Dried Fruit, Summer Heat

"Dried Fruit" by DW 2007

Whaddya think? Shall I abandon writing and just try to convey my thoughts and feelings through images? I admit that I love the above image. It took me hours to create, and it represents something essential to me.

Many years ago, when I was young, I dreamed of moving to the country, as many Hippies did in that era, to a peaceful place, where we could grow our food, write our books, paint our paintings, and make love freely out in nature, naked and unconcerned with the noises of modern urban reality.

I tried, over the years, to achieve some of these fantasies. I planted banana trees in our backyard on Sanibel Island, but a non-hurricane storm flooded the yard with saltwater and killed my young plants.

I studied The Whole Earth Catalogue about how to dry fruit. There was a contraption available, but I couldn't afford it at the time. We were poor, my wife and I, very poor. In the early '70s we never put together an income much more than $2,000 a year, and believe me, you can index that for inflation and adjust it over time all you want, but it wasn't much for two people to live on.

Especially since our rent was $1,680 a year. If you do the math, we were subsisting on less than a dollar a day, yet we were able to do that, here in San Francisco, and I have the hand-written spreadsheets to prove it.

One of the secrets to our success was that we walked a lot, my wife and me, and we always were able to find money. I believe we found somewhere around a quarter as much money lying in the streets as we reported on our tax forms.

We ate Chicken giblets.

We were former Peace Corps volunteers. We knew how to make something out of nothing. If someone hit our car, which occasionally happened, we collected insurance settlements. In the social welfare state that was then California, we qualified for Food Stamps.

We knew how to obtain food for virtually nothing at a warehouse called (I think) "Dented Cans." And we knew the edible weeds that flourish in the city.

At that point in my life, despite my college education, I had the outlook of the proletarian class. As I searched for ways to pay my way through college in my junior and senior years, I had applied for factory jobs, just as my father has done, including an iron foundry in Saginaw or Flint that was one of the scariest places in this country I ever have visited.

They offered me a job, at the minimum wage, but I decided not to take it.

***



Almost four decades later, I am a middle-class citizen in the city I alternatively love and hate, raising children and dreaming once again of growing crops in some peaceful place, somewhere far from here. Today, for the very first time, I actually started to believe I have an exceptionally talented athlete in my family -- Aidan, age 12.

All my kids have been pretty good at sports -- strong, fast, and coordinated. But when the African-American coach at the basketball camp took me aside today to tell me Aidan is gifted, I listened to him. A 22-year-old, handsome, big, strong, college graduate who is a basketball player himself, he clearly knows what he is talking about.

"Your son," he told me, "is talented, competitive, fast, smart, and committed." This is the age, he explained to me, where the true athletes begin to show themselves. He recounted his own childhood, and how this happened for him.

My head was spinning. Although I've always enjoyed watching my kids play sports, especially watching Peter hit baseballs and win 100-yard dashes, I never considered that one of them might turn into a competitive athlete.



And then, of course, there is my sweet little Dylan. He is trying mightily to improve his skills so he can play basketball on his school's JV team next fall. One of the other parents at his school, whose son is also in this basketball camp, told me today that she'd never seen him with his Russian Red Army Cossack hat off, and could not believe how different he looks, out in the open with his curly red locks.




He had a discouraging day out there. It is really hot in San Francisco, and even close to the ocean, the temperature was probably 75-80 degrees this afternoon.



I found a bone in my backyard today, near where we dug up those old bottles last summer.



It is big, round, a socket of some sort. Now I assume this is the remainder of one of our barbecues last year, but its size and heft startled me. If anyone knows anything about identifying bones, please contact me.

It's hot here. My windows are open and the fans are on. It's a warm San Francisco night, and I wish you were here to enjoy it with me.

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