Necessary Stops

The flight from New York to California is between five and six hours long if you have a direct flight, seven or eight if you have a layover. Add two hours to that for the time it takes to get to the airport, either via the rickety C train to the slightly more reliable A train to the JFK AirTrain, or by the N/Q/R to a lonely corner in Astoria where a bus to Laguardia appears every once in while, in no connection to the posted schedule. At the other end, I usually face about a forty-five minute wait outside of baggage claim, since my mother generally has trouble realizing that it might take more than negative-ten minutes to get to the airport.

I spend most of this travel time looking forward to certain stops to be made on the way back from the airport. Only certain stops, because with my mother driving the ride home inevitably involves several. These might include but are not limited to: picking up mail from our old house, long discussions with four of the seven Balkan tenants about why they have to pay for the heat that only the Serbian woman requires and when they might be able to get a ride to Canned Foods, detours to houses in the hills where my mother can steal roses, lemons, and, once, a trash can (it looked like it was free). During these trips I try to use the volume and timbre of my voice to affect the car’s steering mechanisms, to make it veer away from garage sale signs and towards the places I’m more interested in. This has limited success.

The stops I want to make are, usually, Acme Bread Company, the Cheeseboard, and Monterey Market. These are the places from which separation is almost intolerable. These places provide things that, though in some ways luxurious, seem basic and necessary to humane life, yet are impossible to find elsewhere. Acme makes baguettes as good as what you find in France, huge slabs of spongy foccacia, and loaves in all shapes and colors, at prices that make it possible for normal people to exercise their basic right to good quality bread. The Cheeseboard is slightly fancier, and perhaps it’s understandable that creativity at their level isn’t ubiquitous, but they still go far with the simple principle that cheese is great, and need not be used sparingly.

While trips to Cheeseboard and Acme were exciting to me as a child, I didn’t fully realize what Monterey Market had to offer until I was a bit more grown up (or maybe it was the experience a few years of grocery shopping in Manhattan). In October, of course, Monterey Market was the most exciting place in the world, since it was home to a giant mountain of pumpkins that you could climb up to find the best one. But year-round, the market sells beautiful produce at prices that enable you to actually buy things, not just the basics you know will be delicious, but exotic new things from all over the world. Instead of just looking and oohing and ahhing, you can go home with some cherimoyas, purple kohlrabi, abalone mushrooms, turban squash, and all kinds of other knobbly and brightly colored plants that you can only assume are edible. These days, the internet can always tell you whether something should be peeled, chopped or grated, boiled or roasted, sweetened or seasoned.

This will be the last time I write about Berkeley establishments in the context of so much longing and complaint, since I just found out that I’ll be moving to the Bay Area in a few months. I had been back in New York for less than 24 hours, and had just started in on a personally imported Zampano roll from the Cheeseboard, when I got a call saying that the philosophy department had decided to offer admission. Chase, at the other end of the isle of Manhattan, was eating a cheese roll at the same precise moment, and I’d like to think that Professor Mancosu had just finished a Greek shepherd’s roll when he called.