Some time back, my friend Peter wrote me about teaching a class on Romeo and Juliet, steamy teenage passion and all that, to his son's high school English class and mentioned the son's describing the event as his "Day of Humiliation."

Or consider my prematurely-balding friend Jürgen, who recently went back to Germany to visit his parents after an absence of several years. He was innocently sitting there reading the newspaper at the breakfast table when his mother came over behind him, giggled at her first sighting of his bald spot, and leaned over and kissed it.

I got rather a kick out of both of these and used them in an email to a number of friends dilating upon this joy of parenthood that I missed: embarrassing one's children.

Then again, my friend Jim recently forwarded me an email from his thirtyish son Mark, an utterly delightful young man who seems to embody his father's finer qualities while avoiding the other ones. This email was the excellent sort of thing I would have expected Mark to send his father. In it he discussed some splendid wedding pictures Jim had taken and then artfully arranged with delicious captions on several web pages. However, Mark's comments included a line which gave me more and more pause as I dwelt on it. He wrote: "You still take good people pictures." Now some people would take this as a straightforward and accurate compliment of one's father's photographic ability. It came to me, though, that here was revealed yet another serpent's tooth. At what age, I asked Jim, was he when Mark started reassuring him that he was...still...retaining his abilities?

I should find this quite tiresome in my progeny.

Perhaps it's best after all that I avoided them.

Finally, after a three-day heat wave, this morning about 3:00, our friend the fog returned to the top of Twin Peaks, brought by a 20 knot zephyr at about 12 degrees C.

While applauding my pinpointing of this event, you may wonder just why I was able to do so. The answer, insomnia, brought on either by my excitement over the impending visit of an old friend or by my having slain, gasp, a mosquito on my laundry porch at dusk and thus lain there naked atop my bed impatiently waiting to be devoured alive before the house cooled off enough that I could shelter under a sheet.

Apparently I killed the only mosquito in the neighborhood to achieve gestation in the brief window of opportunity the heat wave offered. Either that or my constant thrashing about after imaginary bites so exhausted the hovering clouds of mosquitoes that one by one, their famished bodies fell noiselessly to the floor before I finally succumbed to sleep at 3:30 or so.

I had managed to wriggle out of a friend's proposed trip to Ikea (the Swedish purveyor of home furnishings) for its opening last week, but was cornered and taken (in the Elizabethan sense), and trying not to take it too badly, took my friend (henceforth, The Instigator) there Saturday afternoon. When we left his place downtown at 5:00, the city streets were crowded. And the freeway! Heavy, heavy traffic. We were halfway to Treasure Island before we got up to the speed limit. Now that I'm not commuting, I'm unaccustomed to this, and joked with my companion that everyone was headed to Ikea. As we got off the freeway in Emeryville and were on surface streets approaching Ikea, the traffic got heavier and heavier. The thought recurred that all these people were headed for Ikea. Ha, ha, we laughed. As we crept toward Ikea's enormous building, the dialogue took the following turn, paraphrasing my favorite Gary Larson cartoon:

"Looks like a trap," I said.

"Nonsense," The Instigator said. "What's a trap doing way out here in Emeryville?" he said.

It was a trap, alright.

There were Emeryville police at intersections herding us all past the entrances to the parking lot and around a great loop through town but eventually bringing us back to the parking lot entrance from the other direction, where we were permitted to enter. We cruised around like jackals watching for the old or weak, except we were all waiting for burdened people to approach a car. At which point five or six of us would converge upon the prey, each of us firmly convinced that God certainly was absolutely clear that we were the rightful new occupants of the coveted space.

I'm on Prozac to try to calm myself down a bit. It's working. The irrational and unpredictable bursts of anger are subsiding. Unfortunately, so is my ability to be the alpha jackal.

Luckily, we spotted a sign for supplemental parking and ultimately found a dirt lot way out there and joined the throng of pilgrims headed toward this new shrine.

And inside? Inside, acres and acres of pretty ordinary stuff at reasonable prices, all being examined by hordes of eager shoppers following a well marked trail that led you through all the departments. And here and there, very occasionally, were things that were just astonishingly excellent at unbelievably low prices. The kind of thing that you double and triple check to see whether that's really the price and start examining closely to see what's wrong with it. Like a five leg, swiveling, height adjustable, extremely comfortable work chair with well upholstered seat and back. And it was beautifully designed, not a false move anywhere. In several adrenaline-inducing colors for $29.95. I wanted so much to need that work chair.

And then we realized that the trail ahead of us was full of people and that movement had slowed to a creep. We were approaching the checkout lines.

We got home by nine.

After buying a box of cherries and filling one bag with grapefruit (16 @ 4/$1.00) during an initial swoop on the Hamadas (the only vendors I know who still have a few of the old Marsh variety trees yielding the old, sour white grapefruit) and seeing the worried look on their faces when I inquired whether they would have more the following weekend, I took the bag back to my car. Realizing that I didn't have enough money for one of Mrs. Hoffman's smoked duck breasts and everything else, I stopped by the ATM on Battery Street. Recharged, I returned to the market, stopping first at Hoffman's. Alas, there had been a very early run on the duck breasts, so I had to make do with one of their chickens, which I had planned to roast pretty much naked tonight, dressed only in a little salt and pepper. When you've got a chicken that fine, you don't want to do too much to it.

Then on to my quark boy at Oakdale Cheese for one of his quark brownies to nibble for breakfast. While nibbling, I discovered a nice girl with the first peaches, which, for the first peaches, even filtered through the brownie, were ambrosial. So I got a bag. And then to my potato girl, where I picked up a few German Butterballs, Van Mourik's for three pounds of almonds for my cousin, and back to the Hamadas for another sixteen grapefruit. Dropped in at Medina's to continue establishing myself with the Ferry Plaza crew as a Serious Customer, for whom the Good Stuff should be put back.

Medina's is the perfect example of Thom Gunn's theory of Beauty Drain, which is similar to Brain Drain except that it's beauty draining to the coasts. I was a regular for years at Medina's at the San Mateo farmers' market, and I bought my berries by the flat there. Like almost all the other vendors in San Mateo, my berry man was nondescript. Not so at Medina's at Ferry Plaza, where the salespeople are as carefully picked as the produce, all fair youths and maidens gay (in the old sense, dammit), cheerful, bright, and squeaky clean except for maybe the tiniest hint of dirt under the nails for authenticity.

Finally, the obligatory stop at my cactus/succulent guy, pumping him for propagation information and purchasing a Lobivia arachnacantha to replace one of my Failures. It's covered with buds, so we shall see.....

Returning home, I picked up some Clover/Stornetta heavy cream for the peaches, and as I was unpacking everything, ate the ripest peach out of hand. Then I cut up the second ripest in a bowl, added an equal volume of cereal, a bit of sugar, and milk and heavy cream. Ohh, heaven. Then I examined the cherries. The variety is Brooks, one I'd not eaten. They are, or actually were, since I ate all of them during the examination process, a nice medium red, big, perhaps the biggest cherry I've ever seen, and shaped like miniature pumpkins, a little flattened. Wonderfully tart and sweet. Then I needed some meat, so I dug into the freezer and found an ancient pair of desiccated Italian sausages, which I fried up and ate with another peach and some fresh chèvre. By then, it was lunchtime, but I was exhausted and crawled into bed.

I awoke at five, had a large bowl of cereal with two peaches and cream, and came in here to write this. I think I'll go back to bed now and cook that chicken tomorrow.

I don't think it's too early to crow. The new meds are definitely an improvement. I'm having more Good Days and the neuropathy that was for the past year driving me batty is definitely retreating, residing now only in the tips of my fingers.

The Ferry Plaza Farmers Market was just electric Saturday morning. I got only a dozen white grapefruit this week from the Hamadas (I'm tapering off and they're running out), but they had their wonderful Brooks cherries again this week. They also had another variety for the first time, but I found it inferior to the Brooks and didn't write it down. They also had their first nectarines, and when I tasted the sample, my taste buds went into a spasm that was astonishingly painful. Ohhh, it hurt so good, and soooo much better than those furry peaches. The Hamadas are such delightful, friendly people. It was ages before I asked them their names, and when I finally thought to do so, my long delay was embarrassing to me. Mr. Hamada's given name is Yukio but he goes by Yuk, which is pronounced Yuke. When I first got his name I tried to show off by making an allusion to Yukio Mishima, but Mr. Hamada had more sensible priorities. The older woman is Mrs. Hamada, given name Iyoko, and the girl (that shows my age, I meant, of course, young woman) is Janet, who I wrongly assumed was their daughter merely because she's Japanese. The other worker is a man named Gordon Patterson, and if I have this straight, he teaches high school math, which is an eloquent argument regarding teacher compensation in California. They're all wonderful people. One time when I asked the name of a nectarine, Gordon grabbed a sheaf of papers, flipped them open, took a quick look and said, "904." After hours of giving the trade name "Crimson Blush," or whatever, for a lark he gave me the agricultural code.

But I digress. After buying Brooks cherries from the Hamadas, I kept discovering other vendors with their first cherries this week, so I bought two more varieties: Tartarians and Vistas. By the time I was passing Medina's, I already had a heavy load, but Medina's, bless them, had their first raspberries. I got only one box because I didn't feel up to making jelly this weekend.

The Brooks cherries are a real delight. They're so big and so meaty/crunchy that each one is like a fruit appetizer course. They're wonderful with chèvre and just fabulous with quark.

I am continuing to plan my Western Motor Tour, trying to browbeat four households in Denver, Santa Fe, Canyon (TX), and Midland (TX), in that order, to commit to a one and a half day visit from me. It came as a great shock to me to discover that these people have lives that are actually planned over a month in advance. Negotiations are still in progress, and not everyone has signed off, one of the involved households apparently having had the poor taste to go away for the weekend, but the current tentative plan has me wandering through the Basin and Range and over the Rockies, arriving in Denver on 24 June, leaving Midland on 2 July, and wandering back through the Basin and Range. Sort of Blue Highways light.

One of the very highest culinary points of this trip will occur between Canyon and Midland, when I stop at the White Pig in Lubbock, where I plan to eat myself sick on their chili dogs so I will no longer be plagued with long distance desire for them. I last ate one of these marvels in the spring of 1975, and they better not have changed that recipe! It would be just my luck if they've replaced it with a lo-sodium, non-fat, tofu dog with fresh chile salsa.

In his email responding to last week's Farmers' Market report, my friend Jim speculated that I had perhaps been "smoking a little appetite enhancement product" as an explanation of the voracity described in the Report. The perspicuity of my friends continues to astonish me. Or in this case, the even finer ability anticipatory perspicuity, as I had not been smoking...yet, being too old now to have what in the sixties we called a "connection." I had, however, been premeditating, having realized that the fairly frequent but intermittent nausea I had been experiencing during the change in my meds was a prime symptom that would qualify me for medical marijuana. And what I had done that very afternoon, is drop by one of our excellent medical marijuana clubs and pick up their form to take to my doctor for his signature during my appointment after the results are in from the blood work that I will have done this coming Tuesday.

But not having nausea now, I just consumed eight or nine Brooks cherries with quark. What a lovely combination.

The houseguests are gone. Remind me never, never, never again to accept a schedule in which one guest arrives on the departure day of the previous guest. They were both just exhausting, albeit in very different ways. Of course the reason they were exhausting is that they were delightful. Good grief, is nothing free? I spent yesterday sitting in the garden listening to the insects. It was sooooo peaceful.

There is good news. The new drug regimen has alleviated the peripheral neuropathy, and for the first time in over a year, I can feel the little bumps on the "f" and "j" keys. The negative side effects of the new drugs are disappearing, too, and what's more, the new regimen is effective. T-cells 559. Viral load undetectable at <50/cc. My mood has improved enormously.

I expect it to improve even more when I have finally got all my papers in order for a productive visit to CHAMP (Cannabis Helping Alleviate Medical Problems). My doctor signed the release on my last visit, but I thought it would be in poor taste to go prancing off to CHAMP with it on my way home from his office. So I waited a few days and then casually stopped by with it, only to discover that, fearing forgeries, they needed to confirm it with my doctor's office. So a few days later I returned from grocery shopping to discover a message on my machine from them announcing that the doctor's release had been confirmed. Not wanting to seem to be in a rush, I waited until the next morning to drop in on them. Not wanting to be rushed, they informed me that they were now ready to schedule an appointment for my intake interview, a necessary precondition for the issuance of my membership card.

The appointment is scheduled for this coming Friday. I did not inquire whether there were other requirements to be met before the membership card could be issued, nor did I inquire how long it would take them to issue the card once all the requirements were met, and I certainly didn't inquire whether there were additional mandatory steps to be taken before an issued card could actually be used by the issuee to effect an issue.

Frankly, an Unlimited visitor's pass to Ft. Knox may be easier to get.

Meanwhile, today's FMR:

Today's Farmers' Market Report is datelined San Mateo since it's Wednesday and I couldn't wait for Saturday's Ferry Plaza market to make raspberry jelly.

Damn good thing I didn't wait, because not only did I get to schmooze with Medina, my longtime berry man, but also he had his first blackberries. I got a flat of each and plan to spend this afternoon over steaming cauldrons in the kitchen. This is just to alert Those Who Have Been Nice that continued behavior of this sort may again have its reward.

But it was not just berries. Through the happiest of circumstances, I managed purely by accident to hit the one day each year that a local cherry orchard takes a booth at the San Mateo Farmers' Market. They had excellent Bings and Raniers, of which I bought a bunch. But what they really had, and the reason for their renting the booth, was their very own hybrid, which they call "Big Boy". They're big, alright, they dwarf the Brooks. They're downright enormous; I've seen smaller apricots, and boy oh boy are they good. The reason these people rent the booth is that, like all cherries, the whole orchard ripens almost at once. Furthermore, this hybrid ships poorly and does not keep well, so you have to gently set them out for the howling mob one week a year.

There wasn't too much howling; it was, after all, San Mateo, but there was definitely some serious crowding as those in front of the trough resisted being pushed aside by newcomers before they'd filled their bags. Fortunately, I was there early enough that the crowd was not inflamed by a sense of imminent shortage and was on its better behavior. Now that my peripheral neuropathy has gone, it hurts when I punch or kick others, and I find this a great disadvantage in combat shopping.

I have three recordings of Shostakovich's Preludes & Fugues.

Keith Jarrett, who continues to annoy me with capricious phrasing and rushed tempi, but whom I forgive everything, all of it, even the acts of unkindness to small animals as a child, while he's crashing through the 24th fugue. An exciting performance. Recorded in 1992.

Vladimir Ashkenazy, who is my overall favorite. He's just as fabulous with this as he is with Prokofiev. This is also the newest recording of the work, it being recorded only last year.

Tatiana Petrovna Nikolaeva, who was the source of it all, being the woman whose performance of Book 2 of Bach's Das Wohltemperierte Klavier one fine July day in 1950 so inspired Shostakovich that he thought, "I can do that!" And did so before the next February was out. She premiered the work the next year and has, at least until Ashkenazy's recording last year, been one of the definitive performers of the work. (To the best of my knowledge, Shostakovich himself never recorded the entire work.) Nikolaeva begins at a pace that can fairly be described as stately and seems agonizingly slow if your only exposure has been to Ashkenazy and Jarrett. However, after the first Prelude, her pace feel quite right, and it comes as a shock, then, to notice that it takes three CD's for her version rather than the two required for Jarrett and Ashkenazy. Sure doesn't seem like it's that much slower, and wouldn't I love to hear an earlier recording of hers.

Jarrett - 135 minutes, 21 seconds. Feels every bit as fast as it is.

Ashkenazy - 141 minutes, 43 seconds. Doesn't feel almost as fast as Jarrett.

Nikolaeva - 168 minutes, 25 seconds. Doesn't feel nearly that slow.

OK, OK, I had to get out the CD's for spelling/fact checking, and my calculator to add up timings to satisfy my curiosity.

I love keyboard music. Last summer I read a review of the recent release of Ashkenazy's performance. I had never even heard of the work, but the review was enticing, so I ordered it. I loved it. I loved it so much that I just played it over and over and over....at increasing volume. And none of that Gouldian humming along with it, I'm singing along full throat: YAH-da-da-da-da-da, YAH-da-da-da-da-da... (in #24, which just finished).

Then I bought Jarrett's and Nikolaeva's versions. Now I alternate among the three.

Do you know this work?

I'm off to Texas tomorrow, but this time to west Texas. Twice this year I've dawdled and missed a timely last visit with friends who've died suddenly on me. Most recently, Mr. Manasek, the framing genius and owner of a framing and art supply store on Market. He'd been ill for a year with poisoning from the toxic chemicals he'd been using all his adult life, and I'd been taking in jellies for him and his wife. Well, I'd run out of jelly in the late winter and had earmarked one of the jars from this spring's first batch for him. Forgot to take it with me on a Thursday. Went in with it on the following Tuesday only to learn he'd died suddenly of a heart attack on Saturday but had been doing OK on Thursday. Damn me. He could have died with a smile on his face and my jelly on his lips.

My old friend Mel lives in Midland, where I met him when he moved there while I was teaching at Midland College. He's 88 and in poor health. Realizing that the old fart could pop off any minute, I'm flying there for a long weekend. Maybe I can feed him so well that he'll just drop dead of overfeeding. A splendid death, I think. I'm taking him some San Francisco treats, and I expect to find some very Texan items to bring back, like the killer tamales made in that little place in on the wrong side of Main Street that I can't remember the name of but am sure could find again.

Not that I expect to find them in Midland, but there are a couple of Texas treats that I have never eaten and am just dying to try: opossum (called 'possum) and armadillo (called 'dillo). Both are reported to be delicious, but there are culinary class distinctions.

Middle-class white people don't eat them. Our redneck parents ate them during the Depression when times were so bad that they ate anything they could catch. But now they don't. And upscale blacks won't touch them either. And downscale blacks would die before they'd serve either to me. They just enjoy them secretly.

It has become increasingly clear that if I am to eat either of these delicacies, I'm going to have to catch it, kill it, clean it, and cook it myself. And frankly, my prowess as a hunter has seriously declined over the past few decades, as has my inclination to go slogging around in river bottoms with the water moccasins.

I may just have to settle for smoked pheasant breast.

On my August trip, it was the afternoon of the third day before she knew who that nice young man visiting her was, so I was emotionally prepared for her to not recognize me at all this time.

I go walking in and spot her down the hall in a medium security wheelchair. About the same time, she spots me and breaks into a big smile, recognizing me instantly. Turns out she's been a lot clearer the last couple of weeks, so much clearer, in fact, that she's figured out how to get out of the normal wheelchair with the "keeper" pad across the front.

Unfortunately, she doesn't remember that she's no longer smart enough to learn how to walk again, so she immediately falls to the floor as she gets out of the chair. Thus the escalation to the medium security version.

And this time, for the first time since last November, she's actually capable of volunteering information rather than just responding very briefly to questions.

Alas, this is not really a plus. On the first day, she remarked, gesturing at the chair, "I must have done something awful to be in here like this."

While that line echoes incessantly, I'm trying to make myself believe that she thinks it's jail rather than hell, an effort bolstered by the realization that Mother's flavor of hell, unlike Dante's, does not permit visitors. The meter is just excellent: "something awful" provides an exquisite trochaic break in the iambic flow, emphasizing the egregiousness of her crime.

If there had been a Shutdown button, I'd have pushed it through the wall. As it was, we just held hands.

My depression over this discovery, however, was completely alleviated when I got to the very last line, where I discovered that the dressing had been "processed" by "E. F. I."

Unfortunately, what this processing consisted of and who actually made the stuff remained unclear. What was very, very clear, though, was E. F. I's address: "1000 Naturally Fresh Blvd., Atlanta, GA 30349." The folks at 999 Naturally Fresh Blvd. are doing some natural processing on spent fuel rods, but that's way across the street.

Other observations on the trip:

Texas was true to its name, maybe even truer than usual. After all, one doesn't have the opportunity of all that many redneck weddings in his own family, even considering that we rednecks tend to marry with uncommon frequency.

This one was made especial by the miscegenation factor, the bride being Latina. The ceremony was bilingual... and thus made vastly more interesting as I strained with only partial success to determine whether the Spanish and English parts were pure, direct translations of each other or whether different spins were being spun. Yes, Eternal Vigilance must be maintained. It seems like only yesterday that during Die Zauberflöte I lifted up my eyes to the new supertitles only to catch them glossing over the racism in Monostatos' aria "Weiße ist schön, ich muß sie küssen", most particularly the line, "Eine Weiße nahm mich ein." You can rest assured that afterwards I sent a sharp note to the management. "If it was good enough for Mozart", etc. etc.

The reception was bilingual, bicultural, and biculinary, and damn me, I ran out of steam and had to go off to bed just as they were hauling in the speakers and setting up for the Gran Baile. Anglo informants the following day reported strange folk rituals during this part of the nuptials, which ran on until two in the morning.

Other notes: Mother is thinking that with time off for good behavior, she'll be out by Christmas.

Baaaaaad day today. However, as is so often the case, there is a silver lining.

I have finally crawled out of bed and stumbled into the kitchen. After blunting the point of one of my best knives trying to hack open a pill bottle (don't even ask), I get the coffee going.

Then I turn the oven on to the max, drop a couple of pieces of bread onto the bottom rack, and set the timer to twelve minutes in order to 1) have oven-style toast, an old favorite, and 2) warm up the kitchen.

By the time I've stumbled to the front porch and retrieved the newspaper and then got back to the kitchen and poured a cup of coffee, the timer has gone off and I retrieve from the oven the left slice of bread, now nicely toasted on the bottom.

As an aside here I need to point out that when I "dropped" the slices of bread onto the lower rack, the act of dropping was far less casual than the word implies. Different parts of the oven floor heat up faster than others. The left slice goes over a hot spot so that it browns faster than the right slice and can be jellied and peanut buttered and returned to its spot on the rack just as the right slice becomes perfectly browned on the bottom. This also means that the fully slathered left slice browns on the new bottom shortly after the peanut butter and jelly jars have been recapped and returned to the refrigerator and the knife (for the peanut butter) has been licked clean and tossed into the dishwasher and the spoon (for the jelly) has been dropped into the little tub of Lucerne Lemon Cheesecake Low Fat Yogurt. (This stuff is way better than you might think.) The left slice can be half eaten, with exactly 50% of the yogurt, before the right slice is ready, so I get perfect consumption temperature for both slices.

But I digress. As I am spreading the toasted side with jelly, I observe that one of the air bubbles goes all the way through, so there is a hole that I must carefully avoid or the jelly will drip through onto the oven floor while the other side toasts, making a mess that I find far more offensive now that my housecleaner has deserted me.

Considering the state of my manual dexterity today, this is not an easy task, and I crossly realize that I should have inquired in the checkout line, "Does this bread have holes that go all the way through?"

Not quite, I admit, fully up to the standard set by the little old lady who, according to my friend Jim did not want her purchases passed across the scanner, complaining, "Too much radiation", but I'm getting there. And at my current rate, I'll be there soon.

OK, OK. I fumbled the damn knife and it fell point down into the sink. I should be grateful, of course, that I didn't cut myself open with it. On the other hand, had I done so I could have rushed outside and sat down on the curb so I could have the line in my obit, "...bled to death in the gutter."

It's Christmas Eve and all is, well...

I seem to be on an increasingly steep slope down into madness, alternate fits of rage and tears over the stupidity and inhumanity and greed and misery of me and my fellow mortals, but before I slip off the end I've got to tout "Might as Well" by the Persuasions....and Jon Carroll's touting of them. He wrote, "Suppose, not to put too fine a point on it, that Grateful Dead songs could be recorded by people who could actually sing." And he went on in four columns to describe The Persuasions doing so. See the "Persuaded" columns in his Greatest Hits.

I have been listening to this album over and over the past few days and find it just captivating. I enjoyed it the first time I heard it some months back, but it has been growing on me.

Early yesterday evening I dragged my upstairs friends Al and Bob out over the top of 21st Street to the gloriously decorated place where last Christmas Eve I presented Santa a jar of my chocolate sauce, delighting Santa, the crowd, and of course myself. I had just made a batch of the sauce with the idea of handing him a still warm jar.

I seem to be ruining everything I touch nowadays so the first thing that went wrong was that I turned my back on the sauce and it boiled over all over and down into the stove. And then, after I'd talked Al and Bob into joining me for the experience, we climbed over the hill only to discover that Santa was not out yet. My disappointment was boundless.

To be fair, yesterday was not a total waste. In the morning I took my favorite cactus vendor my Lophophora williamsii (peyote), which I had started from a button dear dead Harry gave me in 1976 and from which I have passed on over the years the half-dozen offsets. My vendor was delighted. He's the only one I know here who can fully appreciate (not to mention care for) such a deliciously illegal, albeit nauseating, rarity and I figured I'd better pass it on before I killed it, as I have already done with most of my plants.

Then, after a mid-day rest at home in our luxurious hilltop enclave far above the wretched poor, I went down into the flats where the sidewalks glitter with car window shards and took an impoverished friend on crutches to lunch and then to the grocery store to get a bunch of heavy/bulky food. Stuff that's hard to manage when you're on crutches and trying to rush so the taxi won't cost you next week's food budget.

This far north, the winter sun is never all that high in the sky, and it slants across the city most exquisitely. Last Saturday about 8:00 in the morning the extremely upscale Ferry Plaza Farmers' Market was just gorgeous, beautiful arrangements of multicolored fruits and vegetables and nuts and berries and fish and poultry and meats and breads and pastries and luxury jellies and fine oils reminiscent of the lovely displays in the Viktualienmarkt near the Frauenkirche in Munich, all illuminated from the side by the rising sun and being picked over by well-dressed, discriminating gourmands.

Yesterday the sun came out while we were at the downscale market serving the poor, and it illuminated them equally even though most of them did not look all that good in the glare.

Tonight, kind friends in Walnut Creek have invited me for a family Christmas Eve feast. Over the past week, I have made five variations on my chocolate sauce, using four different cocoas, and we will have for dessert a blind tasting. Wholesome family entertainment to which I look forward with great anticipation.

Last night's trip to Walnut Creek for Christmas Eve dinner and chocolate sauce testing was a great success, particularly since it gave me my first chance in several years to see David and Sandy's kids, Casey and Cooper. Fine kids, which could be expected under the circumstances since 1) they're David and Sandy's and 2) it was Christmas Eve, when all kids are at their finest.

Their new black Lab bitch was also fine. However, when I complimented David on her most excellent behavior, he confessed that her regal reserve owed something to the miracle of modern chemistry. Yes, Virginia, there is Puppy Prozac.

The dinner was excellent, the other dinner guests were entertaining, and the chocolate sauce tasting went off so successfully that I may have to try this again.

Afterwards, I returned home to treats on another plane, my friend Chris having arrived from Germany bearing a smoked eel, a smoked mackerel, and something like half a kilo of Schmand, a German dairy product known only in the region around Kassel and tasting somewhat like a super-rich, extra thick crème fraîche. To facilitate their passage through customs, his mother had thoughtfully got her butcher to seal these items in impervious heavy plastic and then gift-wrapped them. Luckily, I had in the refrigerator some thumb-sized mutated blackberries from Driscoll's in Watsonville, so we were able to sample the Schmand immediately. It was everything I had expected, and afterwards I drifted off to sleep with visions of annexing Daly City dancing in my head, Chris and his friend Dirk having gone out for an evening of Midnight Mass and the pursuit of sodomy, in that order.

Today, after I shower and shave and take my Pravachol (cholesterol inhibitor), I'm headed upstairs for Christmas Dinner, for which my contribution will be fingerling potatoes in Schmand and cornbread made with blue corn and duck fat.