Yesterday my mosque was infiltrated by a commando team of toddlers. The presumed leader was a three year old with curly hair who climbed halfway up the steps of the minbar to better oversee the operation. An advance scouting party, one quiet little girl with enormous eyes, rosebud lips and a tendency to drool, crawled into the middle of the men’s section and stood on someone’s leg to scan the terrain for potential threats, paying particular attention to the suspicious looking man addressing the congregation from the front of the room. Meanwhile the troops moved in. A boy in an immaculate white thobe rolled evasively back and forth in the aisle between the men and women's sections in order to avoid enemy fire until, apparently, he was hit and would have been lost if one of his peers had not ventured onto the battlefield and carried out a daring rescue operation, an enterprise which, incredibly, required him to drag his brother in arms by the feet across the entire length of the mosque.

Overall the infiltration appeared to be a success, because, with the exception of one embarrassed mother who came forward to scoop her three year old son off the steps of the minbar, no one seemed to notice a thing.

Notes from Half Moon Bay and Stanfurd

At 7:45 am on Tuesday September 21, 2011, I set out from Oakland, Ca intending to go to Stanfurd University to get some paperwork pushed through. These are my notes from the day.

To me it makes perfect sense that, while driving across the San Mateo bridge, you should hazard long glances to your right and left knowing full well that your gaze will catch and linger on the brooding rectangle skyscrapers of San Francisco shrouded in the morning gloom to the north, or the thin pencil line of Dumbarton bridge floating in the swath of brilliant, sunlit haze to the south. And if in front of you the cars flash red warning signals as impatient commuters swerve from lane to lane, and if perhaps the waters below lap at the pilings with murderous intent, consider that a marginal increase in the probability of having an accident on a bridge might be well worth a moment of your attention expended on the far horizon.

I hit traffic before the San Mateo Bridge intersects the US-101. I freaking hate traffic so I pull off and go to Target. Two girls in an SUV roll past me in the Target parking lot. Tanned skin, tank tops, glossy lips, sunglasses on high cheekbones and highlights in their hair. I raise an eyebrow and turn my head as they go past. ‘What am I doing?,’ I think, ‘As if I could glimpse more of them by the shape of taillights and the scuff marks on a rear fender.’ But still I stand there and watch them go.

When I get back on the freeway forty-five minutes later there is still traffic, so instead of heading south on the 101 I keep going west on CA-82 toward Half Moon Bay. A few miles farther and I’m at the I-280 interchange. The 280 is moving along well and I remember that it’s just as easy to get to Stanford from the 280 as the 101, but the hills to the west are already calling me; they’re telling me about all the things I should do before the things I need to do.

A beautiful woman in a simple black dress and a broad straw hat is at the beach with her daughter, a precocious child of three or four years who is engrossed in the serious business of moving sand from one place to another with a blue plastic shovel. Her mother stands a few feet back, one hand clinging to her hat, the other occasionally readjusting her dress in a vain struggle to undo the perturbations of the wind. When the little girl tires of digging her own hole, without a word or glance to her mother she clambers into a larger hole nearby, left by some other industrious beachgoer, and resumes shoveling sand with her head just peeking out over ground level. The iPhone comes out of the mother's bag, and a frenzy of picture taking follows. She orbits around her daughter and the hole to get shots from different angles as the iPhone makes the fake camera shutter noise again and again.

Farther up the beach an woman with thinning gray hair sits alone in a lawn chair. She’s brought her lunch in a small wicker basket, but she does not seem to have reading material or any other form of diversion with her. She is merely sitting and watching the waves crest, crash, unfurl and recede. Fifty meters out, surfers are camping the break point. They rise high on the swells and for a split second intrude into the sky, precariously transcendent figures already tilting backwards into the waiting trough. I wonder what a 4-6 meter rise in sea level will do to the surfing here.

Stanford is a strange other world. Everything is so pretty and clean. The tables in the main courtyard of the civil and environmental engineering building are not bolted down to the floor. Students leave their laptops unattended in glass-walled study rooms for fitteen, twenty minutes at a time. I think madly of renting a UHaul, pulling up outside the building, and throwing as many tables, chairs, and laptops as I can into the back before they call the campus cops on me. Or at least I consider buying a pack of chewing gum then chewing every stick and rubbing it into the sidewalks.

It’s easy for a Cal student to hate Stanford. They’re our richer, smarter and better-looking cousins from across the bay, or if they aren’t really all these things, our inferiority complex makes them so. They also seem happier than Berkeley students, perhaps because they lack our self-important sense of liberal guilt (or maybe it’s just the sunnier climate).

Damn that school is nice.

West Oakland

8/2/2011

The boys on the corner by the tiny taqueria have piled their bikes unceremoniously on the concrete, and they stand about and hold their shoulders high and give the passing cars hard looks. But they’re only imitating the men—they do it so well—who loiter outside the auto-shop, resting one foot against the wall.

The cars stop to let a woman cross, but she isn’t looking anyways. She’s got a wool-knit top—you can see her skin through the weave—and she’s cut the bottom short with scissors where her midriff is. She’s tall and fine, she’s sex on legs in torn up jeans, and she has eyes only for the red thunderbird that has stopped across the street. She comes alongside the car and bends down so that her unremarkable face—neither ugly nor pretty—and her remarkable breasts are thrust into the window. She speaks a word. The driver gives a response. And she gets into the car.

The door to the public library has a bullet hole in its glass, and in the lobby a security guard sits at an old metal desk. He is young, and big, and from time to time he shuffles around the lobby floor. The librarians come out and direct him to uphold the pedantics of library law—a firecode violation, a foot on the chair, a giggle in the silent zone. He shuffles among the troublemakers, speaks to them with an air of tired apology, and all the while his eyes are rimmed with red.

Two girls can be heard from across the aisles of library books. They sound like they’re in junior high. There is no breathless excitement to their gossiping, no conspiratal whisper of shame. Just a matter of fact recounting: “… she’s dating a twenty year-old, and they were sleeping together, and she got pregnant from him, and then she got taken to jail cause she was at his place—they both got taken to jail, cause he’s a drug dealer, and the police came to take him while she was there….”

In a backstreet beside the railroad tracks, a man is crossing at a signal light. He limps to favor his left, and he’s wearing a pointy Christmas hat—a festive red beanie with white snowflakes on the sides. In the opposite direction a homeless man is pushing a shopping cart, and he has a Doberman tied to his cart by a string. As the Doberman trots along it arcs out from the cart and into the middle of the street, then back toward the cart, then back toward the street, then back to the cart, and it hangs out its tongue to laugh at the cars that pass.

Across from the public library is a busy city park. At the crest of a knoll in the middle of the park rests an old Victorian house where a summer day camp operates. They have hung fingerpainted signs of butcher paper from the rails, and they billow in the breeze like a paper skirt around the porch. In front of the house girls with braids in their hair are skipping rope and they sing the rhymes that all children know to accompany skipping rope. Some of the littler ones are playing tag by an elm tree, and a large, young woman with a shining forehead watches them from the doorway of the house. Cars have already filled the nearby lot so they begin to park at the library, and solicitous parents herd their children from the cars, across the street and into the waiting park. From somewhere a few blocks away a police siren wails, but no one turns to look—the girls are still skipping rope, the little ones still run about, and the woman in the doorway is smiling at the sunlight as the children squeal in play.

The girl on the bench at the marina

9/9/2011

I met a girl who every Sunday afternoon sits on the bench by the old pier where the wind is soft but always blows, where joggers and bicyclists parade up and down the shoreline trail in their silly clothes, where couples stroll arm in arm and the destitute woman with the sequine hat pushes her shopping cart but does not ask for charity, where homeless men and seagulls fish for their dinner in the waters around the pilings and as the seagulls loft on the breeze they shit white splotches shaped like starfish on the wooden planks of the pier; she sits there on the bench and she says many things to me; she says that the ugly and the beautiful are twin manifestations of a larger whole, that if a person could know the ocean it would be a better approximation of eternity than anything else we might experience in this world, that sometimes she looks to the western horizon and believes she can feel the push and pull of cold saline waters swelling into the bay through the gap at the feet of the golden gate bridge, or the warm brackish waters of the bay releasing themselves back into the ocean with a sigh when the tides reverse, she says that imagination makes time a plaything for the mind, and I have asked her if she can see our lives in fast-forward and reverse like a movie montage of memories some past and some yet to come, but she smiles distantly and says that if ever I want to ask a prescient girl whether she sees me in her future, I should have the courage to ask her as directly as I can, for such ambiguity would surely count against me.



The Girl at the Marina: 9/9/2011

I met a girl who every Sunday afternoon sits on the bench by the old pier where the wind is soft but always blows, where joggers and bicyclists parade up and down the shoreline trail in their silly clothes, where couples stroll arm in arm and the destitute woman with the sequine hat pushes her shopping cart but does not ask for charity, where homeless men and seagulls fish for their dinner in the waters around the pilings and as the seagulls loft on the breeze they shit white splotches shaped like starfish on the wooden planks.  She sits there on the bench and she says many things to me; she says that the ugly and the beautiful are one and the same, that if a person could know the ocean they might know eternity, that sometimes she looks to the western horizon and imagines the strain of those cold ocean waters pushing into the bay through the gap at the feet of the golden gate bridge, or the warm release of brackish bay waters flowing into the ocean with a sigh when the tides reverse.  She says that imagination makes time a plaything for the mind.  I ask her if she can see our lives in fast-forward and reverse like a hollywood montage or a slideshow of old family photographs, but she smiles distantly and says that if I ever wanted to ask a prescient girl whether she sees me in her future, I should have the courage to ask her as directly as I can.