Microclimates

Apparently I'm not around women often enough. The occasional weekend brunch and my book group aside, there's an estrogen deficit in my life, and being suddenly subjected to 1000 women in one place, all emotional and unstable — as is our wont — caused my own emotions to fly off the handle.

Or perhaps it was the full moon. Or microclimates.

Before J and I packed our bags, we checked the weather.

"I'm getting highs of 64."

"Really? This says 77."

Our first morning in the hotel, the same diverging temperatures. We compared notes — the zip code he was using was five blocks north of our hotel.

"How can it be ten degrees warmer five blocks north of here?"

The first moment I had to myself, I turned left out of the hotel and climbed. I felt like I might be able to reach forward and touch the sidewalk ahead of me, fearing my knees had suddenly aged sixty years in five minutes. And at the corner of Pine and Mason, I took off my jacket, loosened my scarf, stood still in the sun. And it was, indeed, ten degrees warmer.

The microclimates of San Francisco at work. And so I had found my metaphor.

Here among these women, I felt warmer still than I had moments before, out on my own in the back alleys of Chinatown. Little microclimates of people, all of us sharing a common interest, but writing our different stories. Those who were happy, those who had lived, those who seemed to be still living. Those of us who couldn't stop laughing. Big goofs, all of us. Feeding Roombas and giggling over mixed drinks. Finding the loops in strings tied to keys. Calming each other's nerves before we had to face the crowds. Moaning at the sight of doughnuts.

I wasn't going to write about this at all. I thought I could bury my emotions from this weekend in this prosaic musing on microclimates, shoveling dirt over the excitement by stitching together an anecdote of how at a different altitude, the weep suddenly sets in at the airport ticketing counter.

But I have to write about it. I met some amazing women, and learned something new from all of them. How not to fear showing the OH MY GOD YOU GUYS side of me. How to laugh at myself. How to give the perfect high five. How if you get the right roomful of people, everyone will dance to "Blister In The Sun," just like we did back in high school.

How you can read as many books as your heart desires, you can find comfort in other people's stories, but you can never, ever replace the feeling of being part of a story in the making. And how a thousand storytellers in one place means a thousand stories.

You can see why I got weepy.

It wasn't until I was flying through the air, sandwiched between J and a lovely man in a cowboy hat with a loud voice and teeth like a country music star, that I was able to bring those estrogen levels back down again, calm enough to watch the thunderstorms from above.

And wouldn't that be a better metaphor anyhow.

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.

Oh Beautiful For Spacious Skies

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.

Life Is Good

All Over Coffee came down off the shelves again yesterday. I thumbed the pages. I sighed over the India ink washes. It even smelled good.

San Francisco on the brain. I searched casually for real estate, and, on seeing the prices, shouted "WE'LL NEVER EVER LIVE IN SAN FRANCISCO!" "Never say never," said The Husband.

There are thousands of people to lust after, to fantasize about. All of whom, she knew, would be impossible to get along with. Still, she wanted them.

That's true of cities, too. I'm certainly guilty of lusting after a place I only knew for a few days. A fling with somewhere I might not get along with. Turn ons: great food, stunning architecture; turn offs: the unhelpful woman manning a public transportation booth where we were required to have exact change. Drunk on the steepness of hills, enamored with hotels named for poets. It haunts me. I even passed a girl carrying a City Lights bookbag yesterday on my way to the market. As if she were planted in my path.

The last time I read All Over Coffee, it described a world right outside my window. But now? A plane flight. At least two days by car. A lifetime of walking.

The illustrations in this book now join a small selection of illustrations that are capable of stirring up great emotion in me. The old-looking rose-faced children in Tell Me A Mitzi. The Aubrey Beardsley-esque line drawings done by a friend's cousin in a book of Latvian poetry. And the 1970s greeting card that sits in my office, three pairs of colorful tennis shoes resting on a porch railing over an autumn sunset, telling me on the inside that Life Is Good.

The smell of taquerias and burnt coffee in early morning.

Life is good, and still glowing with promise.

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.

My heart cried out for you

There's a place on the Pacific Coast Highway where the road cuts the rock, and a large monolith juts up on your left as you drive north. The steep hills of the west coast steady you on your right, hills that appear to be pushing back against the rest of the country, keeping it from leaping into the Pacific. This stretch of road has become part of our collective image database, used in car commercials and travel brochures. In September we saw it for ourselves. The sun was setting over the road as we approached, forcing its rays through the crevice, screaming all shades of yellow onto the road and the hills beyond.

I'm going to remember this for the rest of my life, I said.

I had just collected J at LAX. The flight was delayed, and I found myself sitting in a vinyl seat next to a Hungarian man who was there to greet his daughter on her return from a summer in Africa. I had been planning on taking the 405 to the 101 straight up to Santa Barbara, but he put his finger on my map and traced a different line, his accent punctuating the proposed route.

Through Maleeboo, he said. Maleeboo is so be-yooteeful as the sun sets.

We stopped just beyond the clapboard-backed houses in Malibu for apricot and almond granola bars from the pharmacy. The supermarkets were all shut. Families piled out of minivans and into strip mall restaurants; the sounds of car doors closing and rubber shoes on tarmac scored the calm turnover of day shift to night.

Further north, crouched behind camper vans, they lit bonfires on the beach. There was a hum — in the road, in the air — as the sun tucked itself over the horizon. The hum and crash of waves. We hit the crack in the road and the sun fell, and then the only lights were the oil rigs in the distance. To my left.

To my left. I had to keep reminding myself that I was driving north, being so unused to water on that side. I remember having a distinct fear that it would be so easy to turn the wheel the wrong way and steer us into the Pacific.

Now what would you want to go and do that for.

We hit Oxnard at dark. The fields opened up. These flat fields, covered at night with tarps. I lost the ocean. The traffic veered off to the left, but for some reason we kept to the right. Access roads and semis. Wide lanes and the noise of distant traffic. The 101 up ahead.

Behind us we dropped the crumbs of apricots and almonds. The hum and crash of waves.

(Written months too late, inspired by late Tuesday night, when, like the rest of the country, my mind was in California.)

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.

Reading California

I was a bit optimistic, bringing five books with me on vacation. I honestly thought I would absorb Didion in Big Sur, pause over Steinbeck on the way to Monterey. Surely a moment or two with Perrotta in Santa Barbara. But it was not meant to be. I have read absolutely nothing on vacation. Until this morning.

Yesterday I browsed City Lights Bookstore, in search of the spirit of the Beats I had adored so much in high school. Upstairs in the poetry room I picked up the poems of Kenneth Rexroth and tucked it under my arm. Downstairs I thumbed through City Lights' own selection, and pulled down another book that caught my eye: Paul Madonna's All Over Coffee. The obsession with buildings, rooftops, windows, accompanied by the fictionalization of overheard conversations: it was the perfect San Francisco souvenir.

I read the whole thing this morning while The Husband slept.

Didion and Steinbeck will comfort me on the plane ride home. Their California is each bend of the Pacific Coast Highway, the traffic on the 101, Chinatown alleys, and the stretch of inland fields and railroads. But All Over Coffee is San Francisco at its deepest essence for me: sunsets over hills, silhouettes of telephone poles and electrical wires, the curved wood of a neighborhood turret.

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.