Miscellany

Remember when stores were closed on holidays?

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I had to run some errands today: Trader Joe’s, Petco and the hardware store. Lots of other people were out shopping too. When I was a kid, of course, this would not have been possible—nothing was open on Easter Sunday. All the stores were closed on all the holidays: Thanksgiving, Christmas, Lincoln’s Birthday, July 4th, Memorial Day, Labor Day… So people learned to shop ahead. Even if we weren’t having guests over for holiday dinner, Mom didn’t want to run out of bread or milk with three kids in the house. (For that matter, one had to shop ahead every week: fresh bread wasn’t available on Wednesdays and Sundays. My father always went out on Saturday mornings to buy warm French bread, just off the delivery truck.)

America, at least, has turned 180° — now stores are open 365 days a year. I didn’t bother to check whether Trader Joe’s or Petco would be open, because I knew they would. I wasn’t so sure about the hardware store (a local independent), but it turns out I needn’t have worried.

In contrast, my favorite bakery, Cheeseboard, in the “Gourmet Ghetto” area of Berkeley, is a throwback to the old days. They close for all sorts of celebrations: May Day, Columbus Day (here called Indigenous Peoples Day), winter vacation, summer vacation. If you want your bread, pizza and cheese, you have to watch their calendar and plan ahead.

During a trip to France years ago, Arlene and I stopped in Lyon for a few days. One particular Thursday we walked to a museum, only to find it was locked up. Suddenly it occurred to us that the streets were unusually quiet. Oh no, is this a holiday? we groaned. We asked an elderly lady on the street, who told us that, mais oui, today was Pentecost. Zut alors! It hadn’t occurred to me to consult a calendar of Catholic holidays before our trip—something I now do every time we go to Europe. I forget what we did that day, and we did eventually make it back to the museum. But we learned our lesson.

All daylight, all the time

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It’s time to set the world’s clock to daylight time and leave it there, permanently. This silly switching back and forth should be given a dignified burial. Farmers get up with the sun, no matter what time the clock shows. Do the birds change their clocks twice a year? Many people don’t even have manual clocks anymore: their computers and iPhones already know when to change, hence the declining number of time change announcements from the news media.

I remain unconvinced by the various arguments in favor of the switch. As Wikipedia reports, “Although an early goal of DST was to reduce evening usage of incandescent lighting, formerly a primary use of electricity, modern heating and cooling usage patterns differ greatly, and research about how DST currently affects energy use is limited and often contradictory.”

The time change is like getting on a plane—it’s an enforced jet lag of one hour. For some people, the loss of sleep makes a difference. A 2009 U.S. study, reported in the Journal of Applied Psychology, found that on Mondays after the switch to DST, workers sleep an average of 40 minutes less and are injured at work more often and more severely.

So let’s just do it. All daylight, all the time.

Allegory 1: Unwritten laws

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In a dusty corner of my memory lie a few short stories from my grade school days. Most of them were read aloud by my teacher, although the one below was in a textbook. Hackneyed though they may be, for some reason these stuck with me. Here is the first as I remember it:

A group of cowboys were in line at the chuckwagon, getting their supper, when a stranger rode up. He dismounted, wordlessly greeted everyone with a nod, and joined the food line. He sat down alone and ate quickly. When he finished, he walked to the chuckwagon and prepared to wash the dishes, because one of the unwritten laws of the West was that a stranger pays for his meal by washing up. As he worked, the stranger often glanced back in the direction from whence he came. An older cowboy recognized his look, and began to prepare the stranger’s horse for a hard ride. Soon a dust cloud could be seen in the distance — someone else was approaching. The stranger became visibly more nervous but kept working. The moment the last dish was washed and dried, the stranger gave a nod in farewell, ran to his horse and galloped off.

The cowboys never learned what deeds the stranger was escaping from, but he had obeyed the unwritten laws of the West, and so could not have been all bad.

Recently I found this list of unwritten laws of the west, although it didn’t include one about washing up.

Off the grid

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After discovering that a favorite physical therapist no longer worked at the clinic, I thought to myself “hey, no problem, I’ll find him online.” Except that I couldn’t: Google, Facebook, white pages, name misspellings… all my attempts failed. The fellow seemed to have no online presence at all. At first I was frustrated, then I laughed at myself. How quickly we become accustomed to the new reality — just fifteen years ago the Web didn’t exist.

The ability to ‘disappear’ and re-emerge elsewhere with a new identity is as old as history. In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus returns home to Ithaka after 20 years and pretends to be a beggar: as no one recognized him, he could have remained so indefinitely. In the California Gold Rush, many men chose to leave their old lives behind, giving themselves new names and life stories. This was paralleled in the 1960s and 70s, notably by gay men escaping small towns for more tolerant cities such as New York and San Francisco.

Today, it is essentially impossible to disappear and move unnoticed to another state, another country, another continent. We can’t board an airplane without our ID. We can’t take our money because it’s all electronic and traceable. We can’t hide because everyone in the world has a TV and a cell phone camera.

So where did my physical therapist go? Darn!

Are you prepared?

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There was an earthquake at 10:40 this morning — as fate would have it, just as I was reading my homeowner’s insurance renewal. It measured 4.3 on the Richter scale, centered near San Jose. Here in Berkeley it shook the house just enough to remind me that we live in earthquake country — the kind of quake we Californians casually toss to Easterners who can’t fathom why anyone would live in earthquake country. “Oh,” we say, “we get these every so often. It’s no big deal.”

When I was a child, I thought earthquakes were the coolest thing. Science in action! I loved the earthquake sequence from the movie San Francisco, with great rents opening up in the city streets as hapless pedestrians fall into them. (Once, as our family was driving in San Francisco, I asked my father if we could go see one of those big rents, confident that after sixty years it would still be there.) Much later, as a student at UC Berkeley, there was an earthquake during breakfast at my student co-op. I rushed over to the seismograph at the Earth Sciences Building, just a block away, only to find a huge crowd of people already there, clustered around the printout. For the centennial of the Great 1906 Earthquake, my friend Coy and I went to the annual gathering of survivors at Lotta’s fountain at 5:06am on April 18th: there was no way I was going to miss that. Ten dignified elderly men and women were chauffeured to the platform in classy vintage cars. Mayor Newsom interviewed every one of them. (Sadly, the last known survivor of the 1906 earthquake passed away in February.)

Now that I’m a homeowner, I am very afraid of the Big One. The Hayward fault could let go any minute now: the last Hayward quake was in 140 years ago in 1868, and at least one geologic survey suggests there have been big quakes, oh, every 140 years, give or take. The 1868 quake knocked down buildings all over the Bay Area, but so few people lived in the East Bay that the damage in San Francisco got more press. Today, millions of people live within a few miles of the Hayward fault, and it will be a calamitous day indeed when the earthquake hits, on the scale of Katrina.

Are you prepared? You must assume that you’ll be completely on your own for a whole week. Do you have food & water stashed away? Do you have “go bags” ready in your car? Radios? Flashlights? Cash? Prescription drugs? Bicycle? Leashes & food for your pets? Is there at least half a tank of gas in your car? Does your family know where to gather after an earthquake?

Am I prepared? Partially, but not completely. You’d think after spending all this time worrying about it, that I’d have attended to everything. But it’s like the hole in the roof: it doesn’t leak when it’s not raining. If you fulfill only one of those New Year’s resolutions you made, fulfill this one: be prepared for the Big One.

Visit this USGS web page for excellent resources on earthquake preparedness.