from a usual work day.
A refuge, too, from a typical school day for the third graders I accompanied to the Don Edwards National Wildlife Refuge. And one also, most importantly, for the plants and animals that live there.
It's just across the San Francisco Bay from my home, but I'd never visited until today. It's quite lovely. The views are spectacular.
The natural history is rich, as is the history of humans there.
The area was first used by the native Ohlone, then by duck hunters and then to evaporate salt. You can see an old, abandoned duck blind in the center left of the picture below.
It's now owned by the public, and administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Perhaps most significantly, it's a vital refuge for the elusive and highly endangered Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse, one of the world's tiniest, which loves to eat the intensely saline but delicious pickleweed.
Inspired by the results of this architectural competition and a recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle, the kids and I made bug hotels today. Pictured is the one that Ada and I put together.
Where I grew up, one unsurprising mark of affluence was to have a large kitchen table. Clearly, that signaled ownership of a kitchen large enough in which to fit it. But a subtler aspect of kitchen table semiotics in 1970s England was how you used the things. Essentially, once you acquired your oversize table, you piled it with stuff, most commonly pieces of newspaper, homework, crayons, half-finished knitting or LEGO constructions, a fruit bowl, perhaps, and books. Always books. Thanks to your table's enormity, you could heap all that stuff on there and still have room to eat a meal at it, which you did frequently. For the already well-to-do, refectory-style kitchen tables marked a deliberate move away from the fantasy that their meals really ought to be eaten in a dining room and towards a Terrance Conran/Elizabeth David inspired adoption of European bohemianism. It went with the duvets from Habitat, the new popularity of brie, un-sliced loafs and wooden salad servers. Beyond the aspirational semiotics, though, the large, book-strewn kitchen table had a more concrete utility for families. It put reading at the very heart of family life. I was reminded of this when I noticed the state of my own (not especially refrectory-sized) kitchen table on Saturday morning.
Kitchen tables, I realized, still fill that role.
. . . has joined our household.
A cufafa is small and possesses a sting in its tail that will send you sleep for ten minutes.
Cufafas eat sweet potatoes and berries.
Cufafas glow green in moonlight.
They have no predators.
Here I am, working in a Palo Alto cafe again. There are no business meetings interrupting my workflow this morning, but the new crop of Bay Area Michelin stars were announced today and I'm distracted by the reality that this city of such wealth and creativity features such a dearth of great eating alternatives.
Where's the food innovation?
Well, it all starts with ideas. So here, for all you wannabe food entrepreneurs with money but no inspiration, are five guaranteed winners that I'm giving away for free. If well executed, each would do hugely well and at the same time improve our collective qualities of life:
1) A genuinely local-friendly, locavore bistro -- this would be both cosy and expansive; a place for romantic nights out and an affordable lunch and long meals with big groups of friends and family on a weekend. It's a place where the menu is small but changes all the time. It's where the chef will gladly cook off-menu for kids. The food is emphatically not the kind of butter-heavy richness you find at otherwise great local places like Bistro Elan. This place cooks what you'd cook at home every night -- if you only had the time, skill and ingredients. It tries stuff out. If a neighbor brings in a box of quince, a new cheese or a special kind of local honey, they're that night's news.
We live in one of the best growing regions in the world. Most of our produce tastes great right out of the ground. So no themes. No pretension. Just whatever is seasonal, cheap and plentiful served in creative ways to all comers.
The nearest we have is Calafia, but it's more of a pit-stop than a hang out and it's a prototype for future expansion more than anything sui generis. I'm imagining Chez Panisse without the prices, Osteria Stellina without the Italian veneer. The nearest I can think of is Firefly in San Francisco's Noe Valley, perhaps, which I've always seen as the perfect neighborhood restaurant. Or a classic, old-fashioned Parisian neighborhood bistro. Sometimes the oldest ideas are the newest, too.
2) Truly innovative ice cream. I've written about this before, so no need to rehash the argument. And yes, we can do better than Ricks. Why, for example, didn't we get a nitro ice cream parlour before London?
3) A really decent vegan place like Cafe Gratitude, but without the attitude. Enough said.
4) Robot sushi -- this is a dream that I've had for about ten years. It takes the sushi boat or conveyor idea and ramps it up by a factor of ten. If features conveyor belts of sushi going past every single table, and above your head and through tunnels, across bridges.
It's sushi meets toy train nerds, meets the Bay Area LEGO Users Group. Heck, the whole restaurant could be made of LEGO. The 'boats' would feature plates being ridden by little robots (or LEGO people, perhaps) that you could buy along with the food.
5) Lastly, I'm still looking for a truly great local cafe. Yes, we have Printer's Inc, Coupa Cafe, and The Prolific Oven -- they're all fine places. But we have room for more, and better: especially places with real personality and that are staffed by real personalities. It's what Bucks in Woodside is to the Sand Hill Road set. It's like bars of legend where they know your drink and your name. I want a place with a ton of different seating arrangements, that's welcoming to loners and meetings, where you can write a novel, make a pitch, play chess; where you can nurse a single cup or buy champagne. The reality is that more and more people are using these 'third spaces' to work, meet, and relax. And they've become an integral part of the entrepreneurial meat space of Silicon Valley -- indeed, deliberately plan a space that really nurtures the many facets of the start up world (outlets, wifi, incredible coffee, as welcoming to the penurious as to the loaded success, space for hiding and space in which to be conspicuously seen) and you'll have created what I'm looking for.
So there's a start -- please, someone get going on this! And locals, visitors, do add your own Palo Alto food dreams in the comments below.
Only months ago,
Every evening before we slept,
We'd check
That he'd not tossed himself from bed
Or lay coverless again.
Each time she toddled
Up the stairs
We followed close.
When suddenly he'd set to
Race-the-wind run wild we'd
Shadow his yearling body.
In her first weeks, we stood
And held her,
If need be,
Through the night.
. . . to about five thousand people when speaking at Stanford.
I thought I'd type out my notes while I can still read them. In case you are interested, here's the essence of what he said:
1) He builds from the fundamental tenet that all people have a right to happiness and that our lives are best lived if they are directed towards increasing happiness, both for ourselves and others.
2) Happiness comes from working with and for others. To be able to work with and for others requires compassion.
3) There are three routes to becoming a compassionate person:
- through religion. By giving yourself to a higher power you learn selflessness.
- through a spiritual practice, like Buddhism, that doesn't require a creator, but where instead you are the creator. Thus you create both your own suffering and your own capacity for joy.
- through the practice of secular, ethical humanism.
4) So, it is possible to be compassionate without religion.
5) We know this for three reasons:
- we only survive as children through the care of others
- a compassionate person, family or community is always happier than one governed by anger, envy, jealousy or fear, whether they are religious or not.
- science shows us that negative emotions affect us physiologically and that calm and compassion enhance our physical well being.
6) The rise of science has challenged religion but not the value of compassion.
7) For 4,000 years organized religion has given us hope, but not always material comfort.
8) The science revolutions of the last 200+ years have give us a new, secular kind of hope.
9) But even people with great material comforts, like many Americans, still feel lacking in something.
10) Scientists feel it themselves.
11) Science now better understands how emotional states affect physical health and how minds trained to be compassionate experience less depression and more fulfillment.
12) Material solutions to the lack of fulfillment that we feel (drugs, alcohol etc., becoming rich for its own sake) don't work.
13) The alternative is to follow a practice (mental and physical) that increases our capacity for compassion.
14) That will help us individually and socially.
15) People who value inner peace are compassionate and able to empathize. They will be able to communicate successfully with others and find lasting, fair solutions to the conflicts that inevitably arise between us.
16) The only route to real social peace is through inner peace.
--
In the question and answer session the Dalai Lama was asked whether modern scientific research into the brain threatens his ideas. I didn't follow everything he said in reply, but in essence his answer was that as science advances it appears only to be proving him right about why compassion should be at the center of our lives.
Four other ideas that I took from the Q&A:
a) to dissemble to others or even to oneself, is to do a kind of violence. True non-violence extends to the ways in which we treat each other in our day-to-day lives. What's needed is honesty, integrity and, of course, compassion.
b) it used to be that religious institutions and parents taught ethical behavior. Today, both do that less. So it's now important that our schools and universities teach ethical behavior and the value of compassion -- something it is possible to do in an entirely secular way.
c) to teach the value of compassion will require new curricula. He hopes that the Stanford Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education will help develop such curricula.
d) education, not force, is the best and only lasting way to change minds. Then, while always maintaining respect for those in disagreement with us, we can embark on a century of dialog that will take us away from the last century's time of wars to a new century of lasting peace.
I've spent too much of the last two days having fun with the Hipstamatic iPhone application. Here's a slice of my world through a hipster lens.
The study:
The house:
The school:
The boy
Somehow our children have persuaded their parents to buy them goldfish. We now have three on the back porch, courtesy of Petco and the Sloo family, who kindly gave us a surplus tank.
While the fish food wasn't cheap, the fish themselves were -- 81c each. Why? Because, I gather, they were 'feeder' fish, i.e. intended to be some other animal's prey. This I didn't make much of in front of Michael. It did bring home the odd ambiguity of the 'pet' store, though. For every child eyeing the store's assorted fish, mice, crickets and rats as potential objects of affection, others will be picking out dinner for the animals they love instead.