California Dreamin’
We fly out to SFO, San Francisco International Airport.
My new sneakers cost $15. I’ve tried more expensive, name brand sneaks, but my arches fall. So I end up with the basics, although they too have that fancy silver greyhound look.
Plain white costs extra.
Fifteen dollars! I tip the wheelchair attendant at the airport $15 for wheeling my mom through security or to the baggage carousel. So “15 dollars’ worth” depends on the context: A year of footwear or 15 minutes of someone else’s time.
We always freeze our asses off in San Francisco.
This trip, Californians immediately ask about the traffic in Washington, DC. Accustomed to leading the country in auto congestion, they haven’t gotten used to the Nation’s Capital being # 1. “The roads and neighborhoods are still the same,” I tell them. “The only difference is the cars. They are everywhere. No place to park. Two SUV’s and one compact per family. Even I have my own car!”
My San Francisco cousins live on a mountainside. The incredibly narrow roads require people to park half on the sidewalk, half on the street. Even so, the doorbell rings and it’s the UPS guy, desperately seeking the owner of the yellow Ford hatchback that blocks the right of way.
My cousins are clearly exhausted. A family reunion, we use a caterer and eat at the house.
“Seven billion people on the planet,” my cousin Izzy tells me. “The Jews are one fifth of 1%, yet we’ve won 21% of the Nobel Prizes.”
If he knew about the political wrangling that goes on behind the scenes at the Nobel Committee, Izzy would find a better example of achievement, but I get his point: Forced to hone our survival skills to the utmost, we Jews deliver. We achieve.
“As long as Israel was the underdog,” he points out, “we had world sympathy. Now that Israel is doing well, non-Jews resent it.”
There are 16 different reasons for anti-Semitism. So, yes, envy would be one of them.
“Israelis are no longer invited to international scientific conferences. Who loses? The international scientific community.”
Ouch! My cousins are Israelis, working within the international scientific community. I didn’t know they were being ostracized. I know they are moving back to Israel to collaborate with other Israelis, now that Research & Development money has dried up in America.
“Scientifically,” Izzy assures me, “Israel is booming. That’s where the new discoveries are being made.”
When I tell Izzy about my blog, he smiles and says, “Really? I know the two guys who own the company!”
I sing their praises and ask him to say “Hi!” from me.
“How often do you post on your blog?”
“I always try to post something once a week.”
“Once a week?! If there’s no new entry within 2 days on the blogs I read, I figure the blog has died!”
“It’s not that kind of blog. It’s creative writing. I’m not tweeting.”
We have Izzy’s younger bro Samuel bring up the blog on his iPad.
Lo-o-o-ong pause while Sammy, who is a speed reader, scrolls and devours, scrolls and devours. “It’s very well written,” he comments.
“See! See!” I tease Izzy. “Sammy gets it!”
Their wives, wonderfully well-informed, discuss with my mom brisket recipes for Passover and lessons in child-rearing.
“Look at Kevin,” my mom admonishes them. “He’s the perfect example of what to avoid!”
Izzy is 42 years old. He was a newborn the year I visited his parents Shura and Nachum in Tel Aviv. I was just out of college. My contemporaries. Even by Israeli standards, we were an argumentative clan. A shrewd business person, Nachum— my second cousin— owned a shoe factory and shares in a cement plant outside Haifa. That was some cement works, the Fort Knox of boomtown Israel. You could see it for miles, the smokestacks dominated the port skyline. Shura’s parents, sabras, got in on it from the get-go. If you owned shares in the cement company, the money just poured in.
Shura and Nachum had a three-room apartment on the fourth floor of a high-rise in the ‘burbs of Tel Aviv. One day, taking the elevator, I was accosted by another tenant. “Who are you?” he asked me forthrightly. “I don’t know you. I know everybody in this building.” He all but accused me of being a cat burglar.
“I’m Kevin Feingold. From America. I’m visiting the Feingelders.”
“Ugh!” he grunted. “How can you stand the shouting and endless arguing? If it gets to be too much, I’m Simon Kuppferberg, on the sixth floor. Come up and take a break.”
Back then, Israel was a small town. Everybody took responsibility for everyone else.
When I told Shura that Simon Kuppferberg thought I was a burglar, she chuckled. “One Saturday afternoon,” she explained, “everybody home on Shabbat, a couple started making love in the back seat of a convertible that was parked in the parking lot. People crowded onto their balconies to watch this spectacle. While people were out on their balconies, some wily thieves snuck into people’s apartments and stole their valuables. That’s what Simon is worried about!”
That was 42 years ago. I cannot even begin to imagine what the country looks like today. I watched Paradise Now on DVD and was fascinated by the scene in the Tel Aviv parking lot. What a behemoth the city has become, like something out of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.
Since mom and I are staying at Half Moon Bay, my cousins suggest I visit the seals at Moss Beach. Our Comfort Inn turns out to be five miles from the J V Fitzgerald Marine Reserve. I get there at 7:30 in the morning. High tide is at 8:07, low tide at 1:52 in the afternoon. Read = I’m there at exactly the wrong time. No little tidal pools filled with starfish and sea anemones. Instead, roaring waves thunder across the rocks and up the beach toward windswept, brown dirt cliffs.
Donning aquatic shoes, I truck along the shore. The seals may be out feeding in deeper water. Maybe the sea is too rough. But then, like bobbing corks, I see two seals sticking up in the water a quarter of a mile out. Walking along the beach, I wonder if I’ll have any other sightings. The number multiplies as they close in on the shore. A flock of nine seals, seven adults and two pups, swim into the shallows to check out the croaking, arm-waving stranger and see if he has any fish in his white plastic bag. I don’t. I grunt and chirp and flap my arms. Like a seal. The instruction board at the entrance to the beach tells me not to get closer to a seal than 300 feet. That’s way too far! Two bulls lead the pack. They swim within 30 feet of the waterline. When I approach empty-handed, they exhale great gusts of disdain. We eye each other, but I’m not ready to jump into the water and they’re not inclined to come ashore.
A wave catches me at the knees, soaking my shorts. I march back up the beach toward the parking area. The seals disappear into the Pacific Ocean. As I trudge up the path, two park rangers in green uniforms and wide-brimmed hats approach from the opposite direction, starting their day. We say good morning.
Returning to our motel room, I cannot get inside! Mom has thrown the deadbolt and my magnetic keycard gets no response. I talk to Billie Jean, sitting behind the counter in the lobby. She looks like a cross between a high school cheerleader and Sophia Loren. Before my very eyes, she transforms herself into a locksmith! She gathers her toolkit, locks the register, puts a sign on the counter, “Be Back Shortly,” and accompanies me to the room. “It’s the slow season,” she tells me. “In the summer, this place overflows!”
Unscrewing the plate, she uses a metal passkey to shift the bolt and open the door. Testing with a special card, she and I see a faint red light. “That means the batteries are dying,” she explains. Using an ultra-thin screwdriver, she removes the battery plate on the inside of the door and pops in two new AA batteries. Attaching alligator clips connected to a portable computer of 1995 vintage, she reprograms the mechanism before closing it up. She also uses this leviathan PC to juice up our key cards. When I swipe the card in the door, the lock pops open with a throaty growl.
Having watched four hours of American TV shows on a transcontinental flight— where characters ran their mouths off, talk talk talk— observing Billie Jean perform her magic in silence restores my faith in our species. Unlike the actors on Zooey Deschanel’s TV series New Girl, Billie Jean does not even take off her clothes!
*
At 1:50 p.m., the tide is all the way out, exposing jagged, rock-strewn tidal pools and about 300 beachcombers. People everywhere. I end up parking at the far end of a local street, four blocks down. I use a cliff path to reach the beach. I’m at the northern end of the park. There I meet middle-aged Colette and David McKinnon in their windbreakers, corduroy pants and tennis shoes. They are from Annapolis. Upon hearing my Maryland accent, Colette immediately bubbles over. “There’s a special telephone number,” she informs me, “you can call to get the time of the tides.”
They’ve been living 14 years in San Francisco. “It took forever to sell our house in Annapolis, but within a month, the condo we were staying at here on Russian Hill came on the market. It got auctioned off in two days. We just grabbed it! Pure luck, really.”
They have a 270-degree view, she tells me, of the city, the Golden Gate Bridge and the bay. All laid at their feet. David, a retired doctor, does volunteer Red Cross work for marathons and biking events.
Life is good.
The wind is brisk and cold, but I can point out a small black crab scuttling sideways through the shallows.
“Oh, he’s so big!” Colette comments. “And look, he has a red snail attached to his shell.”
Leaving them, I fulfill the mission Izzy and Samuel have proposed: I find starfish (the park calls them “seastars”). I find three. They are gray with lots of red speckles. I also find a sea anemone and shove my finger into its gray tentacles. Extremely sticky, it closes up, “eating” my finger. I extract myself and wait to see how long it will take for the plant to reopen. Five minutes and it is again ready to lure coral fish and other marine life into its maw.
Splashing in my aquatic shoes back to my fellow Marylanders, I excitedly tell them of my finds. I offer to bring over one of the starfish, but Colette tells me, “Oh, no! They get very upset if you pick them up.”
“The starfish?”
“No! The park rangers.”
“Ah.”
I walk up the beach to the center of the park. The surf is at least 300 feet away. Halfway there, orange plastic highway cones and small signs form a demarcation line, which we are not allowed to cross. “Do not proceed beyond this point. Seal pup habitat,” it says on the signs. There’s even a park ranger stationed on the rocks to make sure we obey. Rocks and rocks, these are eroded limestone, dyed black by algae, ugly as sin. If you are barefoot, they spell death by a thousand lacerations. And there are no seals. You want seals in the p.m., try a different beach on another Sunday.
*
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