Previous - 108. Creating fiction
Absalom
p317 ...who could know what times he [Bon] looked at Henry's face and thought, not there but for the intervening leaven of that blood which we do not have in common is my skull, my brow, sockets, shape and angle of jaw and chin and some of my thinking behind it, and which he could see in my face in his turn if he but knew to look as I know but there, just behind a little, obscured a little by that alien blood whose admixing was necessary in order that he exist is the face of the man who shaped us both out of that blind chancy darkness which we call the future; there -- there -- at any moment, second, I shall penetrate by something of will and intensity and dreadful need, and strip that alien leavening from it and look not on my brother's face whom I did not know I possessed and hence never missed, but my father's, out of the shadow of whose absence my spirit's posthumeity has never escaped...How does Bon know to recognize this similarity? And do half brothers really look so much alike?
...this flesh and bone and spirit [Henry] which stemmed from the same source that mine did, but which sprang in quiet peace and contentment and ran in steady even though monotonous sunlight, where that which he bequeathed me sprang in hatred and outrage and unforgiving and ran in darkness...
Through most of this, Shreve could just as easily be talking about God (the Father) rather than Supten. And Henry could be shorthand for the White race and Bon for the Black race. This even sounds biblical.
Women's March
After 40 years I don't even think about riding through a metal tube under the bay every time I take BART between SF and Oakland, except when the train stops in the middle and just sits there. Today I volunteered to sort and collect the trash at the City Hall end of the anti-Trump march. I may not be able to do anything about the political situation, but I can handle the trash like a rock star.I left Oakland after 4pm (I'm always happy to let the younger people put everything away at the end), and found a crowd of people at the 12th Street BART station either leaving our event or headed for the much bigger SF march. Maybe some were doing both. The crowds were so big at the SF Civic Center BART Station that the trains were backed up far into the tube. It took us quite a while to make it to the first SF station, where I bailed since I figured walking was more predictable than being stuck in the train.
You would think that exiting two stops early would mean more walking, but really it only amounts to a block or two. It's that darned Market Street diagonal again. As the bird flies, it's about the same distance to my house from all three stations. I chose a walking route that is two blocks longer because it avoids the steepest block. If it had been raining harder (and I had thought of it) I could have grabbed a cable car and been dropped a block above my apartment. My plan is to take advantage of that option once I'm eligible for the Senior discount -- making the most of my Golden Years.
Checking in on Facebook this evening, I knew people who had attended marches in SF, DC, St Paul, Mexico City, and even Flagstaff. Everyone seemed to feel better because of the marches. In Oakland I felt a little ashamed of myself for hating David Ricardo more than I hated Donald Trump.
And I missed that Kumbaya feeling other people had because the recycling scavengers were stealing not only the cans and bottles (which we didn't care about) but, in at least two instances, they took the entire bag leaving no place for people to recycle. So this is now the first event of 2017 and I'm ready to kill them. It wasn't supposed to be like this.
Postscript
Thanks to the Golden Cheeto I'm thinking about greening two months early, damn him. One of the things I'm best at in my greening career, is adjusting to unexpected circumstances at events. Yesterday I had no idea I was going to be the virtual crew chief at Oakland City Center and also virtually the only experienced staff. After we got set up, the woman who suckered me into this gig took off to join the march so, it was just me and three untrained volunteers until almost the very end. But I really prefer to plan and to be prepared.If I had anticipated having to coordinate volunteers I would have come up with a plan, but, taken by surprise, I just explained the basic of Oakland trash sorting -- which you could almost see passing through their heads the way gold passes through the GI tract, not being affected and not having any effect -- and then turned them loose with pickers and bags. In fact this worked out fine. They came with a notion of walking around with pickers and keeping the grounds fairly clean, which they managed quite well. Again, had I been anticipating my role here I would have made a mental note to encourage them about all this, but instead I just focused on my task of keeping all the three-stream stations sorted and accessible (not over-filled).
My volunteers (including the barefoot one and the one who had deep thoughts about the environment that took a surprising amount of time for him to express) brought their unsorted bags to our gathering point -- much like a cat coming home with a dead bird or mouse -- so when I made it back there after hitting all our stations, I then took their bags to a busy nearby station where I sorted it into those bags until I had full compost and landfill bags to label and drag back to our headquarters. If it was a Green Mary event the collectors would probably have been able to do their own sorting, but maybe not as well or as quickly as I can, so, again, it worked fine.
In the end, they kept the grounds reasonably clean while I kept the stations reasonably sorted, and at the end of the day I was even able to sort-down and shut down most of our stations so that when Liza returned all she had to do was load already sorted and marked bags into a pickup truck and then return all the gear to the garage where we collected it in the morning. I would give everyone passing marks, except for me as volunteer coordinator. But then again I didn't kill any of the recycling scavengers, so I should get some bonus points for that.
According to the morning news, both Oakland and San Francisco drew crowds of 100,000 -- which I have a hard time believing. I would have thought Oakland was less and SF more, but then the plaza at the end of the march wasn't big enough to hold all the marchers so I never saw all of them at the same time (thank god.) Santa Cruz, where one of my Buffy friends was marching claimed 10,000 and Flagstaff, where a friend from college was marching managed 1,200 in a snow storm. Didn't look up St Paul or DC.
Oakland
This was the same setting as the Art and Soul Street Festival we work every summer -- only less of it. I spent much of the day looking around Frank Ogawa Plaza and, as usual, thinking about how far Oakland falls short of its potential. (Wiki seems to have gone to some trouble to not show any decent photos of the place so I'll include two below, the first shows my main view on Saturday -- though I was at ground level -- and the other shows the visual focus of the plaza, the handsome Oakland City Hall, during Art and Soul.)
Sadly, many of the retail spaces in the area are vacant. Partly this is because few people live in the area and the people who work near here are only here for work. Another reason, and a reason I wouldn't have a business here, is that since at least the Occupy days this area has gotten vandalized and or looted any time people have gotten upset about anything.
One relatively nondescript building on the plaza I had never really noticed before is the Rotunda. I just looked it up and it's gorgeous inside, and apparently primarily a wedding venue.
If Jerry Brown, during his years as mayor of Oakland, had just allowed unlimited residential zoning within a two block walk to a BART station, downtown Oakland could be as vibrant as SF by now. Actually I doubt that -- Oakland can always find a way to screw itself.
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