Out of Money in the Sonoma Valley

The following afternoon, as we stand sipping tiny pours of Sonoma Valley wines - sniffing them like true sommeliers there is one thing that becomes very clear to me - shoes and handbags are perfect barometers of fiscal health.

Jeans and North Face fleece may distract but if you normally wear Prada you look like you wear Prada even when you’re not wearing Prada. We do not normally wear Prada and it shows.

At the Valley of the Moon winery we've tasted a lovely wine and decided the label is pretty enough to justify the purchase of two more bottles. We are second in line behind an elderly couple -- the man of the two is buying a several cases of wine.

We wait patiently as a total is tallied and patiently again as a decision to increase the bottledge in his cellar is made. A new tally is neared and Mr. I'm-Buying-Cases-Of-Wine-While-My-Wife-Withers-Faithfully-Worrying-About-Who-Will-Pay-The-Egg-Man decides upon an additional case or more.

Unfortunately for Mr. Wino, Wells-Fargo Bank has a different idea about wine affordability. The efficient, friendly and enabling clerk tries to swipe the card several times to no avail. We continue to wait as the efficient, friendly and enabling clerk phones the drones at Wells-Fargo and sits on hold.

While listening to how valued he is as a customer, the clerk explains to the wine buyer that the system must be down or the CIA has changed some access codes.

He explains that this has been going on for a couple of weeks and that it must have some thing to do with "The Thing" that has happened.

Finally miffed around the point of no return I pipe up, "Do you mean the War?? That thing?? The War that we're having? Because, that's what it is, you know, it's a war. Those bombs dropping? That's a war. It's - a - war."

Shoes and handbags and over the limit credit cards pointedly ignore.

I'm disappointed.

Not because they chose to ignore - but because those two bottles we decided not to buy after all would have looked pretty in candlelight in our dust and cat hair filled home.

It occurs to me that very few people are talking about "The Thing" in general. We've headed west following stars and bars covering nearly every surface – including the two signs made of red Solo cups jammed into chain link fencing - WE (HEART) USA –

Somehow, I had assumed that once we arrived in the Bay Area we'd hear about what has happened in the past week.

Surprisingly, nobody is talking about "The Thing" at all and I'm wondering why.

The Waves Crash and We Prepare to Return

The seals lie splayed on the rocks of Monterey Bay but now we must return east. We’re visiting my cousin Kathy who has moved from her condo in LA to a studio apartment in Pacific Grove after the world and a long term relationship have gone to shit – not necessarily in that order.

She tells us of how drove from LA at three a.m. in those first few days of uncertainly and National Panic.

The Northridge earthquake, the Rodney King riots and the fires and floods had been one thing…. Kathy and I share stories of the days immediately following and feed one another’s quiet hysteria.

This morning I woke after dreaming of the women of Middlegate, Nevada who stood in the yard of the one bar/motel/restaurant/bordello in that town of 15 citizens. We had stopped there on our way west and as we pulled up Air Force jets were screaming overhead - their fast shadows and sonic booms echoing across that expanse of desert. The women stood in the yard with their binoculars pressed to their faces - their necks craned to the sky.

It was in Middlegate, the source of this dream, that we met the biologist who used to work for the Field Museum and was now the town handyman. His job was to maintain the town’s generator to keep the electricity flowing. This electricity runs the large television in the bar. It was on this television that people talked about anthrax.

We had been avoiding the news, but in Middlegate where the electricity is supplied by a biologist, we could not avoid CNN. The woman behind the bar wore a stars and stripes shirt and opined that the media tells too much sometimes. That sometimes the media reports on things that only become true when they're reported on. The jets screamed and boomed overhead and Edward ordered a western burger to go. It is large and greasy and topped with cheese. The woman in stars and stripes flips the burger and offers her take on what has happened to our world since the Towers fell to the ground many miles and days to the east.

This is the first but not the only time I dream of the women of Middlegate.

Later that afternoon, In Big Sur, I stand on a balcony of a restaurant that stands on property once owned by  Orson Welles. Below me I watch crows and blue jays flit from branch to branch on a huge specimen of a plant I am forced to grow in our less Mediterranian clime, in a pot, during summers, on my porch. I’m quietly amazed by this when I hear an unseen man speaking loudly, somewhere beneath the balcony and hidden by the foliage of this specimin plant, to an unseen person. He mentions Abbie Hoffman several times and the Washington Monument. He talks about the time 30 years ago and how at that time it was either illegal or extremely frowned upon to wear clothing made of the American flag. He was laughing ruefully that now those same people who would have harassed him for wearing flag clothing are now proudly displaying the stars and bars.

I remember Middlegate and a frozen burger frying.

That night we meet Kathy’s good friend. An Argentinian woman who quietly urges Kathy to move to Pacific Grove for good. For her own good. For her spiritual health and well-being.

She herself has been listening carefully to the news. She tells us she feels uneasy as she is eerily reminded of the politics of the country she left behind many years before. Fled. She tells us breathlessly, that they might be burning the mail.

The next morning, because it is time to think about returning to our job's desks, we wish my cousin Kathy goodbye and head east.