A loud bump at the other end of the house woke us about dawn yesterday morning. Both Michele and Precious Mae sat up and looked around, but that’s all it was, one loud bump. And then silence. We all went back to sleep.

When we did get up, at first, there was no sign of what could have made the noise. I would say, Here is a book that fell over, and Michele would say, No, I put it there. The whole loud bump thing was soon forgotten, that is until Michele found a Band-tailed Pigeon – Columba fasciata – dead, under a chair out on the deck. As an aside, the name columbarium – a place to store cremains, the cremated remains of humans – comes from the Latin for dove, columba, and originally referred to the compartmentalized nests for doves and pigeons. End aside. This poor dear had apparently flown into a window and killed her/his self.

We have a bird feeder out in the garden and I mistakenly bought Wild Bird Seed rather than Patio Mix and that has resulted in the birds at the feeder sorting through the seed and throwing the seed they don’t like on the ground (I guess, technically, they sort through and let the seed fall to the ground). Either way, this has brought more ground feeders into the area and that includes the Pigeons. Unlike their city cousins, feral pigeons – Columba livia domestica – the Band-tailed Pigeons are very shy. The slightest movement sends them flying and this poor animal flew the wrong way.

All the Pigeons didn’t fly into the window, just this one, and that is vitally important.

Courtney Gonzales and I were talking about the desirability of embracing differences in people. In thinking about the Pigeon, it seems to me that embracing difference is not just desirable in itself but vital to any group prospering. Monocultures don’t do well in a changing world, they probably wouldn’t do well in a static world either, but – since the world is never static – we don’t know that for sure. As an aside, diversity is the most basic success story in the living world,  it is engine that drives evolution and, to get diversity, we have sex. At the most basic level, if we reproduced by splitting into clones of ourselves, there would be no diversity and there would be no evolution (and we would all still be proto-amoebas). End aside. Societies that are monocultural, that are pure, are not as strong as societies that are diverse.

Our diversity is what makes the United States is so powerful and it is why the most diverse parts of the United States are the most prosperous. Silicon Valley is so successful because it is so racially diverse (and I suspect it would be even more successful if it were more behavior and gender diverse). People who want to have everybody the same as themselves are really trying to make an environment that is a setup for stagnation and failure.

It is nice to remember that.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

According to AZ Family, a man accidentally shot himself in the leg while at a Wal-Mart store in Phoenix on Saturday.

My first reaction on reading this was, It serves the SOB right, but my second reaction was to remember a time when I carried a weapon (carry may not be the right word, the weapon was in my briefcase and I was carrying the briefcase, not the weapon). I was 33, married with a baby at home, and how I ended up carrying a weapon is one of my favorite stories.

We had sold a house to a guy named Bob Shimbari – I’ve changed the name a little for reasons that will become obvious – and Shimbari changed his mind and wanted his deposit back. The salesperson gave him the usual forms to fill out but he refused to do so. He just wanted his money. As I recall, it was 500 bucks on a, around, 40 thousand dollar home (we always called them homes, rather than houses). The salesperson bumped Shimbari to the Sales Manager who confirmed that he had to fill out the forms.

This was the early 70s and I was the Director of Operations for Shapell of Northern California, so the Sales Manager now bumped a pissed-off Shimbari to me. Shimbari said that he wanted his money back and I sweetly said Sure..long pause…just fill out the forms (I was a much bigger smart ass then, than I like to think I am now). Shimbari went nuts, telling me that he was going to kill me if I didn’t give him the $500. I told him that he had to fill out the form before I could give him the money and he hung up.

Maybe an hour later, he called back and told me he was going to wait in the parking lot, shoot you down, and then go to your house, I know where you live, and kill your wife and kids. The fact that he said kids, led me to believe that he really didn’t know where I lived or that I only had one kid, but still, it scared the hell out of me. I went to my boss, Sam Berland, and asked him what to do. Sam, who never panicked, who was always cool,  assured me that people make threats all the time and they don’t mean anything. If I didn’t believe him – Sam said – call the police and they will tell you the same thing.

I did call the police and they did tell me the same thing. With Sam’s calm assurance of my safety and now the police’s reassurance, I was starting to calm down. However, as I started to hang up, the cop told me I had to fill out a complaint form (hummm, what a pain in the neck and how ironic, fortunately I could fill out the form over the phone). The cop asked me the threatener’s name and I told him Shimbari. The cop then said – almost yelled – Shimbari!, Bob Shimbari? When I told him yes, the cop said I should be afraid, Very afraid.

It turned out Shimbari was the local bad boy, he owned several massage parlors and was known as a dangerous hothead. The cop said I should be very careful and, now, my panic reached a new level. I went back to Sam and, after some discussion – in which, among other things,  I stubbornly refused Sam’s suggestion that I give Shimbari back his money without the forms – Sam offered to loan me his Army issue Colt .45 automatic. I was pretty good with a .45 in the Army, so I said Yes.

The next day, I had Sam’s trusty .45 and, when Shimbari called to threaten me again, I dug in my heals. But, now that I had the gun, all kinds of real, practical questions came up. Did I load the gun? I don’t mean should I put a loaded clip in?, that was obviously Yes, but should I chamber a round?  Do I take the safety off if I have a chambered round? How do I carry the gun? I decided to put in a full clip, chamber a round, and half-cock the weapon (because I had heard stories of people dropping their fully cocked .45 and having it go off). I didn’t – and in California, I am glad to say – couldn’t carry the weapon around in my hand or in a holster, so I put it in my briefcase.

As I went out in the parking lot to get into my car, I realized the problem. The sun was bright, there were cars all over the parking lot, and anyone of them could hide a shooter. In my imagination, in the shimmering light, Shimbari is over by his car and he yells at me, Hey Asshole, I want my money! I put my briefcase down on the closest car hood, struggle it open – sweating in the heat, my hands almost slipping off of the shiny, brass, latches –   and take out the .45. The .45 is cool – it has been asleep in a briefcase in an air-conditioned office all morning – the safety is off, and it is easy to fully cock  the weapon. Now! I am ready to go.

But, if this whole thing were real, if it weren’t my imagination, if Shimbari had really been hiding behind that car, I am probably already dead.

Standing in the parking lot, looking at all those cars – I recognize that one, it’s Sam’s, that’s Dan’s, but where did that black Cadillac come from and is that somebody hiding behind it ? –  I could feel the sweat running down my sides from under my armpits, I could feel how exposed I was, how vulnerable. I began to realize that a gun in a briefcase is worthless and I thought about doing this for days (for weeks maybe, depending on how persistent Shimbari is). After, maybe 10 seconds, worth of thought, I went back into the office, filled out Shimbari’s forms for him and told the Salesperson to tell him the money was in the mail.

I gave the weapon back to Sam.

As an aside, there is a postscript to this story. Several years later, Sam and I started our own company, bas homes,  and the first contract our salesperson brought in was to Bob Shimbari. When the salesperson brought in the contract, I told her that I wouldn’t sign it. An hour later, Shimbari called me screaming that he was going to sue me for discrimination and I told him that the last time, he said he was going to kill me. There was a long pause and Shimbari said See, I’ve matured. End aside.

I resaw Erin Brockovich – the movie, not the real person – the other day. I had forgotten how good the movie is and how bad it paints PG&E. I have alot of experience with PG&E and they are every bit as bad as the movie depicts. They are, by far, the worst organization I have ever worked with.

In my experience, PG&E is way more difficult to work with than any state organization, worse than any water department or city. It is much harder to do business with than the Federal Government.  Without going off to far on a Libertarian rant, I think that a huge number of laws and codes are just there to protect some vested interest; a rich vested interest. However, governments are – to a greater or lesser degree – accountable to the people. The less accountable they are, the worse they are. The United States – Federal – government is not as accountable as I would like, nonetheless, it is still accountable. But PG&E isn’t. It may pretend to be but, in almost every area, it isn’t.

The PG&E entrenched bureaucracy with its unknown – to the outside world – table of organization and power centers, does what it thinks is best for itself. The picture above is a scan of a mailer that PG&E sent out telling us what a good job they are doing. The mailer neglects to tell us that a 30″ gas pipeline blew up in September of 2010 because of neglect and eight people were killed and alot more were injured. They do tell us that they replaced nearly 15 miles of gas transmission lines in the Bay Area and pressure tested an additional 50 miles but they neglect to tell us that this is out of 48,579 miles of natural gas distribution and transportation pipelines in Northern and Central California.

The second worse organization was a railroad, Union Pacific (I think). We were building a soundwall next to their tracks and wanted to get permission to encroach on their right-of-way with our cranes. The request had to go to engineering and a right-of-way committee and I would call week after week for a schedule without getting one. Finally, I told our guys to just do the work and try to stay away from their right-of-way as much as they could. We had been finished with the work for about six months before the permission to do the work came through . When people say that the government should be run more like a business, I wonder what they are really talking about.

Aside from the obvious, a business is designed to make money and government is supposed to protect Life, Liberty, and The Pursuit of Happiness, a business that has been around for a hundred years is probably run much worse than any government.

.