Nora rode a Raleigh bike. It was black and basic—three gears, hand brakes, a pump for the inevitable punctures. A gray leatherette bag hung from the handlebars. Every day or every other day she’d ride into town for “messages.“She would return with some muttonchops and rashers, the day’s provisions, staples and necessities, ten Woodbines for Tommy, Maguire & Patterson matches, and a newspaper. The spuds and onions and cabbage all came from the haggard out the back door beyond the whitethorn trees. The eggs came fresh from her own hens. Bread she made—plump loaves of soda bread, crossed like a good Catholic, baked in her covered cast-iron pot with turf coals on the bottom and on top. Milk was their business. Every now and then she’d kill a goose.

But it was that trope, “going for messages,”—not marketing, not shopping—that best described the difference between the “custom” in West Clare and “consumers” in Michigan.

…

By then in America we went to “super” markets for the stuff that filled the back of cars with a month’s provisions and spent the time at the checkout watching the charges as the clerk rang them up, or rummaging for the coupons, or sighing in commiseration with our fellow shoppers and sellers fro whom the transactions had become just work, just getting it—the money and the stuff. In trade for “messages” we got discounts, “paper or plastic?” and “have a nice day,” all in the one monotony of corporate good manners. The market is common, global, and dull. We buy in bulk, bank by machine, and couldn’t care less about the name on the sign. More and more, we point and click our way past any human interaction.
…

Nora came home the long road from Kilkee with a small bag of things—a day’s worth of perishables, a night’s worth of news—her messages. We return bulging with our bags and boxes of stuff—our newer faster brighter bigger better-than-ever-right-priced stuff—laden and empty, grim and wordless.

—Thomas Lynch, Booking Passage

For the first time in what seems like months, Twin Peaks is unblurred by the fog. I’ve missed its humps, which last night were as sharp as my reply to my mother when she asked—again—if the weather was hot in California. (I was instantly sorry, but didn’t say.)

I walk up brown Bernal Hill and look down over the city, out to Golden Gate Bridge and the Marin Headlands, and over to Twin Peaks again on the left. The first Bay Bridge carries people to Target and IKEA. Next to it, the second Bay Bridge is still a disappointed pier. The other major landmarks, or maybe timemarks, are two giant billboards, one pink, one blue. In silhouette, a man and a woman fling their arms in solo bliss, a mile or two apart on Highway 101. They are slender, oblivious, and plugged up. I want to rip them both down, but instead I strike an aerial X through each one, and skip to the next John Prine song on my own goddamn Shuffle. We are mistaken, the iPod ciphers and I. The yellow labrador and the Maltese sniffing each other’s arses by the park bench have it right.

At the bottom of the hill, where the freeways tangle, the Bernal Farmers’ Market gathers every Saturday. You can buy heirloom tomatoes for $3 a pound from the white farmers, or disposable tomatoes for fifty cents from the Mexican growers. The Vietnamese sell flats of duck and quail eggs, and knocked-up chicken eggs. There are lemon cucumbers and cling peaches and honeycombs and tamales, and Vietnamese herbs “for diabetes.” It’s a hike to get there, over the hill, but I like to watch people getting excited about vegetables.

Charles the baker has a stand next to a man in an orange turban who pushes his overpriced Sukhi’s chutneys so hard that I don’t go near him any more. Beside him, Charles is still, even a little forbidding. I watch him as middle-aged women wave at the racks of breads and ask for “one of those.”
“Which one?” he asks, and they don’t notice the tiny edge, frayed from hours of vague demands. I try to have my order right, and ready.

But he took a shine to me a while back, and each time now he surprises me with a sudden smile and a yard of flattery. “Where have you been?” he asks, and makes me wonder. Where have I been? Not doing the good stuff—scribbling, seeing pals, cooking food bought from other human beings who grew or baked it. I ask him for a loaf of black olive bread, because even though he’s chatty now, I don’t want to hold up the line.

Charles says he’s the only seller at the market who lives in San Francisco. Everyone else drives in from the Central Valley farms before dawn. He has a bakery over on the other side of town; I’m not sure where. His olive bread is good enough for Bernal, but truth be told, it makes me miss the loaves that Caputo’s on Court Street sold out of by noon—the ones Nicholas Cage dripped sweat on in Moonstruck. But the Brooklyn Italian bakers were surly, and Charles makes me feel like more of a hot young thing than I’ve felt since I used to gatecrash the geriatric nudist camp for morning swims with Tim.

He wraps the loaf and says I look beautiful today. “Damn, girl, you got some kind of portrait in the attic?” I realize Charles thinks I look great for 47. Then I scrabble in my bag and tell him, worriedly, that I think I’ve forgotten my wallet and I’ll just go back home and pick it up and maybe come back later for the bread. He shakes his head, cocks an eyebrow, and hands me the loaf. I wave it off, mortified.
“Take the bread,” he says. “It’s four dollars. You can give it to me next time. That way you’ll come back.” I hem and haw, and take the bread. “Do you have more shopping to do at the market?”
“Em…”
“Do you have more shopping to do? Yes or no?” I hear his tiny edge again and admit that I do. He reaches into his cash box and hands me a twenty. “Here you go, sweetheart. Now go on, and eat that bread when you get home. You got skinny since you last came by.”

I stuff the bread and the gratitude and the goddamn white earbuds into my rucksack, and nose around to see what else looks good today. The egg man with the aviator glasses packs six white and brown ones in a paper bag of straw. The fruit lady offers bruised peaches for ten cents off. A woman with a basket of baby aubergines shares her ratatouille recipe. I tot up how far Charles’ cash will get me if I buy the Mission figs. I’ve made the same happy calculations in Bangkok and Lima, Chiapas and Hanoi, but never in the swipe-your-loyalty-card Safeway at the other side of the hill. At the farmers’ market, no one has shopping lists. That’s because markets are conversations.

I’m a new customer at Bank of America. Though Citibank has bought billboards all over San Francisco to advertise their unsettling belief that money isn’t important, they have only one or two actual branches. This forces me to use other banks’ ATM machines, for which I get charged two dollars. Still, I stayed loyal until they turned me down for a small overdraft facility with a form letter that said, in block capitals, ‘YOU ARE NOT A PERMANENT LEGAL RESIDENT.’ Yes, I’d noticed. It hadn’t stopped them giving me an automatic overdraft for years, which I’d never even used.

Feeling rejected, I walked across the street from my office and opened an account at Bank of America. This branch exuded ugliness, from the low, dark building, to the ancient, grubby Windows terminals, to the tacky welcome kit. Though I missed Citibank’s shiny ATMs, pride kept me there even as the terminal crashed three times on the young Relationship Manager who was setting up my account. “Your first check will take three weeks to clear,” she said. That seemed fair enough.

Then I tried to confirm receipt of the credit card and debit card that arrived two weeks later.(They are almost identical, and butt-ugly. I’m not sure how customers with poor eyesight are supposed to manage.) On two separate calls, I had to sit through a six-minute pitch for an identity theft protection ‘service,’ which I didn’t want. There was no indication that my card had been confirmed until right at the end, so each time I was trapped with a robot huckster. “Welcome to Bank of America,” she lied.

Then I went to the branch and deposited a pair of checks. Since I was a new customer, the teller told me, they were going to place a ‘Hold’ on them for three weeks. I asked how long this policy would apply, and he consulted a more senior employee. I’d be on ‘probation’ for six months, she explained.

Probation? These people are getting automatic delivery of my paycheck.

I told the poor young clerks that these experiences were not what I’d hoped for as a new customer. They looked stricken. ‘We can’t do anything. Corporate doesn’t listen to us. Maybe if customers told them they’d do something, but we have no way to tell them. Maybe you should try to find out who to complain to.’ They had no idea who that might be. “Corporate?” they bleated.

Bank of America, are you listening? You’re toast.

My Friday evening taxi driver was a 56-year-old woman with waist-long blonde hair. She had rambled up and down California since she was nineteen, apart from a few stints in Hawai’i and Oregon. Did I ever go a Renaissance Fayre? Or Burning Man?
“Oh wow,” she said, as we sat a red light. “Look at that block with the trees. There aren’t enough trees in San Francisco. It nourishes my soul to see them. I could paint those, with the tops of those two Victorians and then the trees. I’m learning to paint, and it’s teaching me to see things that other people don’t see. I feel the world is becoming special to me again, and me to it. I think I’m going to sell some paintings at Renaissance Fayre…”

California’s hippie boomers seem to be forever addressing the mommy who asked about their day over milk and cookies.
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Ten years ago, I experienced the internet only through paper. It was reverently capitalized back then, like the Electric or the Motor-Car, and for those who visit but don’t yet live there, it still is.

I was working at Hodges Figgis bookshop in Dublin while my future ex-husband finished his thesis on delivering video through noisy channels. I’d had little chance to use computers, and was hazy about his post-graduate research. When I found the first issue of Wired, it didn’t occur to me it might have any connection to his work. Wired burbled with the promise of this World Wide Web, and I pored over it with the fizz of discovery, even though the typography was maddening. More than once I had to trace with my finger some distressed fuschia font as it wobbled from a lime-green background to the purple overleaf. I felt like a dyslexic with a treasure map.
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Discovery Channel viewers have picked a shortlist of the five greatest Americans of all time. It’s one of those memes that starts on the BBC or the CBC and spreads to US television, like The Weakest Link or those LiveJournal “If you were a bodily fluid, which one would you be?” exercises. This particular soap opera is sponsored by Tide.

The top five does not include Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Edison, Frankln D. Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, or Mark Twain.

It does, however, include Ronald Reagan.

Another valentine to engineers as writers: today I got my favorite-ever subject line for an email birth announcement, and a photo that didn’t topple my mailbox. Welcome, Milo Smith! Live long and prosper.

As a kid, I worried about Santa Claus’s feelings. For weeks—months—he was all we thought about and talked about. We laboured over letters with our tongues stuck out, explaining that we would please like a Ballerina Sindy Clear Casters a selection box and a surprise please. We listened to the radio on Christmas Eve, dying to hear Santy read our names. That night, excitement edged towards panic as the hours refused to get out of the way. Then—sandy-eyed after bad sleep—the breathless unwrapping. What is it? What is it? Strap-on rollerskates. Here’s the Sindy. A Timex watch! And Clear Casters? No, the selection box. (Disappointment.)

And as the wrapping paper piled up, Santy disappeared from our consciousness, like a porn star after the money shot. We stood ready to catalogue our swag: “Was Santy good to you?” the aunties would ask. “What d’ya get?” said the other kids, jostling to compare. But beyond that, we didn’t give him a thought. No reports, no thank yous. No more being-good-for-Santy. Stupid old stupidhead forgot the batteries again, anyway.
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In Ireland, we didn’t get to prove our “scholastic aptitude” with a multiple-choice test of our parents’ ability to pay for Kaplan prep. Instead we faced the Leaving Certificate, a national examination that would, we sincerely believed, determine everything in our future except the color of the curtains.

For two years we consumed seven subjects. Over a June fortnight, we regurgitated this knowledge into thirty hours worth of essays and proofs. The first day, we might dispatch Yeats, Scott Fitzgerald, George Eliot, and Shakespeare for good, and then choose from a list of titles the last original essay composition we would ever write. The next day, we would think about calculus, trigonometry, and quadratic equations—intensely, for six hours, and for the very last time.

Our results—graded on a national curve—were converted to points, which could be traded for college places. Five points for an A, four points for a B, and so on. These were totted up by a computer in Athlone, which existed in our minds as a Borg, a god, and an oracle in one. This Central Application Office computer already held the ranked college choices we had sent off months earlier. Under this system, we applied not just for a college but for particular courses at that college, and entry requirements shifted every year with demand. No school plays or humanitarian awards could sway the calculations of the Borg; only the Leaving counted.

Like democracy, it was the worst possible system, except for all the others. In a small country, high school credits and college interviews would have turned into a riot of patronage. The Leaving Cert was rigorous, anonymous, and required some thinking as well as regurgitation. The shared ordeal bonded each cohort forever. Unlike our English neighbors with their narrow A levels, we weren’t forced to choose too early between science and arts, or languages and business subjects. But nor were we encouraged to read much beyond our textbooks, or to distract ourselves with the Enrichment Activities with which our American counterparts were lining their résumés. Our main Enrichment Activity—apart from underage drinking—was studying for the Leaving, with its promise of a college place leading to a good job. That fitted a country that had been in recession since we were babies. The Leaving favored those freaks among us who enjoy exams and have good handwriting, but even for us it was miserable.
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A day out with Tim usually involves some combination of getting dirty, eating soul food, trespassing, scrambling, decayed waterfront, poison oak, housing projects, bushwhacking, and a canoe. This life has taken a toll on his car, a 1991 Honda Accord station wagon, which was once admired by the Puerto Rican kids as a potential lowrider, but is now beneath their attention. The windshield is cracked. The rear-end has been replaced with a slightly different shade of charcoal, after a disagreement with a garbage trailer up at Lake Superior. The color doesn’t quite camouflage the caked mud and dust from its daily commute up a dirt road. Strewn inside are all the necessaries—canoe and kayak paddles, firewood, mosquito netting, tools for fixing the car’s many problems, bags of laundry, dozens of magazines, pads and ropes and bungee cords, oil, coffee mugs, and several changes of clothing. There is often a canoe strapped to the roof, in case the Ontario plates don’t explain enough. It is unstealable.
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