Dad signals the end of his nap with an announcement. “I’ll have a cup of tea,” he says. He doesn’t trouble to open his eyes for this request, and so his womenfolk tease him like Pegeen Mikes.

It’s hard not to delight in my parents’ delight in being on holiday, which is based on walks, treats, naps, and wine. Eleven o’clock is latte time. There are no Starbucks in Limerick yet, but there’s one at the end of my sister’s block in the Glebe, and they love it.

By going to the same place at the same time every day we deal with our most pronounced family trait: indecision. At least until we get there. Starbucks is hard for us, with its made-up sizes and milk varietals. Though Mum has taught generations of Senior Infants to sort big-bigger-biggest, she has trouble with tall-grande-venti, let alone misto-mocha-macchiato, or dry foam. We all do. We mill around the register, getting in the way, then blurting half-formed choices before our shared fear of the service industry drives us out. While the baristas quiz us, we squabble about who gets to pay. The pleasure of the coffee is always tinged by someone’s regret that they didn’t order what they really wanted. Today, we swap what we have to match coffees with hopes. Tomorrow, we’ll know exactly what to ask for…

The Glebe is full of babies and children. On weekday mornings the jog-strollers are lined up outside Starbucks, their big off-road tires signalling some kind of pediatric biker gang. These babas were born to a millennium that gives them the run of the place.

My sister’s new house is a glass-walled beauty, all Corian and cheekbones. Though it sits back discreetly from the red-brickery of the Glebe, it has caught the attention of the neighbors in the year or so it’s been going up. They stare frankly. They want to know how much it cost. They tot the price of the stained oak and brushed steel that gets carried in. They want to know what “he” does.

We know this because “he”—my sister’s guy—works alongside the contractors hired and led by his brother-in-law, George. As Glen steadies bricks or carries sheets of glass he hears and fuels the speculation. One day he’s Head of Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins. The next he’s a retired hockey player from the Russian leagues. Later, he claims that it’s bought with an advance on my sister’s trust fund; a rumor that makes my schoolteacher parents beam. Mortgages are so dull, and Ottawa needs glamour.

Over the back wall lives a shirtless crank who keeps a broken-down school bus, an oven, a badly-crashed car, and a mound of tires in his yard. He scowls and sunbathes, facing the oven as if for extra spring warmth. Every six months, Glen says, he puts his heart and soul into starting that school bus. By driving it up the block and back in front of the city inspectors, he wins the right to keep it as a “working vehicle.”

A doleful, cat-sized creature paces Claire’s tiny yard, seemingly puzzled by the fence. It has a flat nose, and a band of flattened fur around its middle suggests it’s been run over by a bicycle. It peers at the fence, confused as a sleepwalker, then shuffles to another spot to peer some more. What we know of North American animals we learned from Chuck Jones cartoons, and this one we haven’t seen. Gopher? Possum? Prairie dog? We rule out porcupine, armadillo, and coyote before Glen’s father tells us it’s a groundhog, shedding its winter coat. “I thought they’d be smaller,” Dad says, “Hamster-sized.” After that, we notice groundhogs everywhere, curled up on the verges like Moscow hats discarded for the spring.

Every day we walk the length of the Rideau Canal. My parents stride ahead, discussing whether to move to the Senior Living apartment complex in the Glebe, while Claire and I trot behind as if we were still short-legged kids. I’ve never met anyone whould could match their walking pace, and now that they’re outfitted with new sneakers and windbreakers from the local running shop, there’s no catching them. We survive only because a canal march has to include “a cheeky little beer,” or another “milky coffee,” or a beaver tail. Usually all three.

In the Black Tomato café, the receipts itemize “Dalton’s Tax”—for Dalton McGinty, the Ontario premier-and “Stephen’s Tax”—Harper, the new prime minister. Mum wants to go to a Tim Horton’s, but Claire steers her away, which is a shame. You can’t understand Canada until TimBits float in your blood. I might even have taught her to ask for fifteen TimBits, just to see what would happen. Rumor has it that in certain outlets, that gets you a bag of weed with your donut holes—more Canadian a combination than poutine and Red River Cereal.

The Ottawa spring is undecided. On alternate days it tries out gray bluster, then marrow-warming sunshine. The natives are hedging—fleeces on top, and bare, pedicured toes. Even at 70 degrees, snow is still stacked along the tow-path, and Claire describes winter nights when bar buddies confiscated ice-skates from friends too drunk to glide home. Drug tests. Skate-commuting seems magical to me. I think it would make me feel like a pink-cheeked Jesus to slide down that canal.

Mum is affronted that the tulips haven’t bloomed yet. The Netherlands sends thousands of bulbs every year to thank Canada for liberating the Dutch at the end of the Second World War. Their royal family had taken refuge in Ottawa, and when Queen Margarethe was born the delivery ward was designated temporary Dutch territory so that she would be a full citizen. In the War Museum, there’s a wall-sized photo of Canadian veterans parading in Amsterdam fifty years after their first visit. They look amazed at the young girls who offer them tulips.

It’s two and a half years since I lived in Canada. Two quick April visits—to Vancouver and Ottawa—have made me miss it more, though I still can’t bear Leah McLaren, and I’ve never been able to finish an article on their parliamentary politics. Before I headed back to San Francisco, Claire handed me a bag of papers I’d left in her basement. It’s my laborious application for Canadian residency, almost complete. There are letters from the local sergeant in Patrickswell, from the FBI, and from the Metropolitan Police in London, attesting that no record of my criminal tendencies can be found. There are letter-headed notes from people who admit to having employed me. My college transcripts prove I have unsaleable skills in medieval literature. A certificate from Montreal grades my French as intermediate-advanced. (And for a slow-witted seven-year-old, maybe it is.) I’d filled out a family tree, and accounted for my whereabouts every month of my adult life.

My parents don’t much care for the idea of California, with its earthquakes, SUVs, and fool of a president. They’re pro-Canada. They think it would be a good place for me. As they ask, delicately, what I might like to do with that visa application, I think how hard it must be to go from ordaining how many peas a kid has to eat to earn dessert, to wondering how to suggest that a whole other country might suit that grown kid better. I’m grateful for their grace.

Crotchfruit, n., a child or children. (Often derogatory.)

As punishment for irregularities with her Canadian visa and seventeen previous lifetimes of evildoing, my sister is substitute-teaching in our home town. Unlike San Franciscans, Irish breeders are keeping up the numbers.
   “I taught 30 four-year-old crotchfruits today,” she wrote. “They were ick. They kept wanting to hold my hand. And I think one of them had a yeast infection; she kept scratching herself.”

I passed on this touching story to my co-worker, L.
    “Crotchfruitflies?” she speculated.

She moved to Paris because she loved nineteenth-century French composers, but they no longer walked the streets. Instead she was surrounded by hard-faced Parisians who didn’t speak Greek, and would not have spoken to her if they did. Though the smog in Athens had made her throat itch, she missed the sun. In Paris the sky sat low and pearly, like a Tupperware lid. She had no one to talk to, but every day she sang, and the silenced chatter purified her scales. Being a ghost herself—raw, invisible, and unmoored—made her still more grateful to the composers who consoled her. She took in air and let out music. She visited Bizet’s grave and thanked him, fervently, because his art had given her hers.

On the way home from Pere Lachaise, she didn’t even see the boy stepping onto her métro carriage. There were so many people—always so many people—and she was picturing the yellow score of Carmen and tapping the notes on her knee. The knife was at her throat before she saw his face. He said something—in French, she couldn’t understand—and in a pure instant she knew that she, too, would die by the knife.

She filled her lungs for a last aria; the song as instinctive as the breath and the adrenaline. Her voice soared through the carriage as she called to God in mother Greek.
“ I am coming to you. I am coming home,” she sang. Kyrie. Looking into her killer’s eyes, she saw God, and raised her song. The music was outside her, and it wrapped her in peace. God’s face turned slack and grey. The train door opened. God dropped the knife, and ran.

The other passengers, the hard-faced Parisians who had stared ahead throughout her hymn, clapped and laughed like babies who’d been thrown and caught.

[Thanks to Nicolas for the bones of this story. Phone cards]

I’d make a good nun, I think, as long as they’d let me sleep with men once in a while, or at least drink a glass of wine with the best ones. There’s a convent in Arequipa, Peru where the colors alone might convince me of God, and the design patterns laid down in 400 years of domesticity would make up for hard beds. I go there sometimes, during meetings.

By night I’d be a modern Heloise; all wimpled yearning and philosophy. By day, I’d bring my San Francisco consulting chops to the hard-nosed business of contemplation. Through those efforts, and divine co-marketing, The Little Sisters of Perpetual Innovation would find fame with hand-churned chocolate body paint, and artisanal wikis.

Classic Eames lounger and ottoman – $xxx (haight ashbury)
Reply to: sale-131113385@craigslist.org
Date: 2006-02-03, 10:09PM PST
I have a classic Eames lounger and ottoman for sale. Bought it from dwr for xxx. Will take xxx for it. Was a gift but can not afford to have such luxuries. cherry finish with black leather. in perfect condition. rarely used. * This item has been posted by-owner.

• no — it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

The orange sofa was demoted to the kitchen when we moved to the new house. Although it was born in the seventies, the shade wasn’t that 1970s burnt-orange, exactly; it was more the marmalade tan of old Florida ladies. Its leathery skin had crackled, and it sagged. It was homely.

You could drape yourself across the top, and then roll-flop down onto the cushions, like a sea-lion cub. The back would support timid headstands, and while you lolled upside down you could pull fluff from its (belly)buttons. Or—and this was what I liked best—you could burrow into the left-hand corner, safely sandbagged by the wide leather arm that came up to a seven-year-old’s chest. That’s where I sat for hours with Enid Blyton for company. In spite of all the scoldings for reading in the dark, my shoulders are still rounded from those winter afternoons.

I read about The Enchanted Forest and The Wishing Chair. “Mollie and Peter have a thrilling secret. The chair in their playroom is a magic Wishing Chair. When they sit in it and wish, it grows wings and takes them on lots of exciting adventures.” When they finished their adventures, I’d turn back to the beginning and start them again—chewing strips of the pulpy paper as I went.

My grown-up sofas have not been squashy. I own two: both built for two, and neither built for lounging. Over the last year, it began to occur to me that I live alone, and that I might like to lounge once in a while. A chair arose in answer. It would have arm rests broad enough to balance notebooks and cups of tea; low enough to keep my typing elbows free; soft enough to pad my bony arms. There would be a place to drape my legs. When I sat down each evening, the chair would remember me like an old lover. From this chair, I could gaze out at Twin Peaks and the Golden Gate Bridge, or watch a whole season of Six Feet Under in a single weekend. It would grow wings and fly me to the woods to talk to pixies when things got rough.

I tried out friends’ favorite chairs: La-Z-Boys and Saarinen wombs; Jennifer Leather and IKEA. Either they looked good or they felt good. Then Keith let me sit in his vintage Eames lounger. He claimed it was the best chair for nursing, though he lacked the boobs to be convincing. Still, the old baseball mitt was a comforting cradle, and it was the first seat in years that made me want to reach for an Enid Blyton. (In chairs, as in music, my tastes are those of a middle-aged man.) I dug out Charles and Ray Eames’s exasperated letter to Henry Ford, and remembered how likeable they were.

I started to type their name into Craigslist every few days; another idle surfing tic. There was a lot of junk. Like “web 2.0,” “eames” is now a code for raising cash. Every swindler with a particle-board bookcase adds “eames herman miller midcentury” just to bump the search results. After eight months I found Truong’s ad for an Eames lounger, several days after he’d posted it. I guessed it was gone, but a few days later I got a terse reply. The first guy had flaked. He would show the chair to the next three people at 10am on Wednesday, and the first one with cash could take it. I explained that I had the cash, but had to be at work at 10. After several exchanges, he relented, and let me come early.

I thought about his post as I biked up Haight Street, lungs bursting: his frank (stern?) admission “can not afford to have such luxuries;” the chair for sprawling that was “rarely used.” Why did I think a chair was worth a month’s rent? Did I think I could sprawl more than “rarely?” I pictured a tough-minded Vietnamese accountant who would barely hide his distaste for my American self-indulgence.

But of all things, Truong was a poet. His bay-windowed apartment was stuffed with furniture that would have looked good in the modernist Reunification Palace in Saigon. He sold pieces from time to time to raise cash for poem-writing. He showed me his books. “Are you a dealer?” he asked, and was pleased when he learned the chair was for me. I wanted to ask him about Vietnam phone cards, but instead we talked about poetry. Poets always seem surprised to meet punters who read poetry—most don’t themselves, as far as I can make out.

A few weeks later, my friend Kevin helped me pick up the chair his truck, on a night when I was so frazzled that I left my bag at the office and he had to pay my taxi-driver off. He carried my chair up the stairs and then left us alone. I sat down and swung my legs up, and the cool leather unfrazzled me. I burrowed in and read Truong’s poems.

A chair should feel like home. A chair should have some history. This one does. Now I’m waiting for it to get its wings.

yes the stories are at times overwhelming but would i stop listening the answer is no for without the stories there would be no history and without the history there would be no people where then would i be if not for the acronym the oddity the visitor the native
—Truong Tran

Schmerzescheissekandynacht

The late-night sadness of seeing from 20 paces that the office candy jar has been refilled with despised black licorice, when the planned high point of one’s day was grabbing a handful of Werther’s butterscotch to eat in the elevator on the way down to the underground bike parking cage—a sadness compounded by the knowledge that nobody else likes the black licorice either, so it will be there for many nights to come.

Freudentelefonikageist

The small moment of delight in getting voicemail, not a person.

Schadenbloggenstille

The disappointment of checking one’s RSS reader to note that one has not updated one’s own blog.

Kumulusverklempt

The strong desire to bounce on, roll around in, and possible eat, the bed of fluffy clouds beneath one on an airplane.

Kinodietrichzeit

The inability to enjoy a movie until one has established who that character reminds one of.

*Crediting the great Merlin Mann.

“We don’t have the shields here like they have in New York,” says Joe. Not the plexiglass variety, anyhow. His arm is draped over the passenger seat and he keeps turning right around to talk to me, as if he’s backing up, or we’re having brunch. But we’re not backing up. Nor are we having brunch, though it’s Sunday morning. He’s driving me to work down Folsom Street, which is smooth as a desert highway at this hour.

“Driving cabs is mostly pretty safe,” he says, with his back to the oncoming traffic. Some years ago there was a spate of armed robberies, but they’ve had little trouble since the drivers took care of ten or a dozen guys, he says. I ask, cautiously, what that means.

“There was one guy, Blackie, he was a legend. He picked up a guy at the Greyhound Station once; guy was acting funny from the minute he gets in. They’re a few blocks away when he pulls a gun. Okay, okay, says Blackie, and makes like he’s getting out his wallet. But he has a clamshell holster under his arm.”

Joe slides his left hand across his chest, then cocks two fingers at the empty seat beside me. “Shoots the guy right through the seat. He drives round the block straight back to the Greyhound Station, dumps the body in front of the guy’s buddies, and stuffs the Red Cab receipt in his mouth. ‘Anyone else need that kind of a ride?’ he says, and they’re just sta-a-aring at him. So he says, ‘Tell the cops I’m at the Black Crow.’”

Blackie got off. Word got around that drivers would radio each other and hunt guys down. Word got around that there were easier pickings than cab-drivers.

“These days it’s quiet. We have the camera right here,” he says, tapping the little eye above the rearview mirror. “If someone gets in and they’re acting strange, got the hood pulled down over their face or something, there’s a button I can push on the door handle to take another twelve photos. Anything worse, I’ve got a panic button between the gas and the brake. We got GPS in all the cars now, so they know where I am.”

There are a lot more women driving cabs these days, he says. “It’s not a bad job for them, especially during the day. You get a run of good fares, and by that I mean in the nine- to twelve-dollar range, you can pull down four hundred bucks on a long shift. Flexible. Not too much trouble.”

“Your drunken Irish brothers are okay, colleen,” he says, craning around. When he smiles it’s plain our faces have borrowed features from the same drawer. “They just get in and say, ‘I’m drunk, mate, I won’t give you trouble, just take me home and if I have to puke I’ll let you know.’ You know where you are with them. It’s the Marina yuppies the cabdrivers don’t like. I won’t pick up anyone at Bush and Gough after eleven at night. First they’ll hold the door open and say their friend is on his way out—and you know he’s in there still throwing up his beer or hitting on some woman who’s not interested. Then they finally get in, and they want to go three blocks to an ATM. Then they want to go another two blocks to some pizza place with a line out the door. They want to drop someone off. And when they finally go home, it’s maybe six blocks total of a fare. They wonder why the taxis keep passing them by…”

I tell him about the rates posted in Dublin taxis. It’s $35 to go to the airport, and $75 if you puke up your paycheck. Typed up and laminated, though not in those words. The drivers shrug. It just pays for the cleaning, not for the loss of a night’s business, and so they hope the barfers and the bleeders stay away at least until the end of a shift. Nobody seems to think it’s odd that there’s a standardized charge for getting too pissed to hold your dinner.

He asks my favorite Irish bar, and when I can’t name one, he prompts. The Dubliner? The 32 Counties? The Oscar Wilde? Perhaps to make me feel at home, he starts a tangled story about meeting an old IRA guy and his sister in a raw juice bar on Haight, and I become convinced he’s talking about Jimmy Smits from Law & Order. It’s a familiar feeling, holding up a slippery conversation with smiles and nods, and for a moment I pretend I’m back on the road in Peru rather than heading to an office in SoMa.

“You know, sometimes people get in, and they have no idea where they’re going,” says Joe. “I picked up this one guy, he says, ‘I want to do a round trip.’ No problem, I say, where to? And he gets all mad. ‘Here, of course, where do you think, I said round trip.’ Well, I tell him, sir, I think you’re already here. “Oh,” he says, and gets out. Twenty per cent of the time, people act surprised to find themselves in a cab. I swear, it didn’t cross their mind until they saw a taxi that they wanted to go anywhere. And these are normal, ordinary people. Just acting on impulse.”

He’s been driving cabs for twenty-five years. “I love it,” he says. “People tell me stuff.”

Inside the door of Marks & Spencers on Grafton Street, four ladies stopped by the jumpers for a break from Christmas shopping.

“How many have you at home now, Mary?”

“Two and a half. Andrew’s mostly gone, but he’s a bit fond of coming back for dinner and the washing.”

“God, it’s hard to shift them, isn’t it?”

“My eldest was 31 when he got married. I said to him, you’re not Jesus Christ. You don’t have to live with your mammy this long.”

“Should pretty boys in discos
Distract you from your novel
Remember I’m awful
In love with you.Come back from San Francisco
It can’t be all that pretty
When all of New York City
Misses you”

—The Magnetic Fields, “Come Back From San Francisco“

“INFORMATION GLADLY GIVEN, BUT SAFETY REQUIRES AVOIDING UNNCESSARY CONVERSATION.”
—San Francisco MUNI bus system sign

I moved from New York to California a year ago today. It was raining when I got here, and it’s raining today. The address of my temporary corporate housing was Saint Francis Place, but that wasn’t what anybody called the street, and so I spent the ride from Oakland Airport squinting not at my new hometown skyline but at its paper representation on the map my Meetup friends had given me. I traced and retraced the length of Third Street, and couldn’t find where I was going.

“Saint Francis Place. Don’t you know where that is?” The taxi-driver’s friend; the over-tipper who coaxes confidences on their hopes and fears for our adopted country, was now crabby with anxiety.

It was after midnight when we found the apartment complex. The sign outside read “Live the Downtown Life. Love the Suburban Feeling.” I staggered up the steps with twice the JetBlue baggage allowance; and not all of it in my suitcases. The concierge didn’t take her eyes off the TV as she handed over the credit-card key.

Eighteen hours earlier, on the other side of the continent, Gus of Tom’s Diner had fussed over my last Brooklyn breakfast. I shared it, googly-eyed, with a man I had met on the evening shift at a crisis hotline not long before. Between calls I’d listened to him soothe people in trouble, and his tone and dimples were enough to make me shuffle hopefully while he packed up. Oh, are you walking to the subway too?

He lived in Fort Greene, my favorite Brooklyn neighborhood, a Q Train fact that made me as woozy as a Meg Ryan ditz. He’d played bass in a band I remembered from my Boston days. He was a reformed advertising man, now a trainee therapist. He read good books, ran trails, and called his family.
“Can you…make things and fix them?” I asked him; an absurd and primitive measure of manliness that has somehow taken root in spite—or because of—my own lack of interest in the tangible. He used to be a carpenter, he said. He was American. It had never occurred to me that your chosen person could be from the inside, not the periphery. I tried to explain what it meant to be from the outside. “We like the same music,” I babbled to my best friend, though I had already faxed a signed contract for a new job to San Francisco.

We didn’t have much time to merge stories. Over breakfasts at Tom’s Diner we told and retold our short story—what he had thought when we first met; what I had thought; what he had said to his friends; what I had said. We compared a few weeks’ impressions, shaping “I” into “we” as quickly as we could. I moved my flight to San Francisco out another four days. We grinned into a cameraphone in my emptied apartment: look, we existed.

The movers had packed my coats, and I was swamped in his borrowed sweaters when we walked to Prospect Park a year ago today. It was so cold my face froze, the more so because we couldn’t stop smiling. My teeth hurt, but it only made me grin more; gazing like a newborn in the nearly-empty snowfield. We jog-trotted back to Fort Greene, whooping against the cold. Then he dialled a car service—Atlantic Avenue to Queens; Friday rush hour. We said goodbye beside the shoeshine stand at JFK.

(My mother says that my first real word, after the “dada-baba-mama” pleasantries, was “perfection.” Someone nearby said it, and I grabbed onto a guiding principle. It might as well have been “methamphetamine,” for all the promise of lasting contentment that it held. For those of us crippled by ideals, love is most possible when it’s already circumscribed by departure, or safely past.)

New York had a blizzard last weekend, while I sat outside at an Ocean Beach beer garden with friends from Limerick. The wind has picked up again in San Francisco, and the local radio presenters warn us to bundle up and bring the pets inside.
“Brr! It’s a cold one.” But it’s 45 degrees. In place of February bitching about dog-shitsicles and slush puddles, we have California’s enforced sunniness.

Like the range of weather, the scope of my life is smaller here, and dampened. Maybe it’s because I’m still new in town, or at the age when the breeders hunker down. Maybe it’s because consulting doesn’t leave much room to collect all the stories and people in this city.

Last Sunday I walked to work, up over Bernal Hill, then over Potrero Hill and down to the bay on Third Street. It was t-shirt warm, but even on beautiful days San Francisco has a way of seeming empty—car-rich and flesh-poor—and there were no walkers but me on the waterfront. I was watching the alcoholics fish in front of a giant cruise ship and thinking of Red Hook when a white stretch Hummer pulled up beside me. The driver leaned out.
“Are you lost? Do you need a ride?” he said. I said no thank-you, and smiled. I’m protected from all kinds of craziness and help by a reflexive refusal of support. “Are you sure?” he said, shaking his head, “It’s an awful long way from here to there, wherever that is.” It is.