July 13, 2016

I stepped out of our tiny rented apartment this morning with dog, dog leash, and plastic poop bags, and thought, “Wow, another beautiful, sunny day.” Then I remembered that I’m in Berkeley and every day is the same except for those few short weeks between December and February when it can rain during the wintertime. When I first moved to Berkeley many years ago, this really bugged me—the sun was too bright and intense for me and I wanted it to tone itself down a bit, take a vacation from being so cheery and bright all the time. Having moved from Michigan, the land of severe weather shifts, I found the weather in Berkeley boring. Some people love this about living in the Bay Area—that they can count on the weather every day to be the same and maybe it does take one variable out of the equation of a busy lifestyle—what to wear and weather or not to carry an umbrella. I for one, will take a thunderstorm and some good lightening any day and am willing to carry around my umbrella just in case and am even more willing to let the rain fly and give me a bath.

A little boy of about 3 years was waiting on his porch and as his mom approached I heard him say, “Mama, you’re back, I’m waiting right her for you. You were gone a long time.” I had seen her walking their dog to the corner and back about two houses down, and what seemed like a bleep in time to me seemed like an eternity to this little boy yearning for his mother to come back home. I forget what famous scientist said that we can all have different experiences of time and when I heard that sweet little boy’s voice I thought, “I want to slow down time and know the yearning of something really good to come in the next few minutes or hours or days.” I know there have to be good things passing me by all the time because my “time” rushes by them before I can notice these treasures.

Dreamer and I walked through Strawberry Creek Park, an idyllic little place with playground equipment next to an historic building with a cute little café that had tables out on the brick patio awaiting the early morning coffee drinkers. When we approached the park we saw a dog named Pepper climb a 15-foot tree and sit in the branches before climbing back down! I didn’t know dogs could climb trees; it actually appeared that he was running up the tree, but even so, I didn’t know dogs could run up trees! His babysitter told me he was a sheepdog and that he was climbing his favorite tree and that he does it often. I saw a dog climb a tree!

Elena, Benjamin, Dreamer, and I have been driving around Berkeley to various restaurants and stores to explore and to wait for that unexpected adventure to happen. The kids noticed that I am constantly pointing out good restaurants. If you asked me to remember these restaurants I wouldn’t be able to tell you about them or where they are located, but as soon as I see a gem I immediately know I ate there and I can taste the Indian or Ethiopian or Thai or Mexican food that pleased my palate.

As I wander around the neighborhood we are staying in I snap photos of interesting things I see. It is a diverse neighborhood in many ways including ethnically and economically and some in Berkeley would be quick to add that it isn’t a good neighborhood. Berkeley is polarized and the wealthy people tend to live in the hills in fancier houses and the less wealthy people live in what are called the flat lands, but who gets to decide what is considered a good or bad neighborhood? When I lived in Berkeley I had a tiny rent-controlled apartment on the edge of campus on the edge of the hills. Aside from the people that also rented in the cut-up house turned apartments, none of the neighbors bothered to talk with me or get to know me. Is that a good neighborhood? Here, today, as I sit in a tiny rented apartment in the flat lands, it is clear that the neighbors know one another and look out for each other, people walk their dogs and stop to chat, children play in the parks, and people hurry off to work in the morning while greeting one another. It is true that there is more garbage on the streets and that a few blocks away there are homeless people pushing shopping carts, but as I wander around I learn that they are also part of the fabric of this diverse neighborhood. This feels like community, which to me is a good neighborhood!

I moved to Berkeley from Ann Arbor, Michigan, which isn’t a small town, but is a dwarf in comparison to Berkeley. I remember being excited by so much activity and the availability of anything you could imagine—every type of yoga imaginable, every ethnicity represented by a restaurant, great bookstores, markets with fresh local foods, farmer’s markets, non-profits that represented every imaginable cause, etc. Amidst this excitement was a hint of fear as I had never lived someplace so diverse and lively, which could sometimes paralyze me because I didn’t know where to go or what to do or if it would be safe. I think women spend a lot of time thinking about their safety and rightly so, but I wonder if fear sometimes held me back while I was living here in such a foreign environment. I wander around now and talk with people freely that I might not have talked with previously out of fear of how they might respond to me and I wonder, what other fears are holding me back from really living and experiencing a full life?

I’ve read some stuff by James Cone recently, an African American theologian, and am thinking a lot about race, and am challenged and enlightened by his work, so I’m sure some of my thoughts this morning about an adventure with Benjamin and Elena are influenced by my reading Cone. We went to Lois the Pie Queen for breakfast, which is located in an African American neighborhood in Oakland. It is the kind of place you can get fried chicken with eggs and grits for breakfast and have some pie for dessert. I loved this place when I lived here but didn’t go very often because I always felt I was being intrusive by inserting my white body into a sacred African American space. Of course, I am completely welcome there but I do wonder why I am so welcomed into a sacred space when my white brothers and sisters aren’t always so welcoming of difference in their sacred spaces. My children are completely unaware of any of these dynamics, or at least if they are, they don’t talk about it; which makes me think they aren’t aware because they talk about things like this with me. Their only comment was repeated by both of them, “I like this place!” The wait staff and cook were all Latina, the manager was African American, I was one of two white people, and my children were two of many bi-racial patrons among mostly African Americans. I pray that experiences like this will be a normal part of my children’s lives, that race will be a cause for celebration and curiosity not division, and that they embrace the adventure of knowing people from the inside out.