Summer

25. What I did this summer (Oct '07)

When last we spoke I had just arrived on these shores and was assiduously readjusting to life on this large continent (no reference to the girth of any specific individual intended). But just sitting around readjusting (no matter how assiduously) makes for very boring email, so for your epistolary pleasure I went out adventuring! Exploring! Visiting places old and new and sleeping in lots of spare bedrooms as I journeyed nearly the entire length of the west coast (travelling roughly 60,318,720 inches [or 153,209,548 centimetres, for those who comprehend distances more easily using the metric system]).

My first stop was Burbank, suburb of LA, and home to one of my best friends from high school, and her family. Most of the time while I was there the temperature was about 104 degrees Fahrenheit (over 40 degrees Celsius)! While I've never heard of a case of someone's eyeballs actually boiling at that temperature, there are still things in this life that I haven't seen and want to see (heat haze radiating off of a gasping lizard as it struggles to cross sizzling tarmac not being one of them), so we stayed indoors a lot.

One day, to escape the heat, we drove to Santa Monica (which is right on the beach, thus subject to winds off the ocean, thus 20 degrees cooler, since the ocean is kept chilled to a toe-numbing temperature of 65/18 degrees [as I found out when we waded, touristically, into it]). However our tootsies thawed out rapidly, and it was blissfully temperate as we followed the further touristic requirements of slurping a smoothie from the Jamba Juice bar and wandering up and down the pedestrianized mall, ogling for celebrities. I truly didn't expect to see anyone famous (after all, if they venture out amongst us nobodies, they're likely to be hounded, stalked, paparazzied, no?) but as we strolled past the street perfomer covered in silver make-up pretending to be a statue, towards the Peruvian folk band playing El Condor Pasa, I suddenly felt reality shift a little; the man walking towards us who looked a lot like Dustin Hoffman actually was Dustin Hoffman! It was disconcerting in the extreme to see him in three dimensions, as if the Mona Lisa herself had clambered out of her frame, donned sunglasses, and decided to take a little Sunday promenade. I mean, the whole thing about movie characters is that you can't enter their world, they're not real! But then Southern California is a bit hazily unreal itself, with those crazy palm trees and 8 lane freeways, so I suppose it fits perfectly. (I did not hound, stalk or paparazz him, I merely snorted pureed orange-guava up into my sinuses, and choked endearingly as he sauntered by).

The next stop on my grand adventure was San Francisco, home to my sister, and city of cable cars and left-behind hearts. We wandered around Golden Gate park (deceptively named, since there are no gates and all the gold has long been panned away), drove around looking at the beautiful Victorian houses, and ventured across the bay to Oakland and Berkeley (home of the world's largest tuning fork. It is 45 feet high [or 1/135 of a nautical mile] and vibrates to an overtone of the earth's fundamental frequency, ringing out with a subsonic hum whenever the earth is impacted by meteor, earthquake or underground nuclear bomb explosion. Luckily none of those happened during our visit). We also took a trip to the Jelly Belly Jelly Bean factory and witnessed the step-by-step process by which raw corn syrup becomes the famous, gooey, cavity-generating treat we love so well. My sister was brave enough to sample some of the Harry Potter flavours like earwax and vomit (I will share the secret to the taste of the latter with you: parmesan cheese), whereas I kept to the safe choices of chocolate fudge and buttered popcorn.

All too soon I was swept on to my next and final destination: Portland, Oregon. Stumptown (because of all the logging that went on at the begining of last century). City of Bridges. City of Roses. And City-of-too-many-darned-nicknames-to-remember-and-repeat. The friend with whom I was staying fed me well, including hosting an ice-cream night with three types of homemade sauce (the caramel/balsamic vinegar one with buttered/roasted sliced pears and chopped hazelnuts was the favourite), and also taking me to a hidden-away restaurant for dim sum so authentic that we were the only white faces in the place. Another friend of mine is a harp teacher and an erstwhile harp store owner (after having been burgled three or four times, however, she decided it was not worth her erstwhile), and she gathered together a few of her pupils for me to teach a short workshop to one afternoon (baking fresh chocolate chip cookies for a treat afterwards [Portland should also be nicknamed "City-of-returning-home-weighing-twice-what-you-did-when-you-arrived"]).

Another friend of mine alerted me to a dahlia festival that was going on while I was in town. Far from being the huge event that I imagined by the term "festival," it turned out to be just a guy who, obsessed by dahlias, had ripped up all the grass, plants and flagstones in his front, side and back gardens, and planted the entire thing -- every square cubit -- with dahlias! At least fifty different varieties!! Tall, short, yellow, red, purple, white, mottled, round-petalled, short-petalled, sea-anemone-petalled; there were masses of gorgeous flowers on display. And if you were inspired by all of this blooming beauty, you could go around with a little card and tick off which ones you wanted (their names were on signs at the base, almost as colourful as the flowers themselves) and the guy would cut down the plants in the winter, store the tubers in his secret tuber-nurturing concoction, and have them ready for you to plant in your own garden in the spring (each plant, I learned, produces 3 to 5 tubers, so he wasn't selling himself out of business). I was content merely to stroll and gawk (some of the flowers were larger than my head! [which is no mean feat]) but my friend got caught up in the dahlia mania, and pre-purchased 9 tubers. She was excited about planting them next spring, and grateful that she would have a dahlia expert on hand to talk her through their care and maintenance. I remarked that he seemed like the King of Dahlias and she replied (and I'm not making this up), "actually, I'd say he's more like the Dahlia Lama."

All good things come to an end, and soon my multi-furlong journey was over. I returned home bursting with good memories (and full of empty calories), and promptly spent the next two weeks recovering :). It was worth it, though. And it was also good to return home; autumn had come to Portland, complete with chill gray skies and drizzly rain, and Philadelphia (sheltered from the driving west wind by 3,000 miles [or 1.564658612e-10 parsecs] of mountains, plains, valleys, forests and cities) is still basking in sunshine and warmth.

Much love,
Andrea

Andrea Blumberg