a fridge and an option to cook my own breakfast. From silentq I had picked up the habit of keeping a gallon of water in the hotel room for incidental thirst, but now expanded that to include fruit, bread and cheese for snacks. So, to stock the room, I prowled across the Gourmet Ghetto for wine from Kermit, bread from Acme and cheese from the Collective -- though, of course, the Collective being a bunch of rat bastard commies, it should've been logical that they'd be closed on President's Day.
I wound up getting Thai food for lunch, and then vaguely pondered where to go next. I had walked past Jitensha Studio in the hopes of getting some bike porn time, but they were closed. Still, looking at vintage Toei frame hanging in their window, I suddenly thought, "hmm ... isn't Rivendell nearby?"
Rivendell, of course, being Rivendell Bicycle Works, the enterprise of Grant Petersen -- consummate retrogrouch and America's foremost advocate for reminding folks that bicycles are not just meant for races. A lot of folks love and hate Rivendell too, buying or rejecting Grant's gospel of old-fashioned aesthetics, venerable technology and a skepticism for modern gimmicks. I've always admired his bikes, but could rarely stand his sermons; and while I've always thought of buying some wool jerseys or odd but practical accessories from the Rivendell site, I couldn't do it if it involved reading a couple paragraphs of his purple bicycle prose.
Still, I figured that they were close enough for a visit. I didn't know where Rivendell was, but a SMS message to Google gave me a hint, and GPS in the car led me the rest of the way. I do love living in the future.
I don't know what I was expecting before I arrived. One would imagine, given the name, that Rivendell Bicycle Works would be headquartered in some kind of overgrown forest setting, with wood and leather and rubber all about and curmudgenous old men totting up your purchases with a scrip of paper and an abacus. One doesn't expect an uninsulated storage shed behind an Avis car rental lot. If not for the bikes, I thought that I might've made a wrong turn somewhere.
Nonetheless, I visited, lingered and bought a wool jersey. My sales guy introduced himself as Keven, and he seemed genuinely puzzled when he asked if I was a Rivendell member or had bought from the site before, and I said no. I wasn't one of the faithful, but I was here anyway and i wanted to buy something. After all, given their location, I imagine that they don't get a lot of walk-ins. "Hold on, sweetie, I'm in a mood to buy an $1800 bicycle. Let's walk over to this nondescript white shed and see if they have anything."
"Nah," I explained. "I've looked at your site a lot but never bought any of your gear. I'm here for work and I've got the day off, so I thought I'd drop by and check the stuff out in person."
"So, you have any other plans?"
"No, just wandering around the Bay. Doing whatever catches my fancy."
"Well, if you've got time, do you want to take a test drive?"
"Like, now?"
"Like, now. There's a bike path a half-mile away, leads all the way up to Mt. Diablo if you're interested. We don't close for a couple of hours, so if you want to climb the mountain and come back, then feel free."
"What's kind of test bikes do you have?"
"Whatever you want. Bleriots, Legolases, Rambouillets. If we have your size in stock, you can take whatever."
"You should let him try the Bombadil."
This was from one of the staffers, wandering by and pointing at a bike frame that they had up on a stand nearby. The frame was unpainted, all raw and new. I walked up to it for a closer look and realized that I was looking at a tank. Heavy steel tubing, double top tubes and massive wheels contrasted against a delicate pair of drop handlebars and a narrow saddle. It made me think of the way ballerinas look with their delicate, wispy torsos and strong,, wiry legs.
"It's our new mountain bike prototype," the fellow explained as I walked around it, "built for gravel, rough stuff and deep country touring. It's the second one we've built and we still need to test it out and see if it holds up better than its predecessor."
And that's how I wound up riding the unpaved back roads of Walnut Creek, leaving the car behind for an hour and exploring the unknown paths before; not knowing where I was going and not much caring. I told Keven afterwards, as I signed back the bikes to him, that I still have a bike at home that is still my one true love, but it was nice to flirt with others for an afternoon.
As I headed back to my car, I realized that I still needed cheese and fruit. I could vaguely recall that my mom was mentioning that a new Draeger's had opened in Danville. Before we knew of Whole Foods or farmer's markets, my mom would take us shopping at Draeger's whenever she needed a little something special for the fridge. Safeway provided our first introduction to American breakfast cereals and fresh milk, but Draeger's taught us the magic of freshly-made pasta and how a simple sandwich made with good bread can still be sublime.
The Draeger's in Danville is a massive, sprawling thing, surrounded by half-empty McMansions, and I purchased the ingredients for a small dinner salad, as well as a half dozen eggs and some bacon for breakfast in the coming days. I returned to the car and drove back to Sunnyvale, completing the circuit just as the sun was setting and the day ending.
Still, I had one more place to visit -- in Mountain View, there's a store called Videoscope. It is in that old breed of rental stores dying off in the NetFlix eclipse, a mom-and-pop shop owned and operated by another Filipino couple who really, really love movies. Obscure foreign films, weird cult flicks, niche cartoon compilations, and bizarre dance championship documentaries -- all of that was available at Videoscope, if you could find it. The store didn't categorize anything, and boxes were just sort of left on random shelves because the owners had long ago given up on re-sorting everything every night. It literally felt like going over to visit a friend's house and borrowing tapes from their collection, and that always added to its awesomeness.
The shop had not changed much since its original days, except for fewer laserdiscs and more DVDs. I wound up pulling out Bob Le Flambeur and Sunshine and walked them over to the counter. The pop was on the other side.
"Do you have an account?"
"I don't know, it's been a while."
"What's the last name?"
"C*********"
"Oh yeah! I thought I recognized you! How are you? How are your parents?"
With that, we wound up talking, about what happened to my family after we left for Canada and how my parents moved back but settled in the East Bay, how my brother's still around, but he doesn't rent a lot of movies anymore.
"Probably joined Netflix," he said dismissively, heavy resignation in his tone.
"Well, Netflix doesn't follow me when I work, so I need to rent a couple of movies for those quiet nights at the hotel."
"True. So, your father's credit card on this account expired in 2002, but if you want to give me a new card, then I can re-open it."
"You sure? You know I'm only going to be here for a week or so. If I forget, it might be a pain to get the Flambeur disc back."
"Chino, I know your family. I know you all are good for it."
It does get harder to remember these things as the years go by.
I had made tentative plans with mengwong and folks like msjen, yosh and tiny_chicken to meet up later in the week, and I was going to see my family later on as well, but I didn't really feel like coming up with a schedule on this one day of leisure, when I had no plans, no commitments and a rare 24 hours of freedom. Instead, I got in the rental car and drove north, following the 101 out to the city and the tomorrow that was today.
When my family left Manila, we initially made a go of settling in the Bay Area, living near Menlo Park and travelling on the 101 for movies, restaurants and visiting neighbors. I have an image fixed in my mind of the highway in its pre dot-com days, when the headquarters of Oracle was a children's park with captive killer whales and there were still drive in movie theatres in Redwood City so from the highway at night, you could see flashes of X-wings diving towards the Death Star if you looked at just the right time.
Eventually it turned out that my father could not gain residency in the States. The ladder was just too high if you were self-employed, had no family who were citizens, and were already married. So, instead of moving back to Manila, we went to Canada, and left the 101 behind. Still, we would visit from time to time, and after parents elected to spend in Christmases in the Bay Area, I would visit every year, and each time I would try to remember the 101 as it was when we left it. Every year it gets harder.
That morning, I stopped in Cafe Borrone, which we always used to refer to as 'Phoney Borrone' when we were growing up because it was a place that everyone loved to hate and hated to love. Selling overpriced sandwiches and coffee drinks to the nouveau riche since 1971; it is everything gloriously stereotypical of the Bay Area character -- a patina of Italian culture dressing up young prosperity, fully aware of its pretentiousness and revelling in it. As a teenager, I had spent more than a few evening in Borrone's plaza, catching up with old junior high classmates and watching the courtship rituals of my peers. Now, I was stopping for breakfast, because despite all of the pompousness of the place, they do serve a great quiche, and it tastes even better when someone else is paying for it.
I had also stopped by Borrone to pay my regular visit to Kepler's, the first great bookstore that I had known. While there, I had picked up Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road, and I realize now that I could've made an excellent day out of just reading that book at Borrone, but at the time I was in a mood for wandering.
I drove up to the City, stopping in Amoeba for CD and DVD trawling and over to the Castro for lunch, but nothing caught my appetite, and the quiche still lingered in my belly, so instead, I headed across the Bay to Berkeley and did some grocery shopping. I had booked a suite for this two week stay, mostly because I wanted a fridge and an option to cook my own breakfast. From silentq I had picked up the habit of keeping a gallon of water in the hotel room for incidental thirst, but now expanded that to include fruit, bread and cheese for snacks. So, to stock the room, I prowled across the Gourmet Ghetto for wine from Kermit, bread from Acme and cheese from the Collective -- though, of course, the Collective being a bunch of rat bastard commies, it should've been logical that they'd be closed on President's Day.
I wound up getting Thai food for lunch, and then vaguely pondered where to go next. I had walked past Jitensha Studio in the hopes of getting some bike porn time, but they were closed. Still, looking at vintage Toei frame hanging in their window, I suddenly thought, "hmm ... isn't Rivendell nearby?"
Rivendell, of course, being Rivendell Bicycle Works, the enterprise of Grant Petersen -- consummate retrogrouch and America's foremost advocate for reminding folks that bicycles are not just meant for races. A lot of folks love and hate Rivendell too, buying or rejecting Grant's gospel of old-fashioned aesthetics, venerable technology and a skepticism for modern gimmicks. I've always admired his bikes, but could rarely stand his sermons; and while I've always thought of buying some wool jerseys or odd but practical accessories from the Rivendell site, I couldn't do it if it involved reading a couple paragraphs of his purple bicycle prose.
Still, I figured that they were close enough for a visit. I didn't know where Rivendell was, but a SMS message to Google gave me a hint, and GPS in the car led me the rest of the way. I do love living in the future.
I don't know what I was expecting before I arrived. One would imagine, given the name, that Rivendell Bicycle Works would be headquartered in some kind of overgrown forest setting, with wood and leather and rubber all about and curmudgenous old men totting up your purchases with a scrip of paper and an abacus. One doesn't expect an uninsulated storage shed behind an Avis car rental lot. If not for the bikes, I thought that I might've made a wrong turn somewhere.
Nonetheless, I visited, lingered and bought a wool jersey. My sales guy introduced himself as Keven, and he seemed genuinely puzzled when he asked if I was a Rivendell member or had bought from the site before, and I said no. I wasn't one of the faithful, but I was here anyway and i wanted to buy something. After all, given their location, I imagine that they don't get a lot of walk-ins. "Hold on, sweetie, I'm in a mood to buy an $1800 bicycle. Let's walk over to this nondescript white shed and see if they have anything."
"Nah," I explained. "I've looked at your site a lot but never bought any of your gear. I'm here for work and I've got the day off, so I thought I'd drop by and check the stuff out in person."
"So, you have any other plans?"
"No, just wandering around the Bay. Doing whatever catches my fancy."
"Well, if you've got time, do you want to take a test drive?"
"Like, now?"
"Like, now. There's a bike path a half-mile away, leads all the way up to Mt. Diablo if you're interested. We don't close for a couple of hours, so if you want to climb the mountain and come back, then feel free."
"What's kind of test bikes do you have?"
"Whatever you want. Bleriots, Legolases, Rambouillets. If we have your size in stock, you can take whatever."
"You should let him try the Bombadil."
This was from one of the staffers, wandering by and pointing at a bike frame that they had up on a stand nearby. The frame was unpainted, all raw and new. I walked up to it for a closer look and realized that I was looking at a tank. Heavy steel tubing, double top tubes and massive wheels contrasted against a delicate pair of drop handlebars and a narrow saddle. It made me think of the way ballerinas look with their delicate, wispy torsos and strong,, wiry legs.
"It's our new mountain bike prototype," the fellow explained as I walked around it, "built for gravel, rough stuff and deep country touring. It's the second one we've built and we still need to test it out and see if it holds up better than its predecessor."
And that's how I wound up riding the unpaved back roads of Walnut Creek, leaving the car behind for an hour and exploring the unknown paths before; not knowing where I was going and not much caring. I told Keven afterwards, as I signed back the bikes to him, that I still have a bike at home that is still my one true love, but it was nice to flirt with others for an afternoon.
As I headed back to my car, I realized that I still needed cheese and fruit. I could vaguely recall that my mom was mentioning that a new Draeger's had opened in Danville. Before we knew of Whole Foods or farmer's markets, my mom would take us shopping at Draeger's whenever she needed a little something special for the fridge. Safeway provided our first introduction to American breakfast cereals and fresh milk, but Draeger's taught us the magic of freshly-made pasta and how a simple sandwich made with good bread can still be sublime.
The Draeger's in Danville is a massive, sprawling thing, surrounded by half-empty McMansions, and I purchased the ingredients for a small dinner salad, as well as a half dozen eggs and some bacon for breakfast in the coming days. I returned to the car and drove back to Sunnyvale, completing the circuit just as the sun was setting and the day ending.
Still, I had one more place to visit -- in Mountain View, there's a store called Videoscope. It is in that old breed of rental stores dying off in the NetFlix eclipse, a mom-and-pop shop owned and operated by another Filipino couple who really, really love movies. Obscure foreign films, weird cult flicks, niche cartoon compilations, and bizarre dance championship documentaries -- all of that was available at Videoscope, if you could find it. The store didn't categorize anything, and boxes were just sort of left on random shelves because the owners had long ago given up on re-sorting everything every night. It literally felt like going over to visit a friend's house and borrowing tapes from their collection, and that always added to its awesomeness.
The shop had not changed much since its original days, except for fewer laserdiscs and more DVDs. I wound up pulling out Bob Le Flambeur and Sunshine and walked them over to the counter. The pop was on the other side.
"Do you have an account?"
"I don't know, it's been a while."
"What's the last name?"
"C*********"
"Oh yeah! I thought I recognized you! How are you? How are your parents?"
With that, we wound up talking, about what happened to my family after we left for Canada and how my parents moved back but settled in the East Bay, how my brother's still around, but he doesn't rent a lot of movies anymore.
"Probably joined Netflix," he said dismissively, heavy resignation in his tone.
"Well, Netflix doesn't follow me when I work, so I need to rent a couple of movies for those quiet nights at the hotel."
"True. So, your father's credit card on this account expired in 2002, but if you want to give me a new card, then I can re-open it."
"You sure? You know I'm only going to be here for a week or so. If I forget, it might be a pain to get the Flambeur disc back."
"Chino, I know your family. I know you all are good for it."
It does get harder to remember these things as the years go by.