Category: Bay area, Calif.

Cell phone

“What happened to your phone?” said the saleswoman sympathetically. She was holding my cell phone between her thumb and forefinger, because it was dripping wet.

“It went into the laundry,” I said.

“Oh, your poor phone,” she said. “I’m going to turn it off so it will stop vibrating.” It wouldn’t turn off, so she took the battery out.

She got me a new phone, but had difficulties with the computer. The other salesman came over to hep her out. He looked at the phone. “What happened to your phone?” he said sympathetically.

“I was doing laundry,” I said. “Then I was like, Where’s my phone? It was in my pants. I opened the washing machine, it was full of water and going goosh, goosh, goosh; I reached in to my pants pocket, and there was my phone — bzzzt — vibrating continuously and totally dead.” I had them both laughing.

I asked the man if they were on commission, and he said they were. I apologized that they weren’t going to make much of a commission off my new phone. He said it was OK. I admitted that I used to be in sales. We got to talking about commissions, building relationships, meeting targets, all the things that salespeople talk about. Both these salespeople obviously followed the soft-sell school of sales. I like soft-sell salespeople: they’re easy-going, they have good people skills, they’re relentlessly positive, and they like to talk.

While we were talking, the man walked the woman through the process of updating my account. When we were done, I asked her if she was new. She said she was. “You’ll do great,” I said, “you have a good sales personality.” And I wasn’t just being an upbeat optimistic positive salesperson: she will be a good salesperson. We all said goodbye, and I walked out into the sunshine with my new phone.

220th birthday

Here’s to the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which, along with the rest of the Bill of Rights, is celebrating its 220th anniversary today. The senior minister here at our church, Amy Zucker Morgenstern, went to a vigil in Palo Alto to celebrate the birthday and protest rising threats to the freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights.

I was not able to go to that vigil, but Hershey, a member of the Palo Alto church, sent me an account of something a UMC minister went through while participating in the West Coast Port Shutdown on Monday in Seattle — this minister’s account, with free speech, religion, and an attempt to keep a public assembly peaceable, seems quite relevant to today’s birthday celebration.

Rain

Yesterday, I noticed that the Swiss chard and dandelion greens we had planted in the garden were wilting again. The soil was almost as dry as it gets in the summer time. I brought out a bucket of salvaged gray water, and gave them a long drink. Even though the rainy season has begun, the weather forecast for the next five days calls for sunny dry weather, so it looks like I’ll be doing more watering in the garden in the week ahead.

Just a sweatshirt

Early this evening, Carol and I were discussing how Penn State fired football coach Joe Paterna, because he didn’t report credible allegations of child abuse to the police.

Then we decided to go for a walk. It was a little bit chilly out. Carol went to get her sweatshirt, which just happens to say “Penn State” on it. “I wonder if I should wear it?” she said. We decided that probably no one would notice.

We had been walking for a quarter of an hour when a car drove by and someone yelled something out the window. We couldn’t figure out if they were yelling at us. There were no other pedestrians in sight. But we couldn’t think of anyone who knows us who would yell out the window at us if they drove by. “I wonder if it’s the sweatshirt,” Carol said.

After half an hour, we got to the business district at Burlingame Avenue. There were quite a few people walking on the sidewalks. Suddenly Carol stopped. “I can’t tell if they’re looking at me or not,” she said, and took off the sweatshirt, and tied it around her waist.

Morning fog in the Coastal Range

When I first started looking at classical Chinese landscape painting seriously, I never thought of it as realism: those steep fantastical hills, the mists that so conveniently provide a sense of distance and perspective, none of that looked real to me. But when you live on the Pacific Rim, you see that much of classical Chinese landscape painting is realism.

For the past couple of days, I have been staying at a retreat center on a steep hillside in a redwood grove in the Coastal Range of northern California. This morning the mist drifted in the valley below us, and this is what I saw when I looked out my window at about eight o’clock:

The first rain

Camp Meeker, California

As I drove up here to where the ministers meeting would take place, it started to rain. By the time I arrived, it was raining steadily. I got out of the car, and it smelled like rain and wet ground. It was the first rain I had seen and felt and smelled since last spring. I took a deep breath.

This evening, Carol texted me: “Where do we have tarp for rowing machine?” This summer, Carol bought a rowing machine for ten dollars, and we had set it out on our little second floor deck so we could sit outdoors while we were using it. But now it was getting wet. I texted back: “Crap. Look in basement.” I hope she managed to find the tarp and protect the rowing machine from the rain.