there was indeed birthday pie

There's a story in it somewhere. How Leah and I drove down Route 1 after work on Monday with vague plans to camp somewhere between Santa Cruz and Monterey, with a car full of cupcakes, one dog, and no gas. How every campsite was full until darkness hit halfway to Big Sur. How I told her of Kerouac's nighttime arrival in the book of that name and said I don't want to be driving this road in the dark. As the fog rolled in, grey upon grey, I asked the gods (and yes, I don't believe, or know what to believe) for a sign of this next year.


How we drove some time more and found an empty campsite and a store to buy groceries (hummus+stoned wheat thins for me, beer, smores stuff, tuna sandwich for Leah). How we brought the dog into the no-dog campsite hiking in darkness and me in flip flops but he wouldn't stop barking, so we stopped trying to set up the tent and hiked back out. How we ate in the car and brought beers to the hood to watch more shooting stars than I've ever seen before. How I slept in the car and Leah slept on the car and we woke five hours later bleary eyed, starving, and stumbled up the road to a diner where I ordered not one but two breakfasts (huevos rancheros, homemade cinnamon bun) and the coffee was good.

How I wanted to go to the aquarium but instead we went wading in the cold and dark blue waters with sea anemones and otters.




How that entire day we kept stumbling into scenes of freakish beauty. How I had so many things to think about, but found the time to get away and stop thinking so much about everything, but only about the important things.

How there was, after all, birthday pie, and strawberry picking in fields that kissed the sky.


Swanton's berry farm just happened to be on our journey home, so we picked strawberries, which Leah had never done before, and bought a big ollallieberry birthday pie for me.

How we ate sweet sweet strawberry shortcake, but it wasn't as good as mine at the FB.


How we arrived back to SF and didn't' get to go to Aziza. But had marvelous beauty, deep fog, and undertones of fiction I'd written when moving to the Bay was just a dream in my writer's mind.

That's the sort of story I want to write about food. A story about how food is sustenance when you're starving and haven't eaten in 24 hours, but then again food is a sign from above, and a sign you're doing something right {for once}, how food is a gift you give someone else, a memory, a key. I will write the story of that trip south. I may have been tasked to write it in longhand, in the shadow of the Maritime Museum down by Ghirardelli Square. In the place where my characters would have fished.

It was a very literary trip, as well.Good for the mind.

Things are afoot but no time to explain.