Some early Christmas mail included a small package from Amsterdam, which I assumed to be from my Dutch landlady, Rina. (See Dutch in Three Weeks.) When I first looked at the letter, a wave of disappointment swept me, as it was in Dutch, and while I was enormously flattered, Rina knows very well that my Dutch isn't really up to a long letter. And then, as I looked at it more closely, a wave of despair swept me, and I realized that I sure had forgot a lot of my Dutch since last May.

But then, when I concentrated on that first sentence with all those words I didn't remember, I suddenly realized that I could understand it even though most of the words were spelled differently than I remembered. And then it occurred to me that maybe Rina was using the Dutch spellings from before the reforms (not that I knew what they were), but why would she do this?

Then I looked a bit more closely at the second sheet of paper that was in the package, which was typeset, and saw handwritten at the bottom the English words "website of frisian literature." Back to the first page. Yes, it was not, after all, in Dutch. It was, in fact, my very first Frisian letter, from someone named Lysbeth.

Then I played the cassette tape that was in the package. It started with a bunch of talking in what I assume to be Frisian, as it sounds sort of Dutch but not really. Then Rina came on in English, but she said nothing about this Lysbeth person, so I realized that I was definitely going to have to translate the letter to figure out what's going on. Rina would have found the letter tedious to read, if she even tried, so this explains why she made no mention of it on the cassette. Obviously, our mutual friend Robert, who somehow knows Lysbeth, merely passed the letter on to Rina. Hmmm. The plot thickens.

To make the problem worse, the letter was handwritten, and reading Europeans' handwriting is always a bit tricky at first until you figure out which letter each one of those little squiggles is supposed to represent in a particular national script. Thus, my usual approach to decoding, guessing at whole words and then extrapolating from that the individual letters that I can't read, doesn't work nearly as well as it does in English.

I can just glance at the first page and see things like "myn hûs" and know without even looking elsewhere that this is in Dutch "mijn huis" and in English "my house." But this is an instance in which the individual letters are clear to me. (As an aside, I just flashed on this single shred of evidence suggesting that Frisian, like the other European languages, failed to participate in the Great Vowel Shift (although it does look like Dutch might have experienced a tiny vowel drift). For those who have not been following the GVS, it was not a recent event, having occurred at 4:53 PM on a sunny Thursday afternoon in October of 1493.)

I would expect Lysbeth to have been taught Dutch script even though she may have been in a bilingual Frisian/Dutch school. As I understand it, at least part of the curriculum is now being taught in Frisian in selected schools in the Dutch part of Friesland. This is a relatively new practice, and I'd be surprised if it went back more than fifteen years or so. Certainly when I was in graduate school, Frisian was described as moribund. Since Frisians have not been sufficiently powerful to control schools for centuries, instruction would have been provided by the Dutch school system, which would have taught the standard Dutch letter forms. I find it hard to imagine that anyone would have dug up examples of Frisian handwriting from centuries back and then taught this script to the kids. Besides, it looks like Dutch handwriting to me even though I'm hardly an expert.

At any rate, it is clear that Frisian is a lot closer to Dutch than English. Not of course that my Dutch is good enough to make that statement with any confidence, since it is barely sufficient to conduct the most ordinary social and business transactions, while my Frisian ability is that gained by a bit of Internet surfing and by studying the introductory material in my Frysk-Engels dictionary and a few of the dictionary entries themselves.

It's been only the past couple of days that I've been seriously working on the letter, and this industry was provoked by my realizing that I would be lunching today with a group of former colleagues including one who is a brilliant linguist completing a doctorate at UC Berkeley and to whom I had sent a scanned copy of the letter. Fear that she'd probably have it completely translated by now has been an effective goad. The only thing that might have slowed her down is that she doesn't know Dutch. On the other hand, she does know Old English and Icelandic, and since her main focus is on dead languages and she thus spends a lot of time with dusty old manuscripts, she is a whiz at reading strange handwriting.

The letter is, as best I can tell, in rather bad Frisian...or at least in highly Duchified Frisian. I suppose it's a supreme arrogance for me to say that, but People's Exhibit A is a list of words from the letter that even I know in Dutch but are not found in my Frisian dictionary.

It's also full of words that exist in no language that I am familiar with. Words like "roastfrystaal," which obviously means "stainless steel" but of which only the final element is correctly spelled in Frisian, English, Dutch, or German. "Staal" is the Dutch word for "steel." The first two elements are not correct in any of these languages. Grrr.

But wait, before I accuse Lysbeth of writing bad Frisian, I must take into consideration that Frisian, as we would expect from a language that for all practical purposes has barely existed as a written language for several centuries, is distinguished by its abundance of dialects. Lysbeth's dialect is probably just not covered in my dictionary.

Anyhow, the linguist and I, by putting our notes together, were able to translate almost the entire letter. I haven't had so much fun in ages.

My friend Jim read about this technique called Babysign in which you teach children to use a simplified sign language so that they can communicate with you before they have developed the physical and mental ability to speak. If nothing else, Jim thought, it will cut out a lot of that crying if they can let you know what's bothering them or what they want. So he learned the sign language and taught it to his twin granddaughters and his wife, who is pretty much raising the girls, and of course the kids started speaking many months (a year?) before they were supposed to and are now learning everything so incredibly fast because they had this head start, etc. etc.

I got to thinking, if I had had a grandfather like him to give me that kind of head start, I might have made something of myself. As it was, when I was five years old I could count and had the alphabet down, but Mother refused, yes refused, to teach me how to read and I wasn't smart enough to teach myself like Milton did sitting there in front of his father while his father read from the Bible. Owing to his seating location, he could read only upside down, but we assume that sometime before he went blind he made the transition to the missionary position.

At that point in her life my mother was an ex-schoolteacher. She took it up again when I was about to start the second grade and we moved to an oil camp out from Notrees, where she discovered that 1) life as a housewife "out from Notrees" was terminally boring and that 2) the schools out there paid the highest salaries in the state.

For persons unfamiliar with west Texas oilfields, when you are "out from Notrees" you are in utter desolation - a camp of four oil company houses huddled about five miles out on a caliche road that hits the paved highway between Notrees and Kermit right off the caprock a couple of miles west of Notrees. Notrees is about halfway between Odessa and Kermit, a distance of about 55 miles, and was given its name in an exuberance of oilfield irony...or in this case inverted irony, the proper name for which I seem to have forgot. How about "truth"? The fauna were cottontail rabbits, jackrabbits, coyotes, horny toads, rattlesnakes, and the occasional gila monster. Oh yeah, and some birds. The flora were mesquite bushes, yuccas, prickly pear cactus, goathead stickers, and occasional tufts of some grass-like stuff. The horizons were distant.

In the late forties, Kermit was thriving and Notrees was on the way up to its peak in the mid-fifties when it and Goldsmith both had small elementary schools educating the oil camp kids although these schools were not opened until after we left Notrees, so mother drove us kids into Kermit where we went to school and she taught.

There were two incidents of excitement and one memorable moment during the year we lived in Notrees. The first exciting incident was the time when, displaying great bravery and savagery I slew my first rattlesnake, only to have my father point out the absence of rattles and fangs, "Those are just 'is teeth," when I displayed the corpse even though it sure had looked like a rattlesnake when it was moving.

The memorable moment occurred one afternoon when I got home from school and was poking around in the garage and saw something new, a box about three feet by two feet by one foot high composed of a frame of one by two inch wooden slats covered with chicken wire. At one end there was this counterweighted cylindrical device that would move up and down to cover and uncover a hole to the outside if you turned the box over, which I did repeatedly, trying to figure out its purpose. It was years later that it dawned on me why Mother was able to serve quail fairly often that winter. All I knew at the time was that Daddy sure didn't want me talking about this thing to anybody. Trapping quail was illegal in Texas in those days although many country folk did it to put meat on the table. I figure by now his sordid history of quail trapping is covered by the statue of limitations. Besides, he's been dead for thirty years, so go fetch him, copper.

The second exciting incident was the car catching fire on the way to school one morning. I happened to look down at the floorboard and notice flames licking up through the hole where the brake pedal went through. Yes, kids, in the '47 Ford, the connecting rods for clutch, brake, and accelerator just went through open holes in the floorboard. I immediately brought the fire to Mother's attention, and she stopped the car, hustled Becky and me a good many yards away, went back to discover that there was too much fire for her to get her fingers under the hood to get to the release lever so that she then could scoop sand onto the fire.

So she left us sitting under a mesquite bush with strict instructions not to go back to the car while she trotted off down the road to the highway and flagged down the first car, whose driver brought her back to us where we sat in enormous disappointment that the car had not blown up in her absence nor even become a modest pillar of fire. Once the car had stopped, the fire went out before it had involved more than the carburetor, the wiring, and the exterior engine oil. Even so, when the Samaritan arrived the car was, although still intact and cooling, inoperable, and he gave us a ride into Kermit. At which point the story became dull enough that I remember nothing else except that the garage that had fixed the car the previous day quickly agreed to fix it again, free.

But I digress. Mother refused to teach me to read when I was five because she didn't want me to be bored with school and also because she wanted me to be a "normal" kid. How could she have known? More importantly, since she obviously knew I wasn't normal when I was five years old, why the hell didn't she realize that I needed every bit of help I could get and that having a head start in reading might have made all the difference? Then again, I'd probably have been insufferable. OK, more insufferable.

And to be fair, when I was seven, she bought the brand new 1948 edition of Compton's Pictured Encyclopedia, which declared its purpose on the frontispiece: "To inspire ambition, to stimulate the imagination, to provide the inquiring mind with accurate information told in an interesting style, and thus lead into broader fields of knowledge, such is the purpose of this work."

I guess it did all of that, except maybe for the ambition part. At any rate, I began devouring it immediately, focusing mostly on the pictures for the first couple of years but somewhere along there realizing that the text was more interesting...at least when I wasn't killing rattlesnakes.

I look back at killing those snakes with shame, not that I killed all that many of them. In those days, folks felt that the indiscriminate slaughter of any animal we deemed dangerous or undesirable was justified. True, had one of the snakes bitten me, I'd almost certainly have died. This was before the antivenin was developed, and I was a small child. But still, I'd feel much better about it if only I'd killed them for food.

To get your towel and suit (optional for suntanning, but I never understood why anyone would suntan except to get a tanline), you passed by a window and handed your reg (rhymes with "dredge") card to the towel boy, who was certainly muscle-bound and indeed a looker albeit very professional in demeanor. So professional that after you'd been there a couple of times, he knew the suit size you wanted. He also knew that there were two brands of suits, one totally shapeless and baggy and the other...well, becoming. Now it would take a bolder man than most of us to ask for one of the good suits that displayed your assets so fetchingly, but somehow, his professionalism extended to this additional sensitive service, and for those of us who needed one of the good suits, when his hand emerged from what looked like a random draw from the bin, it always held the right stuff.

It was some weeks into the term that I learned that his professionalism went even further, and farther, too, as one Saturday night when I'd gone into the City as usual, I paid my only visit to the Ritch Street Baths, at that time San Francisco's premier gay bath house. When I got my towel, it was all I could do to keep a straight face (always a plus in any bathhouse). Yes, it was he, moonlighting, a man who early on found his vocation.

P.S. By the end of summer school, I had grown so fond of those swim suits that I wanted one, badly enough to check around and discover that the company sold only to institutions. No retail. Sigh, so I had no choice. Using a devious route not visible from the towel boy's vantage, I crept to my locker and deposited the suit. Then, when I went to reclaim my reg card from him, I lied, telling him that the suit had been swiped while I was in the shower. So I paid only the institutional price, but hey, it was a used suit. I of course still have it. By now, the elastic in the waist has given out, but then, so has mine.

That the church had been built a century before Columbus sailed was particularly impressive to a man reared in west Texas, which had for all practical purposes been settled by Americans (OK, Europeans) only after the final solution to the Comanche Problem in the 1870's.

Leaving a more lasting impression, though, were the pews, which were clearly designed to inflict maximum pain upon the corporeal portions of the worshipers. They were fashioned of a particularly obdurate corrugated oak and were only eight or nine inches deep. They had resolutely vertical backs about ten inches high, the leading edge of which had been sharpened to dig viciously into the spine of anyone so foolish as to lean back.

The only compensation, I realized, was that modern Germans had got a bit soft, too, so we all sat there squirming in misery as our souls were lofted to heaven by the music.

About '81 or '82, I had a former repeat trick become casual friend named Lou who I didn't see very often any more but knew had taken up with a really ditzy young lover I had barely met. One day, though, I got a phone call from him telling me that Lou had died of a heart attack after his fiftieth birthday party, the attack having been at least partly provoked by some post-party recreational refreshments. There was to be a memorial service at the Neptune Society Columbarium next week, and the lover was going through Lou's address book notifying potential mourners. So I went.

As the mourners were gathering before the service and regaling each other with tales of how we had first had Lou, I turned a corner and found myself face to face with him. He was looking quite good under the circumstances, since he was walking toward me! And then he spoke, crossly, "What are you looking at me like that for?!"

I sensed immediately that this was a test. Unfortunately, like all too many of the others, one for which I was not well prepared and which, worse yet, was not multiple choice.

Gasping, I made a full, if a bit blunt, confession. Luckily, Lou Ryan had a sense of humor, and kindly let me know that the service was for Lou Jones, another former trick of about the same age who also happened to have recently acquired a ditzy young lover whom I didn't know.

The service itself was anticlimactic.

But why, aside from the architectural interest, should you visit the Columbarium? Examine the contents of the crypts, noting the sex of the deceased and their dates as you ascend to, say, the third floor. You see detailed the progress of an epidemic.

This didn't work. Food became an issue. To put it bluntly, he was starving. So he cautiously observed a farm house for a number of hours until he was reassured that it wasn't infested with Americans and then went to the house for food. The woman there fed him, but was no more interested in his remaining there than he was, so after a brief negotiation, he exchanged his uniform and gear for a set of her son's clothes, which came real close to fitting. She couldn't give him much food since she had so little herself, but at least he would now be able to travel by day.

And so, taking an unobtrusive route on country lanes, he set out for home, seventeen but desperately trying to look fifteen and out for a fresh air hike in his own neighborhood.

He had not got very far at all before he was spotted by a couple of American soldiers discreetly watching the little path he was on. He was practically on them before he saw them, but he immediately noticed that they were pointing their rifles at him. One spoke in English.

Hans-Joachim had studied English in school but decided this would be a good time not to understand. Unfortunately, the Americans knew sign language, and one used the universal beckoning forefinger to indicate that he was to approach more closely.

He did so with alacrity and was taken to a local building where there was an American who spoke some German, not perfect German by any means, but sufficiently good to explain to Hans-Joachim that German soldiers whose uniforms and weapons had been stolen by bandits were nevertheless accepted as prisoners of war upon their giving their names, ranks, and serial numbers. After which, they were fed and housed and that sort of thing. German spies, on the other hand, were just taken off behind the building and shot.

Hans-Joachim was able to recall his military data almost immediately.

The first time I went there early one Saturday morning about ten years ago, I stood in stark contrast with all the other customers. None of the other customers was anywhere near my age. They were all either a lot older or a lot younger. And they were all black. And then I realized, who would be seeking fresh black-eyed peas and butterbeans and okra? Maybe somebody who grew up eating this stuff? And can't find it in decent quality at the grocery store? And is retired and taking the grandkids "out to the farm" to harvest some of the good stuff?

So I went there every fall for several years, mainly to pick up crates of fresh pintos and cranberry beans. I brought them home, shelled them out, and blanched and froze them. It was a lot of work, but then for the following year I could serve them to deserving dinner guests. Then I discovered that the Iacopis at the San Mateo Farmers Market had superb Romanos and cranberry beans and Italian butter beans. And then I learned that the Iacopis were at both the Ferry Plaza and Justin Herman Plaza farmers markets right here in San Francisco.

So I stopped making my trips to The Fruit Factory, even though I do miss their wonderful tamales and that peach cobbler they served in their tiny little kitchen.

Note: In August 2002 I received their annual postcard listing available items. Apparently missing people like me, they're trying to broaden their customer base, as in addition to the old favorites they now sell tuvor, guar, papadi, and valor papadi. Mother didn't feed me none of them.

In 1986 I wrote "Auntie," (in Downstairs Journal Prior to 1999) a description of an incident in which my aunt, in the presence of her sister, handed over to me for delivery to my sister a crystal bowl that her sister coveted. At the time, I assumed that her only motive was to spite her sister.

Three or four years after that incident, my aunt became less and less capable of living alone, and her daughter's visits became more frequent. One of these visits overlapped one of mine, and I told the daughter about the incident. She mentioned that she had been very fond of the bowl herself but then immediately observed that, well, she hadn't noticed its absence. Somehow, over the subsequent years I fixated on the idea that my cousin deserved the bowl more than my sister because of the circumstances under which my aunt had given away the bowl, and I brought this concept up to Becky on, I'm sure, many occasions.

Then, last December when I had developed a medical problem that I thought signaled my imminent demise and was trying to atone for as many wrongs as possible, I wrote Becky and wasted my deathbed wish by saying that she really must give that bowl to its rightful owners...the descendants of our aunt. She got back to me and told me that she had started feeling guilty about this herself a while back and had just been too busy to do anything about it. Damn, I should have asked her to stop smoking.

So I immediately called my cousin and got a recording: "This number is no longer in service." Oh dear, I thought, she's fourteen years older than me and I haven't called her in eight or nine years and I've let her die on me. I knew she had two daughters but didn't remember their names...their first names, much less their new last names.

Then I wrote to my cousin's last known address in Denton. The letter didn't come back, but I didn't hear anything either. So about a month ago, I Googled around and discovered that she was on a committee of the First Christian Church in Denton. But there was no church directory that listed the phone numbers or addresses of the membership. There was, however, a Membership Committee for whom email addresses were listed, so I found a member of the committee my cousin was on who was also on the Membership Committee, and wrote her an email telling the story of how my sister got the bowl and explaining that after these many years my sister had agreed that it should go to our cousin or one of her daughters and asking this woman if she could please contact my cousin, if she were still alive, and ask her to contact me or my sister.

The woman kindly emailed me back the next day saying that she barely knew my cousin but that she was good friends with one of her daughters and would pass the message on to the daughter. After what was to me an agonizing delay, my cousin wrote Becky with some additional information of which I had been unaware.

She pointed out, as a minor aside, that it was more like ten years before my uncle's death that he had given the bowl to his sister rather than "shortly" as I had said. More importantly, my cousin disclosed that he had been her mother's favorite and that when he died, her mother had transferred all her affection to my father. (In those huge families, there was nowhere near enough affection to go around). My cousin also said that she had never seen her mother as upset and grieving as she was when my father died back in 1969. And finally, my cousin revealed that when she was going through her mother's things after her mother's death, she found a handful of letters from herself and selected others but a fat bundle of letters from Becky. Apparently my aunt had saved every single card or note Becky had ever sent her.

All this put quite a different spin on things. My aunt's transfer of the bowl to Becky had not been, as I had assumed, purely to spite her sister. Rather, spiting her sister was just an additional pleasure since she had had other reasons for wanting to give the bowl to Becky. My cousin also suspected, quite rightly, that the bowl was the only heirloom Becky had from that side of the family.

So my cousin had written that she felt Becky should keep the bowl. Becky then confessed to me that she really, really did just love the bowl, which she has prominently displayed atop a china cabinet that was our maternal grandmother's. And furthermore, her partner could not help observing that in the same room there was art from some of the better minor artists in this country but that everyone who entered that room ran immediately to a point directly in front of The Bowl and stood there ooohing and aaahing.

What I learned from this was that what I had to atone for was not my role in transferring the bowl to Becky but rather for assuming that my aunt had acted purely out of spite. That and a ten-year campaign to convince Becky that she ought to give the damn thing up. Who knows, maybe I'll be able to generalize from this lesson and cut more folks more slack.

I am the salt king of San Francisco. I shop for the sourest grapefruit so I can salt it; I eat cantaloupe with salt and pepper; I have made concerned friends wince as they saw me wielding the salt shaker at dinner. And yet, I like my peanut butter unsalted. So naturally, my favorite peanut butter, Laura Scudder's Old Fashioned, is available in San Francisco only salted. As a compromise, I have taken to cutting my salted Laura Scudder's with the unsalted Adams 100% Natural. I'm sure this is causing many of you to wonder how it is possible that a gourmet as discriminating as myself is able to stomach a peanut butter other than Laura Scudder's, even when mixed half and half with the good stuff.

Well actually, I had kind of wondered about this myself. How could it be, I thought, that Adams' tastes just as good as Laura Scudder's? Could I have somehow failed to include Adams when I was doing my extensive comparison tastings a few years ago?

And then, this morning, it came to me. As I was preparing to mix a couple of jars, I noticed that both Laura and Mrs. Adams were members of the J. M. Smucker team - the Orrville, Ohio, Smuckers. They had both joined the Smuckers upon learning of the cost reductions they could enjoy if they used the same jars and just paid for separate paper labels to distinguish their products. Well of course, quantity discounts for all that glassware.

In the old days, truckers with their loads of freshly harvested peanuts headed toward Orrville until they reached the outskirts of town, where the road forked and there was a big sign with an arrow pointing left for Mrs. Adams and right for Laura Scudder. The guys knew which fork to take.

Later, Laura and the Adamses moved their plants to new locations side by side on the Interstate loop around town and the truckers went around to the back of the appropriate building to unload, depending on whether they were carrying the 100% Natural or the Old Fashioned.

Then, back in the eighties, the accountants figured out that Laura and the Adamses could save a bundle by consolidating their receiving docks and separating the 100% Naturals from the Old Fashioneds in house.

In the nineties, an employee dropped a note in the Suggestions box that had far-reaching consequences. A radical proposal, actually, but one which was implemented after it was understood that the savings it offered could be utilized to amplify the Executive Bonus Program.

The implementation was straightforward. The wall between the two buildings was knocked out and the processing lines were combined, thus creating a huge pile of extra parts which were sold when the scrap metal market was at its peak. With only one processing line, the companies were able to achieve significant cost reductions by out-processing many of the processors, including the suggester, who had not thought through all the consequences and had had other expectations for his reward.

So now, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, the line processes the 100% Natural peanuts and the Adams label is pasted onto the jars. On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, it's Old Fashioned time, and the Laura Scudder labels are used. The entire processing line is steam cleaned at the end of each day to prevent any possible cross contamination.

I was delighted to learn that while the vendors give the appearance of placing all their focus on the care and upbringing of their own products, they are also all spying on each other. I can just picture a pickup pulling up to the ridgeline with a very large pair of binoculars sticking out the window. "They look ripe yet, Jake?"

I don't know how widely word has spread about the cherries, but San Francisco is in some ways a small town and news travels rapidly. I'm planning to drive down the hill to the Castro and park, taking the F Market streetcar down to the plaza so that I won't have to try to find parking nearby. I do this fairly often anyhow because I can park so much closer to the Castro F Market stop than I can to Justin Herman Plaza. Besides, if they run out of cherries too early and the riot starts before I can get away, there'll be burning cars and stuff blocking the streets and I won't be able to drive the car back anyhow, even assuming that my car is not one of those burning. The underground Muni line, on the other hand, remained on schedule even during the White Night riots, plowing serenely through the tear gas.

It's good to know the terrain.

Yesterday, I breakfasted on fresh anchovies, which I'd never cooked and only rarely even seen. The night before, I consulted Peterson's Fish and Shellfish (the Joy of Cooking of seafood cookbooks) and Cronin, Harlow, and Johnson's California Seafood Cookbook, both of which said first choice was to grill them. Oh puhleez. Both grudgingly admitted that they could be floured and sautéed.

Unfortunately, they were "round," which may be my favorite euphemism. So the pleasure of eating them was preceded by the tedium of cleaning many small disgusting things. However, with practice, I found that if I just ripped the head off, most of the innards were pulled out with it, especially if I pre-slit the belly. I got a skillet hot with a little oil in it, shook the anchovies with flour and salt and pepper, and dumped 'em in. Then just turned them over a couple of times, pitched them out onto a plate, and ate. They were very good. Then I was stuck with this skillet with a little anchovy flavored oil in it, so I sliced up this real tired potato and sautéed it, a treat I haven't had in ages.

For a breakfast dessert I had strawberries. On Saturday I had happened to glance at some strawberries at a vendor I don't normally use whose name I can't remember and thought, "Migod! Those look like they might be Chandlers." So I asked. They were. And even though I'd already bought a basket of the currently popular mutants from Sr. Yerena, I also bought a basket of the Chandlers. After I had eaten the potatoes, I sampled one. Then I ate the entire box without stopping. I had forgot how good they are. If you don't know Chandlers, they look more "pointy" because the ratio of length to diameter is greater than the ones more commonly grown now. More importantly, they're a lot smaller. Watch for them.

For lunch/dinner I had a chowder made with fresh scallops that was mostly scallops, potatoes (the rest of the tired ones), and cream sauce. Oh, that's such a fine dish.

Tomorrow, continuing to eat in order of imminent spoilage, I will have for brunch a medley of pheasant sausage, avocado, and hothouse Early Girls that are so close to real summer tomatoes that you can hardly tell the difference...especially if you haven't had a real summer tomato since last fall.

For supper, there will be a dish I concocted last week in the full throes of dental pain: "Petits Pois ®Frito." Take a bag of what we used to call "English peas" that the Mouas have shelled out for you, cook with onion to the overdone and mushy stage, pour a piping hot cup or two into a bowl containing a handful of Original Fritos. Let set for a moment, and gum it all down. You need none of your dental prostheses for this dish, and yet it's a rich combination of deliciousness and balanced proteins.

During the trip we encountered four San Francisco police officers, and I couldn't at first put my finger on what it was, but somehow something was different. It was only when we passed the last of them as he stood talking to a couple of locals that I realized what was so striking. He looked like a high school student to me, and what had struck me earlier was that they all had looked like students.

Then I realized that here was another sign of aging: the cops start looking young.

And it was only after I made this observation to some friends that it struck me that yet another sign of aging is describing a walk up one side of a block and down the other as a "trip."

Then I introduced myself to John Lagier at the Lagier booth. I had been buying stuff, mostly berries and their excellent almond butter from him and his nephew for years without knowing who they were. Today, I was trying to pin him down on exactly when he'd have his sour cherries. I want to get a lot of them and pit and freeze them to use in making crisps since one of the best crisps I ever made was with the one batch of sour cherries I got last year. Very few vendors in this area grow them (there was only one other vendor last year) and you have to be alert for them because, like all cherries, every damn cherry on the tree ripens almost simultaneously, so the "season" lasts for only two market appearances. He's expecting to have them the 15th and the Tuesday following. But he did have his first "Sylvan" blackberries, of which I bought a flat and from which I have just finished making jelly.

Next I stopped at Ella Bella and schmoozed and picked up a flat of their first olallieberries.

Then to Yerena to give him back the containers and box for last Tuesday's tayberries and to give him the dozen tayberry signs I'd printed up for him on stiff paper. He had put back for me a flat of under-ripe tayberries, which should make just spectacular jelly. Before I left, he gave me a taste of the very first of some mystery berries. Somebody gave him six canes last year but didn't know what variety/hybrid they were. He planted them, and they are now bearing, but he doesn't know what they are. He took them to UC Davis and they didn't know either. All they could say was the obvious, that the berries clearly had both blackberries and raspberries in their family tree. I told him he ought to call them Yerenaberries, but he demurred. He did tell me that he thinks enough will be ripe next week to bring me a flat. Since they're delicious, I'm just dying to make Yerenaberry jelly. Rich and famous gourmets will queue at my door, begging for a jar. I'll tell 'em I donated them all to Glide Memorial Church to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the homeless...on Wonder bread.

The sign I made for Yerena reads: "The tayberry is a hybrid developed by the Scottish Crop Research Institute in 1978 by crossing the Oregon 'Aurora' blackberry and an unnamed, "improved tetraploid raspberry hybrid" developed by the Scottish Horticultural Research Institute. It is named after the River Tay and in addition to its superb taste, has the desirable quality of making really excellent jelly. At least one amateur jelly maker has had repeated success using the recipe titled 'Waterless Grape or Berry Jelly' in Joy of Cooking which, especially if slightly under-ripe fruit is available, somehow miraculously jells without the addition of pectin. This results in an especially flavorful jelly because it contains nothing but berries and sugar."

Next, around to Michael Recchiuti to compliment him on his spectacular new website. God, is it ever beautiful...and slick...and well written...and witty. Things are even spelled right and every accent is there and aimed the right direction. Impressive. Just like his chocolates and spectacular ice creams, especially the burnt caramel. Check it out: www.recchiuticonfections.com

And then back to the car so that my bearer (Chris) could drop off the three flats of berries and bag of Brandywines he was carrying for me (so I'd have both hands free to take notes:-)

And then a second round, stopping to say hello to Jeff, the succulent vendor from whom I've got almost all my Haworthias. During the visit with Jeff, Chris spots Sybil before I do. I'd apparently described her fairly well, as he'd never seen her. I give her a copy of the sign I made for Yerena's tayberries, as she wants to put it on her excellent market update site. [Note: Alas, CUESA has decided that it no longer wanted to provide this excellent service. Pity.]

Then we all head for Fitzgerald's for peaches (Sybil) and nectarines (me). In all my praise of Fitzgerald's wit and charm, I have neglected his able assistant, Liz Crane's. He may be more verbal, but she is certainly just as charming, and I don't say this just because she took my side against Sybil and agreed that in breeding all those white peaches and nectarines for sweetness, somebody forgot to keep the flavor. So she and I agree that if you want your wonderfully flavorful yellow peaches and nectarines a little sweeter, you can just add a little sugar. Actually, at three cents per ounce, you could go ahead and add a lot of sugar. Nice to have taken care of that question for good.

Next stop, Frog Hollow for a little snack after all that socializing: frangipane/cherry galettes, just obscenely good. While still eating the galette, I spot a vendor with the first Queen Anne cherries, so I gradually edge closer and play After You, My Dear Alphonse with a lady also going for a bag. Turns out we're both after the Queen Annes and had an excellent cherry rap as we worked the bin from both sides. I am continually getting into spontaneous discussions with folks at the market, and people are constantly asking me questions. Apparently I radiate some sort of brazen fruit confidence.

Then around to the other row of the market to see if I can find whoever it was besides Lagier that had those sour cherries last year. No luck, but in the progress, I get to know Lee James at Tierra. I'd bought her amazing Chipotle Chile Jam and given it as gifts, and I'd had her fresh chiles, but I'd not bought any of her dried chiles. So I got some jalapeño chipotles with the idea of using one of those recipes for chipotle chile oil that I found on the Internet while I was looking for sources from which to buy the stuff.

Then across the aisle to Hidden Star, where I bought some of Mijnheer Smit's Bings while he dished the Frisians. To the obstinacy he has added a charge of stinginess. Chris just loved this, as the Frisians have been the butt of German jokes at least since I was there in the sixties. Actually, knowing how those Europeans squabble with each other, this has probably been going on for at least 500 years.

End of the line, the Hamadas, for some of their Brooks cherries. And then, back here to make jelly while taking breaks to watch the French Open. At this point, the second batch, with the Ella Bella olallieberries, is about ready to jar, and I'm so tired I can barely sit here to type. Clearly those spectacular tayberries from Yerena are going to have to just rest in the refrigerator overnight.

A comment on my jellies: Friends have asked why I don't strain them through cheesecloth to get out those few immature seeds that get through my sieve. I like to leave a few seeds so folks will know I didn't use a mix.

It all started one day in the spring of 1978 when I was at the VD clinic checking into a public health issue. While waiting, I noticed a poster soliciting volunteers for a study testing a vaccine being developed for Hepatitis-B, which was then rampant in the kind of person who tended to visit the VD clinic. So I volunteered, and they took my blood and a sexual history and said they'd be contacting me. Some weeks later, they got back to me and told me that I had had Hepatitis-B at some point in my life without knowing about it. (Apparently this is not all that unusual.) They also said that I was now immune to the disease but not a carrier, so they needed no further participation from me. Then they went ahead and developed the vaccine without me.

By 1984 the AIDS epidemic was nearing full blast in San Francisco, and my friends and acquaintances were being picked off by an invisible sniper. You wouldn't see them for a while and then you'd be at the grocery store and there would be this gaunt creature covered with Kaposi's Sarcoma lesions who knew you. Or maybe worse yet, you wouldn't see them for a while and you'd call up and get this unfamiliar voice saying, "Oh, he died in July. You didn't know?"

But in 1984 a brilliant man at the Public Health clinic made a quantum leap and realized that they still had frozen blood samples from those 6000 members of the Hepatitis-B cohort, and we were the kind of guys who would make an ideal study group in the attempt to understand AIDS. They were able to find living over a thousand of us. So they took our blood and told us we'd have the opportunity to learn whether we were seropositive for the HIV virus. Like many of the cohort, I decided that I'd prefer to continue to act as if I were positive while still clinging to hope that I was negative. After all, in 1984 the medical treatment of AIDS was entirely palliative.

The situation changed, though, in February of 1987 when Allen woke up one morning terribly ill and a bit crazy: Pneumocystis pneumonia plus toxoplasmosis affecting the brain. I checked immediately to determine my HIV status and when I discovered that my blood from 1984 had been positive, I rushed out and bought a pack of cigarettes, since it was clear that I'd be dead of AIDS in a couple of years or so. Allen died six months later, and for the next year I went into a frenzy of activity to keep myself sane (OK, from getting crazier). One of these activities was responding to Dr. Marcus Conant's call for study group volunteers.

I landed in the thymopentin study. Thymopentin is a naturally occurring hormone that functions as an immunomodulator. Dr. Conant hoped that by injecting themselves with an artificially produced version of this hormone, HIV+ persons could slow the progression of the disease. But how much of the drug and how often? I was initially in the 1cc. per week group on, as it turned out, the placebo, but after a time there was some weak statistical evidence that three times a week on the actual drug might be doing some good. So for several years there I gave myself a subcutaneous injection of thymopentin three times a week. (You try giving yourself a subcue when your body fat percentage is approaching zero! Real narrow target.) In about 1992, they determined that these injections were totally harmless, but also totally useless, and the study was ended.

They transferred me into Dr. Conant's plasma study. The idea behind this study was that HIV+ persons with good numbers (in those days before viral load could be measured, this meant mainly high T-cell counts) could spare some plasma periodically and that this plasma, just loaded with anti-HIV factors known and unknown, could be of great benefit to persons with outright AIDS, perhaps prolonging their lives.

What they didn't tell me before I agreed to join the study was how the plasma was collected. The best thing I can say about this is that the machine was fascinating in its operation and that the built-in couch was fairly comfortable.

On the downside was the Needle, down the barrel of which you could look as you wondered whether there was a vein in your entire body that the damn thing could fit into. The tekkie managed to get it into a vein on the second try, and then I discovered the other downside. This was not like a quick blood draw. Rather, the machine first let the blood flow out of your arm through an elaborate tangle of clear plastic tubing into a holding vessel. When the vessel was full, the plasma was centrifuged out into a plastic bag rather like a typical IV bag. Then the leftover red blood cells in the holding vessel were pumped back into your body, and the cycle was repeated until the plasma bag was full. This took what seemed like hours but was usually something like forty-five minutes...at best a very uncomfortable forty-five minutes. I quickly grew to dread my scheduled visits, and several times my dread was reinforced by their missing the vein or by the needle requiring adjustments at points during the process.

But I persevered, partly out of just not wanting to be a quitter, but also because before he died Allen had turned to me one day and said, "If they ever offer you a blood transfusion, take it!" He said that it made him feel so good that he almost felt normal...for a while, anyhow. So I knew that my plasma at the very least would make the recipient temporarily feel good. It was also clear that receiving a bag full of plasma would be much less traumatic than giving one.

Then one day while I was squirming there on the extraction couch feeling sorry for myself, an Emaciated Wretch, obviously one of the recipients, walked in to talk with the tekkie. He stood there, right beside me, chatting away while taking little quick glances at my blood running through the clear tubing, splashing into the extraction chamber for centrifuging, and the clear plasma pouring into the holding bag. A sense swept me that something was different. Something was somehow wrong with his body language.

And then I realized that although for several years a lot of people, men and women, had been drawing my blood for various AIDS tests in the most professional manner, courteous and steady of hand and using the latest safety measures against accidental sticks, here for once was someone who wasn't the least bit afraid of it.

On the contrary. He wasn't exactly licking his lips, but it was clear that he would have been quite happy for the plasma to have been run right straight into his arm, while it was still hot and fresh.

Note: I'm afraid to assume that everyone understands that I'm being ironic in that last sentence. Yes, I did put almost everything into a trust for Becky; but no, I find that SUT disgusting on several levels simultaneously.

And now, some vehicular observations:

After an evening curled up with the owner's manual, it occurred to me that this fourth vehicle I've ever bought is the first vehicle I've had that would just as soon electrocute me on the spot were I so foolish as to 1) open the hood and 2) actually touch anything inside there. I am hoping, though, to risk number 1 above to see whether I'll be able to distinguish the engine from the motor. I mean, the last time I looked under a hood, cars had carburetors.

And speaking of electricity, it is so much fun to roll downhill and watch the little readout to see how much electricity I'm generating although I can easily see that since this is far more entertaining than television, it presents an obvious hazard to persons and objects in my path.

I also found myself sitting there at a red light and so enraptured, marveling at the engine's cleverness in turning itself off since it was not being used, that I failed to press the accelerator when the light turned green, presenting an obvious hazard to myself from the vehicles in whose path I sat.

This morning, I took a quick look to see whether my new car was still sitting at the curb, since I did not know whether I had accidentally set the theft-prevention system when I parked the car yesterday afternoon. Of course, I'm being an alarmist, but I'm also concerned whether the vehicle will start today, as, according to the owner's manual there are abundant opportunities to run down the BATTERY (as opposed to that wimpy little 12 volt lowercase battery still found in so many vehicles) by leaving various switches and stuff in the wrong position.

Finally, seeking guilt, I just realized that I can rightly be accused of conspicuous non-consumption. And that if I wish to remain alive very long at all, I must make absolutely certain that when, generating electricity with my motor, I glide smoothly to a stop at a red light beside a gigantic, throbbing Escalade and my cute little engine primly shuts itself off for the duration of the stop, I must make every effort to arrange my features into an expression of admiration tinged with envy if I even glance at the obscenity at my side. And most particularly, I must never ever allow my gaze to linger, however briefly, on its enormous exhaust pipe.

I finally got to the part in the owner's manual about opening the hood, so I followed the simple instructions and immediately found myself standing there holding the hood up by hand while searching for the little prop.

Actually, the first thing I noticed during this search was that this was certainly by far the fullest engine compartment I've ever seen. Not a cubic inch wasted. The second thing I noticed was that at least half of the objects in there had Don't Touch Me Here signs ranging from the mildly alarming to the seriously frightening.

This will perhaps explain my reluctance to go tugging around on likely-looking things in hopes of finding something that I could use to prop the hood open. It was only when I was about to give up that I finally saw that instead of positioning the hood prop at the edge of the engine compartment where God and Soichiro Honda intended, Toyota had cleverly hidden it on underside of the hood itself.

With the hood finally propped open, I was free to perform a leisurely examination. In the left part of the compartment is a large object that I would guess to be the engine, basing this supposition upon seeing what looks very much like a dipstick ring at one edge of it, not that I was about to stick my finger in it until I have got some industrial-thickness rubber gloves to guard against electrocution.

I had expected the motor to look something like a giant alternator or like the generators that were found in cars back when the hoods were held open by springs on the hinges. Nothing there looks at all like this, but since I could see only the top layer of stuff, there was still plenty of room underneath for the motor. At any rate, I apparently don't have to worry my little head about the motor and can close the hood on this chapter for now.

But since the manual has made it clear that I am expected to check the oil level at every fill-up, I'll need to buy the rubber gloves and confirm that that thing really is the dipstick before I need gas in a few weeks.

Actually, that event may occur sooner, as I'll be driving a couple hundred miles north weekend after next and will probably not be able to resist going ahead and topping the tank off while I'm out of town since gas is so much cheaper elsewhere.

And finally, on a somewhat related issue, I drove the car this afternoon for the first time since parking it Saturday afternoon, and I can share with you two observations. First, while I was test driving the car on Saturday I noticed that the acceleration was a little wimpy but realized that at this point in my life I am probably better off without quite so much acceleration. What struck me today was that the Prius is so quiet that you don't realize how fast you're being moved. The engine is quite small and has excellent sonic isolation...and motors are nearly soundless to begin with. This is especially striking if you've been driving a Saturn, which are notoriously noisy.

My second observation this afternoon was that driving habits in The City have deteriorated enormously in the past couple of days. The streets are now full of folks zooming around in the most reckless and aggressive manner, endangering the vehicles of others. I shall have to write a strong letter to the Chronicle.

Of course, while I'm writing letters, I'll have to dash one off to Toyota pointing out that since they do not make this vehicle with manual windows, the very least they could do to compensate for this egregious waste of power is to provide a bicycle pedal arrangement in the floor in front of the passengers' seats so they could make themselves useful by generating some electricity.

I used the air conditioner.

Look. I was getting all sweaty and sticky with fruit juices at the Justin Herman Plaza Farmers Market and tried to get some sympathy about the scorching weather from the folks at the Frog Hollow booth since it was 84 degrees out there today. Alas, they came right back at me that they were real happy to be in San Francisco because it was supposed to be hitting 110 in Brentwood today.

Rebuffed, I slunk back toward the car, noticing en route that the sidewalks were covered with the fallen from heat exhaustion, either that or the hot weather had caused a new spate of evictions and it was just more basking homeless.

Having been closed up in the sun, the car was just roasting. So yes, I turned the AC on for the first part of the return home. Not the MAX-AC, which the manual warns is an awful energy gobbler, but just to the Regular. I must say, it was quite nice in there almost immediately. So nice, in fact, that even though the most casual glance at the readouts revealed that I was sure not generating much energy, I left it on for the entire trip home.

Oh, and I can now report the first mechanical problem: I have been driving for three days now and the fuel gauge has not budged. Then again, I may be misinterpreting this since the window sticker did list as one of the features, "Full tank of gas."

This afternoon I was standing innocently in the doorway to the balconette admiring the garden view when a pair of hummingbirds were simultaneously attracted by the Gasteria blossoms and swooped down upon it. The larger bird immediately assessed the situation and, determining that there was clearly not enough to share, chased the other away.

Then, at his leisure, he commenced to dine while I stood there three feet away, transfixed. He was brown, with a bit of greenish iridescence at the throat, and as the branches swayed in the breeze, he hovered beneath the open blossoms, thrusting his bill vigorously up into them as he simultaneously compensated for the movement of the branch. I wish I could do that.

Having finished dining, he alit on one of the branches two feet from my face and daintily cleaned his bill by rubbing all sides of it on the branch. That done, he rather less daintily used his bill to root away in his nether portions. And finally, he held onto the branch with one foot, fluffed himself up, and, with no daintiness at all, used the other foot to scratch himself enthusiastically everywhere he hadn't reached with his bill.

Toilette complete, he shot a dirty look at me for having ogled him so during what should have been a more private moment and was about to leave when he noticed that he had not fed at the branch closest to my face, literally a foot from my eyes. So one by one, he visited every blossom while I stood there holding my breath lest he find it offensive.

I don't think I've ever felt quite so in tune with one of Nature's creatures, and I considered inviting him in for dinner, but realized, just before he flew away, that there wouldn't be any white meat on him.

Her timing was excellent, as I was feeling OK and had nothing planned. So she walked over and we drove down to the Zuni, catching it at its ebb, which is the only time you can get in nowadays without a reservation. It was just as wonderful as ever. We got a tiny table in the little nibbling corner by the main door. Had bloody marys and split orders of their wonderful shoestring potatoes and Caesar salad and talked until the place got jammed with pre-opera/symphony/ballet diners.

In addition to careers as software whores, what we share is long-term chronic illness, in her case diabetes, in both cases complicated now with increasing age although mine is much greater than hers. The other difference is that I'm worn down from fighting only fifteen years, while she has been dealing with it since she was a child. I'm such a wimp.

We also share a great love of The City and its food scene. We moved here only two years apart in the mid-seventies, so we were able to sit there recalling the opening of the Zuni, now a national landmark, twenty-two years ago in a tiny sliver of its current space. We also compared notes on a host of other places, now mostly long departed.

Enormous fun.

Now I'm about to make a New World version of the Gorgonzola-Marscapone Torte to take as a dessert over to Marin County for dinner with Bob, my Great Failed Love and now dear friend. When he called me this morning, he let me know that his lover would also be present, a point which had not come up in previous discussions of the dinner.

When I asked what I could bring, he waffled and then admitted that he had not planned a dessert and that while one would not be at all necessary, it would be the thing to bring. I am trying not to admit to myself that my choice of dessert is perhaps ever so slightly influenced by the fact that, unlike Bob, the lover is, besides a number of other undesirable characteristics, a finicky eater.

Surely, I say to myself, he'll like a torte made of Roquefort, Marscapone, and Pecans. And if not, well..........

I could stop by Just Desserts on the way, but I'm enjoying too much the idea of taking a dish I've painstakingly crafted myself.

During a break from eating with Jane last Wednesday, I had the opportunity to test-drive a Segway. It was an exhilarating experience. So much so that when I got home the Muse did not come fluttering down, alight on my shoulder, and start whispering gentle suggestions in my ear as she typically does during her infrequent visits.

Rather, she swooped down, sank her talons into my chest, looked me in the eye, barked, "Take a letter!" and started dictating.

But why, you wonder, was I given the chance to ride a Segway?

Because the San Francisco Board of Supervisors was holding a public hearing on the question of whether Segways should be banned from San Francisco sidewalks. And because, living in a flat not wheelchair accessible and on a hill too steep for a wheelchair, I had some time back realized that a Segway would be the perfect mobility device for me as my ability to walk declines, so I had registered on the Segway website.

Last week Segway sent an email to registrants in the Bay Area telling us about the hearing and soliciting our support. I emailed them back and said I'd try to make it, mentioning that my interest in a Segway was sparked by disability.

I was immediately contacted by a San Francisco representative because of course they really wanted disabled seniors to limp up to the podium and testify, thawing the cold hearts of the supervisors. The representative casually mentioned that there would be an opportunity for me to test a Segway before the hearing if I were interested. Well of course I was.

It was a glorious experience. I lifted the Segway out of the rep's trunk (they weigh only 80 pounds), untelescoped the handle, put in the key, and stepped onto it while she held it steady. It took me about ten seconds to give up control to the thing and let it take care of balancing me. Actually, since it's making hundreds of balancing corrections per second, you don't really have much choice other than to let it have its way. And after that weird little introductory moment, it's totally intuitive and easy to use.

My test ride consisted of following the rep up the ramp, along the porch, into the building, over to the elevator, into the elevator, out at the second floor, down the hall, and into her office...all without dismounting.

So I was really sold, which of course was the point in letting me try one, to enhance my eloquence at the hearing, which was Thursday afternoon at City Hall and was just astonishing, in a horrifying kind of way. Now I know how Billy Budd felt during Claggart's testimony. Fortunately, I regained my ability to speak in time to testify although I admit that I did want to throttle one of the supervisors.

Alas, the supervisors voted to ban the Segway from the sidewalks anyhow, so it was all for naught. Even so, I have one on order, but delivery is some months out, postponing for now the horrendous cost of the thing.

I never dreamed that frittering away Becky's inheritance would be so much fun.

What a sensual festival it is, as least as served at California Pacific Medical Center, jelled to perfection and sliced into precise one-inch cubes quivering with transparent eagerness to abandon themselves in your mouth.

And it's not just green! You have the additional pleasure of guessing what flavor, many of them quite realistic, the color of the day represents. A delight so fine when no food has passed your lips in days that you'll need to cut the cubes in half, as an entire cube taken at once causes a sensory overload rather like that of a large, Gulf of Mexico oyster taken whole into the mouth and squished around to extract its briny, coppery sexiness.

Doubtless a trifle tipsy from the beers, we were immediately captivated and walked over to see what kind of cookies she was selling. When I inquired, she told us she had giant chocolate chip cookies for a dollar.

But Allen had an intuition and laughingly asked her, "Does Grandmother perhaps have some special cookies?"

And Grandmother gave us a big smile, "Well, goodness me, I do believe I have a couple of those left. They're five dollars each." And she opened a false bottom in the basket, and took out two cookies.

So we ate them and nothing happened at first, just for long enough to make us begin to wonder whether we'd been ripped off. But then suddenly, they hit, and we simultaneously realized that we were so stoned that we were practically hallucinating.

Grandmother had been generous. And this made the rest of that fair by far the most vivid I ever attended.

Note: "Grandmother" was not Mary Rathbun, AKA "Brownie Mary," a San Francisco legend who at about that time was fairly new at her career as a baker of marijuana brownies that she sold but more famously donated to AIDS patients in the early days of the epidemic. Mary died in 1999 after a short stay in Laguna Honda, but immediately before that she had been hospitalized, gravely ill, at Davies Medical Center. One of her friends put a notice in the Bay Area Reporter soliciting cards and visits, and I was gratified to learn later that my card had been part of an avalanche.