All posts by Steve Stern

Muscle memory

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I bought a pair of minimalist – for lack of a better descriptor –  shoes the other day because I have been, increasingly, having problems with my feet. A couple of months ago, I started to worry that I had somehow broken a bone in my foot because I had such sharp shooting pains. After X Rays, the doctor assured me that it was only Arthritis.

Because of the pain, I started walking less and that only made it worse. Finally, I went to Michele’s Chiropractor who is somewhat of a holistic healer. He gave me a heavy-duty massage – with what he called a jack-hammer, it was very strong – and told me to soak my feet in hot water, get massages, and walk barefoot around the house more (since I never walk barefoot, anything would be more). Also, he told me that my shoes were too stiff and I should Get a pair of minimalist shoes.

All of this has been counter intuitive, at least for me, but I am walking around the house with only socks, soaking my feet in hot water, and I have even gotten a foot massage. I also got a pair of New Balance Minimus Trail Shoes. I have been wearing Keen Trail Shoes and they are fairly heavy-duty, in theory to protect my feet.

I knew switching shoe styles would be somewhat of a shock because the Keens are designed to cushion my heel when I land heel first and the New Balance have no heel padding.   What I didn’t expect was the feeling of familiarity I got when I first put them on. Pulling the shoes on – and putting the shoes on is closer to putting on socks than it is to slipping into some comfortable old shoe – I was flooded with memories of pulling on my track shoes. I think that the last time I wore track shoes was May of 1958. That is over 56 years ago and they still – instantly – felt familiar. Now just picking the shoes up brings back those familiar feelings.

It is not specific feelings, I am not brought back to that feeling of standing on a hard track on a warm day, I am not transported in time. I pick up the first shoe and it is lighter than I expected and I am aware that my hands, my muscles – not my mind – are being careful not to grab the front with the sharp cleats. I loosen the laces and open the shoes as much as possible, then I pull them over my feet. I have to run my thumb around the back to get my heel in and, as I run my thumb around, bringing the soft shoe back up over the back of my heel, it all feels so every day. Everyday now, not every day then.

It is not like my mind remembers, it is like my muscles remember. I like that.

Went to a Giants’ game, had pretty good seats

Americana, Around home

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I was invited to a Giants Nationals Baseball game the other night and it was close to revelatory. To back up a little, baseball was always the game du jour when I was in grammar school and I grew up hating it (at least until I got to highschool). And hating might not be the right word, maybe being terrified of baseball is better. It’s not because I don’t see the grace and power of the game, that was pretty much the reason for my fear. I was so bad at it – the catching and throwing part in particular – when I was a child and every other boy seemed so good that my memories have been tainted.

My grammar school playground was asphalt. There is not much a kid could do on asphalt, sure, we had several handball courts – concrete walls with lines in front of them – but that was considered a girls game (it was played with a giant basketball-like ball). Baseball was the boys game – football was out of the question on the pavement and soccer hadn’t yet been invented in our neighborhood – so we played baseball almost every noon. We started by choosing teams and I was always the last one chosen – I had the distinct feeling that, if Nobody had been an option, he would have been chosen before me – and I hated the daily humiliation.

At home, it was even worse. All the boy-kids in my neighborhood used to play baseball in the street right in front of my house. We called it Cat of Ninetails, but it was baseball. Because we didn’t have enough kids for two baseball teams, we fielded one team of the usual positions and everybody else was a batter. A batter stayed a batter until he was put out, then he would be sent to left field and everybody else would rotate over one position with the – now successful –  pitcher becoming a new batter and the first baseman now becoming the pitcher (and so on). As the game wore on, everybody played every position.

This was sixty-five years ago, or so, and I still remember how awful it was. It was worst when I became the pitcher – sooner or later, everybody became pitcher; hell, everybody wanted to be pitcher except me – because I couldn’t get anybody out. Standing there in the street, in the summer heat, tossing a baseball at a guy standing a short distance away – holding a stick he would use to drive the ball back at me – with everybody watching me, all I could do was throw ball after ball. For me, there was no strike zone; my only hope was for the batter to hit out. When I finally became a batter, I almost always struck out quickly and went to left field where I could hide for a while, but soon I rotated to third base and the nightmare began again.

I was tall and could run fast, faster than most people, and I discovered track and football as soon as I got to middle school, leaving my baseball playing days behind.

Anyway, on this day, I was very much looking forward to going to the Giants game because we were going to have the best seats in the house. Richard Taylor and I had been invited by Courtney Gonzales who, in turn, had been invited by her friend and our Ticket Goddess, Suzanne. Rather than fighting traffic and parking, I took the train from Menlo Park, feeling very urbane. When I was in highschool, I spent alot of time at the Menlo Park station and it is like visiting an old friend. The station was originally built in 1867 and updated to its Victorian splendor by Southern Pacific about 30 years later.

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As I have ridden the train, off and on, over the last 60 years – first when it was Southern Pacific and now as a part of CalTrain – I watched the use level go down and now I am watching it starting to revive. I think the heyday was in the late forties and early fifties when men commuted to work in The City. Their wives would drop them off at the station, often driving them there in the family Station Wagons which was the only car the family had. In those days, the men wore grey flannel or dark blue suits and would read the paper – the paper being The San Francisco Chronicle – on their way to work. On the way home, they would often have a drink in the club car. It was not uncommon to see the same four men in the same four seats around a table playing bridge and having a martini on the way home.

Now, I got on the train with an entirely new kind of commuter. Then they were all men and all white, now there are more women and many more Asians, everybody is wearing jeans and short sleeve shirts. My trip started out with almost all Silicon Valley commuters, however, as we went north, they were replaced by more and more people going to the game. The mood got lighter and more festive. The random colors replaced by orange and black.

We got off the train, at San Francisco, and walked – en mass – the two short blocks to the stadium. I was really taken by the level of joy the crowd carried. It was a warm – for San Francisco, not for Portola Valley, 30 miles south – afternoon, probably in the 70s and everybody was there to have a good time. Not frantic or macho like football crowds can get, just a  mellow crowd out to enjoy a warm summer evening watching a good game of baseball. Everybody was walking along, smiling, laughing, enjoying this day, this time, this outing.

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We walked along like friends even though we didn’t know each other, all of us in the same moving crowd, going from the train to the stadium. At the stadium, the our crowd joined the stadium crowd in a big mass of happiness. The only downside is that I found it hard to find Courtney at first. Then she spotted me and we made a beeline into the stadium. We went from this

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to this, following Suzanne through the players entrance and past the guard – who took one look at Suzanne and didn’t even check our IDs – like three ducklings following their mother. Not exactly hanging on, but definitely not wanting to get left behind.

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Then it was through the maze of stadium corridors and passageways all the way down to the first row. Not just any first row but the first row just to the left of the backstop, with an unobstructed view of the field.

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The stadium wasn’t sold out, still, there were alot of fans behind us.

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The game itself was pretty close until the 7th inning and then the Nationals got five runs and just ran away with it. We left shortly afterwards.

On the train ride home, I was a little surprised at how happy everybody still was, after all our team didn’t win. I am sure that most of the people would have liked the Giants to win but, really, we were all here for a nice summer evening watching a group of very gifted athletes play America’s Pastime. Riding along with my fellow baseball watchers, I basked in our collective goodwill, thinking about how many books have been written about Baseball, how many poems and movies. How much pleasure Baseball has provided its fans over the years. And how much pleasure it provided me on this warm summer evening. I guess that I am ready to let go of my Baseball past.

Lucky Peach and Wired….thinking out of the box

Psychological Musings

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Michele picked up an issue of Lucky Peach, an alternative quarterly journal of food writing, art, and recipes – as it bills itself – a couple of weeks, or so,  ago. We were first introduced to Lucky Peach by Richard Taylor who gave Michele an issue, on Chinese shopping center restaurants, probably more than a year ago. Both Michele and I like Chinese food and cooking, so it was a welcome gift. But it was almost  impossible to read. In an effort to stand out in a very crowded food and cooking magazine universe, to break out of that cooking mag box, Lucky Peach had gone overboard. It reminds me of the first year or so of Wired doing the same thing for the digital/Silicon Valley world. The first couple of issues – with about ten type sizes and faces per page – were way more unreadable than Lucky Peach (even Wired‘s table of contents was hard to read).

It seems to me what these two have in common is that they made a radical departures from what everybody knows works in magazines. Thinking outside the box is a conscious effort to not follow the rules. As an aside, I remember reading that, when Charlie Parker – the great American jazz saxophonist, who revolutionized jazz with bebop – was trying to break away from the Big Band Jazz-sound, he turned the score upside down to get in a different musical space. End aside. Without any rules to rely on, the change usually doesn’t work at first.

It doesn’t work, I think, for a couple of reasons. First, we are all still habituated to the in-the-box rules making the new stuff look weird. Even if an out of boxer decides to think out of the box, it doesn’t mean that we, the user, is agreeing to that (even if we think we are). We are still following the old rules, at least until the out-of-the-boxer convince us to change. Using the old rules, it is very difficult to make judgements on the new stuff and we often just resort to Well, that’s weird, and move on.

Sometimes it is actually weird more than good. The new stuff , by setting out to be outside the box, is, in some ways, just random and, in other ways, is just Do it NOT like they did it. Sometimes, it takes time to invent new rules and refine them. However, I suspect that this happens less than we think.

Often, when I look back at some radical design or piece of art that I thought was terrible 50 years ago, it looks great now.

 

The problem with epiphyllums

Around home

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We have a half-dozen or so Epiphyllums in – mostly plastic – pots in the greenhouse. The problem is that they take up alot more space than they should. Way more.

Epiphyllums are cacti that have evolved to live in trees and they have big stems that work like leaves. Maybe twenty years ago, I got several cuttings of various hybrids and they are thriving. They are also unruly, growing every which way in a most unruly manner. The Epippies – as they are known to the cognoscenti, of which I am not one of them – have spectacular flowers. However it turns out that Napa Sunrise and Hawaiian Sunset and Pink Delight and everything else I have – except for one plant with white flowers – are pretty much the same flowers.

Most of the plants are small by themselves, however the oldest  Eppie is large and blooming its little head off and we brought it into the house to admire.