BAY AREA CHRISTMAS

New Year’s having come and gone, this is a bit tardy, but that’s life these days.  As is the new norm, our house no longer hosts these gatherings.  It’s much easier for the two of us to travel to the boyos/girlos than for all of them to come down here.  Easier to put up two than five as well.  So, I worked my usual black arts on stuffing packing the V, shoehorned Mom (who really lights up for the holidays) and Loni into their seats amidst the extra packages, and we were off for the Bay Area on Christmas Eve Day.  Going up (and, worse, down) the Grapevine on I-5 sent my sinusitis-filled head south, and I couldn’t hear for the first hour up the Valley.  We made our usual break at the overpriced (but undeniably good) Harris Ranch.  The problem with this place is that I eat so much that I get sleepy about a half-hour of driving later.  I was concerned that this might be a high-volume travel day, but it turned out to be fairly free-flowing until we got to the 580.  Even then, our stop-and-start didn’t last too long.  Our drives seem to go faster these days as we’ve begun listening to books on CD’s that we borrow from the library.  They always have to be rather simple, as we’d just get lost with anything serious.  A couple of Agatha Christie’s did the trick this time. 

Mike and Alia were hosting Christmas, and Alia’s parents were staying with them, so I had made reso’s for our favorite budget motel, the Rodeway Inn on University Avenue in Bezerkeley.  With school out, their reasonable prices were even lower over the holidays.  We were only minutes away from M&A’s place in north Oakland, so it worked out just fine.  Best of all was the off-street free parking with wide spaces!

Mike and Alia did a great job on the tree, and we added our packages to the pile-o-loot that was massed under it.  An embarrassing haul, but what the heck.  The best present for us was just being there with everyone.  Being 400 miles away is tough on getting together, but makes it that much sweeter when we do.

Alia’s parents, Lynn and Bill (at rear), have a Christmas tradition of eating out on Christmas Eve for food that is different from what would be eaten on the feast on Christmas Day.  That usually translates to Chinese, so we all trooped off to a place in adjacent Rockridge that served a lot of unusual (to me, anyway) dishes, all of which were very good and definitely miles away from our Christmas dinner of roast beast.  M&A are lucky to live in an area with numerous excellent restaurants within walking distance.  Christmas day we gathered to open presents in the morning (that’s Chili, one of M&A’s two cats, in the foreground).  John and Meghan were hosting her sister’s family, including the twins, so they stayed at their place to open gifts, and joined us later for the dinner.  Mike made the mistake of telling everyone that he needed sweaters and I think he got a dozen.  I got a much-appreciated collection of Hercule Poirot stories and a nifty Leatherman tool, for which I’m still trying to decipher the many functions.  Think Swiss Army knife on steroids.  Mom got a book about the Waves in WWII, which she dove into immediately and disappeared for the next hour or so.  She’s very proud of her military service, and she spoke briefly just recently with her old barracks mate, Lettie, from Florida.  Imagine the two of them, barely out of their teens in 1944, still together after 70 years!  Loni, who needs no such encouragement, got a book of 400 new stitches to try out on future g-baby goodies.

John & Meghan and family arrived later and you-know-who was the center of attraction.

Clockwise, us and Mom, proud poppa John, with Uncle Mike holding Isla, Meghan and Loni, twin cousins McKenna and Jackson, and the star of the show at age 3 weeks.  She’s a great sleeper, almost immediately going to 4-hour blocks at night, so J&M are those rarest of creatures: new parents who are not sleep deprived.  We took a family portrait:

 

On Thursday, we relocated from our Berkeley motel over to San Francisco into a 4-bedroom house that J&M had rented about 7 blocks up the street from their own place.  Meghan’s family stayed there for 5 days prior to and through Christmas, and we took it for five days after.  Meghan had expected also to have her mom, stepdad, and grandmother join her sister’s family (hence the large house), but at the last minute her grandmother took ill and was hospitalized.  The house was great, but the two flights of stairs up to it were a challenge for Mom.  She climbed like a trooper, though, and it wasn’t a big problem.  A nice feature was the driveway for parking so I didn’t have to search around. Friday we took in the new Walt Disney Family Museum which is located in the last remaining enlisted men’s barracks building remaining in the Presidio.  They did a nice job of remodeling the interior, while retaining the feel of the nearly 120-year-old building.  The museum was focused on the story of his life, and I came away more impressed than before.  Disney personified dogged persistence to the max.  There were numerous failures and setbacks throughout his career that would have daunted lesser men, but he forged on.  If you have any interest at all in him, his films, or, indeed, the history of animation, this is a must see.  Like many museums, if you were to read all the texts accompanying the displays, you’d be there for a week, so I’d budget no less than three to four hours for a quick tour.  Plenty of parking right in front. 

On Saturday, our Christmas gift from John & Meghan was to  see the Cirque du Soleil show entitled Amaluna.  I don’t think we’ve been to a Cirque performance since the early 90’s at the Santa Monica pier.  We thought it was fantastic then, but the subsequent rise in ticket prices always put us off.  So, it was nice to see one two decades later on someone else’s dime.  Thanks, J&M, it was again spectacular with plenty of jaw-dropping moments.  My favorite was Lara Jacobs’ palm stems balancing act.  All of those frond stems you see balanced on her head are each simply crossing another, and balanced sequentially at the precise fulcrum points.  She layers them one by one, creating a giant mobile, and as the pile gets bigger the audience goes absolutely silent.  See that last big one on the floor?  She picks it up with her foot, passes it to her hand, and then inserts it under the penultimate one on her head. Pretty neat.  Also pretty neat was John’s back-street route to get to the tent at the AT&T Park lot.  I thought we’d get caught in a lot of traffic, but we went virtually nonstop from his house right to the lot.  Ten minutes flat!  In San Francisco!

We spent the balance of the weekend watching the final Sunday of pro football and kicking back.  Monday, Loni and I drove over to Pacifica for lunch with my old (well, he’s older than me) high school friend, John, and his lovely wife, Marshall.  John and I both had peripatetic upbringings, his being international via his dad’s army career, and mine domestic due to my dad’s business transfers.  We both ended up in middle-of-nowhere Modesto at the end of our freshman years, me from New York and him from France.  Newbies in a rather insular place that didn’t see a lot of influx in 1960.  We also happened to have identical tall, thin physiques, and became best friends immediately.  I spent more time at his house than at my own, it seemed.  He was an only and I could escape three sibs.  Anyway, he went off to Art Center School and a career in commercial photography, married the lovely Marshall (who continues to have a very successful career as a painter), and now resides right smack on the water in Pacifica, just down the coast from Frisco.  Marshall set out a beautiful dim sum lunch, befitting the artiste, and we walked it off by going out on the pier and looking back towards their house near its entrance.  The weather was gorgeous, and we saw some dolphins cruising the waves.  A great day.  Thanks, guys.

Tuesday (New Year’s Eve day) we packed up and hauled butt down US 101, a much more scenic route than I-5, but about an hour longer in drive time.  It was worth it, as the views are beautiful.  We stopped in San Luis Obispo for lunch at the Splash Cafe.  Outrageously good seafood sandwiches and plates.  That will be our go-to spot when we take this route in the future.  Traffic was very light just about the whole way, even through Santa Barbara, so we made good time.

Oh, yes.  I haven’t forgotten how.  Here’s looking at you, kid!