Free Apples

"Want an apple?" my dad asks. "They're free."

They're also part of the desk decor at his package-tour hotel. They're bright red and if I was truly starving, I'd gnaw on the desk first. "No, thanks."

We're in the lobby, waiting for his wife. Every time we go somewhere with her, she disappears. When she's not talking or no one's talking about her, she hangs back or walks quickly ahead and eventually she's gone. We all stop what we're doing and look for her. It's her hide and seek time, her time to make sure everyone's thinking about her.

Here she is now, sauntering slowly from the elevator, the last one off. "Want an apple?" my dad asks.

"No, I don't want an apple," she says. "We already have four in our refrigerator upstairs."

"I'll take one for you anyway," he says. "I don't know when we're going to eat next."

"I don't want one!"

"Dad," I say. "We're here to take you to the Dole Plantation, remember? We're eating there and then we're going to North Shore and picking up pie at Ted's Bakery."

"He can't hear you," my step-mother says. "He didn't want to bring his ears."

"I can too, hear you. I didn't want to bring my hearing aids because they're expensive and I didn't want anyone to steal them. Are we going to get back in time for Mai Tais?"

"They have live entertainment," my step-mother says, "and it is free."

"Twenty seconds to spare for $3 Mai Tais," my dad says. "Not bad. Not bad."

He's talking like he rescued someone from a burning building. "What are you talking about?"

"We were walking along the beach and saw a sign for Mai Tais for three dollars," he says. "I asked the bartender, 'Are we too late for happy hour?' The bartender looked at his watch and said, 'You got twenty seconds.' Not bad. Not bad."

"We found free live entertainment," my step-mother says. "We found this here."

There's free entertainment everywhere in Waikiki but the only people I've ever seen listening are over sixty and sixty pounds overweight.

"You haven't seen our room yet," my step-mother says.

"It's just a room," my dad says.

"I think they'd like to see it."

"They've seen a hotel room."

"They haven't seen our room."

"Okay, let's go see it," my dad says, like it's his idea now. We get in the elevator, further from the Dole Plantation than when we came to pick them up.

My step-mother presses the second floor button. "We're not on the second floor," my dad says.

"I want to show them the pool."

"It's just a hotel pool. I don't know if they want to see it."

"We swim here and we swim in the ocean. Every morning we swim at the lagoon in the hotel across the street."

"Okay, okay," my dad says. "Let's go see the pool."

With my relatives, you don't need a coupon for free live entertainment.

Commute

"The car needs tires," Charlie says when I ask him what time he's driving down today. He 's in Oregon to work so he doesn't think about anything but work until he's done working. That means he didn't think about getting tires for his trip until he was on his trip. That was 2 pm today.

He stops at Hillyer's, where he does a lot of business. He quoted me $330, Charlie says, and that's because he's my friend. Les Schwab, down the street, quoted him $480 when he called last week.

"Good deal," Charlie says. "How fast can you do it?"

"I can't do it now. I don't have tires that small in stock. Those are like coffee coaster-sized tires. You'll have to come back."

"I can't wait around. I'm heading to San Francisco today."

It's 2:30 pm and he's driving to Cali on bald tires. "I'll find a Les Schwab on I-5 before 5 pm," he tells me on the phone. "I can do it."

Charlie does this commute so often that he has it perfectly timed. "I'm hauling ass," he says. "I'm car dancing to the Traveling Wilburys, I have a half a tank of gas, more than ready for my Dutch Brothers, and I have to pee, my signal I'm close to Sutherlin."

"I stop at the Shell station, four cents cheaper than the 76 station across the street. The guy comes out to put gas in the car. 'Is there a Les Schwab here?' I ask."

"Right down the street," he says.

The guy starts pumping gas, so Charlie gets out to use the restroom. "I'm pumping out while gas is pumping in," he says. "It never fails. When I'm done and walking to the car, the attendant is pulling out the nozzle and handing me the receipt."

"I haul ass through Sutherlin and Les is on the left. This is perfect. I pull in and see there are no cars in the lot. Five guys with white shirts run over and converge on me like a nest of hornets. I can't even get out of the car. That's how they surround me."

"Can I help you?" the manager asks.

"How fast can you put on new tires?"

"We'll go for a record. Pull it in."

Charlie says, "I still haven't gotten out of the car. They guide me into the tire bay and start working like a pit crew. It was like it was planned, like they knew I was coming. I couldn't get out of the car fast enough. They had it going up the lift before I had the door shut."

"Follow me," the manager says. When we get in the office he says, "We have a couple of different prices. There's the toyo moto tires, the ultimate supreme for $600."

"$600? It's four friggin' tires," Charlie says.

"Or you can have the Firestones, just the regular Firestone tires for $280."

"Let's go with the Firestones." Charlie says those are the exact same tires the Woodburn Les Schwab wanted to sell him for $480.

The manager looks up and yells "Jimmy! Firestones!"

Charlie says Jimmy runs over to the tire rack, grabs four Firestones, runs to the tire bay and they had those tires mounted and the car off the lift with the car door open before he could sign the credit card receipt.

"The guy opened the door for me," Charlie says, "I got in and he closed it."

"Have a safe trip," he said.

"I start driving and it's like a different car. It's so quiet," Charlie says. "The old tires were so bald you could see the inner steel belt showing. I shouldn't have pushed it that long but I am pretty proud I got the maximum mileage out of them."

He drives straight to Dutch Brothers where two kids say, "Where you headed today?"

"San Francisco," Charlie says. "I got new tires and I'm ready to roll."

Charlie gets his coffee and calls one last time. "You know how when you really want coffee and you get a good cup, you don't want it to end? That's how Dutch Brothers is in Sutherland. They don't have old drip coffee sitting around. They make every cup of coffee with two shots and hot water like an Americano, fresh. I say 'lots of half and half and honey,' and it's heaven. It was so good I sipped it all the way to California."

"I'm almost to Redding," he says, "and I haven't felt like complaining about the weather once. I'm so happy about my new tires."

And that's commuter life with Charlie.

Hey, Fulton Street Harley Riders!

Hey Harley riders! Yes, you, driving down my street today, I'm talking to you. Here's why everybody, except the other balding, fat Harley riders riding down my street today, hates you:

When you accelerate from the light at the corner, you make our ears buzz. I'm in my dining room, the furthest room in my apartment from the corner, drinking tea. I'm not bothering you. The windows are shut. The curtains are also closed. There's nothing more I can do to keep you from growling at me. You are so loud, driving by, that you set off the alarm on somebody's car.

Guess where that car happens to be parked? Right under my window. It's still going off in memory of you. My whole apartment building is inhabited with intelligent, interesting people, all thinking of you, all of us. Right now. My apartment isn't even on the corner. I can't imagine how much my neighbors in those corner apartments think of you.

We're all thinking how pathetic it is you and your brethren must resort to making a lot of noise so that anyone would bother to look over at you. You further that attention by dressing up in black leather, appearing as if you're going into medieval battle. You have to grow that rat tail and braid it to hang down your back because there's nothing growing on the top of your big, fat head (not unless you count your ears). We can't see your bald head due to your helmet, but you know it's there and we do, too. Sadly, more hair isn't always good hair just like more weight isn't always good weight. You've proven that, too.

We don't look at you at all, therefore, for looking at you would give you the attention you clearly cannot get in any other manner. If any attention is good attention, then any attention you will not get. Except from the car alarms. You will get attention from them, as they cannot as easily be programmed to ignore you and your chainsaw-like tones. But you are unaware of this mechanical-response attention because you are long gone, irritating our neighbors further west, inside their apartments and offices, their ears buzzing with seething intensity, more with every roar and car alarm you trigger.

Is this the kind of impression you were after?

Get Ready, Rich People

It's an easy thing to hate rich people. They have more than they can ever use and they don't clean up their own shit. They're better than you, and they'll tell you so even if the only reason they're rich is because they're lucky. They were born in the right time, the right place, through the right hole. They were in the right city, with the right career, at the right time. They look down at you and say, "If you knew how to handle your money, if you scrimped and pinched, you wouldn't be so poor." They know more because they are rich and you are not. God loves them more, obviously, since He gave them more.

Unfortunately for rich people, they have the same amount of time in a day as the poorest of losers. Time is one thing they can't hold over us. They may brag about being so busy and having so many people wanting their attention, but even with all their hoarded money, they can't change the hours in their day. They can't live forever, either, and when they die, they take with them just as much as everyone else. It's a comforting thought to think about when you're made to feel like Oliver Twist in their presence.

Countries, on this dynamic planet, are the same way. Countries grow and die, are created and are overthrown. The richest country, no matter how industrious, never stays rich forever. Only a hundred years ago the sun never set on the British Empire. Now the U.K. is more or less a tiny island known for exporting musicians and drinking tea. What once made them rich now makes them a tourist attraction.

Mature countries, like mature people, can go downhill fast. The United States got pretty mature during the past eight years. We used to be the world's policeman. Now we're the world's crotchety old man, giving money to the equivalent of telephone solicitors, getting ourselves into debt by buying useless crap, not deferring gratification and definitely not conserving for the future. We were the rich people, but we won't be soon and everybody knows it.

The National Intelligence Council wrote this report about key global trends that might occur in the next fifteen years. This report from our own government, says the unprecedented transfer of wealth from the west to the east BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries will continue for the foreseeable future, meaning we're going to be cleaning BRIC toilets. Foreign Policy says, China will build more real estate in the next 15 years than the U.S. has built in its entire history. This is the country of toxic drywall and melamine-spiked baby formula. We can try to act superior and give them advice, but we're about to have our asses kicked.

Now what do you think about scrimping and pinching?

(Mark Morford has two volumes of this if you're not scared yet.)

Snap!

Writing Charles Dickens-type entries is like doing homework for creative writing class. It feels great when it's done, you know you have at least one reader, and maybe you learned something in the process. I love Charles Dickens, don't get me wrong, but even his 900+ page length books were published in small chunks.

This is the first thought in my mind when I heard about the Bay Bridge snapping a line. I thought crazy things, like "I think about this happening every time I go to IKEA," "I'm never going to IKEA again," and "Death!" but once the crazy thoughts stop, there's just little thoughts. Little thoughts pop into your head at the least-guarded times, such as this.

From now on, it's minimal with my life and minimal with the amount of words I use in each blog post. And maybe I'll go to IKEA, regardless. My hallway is loaded down with the too expensive (to me) desk I feel too undeserving to own and too guilty to use. Returning at IKEA is more fun than shopping there. You can afford it and your feet won't hurt from trudging through the pressboard maze.

The Run

Week after week I love to watch the fat whiners on Biggest Loser prove over and over again that whining and crying doesn't make exercise easier. It's easy to watch this show and feel good about yourself, at least at the beginning. You look at them, look at yourself and you think, "I'm in great shape." Anyone you know looks great compared to them. This is why, at my house, Biggest Loser night is also Ben and Jerry's night.

By the end of the show, though, tables have turned. If you're not consistently exercising, eating Jennie-O chicken and sweating all over the place at every opportunity, you could start to feel flabby and lazy. It's hard to watch a whole season all the way through without feeling like your own biggest loser.

Maybe that's why I started running again. It isn't to lose weight, it's because I like knowing I can run. If I don't run first thing in the morning, though, I'm not sure I'll get to it, so I set myself a deadline. Okay, I tell myself. 4 pm. I'll run at 4 pm. It'll be foggy by then, and cooler. It's so hot and humid right now that I'm too lazy to get up and pee. When you think 70 degrees is hot, you know you have tremendous Biggest Loser-level whiner potential. Yes, this is definitely why I run.

4:13 pm, I've peed and I'm out the door. I would have gone at 4 pm, really I would have, but for the plumbers. I called Charlie this morning (2 1/2 months left until he retires and returns home, yay!) and left him a message, telling him to go Irish on the plumbers. Going Irish is our way of describing his gift for yelling in an out of control-sounding manner. It gets results. I sound shrill when I yell. He sounds Lifetime TV movie scary. The plumbers need to be scared.

Those crazy plumbers. I'd hoped to have them out of my life by now. They're done but they've left a little love. They haven't called to get the scaffolding removed. These plumbers have taken advantage of my dad, the owner of this apartment building, and his dad before him, for 40 years. They low-balled this bid, I know they did because they kept telling me so, knowing he legally had to get at least one competing bid, and they kept calling us both, begging him for the work. Funny how they don't low-ball any other job.

The first and only time I called them to snake a tenant's tub, six months ago when I first became manager, they charged me $400. One sloppy guy, so sloppy he didn't bother closing his mouth to form words, was here for maybe five minutes, max. I told my dad he might want to consider using another plumber. "I've used them for 40 years," he says and he quickly changes the subject, hoping I'll forget. He and the plumbers both, I notice, do this with me. I'm not saying they think females are stupid. I'm saying that's why I called Charlie.

They bid low and then they convinced my dad to pay for things not included in their bid but, oddly, included in the other plumber's bid. Scaffolding is one of these things. Dad said it cost him $80 a day for this scaffolding, and that amount was before the plumbers decided they needed more scaffolding around the other side of the building. Somehow the ladders they'd assumed they'd use, according to their bid, just weren't good enough. I never saw them bring out ladders, not even once.

The plumbing job is complete, the inspection is complete, and the scaffolding sits in the courtyard for no reason. Nobody has been on it since the inspector, over two weeks ago. Three stories of scaffolding, just on this one side, block the courtyard lights at night and block the daylight through our apartments' kitchen windows. The plumbers clearly moved onto another job and forgot. My dad's paying for it, so what do they care? Even after two calls from me reminding them it's still there, it's still there.

Charlie called me at 3 pm, telling me he went Irish, telling them they'd go to hell for taking advantage of an old man, my dad. As often happens when Charlie gets Celtic, I got three calls right away. First, the sloppy plumber said, or I think he said, "They still haven't picked up the scaffolding?" he said. "I wonder what happened."

I say nothing.

"I'll get on it."

He calls back. "They'll be there tomorrow. Can you let them in?"

"What time?"

"I don't know. They'll call me first, I think, if they're going to do it tomorrow. Maybe I should have them call you and you can take care of it."

"I don't think so."

"Okay."

The third time he calls and says, "They'll be there tomorrow morning and they'll call me first. I hope I can be there to open the door."

"I hope so, too. You still have a key to our building."

"Yeah. Uh, yeah. I'll call you when they call me, just in case I can't let them in."

I really want to go a little Irish on them myself, but I want the scaffolding gone even more, so I say the first thing I can think of to get him to say goodbye. He says goodbye and in my mind I'm thinking why I don't understand how anyone, even anyone as old and trusting as my 82 year-old dad could hire these guys more than once. I can't even understand what the guy says, and I don't want to read his lips because they never seem to entirely shut, except around his cigarette, which he leaves scattered around the foyer and everywhere else for me to pick up after.

There must be something, though, in the way he talks that convinces my dad to give him jobs, and too much money in payment of those jobs. Tenants have called me, many of them, many of them women, saying, "These plumbers are the worst. Whenever I have a problem and I see these guys come in to fix it, I know it will end up worse than before they came. I'll hire my own plumbers and pay for my own repairs before I'll let them in my apartment again. They're horrible."

In two and a half months, Charlie will be here full time and he can run interference. Now I'm just running. The good thing about running in Golden Gate park is that there are lots of runners. I feel like I'm on the Biggest Loser and we're all working toward being healthy, all together. Some people, though, run like it's a competition. They seem to get great joy from looking at their fancy watches and passing people. I'm just trying to talk myself into not stopping.

I make it up the hardest hill and as soon as I do, I wipe my face with my shirt. As I do, some guy passes me, also wiping his face with his shirt in the exact same way. It's like my doppelganger, my opposite, my biggest Biggest Loser competitor.

If you're going to pass me, you have to keep going faster than me or I'll try to keep pace with you. It's like I escape 2009 and return to sophomore year high school track practice. In track, you learn to push yourself to go harder than you want to go, for longer than you think you can. You never, ever let the gap widen between you and the runner in front of you. This face-wiper better hurry up.

I get closer to face-wiper guy and see that he's got at least four water bottles strapped around his waist in some sort of fancy, expensive-looking piece of equipment. He's got a nice shirt, although it's sweaty, and new, nice shorts. I'll bet I could buy four or five pairs of my shoes for the same price as his one pair. When I used to ski, the worst skiers had the best equipment. I can keep up.

The road turns and I lose him. He could have gone right, left, or straight. I continue even though it's up hill and this is where I usually say to myself, "You can walk if you want to." I don't, but if I tell myself I can, I won't. There is a lot going on in my head during such a simple activity as running.

The face-wiper comes up from behind me and passes me again. You bastard! Where'd he come from? Was he hiding? Maybe he was getting a drink of water at the fountain. I'm going faster than he is. I'm going to catch up to him, even though we're heading east and this is the sunniest part of the park. I could get hot. I hate hot.

Another turn and I lose face-wiper again. It's okay. I'm almost done. I'm heading back to the breakers, back home, back to the fog. It gets so thick so fast that I can't even see across the street. I'm trying not to trip on the cypress and eucalyptus debris, and the rocks all over the dirt path, so I'm slowing a little. A car stops to let me cross at the Chain of Lakes intersection and face-wiper comes up from behind and passes me again. Jerk!

I run as fast as I can over rocks and branches, downhill through mud and puddles. I run all the way to the ocean, or where the ocean should be. I can't see it, even though it's just across the street. I'm done. I look around for face-wiper after wiping my own face with my shirt for about the fiftieth time, coating my shirt with sticky sweat. It's such an ugly thing to do but with the way I smell, it's not the most ugliest thing about me right now.

All around me are middle-aged tourists, happy couples from far away, holding hands and walking slowly with wide-eyed looks on their faces. A big red sedan slows down in the middle of JFK and I know they're lost. I walk over to see if I can help, first looking around for my face-wiping competitor. I can't find him anywhere but there's a lot of fog. I just want to know which way he went so he doesn't pass me again. Even though I ran almost seven miles, I'll run another seven before I'll let him pass me again. I'm part Irish, too, and catching up to runners who don't know they're in a competition is a healthy way to let it out.

A really fat lady sitting in the passenger side of the big red sedan looks at me confused. "Do you know where the beach is?"

It's twenty feet down JFK to the intersection with Great Highway. On the other side of the Great Highway is the ocean. I guess that's what she means, but I'm confused. Is she looking for a beach like in Hawaii or the ocean, like across the street? It's such an easy question that anyone knows the answer. I know the answer! I can help.

"Take a left at this intersection and there's parking on the right. That's it. You're right there."

"Oh," she says, smiling. "Oh. Thank you." The driver, her husband probably, looks up from his map and smiles, thanking me, too.

I feel like a Biggest Loser competitor when they win an easy advantage, and I haven't even cried all day.

Hunger Challenge 2009

Eating seems so simple for animals. It seems like all they do, almost, is eat and they aren't one bit guilty about it. All I've ever seen a cow do, for example, is stand in the same spot and chew. Cows are stupid compared to us and yet they don't stress out about what they're going to do about lunch. They're happy with eating whatever happens to be underfoot, right now. They don't check for calories, cleanliness or check with Bill Marler about the Non-O157 Shiga Toxin-Producing Escherichia coli in this particular patch of grass. They don't seem worried about saving a piece of the pasture for later or not eating a particular rich part of the grass until they're really hungry or they've lost a few pounds. They don't give their expanding thighs a thought. They don't hoard and they don't gang up to keep some of the cows from eating the good, green stuff. Cows seem like they have it more together than we do. High school for me would have been so much easier as a cow.

My one son is tall and thin and the opposite of a cow, except food seems simple for him, too. He's one of those, "I guess I forgot to eat today," kind of guys who only realizes he needs food when he's about to fall over from low blood sugar. I don't know how you forget something like that. You're hungry. There's food. You make a choice, you enjoy. You do it again in five or six hours. Where's the complication in all of that?

When you're overweight, or you're broke, or your mother is a Registered Dietician whose solution to every problem is, "it must be something you ate," eating gets complicated. Growing up in my family, if you had a headache my mom asked, "What'd you eat?" If you ate something you enjoyed a little too much, like white bread or snickerdoodles, it was a sin, even poison. Food could be good or it could be evil. It had the power to make you feel as guilty as a pedophile after the simple act of eating birthday cake. Everything we did or didn't do as kids could be traced back to what we ate. We went on beet and zucchini fasts to rid ourselves of some kind of wrong, some evil or ill we needed to purge at age twelve. We went on regular fasts, too, although to me that just meant skipping the boring, healthy meal and going straight to sneaking my dad's hidden candy, regardless of the subsequent guilt or headache.

Being my mother's daughter, I often think my son's lack of food attention is my fault. We were really poor when he was a kid. Not only did I try to not be like my mother regarding food guilt, but I tried to not emphasize eating at all. You aren't hungry? No problem. We'll be eating again tomorrow. You want cereal for dinner? Let's all have cereal for dinner. Who has food guilt now? Maybe I did too good of a job. Now it's my son's wife who tells him, "What are you, on a diet? Eat!"

We didn't have much in the house when we were that poor but even regular kids open the refrigerator door and stare, hoping to find something good inside to eat or drink. I did that all the time growing up, but in my case I was staring at dozens of bottles and jars of green, brown, yellowy lumpy, saucy, veggie things, all very good for me and none of it Coke or Pepsi. My mom said, "Do you think there'll be something different in there if you keep looking?" I'm sure I said that to my kids, too, but there was, truly, nothing. No bottles or jars of anything, especially at the end of the month. Finding money for food when you're poor is playing Texas Hold-em and getting dealt two-seven off-suit every time. You know your chances of winning, making it to the end of the month, aren't good. Unlike poker, you can't fold and sit out, waiting for the next hand. Not with kids.

"The food you want me to buy is so expensive," my mom's clients used to tell her. "Fresh, whole foods cost more. I can't afford to go on your prescribed diet." She'd tell them type-2 diabetes is more expensive but later she'd tell me, "I'm not stupid. Healthy foods are cheaper than packaged, processed garbage." Oh yeah, mom? Have you seen the coupons you can get for some of that garbage? Freschetta Brick Oven pizza is a dollar off this week. That's the good kind of pizza, the name brand pizza that I could never afford when my son was young. Maybe that's why he doesn't care much about eating. He had his taste buds seared off by cheap hot cardboard, covered with red chemicals and white, gooey grease on top, what I called "dinner." I could be wrong but I haven't seen coupons for this kind of savings on, say, beets.

This week is the San Francisco Food Bank's 2009 Hunger Challenge, ending tomorrow, and if you haven't tried it, you are missing out. It doesn't matter if you're rich or poor, fat or thin, have a Registered Dietitian as a mother or not, you can do it and you should. I'm not big on "should" but how often do you get to walk a day in another person's shoes without the inconvenience or the potential foot odor? All you have to do is eat like the more than 35 million of our fellow Americans who live on a food stamp budget; the only parameter being a four dollar a day limit. You can eat Freschetta pizza or whole grains and beets: it's your choice.

My choice was to forget about shopping Sunday, buy $7 of bagels on Monday and share them with my son and his family. The only thing I bought was a medium Peet's coffee on Wednesday. Thursday, while babysitting, I stopped at the Dim Sum To Go shop I like on Clement for a sesame ball, pork bao and coconut bun for the baby (3/$1.20: beat that). My son's wife bought me pumpkin bread and fed me dinner, thanking me for babysitting. That brought me way ahead. Maybe I'll get the soy milk I'm getting low on before this challenge is over, and maybe I won't. When my husband comes home, I'll have to eat real meals on some kind of schedule, and plan and think. His $4 a day will be spent on lots and lots of meat, almost entirely. That won't be as easy.

If you're not on a food stamp budget and you're anything like my mom, you already have a huge advantage: a kitchen full of food. There's only two people under my mom's roof and they could both live off of what's in her floor-to-ceiling pantry and two refrigerators for the good part of a year. Seriously, you couldn't squeeze in a container of leftovers in either fridge without ten minutes of advanced puzzle reconfigurations. She's blessed and if nothing else, you can feel blessed, too, for what you already have. You don't have to go without your morning latte if you are willing to forgo shopping for the day. That's it. It's the best kind of challenge. You may think more about food, but you'll be thinking in a more constructive, civilized way.

Let's be better than cows.