3. Two Fish

Let’s start our third installment with a joke told by David Foster Wallace in 2005:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” The two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and says “What the hell is water?”

This joke will become relevant presently. Be patient. 

As I write, Marcia and I have begun our three-month stay in a rented house in the Oakland hills, just south of Berkeley. I am calling our sojourn a “stay” because I am not sure how best to describe it. Three months is too long to be called a “vacation,” but too short to constitute a chapter in one’s life. Too long to put our life (or our mail) on “hold.” Instead, our letters and bills are being “forwarded” -- the US Postal Service has a word for what is happening to our mail. But what do we call what is happening to our life? 

We are, it seems, two fish out of water.

(See -- a little patience paid off, didn’t it?)

I suppose three months is just long enough to interrupt our routine and cause us to experiment with something new -- a chance to try out a different life, but also to reflect back on the water we took for granted. 

(Don’t flog the analogy, Paul. Move on now.)

Our rental home is located on Acacia Avenue in an area of Oakland called Upper Rockridge. We are “upper” in the sense of being 303 feet above sea level, an elevation that provides us with a glorious view through the living room window: the city of San Francisco, the Golden Gate bridge, and lower Oakland. 

In the morning, over coffee, Marcia and I sit in comfy leather chairs we have positioned in front of the window and watch the city awaken -- little BART train cars move along their elevated tracks as if they were part of some miniature railroad display, ships anchored in the bay wait to be unloaded at the Oakland docks (supply chain bottlenecks come to life!), and commuters driving into San Francisco, backed up on the Bay Bridge. The sun, rising behind us, bathes the San Francisco wharfs and office buildings and is reflected back by the occasional pane of glass, making the whole city sparkle. It is unreal; I am living in a screen saver.

That is until we have to travel the legendary California highways. Six, seven, sometimes eight lanes, each way. Elevated exit and entrance ramps are stacked on top of one another. Lanes disappear at random, becoming exits we didn’t want to take, but too often do. There are so many turns and merges it is impossible to keep track of where we are going, except for the fact that we mostly aren’t going anywhere, on account of traffic that is biblical in its proportions. 

The good news is that we can walk to groceries. No car needed. Just a 14 minute stroll down the hill lands us in an upscale market with fresh produce, fish, and meat. The bad news is that the groceries do not walk themselves back up the hill. Ascending 303 feet, sporting a pack full of groceries, I tell myself that my heartbeat remains steady and my panting is illusory.

Our first few days were filled with the administrative chores of starting a household: Unpacking, locating bathrooms and light switches, procuring essentials for the larder, ordering trash can liners (where are the trash cans, BTW?), buying toilet paper and a bathroom scale (or should we skip the scale?), plugging in extension cords for electronics. 

Now, those tasks mostly completed, we must decide what to do with ourselves. Richard Thaler, a pioneer in the field known as “choice architecture,” would not recommend our situation. We have too many options, and no “default” choice to fall back upon. We can call up and run the familiar marriage program and grandparent program, but our other routines are unavailable and everything seems foreign. We don’t know the local geography, history, organizations, or social norms. Should we volunteer at the church down the street? Should we walk to the BART station and visit the bakery in San Francisco that will share some of their sourdough starter to patrons who offer up a poem? With a sourdough starter, I can run my familiar bread-breaking program and comfort myself by eating as much bread as I want (provided I don’t buy that bathroom scale).

Of course, the biggest gap in our life is people -- contemporaries, friends, you -- our readers. You aren’t here, are you? 

Marcia and I have decided to approach the challenge of acquiring local friends systematically. It is proving to be an interesting experience. And a topic for my next installment. 

Stay tuned.

Paul