Archive for June, 2009|Monthly archive page
Funeral for a Basque
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Last week, I went up to Susanville with my mother to help bury my uncle, Marty Paguegui, who lived on the eponymous street you see pictured above. I’ve never been to Susanville, not being close to my uncle. It’s a wonderful place.
On the surface, I don’t belong in a place like Susanville, not at all. Susanville is about 80 miles west of Reno. It’s in the mountains — 4,200 feet — it snows up there. People ranch, and they work construction (which is what my uncle did), or they work at the High Desert Prison, one of those huge new prisons the state of California’s thrown up in all kinds of out-of-the-way places. When you drive out to Paguegui Lane, you can see the prison from a long way away because it has so many lights outside and there aren’t that many lights on in Susanville at night so nothing competes with it.
Me, I’m from a place that’s easy to get to, any season at all. And people here don’t ranch, let’s just leave it at that. Side dishes with mayo, particularly ones with macaroni? Not much in evidence in Berkeley. But surprisingly yummy when eaten in the parish hall of the catholic church in Susanville after mass, or at my Aunt Vicky’s house, in Maxwell, which is off I-5, on the way home from Susanville. I’m not sure you’re supposed to discover how much you love a place when you’re on a funeral mission, but there you have it: that was mostly what I did.
My uncle — who was in his early 70s — had a lot of friends. The funeral mass was crowded with them, and the amount of help they gave was huge and without any hesitation. It was lovely for my mother and my cousins to have people volunteer to do things they couldn’t do. For example, my uncle left his important stuff in a combination safe. He’d given the combination to two different people, but on the Sunday when we needed to open it, the combination was nowhere in evidence. So, how do you get a safe open on a Sunday in Susanville? Well, you take it to the local locksmith, a heavily tattooed ex-con, and he drills it open in about two seconds so you can get the instructions for the funeral, the will, and the cash he didn’t want to put in the bank.
My uncle was a handsome man, in that way Basque men can be handsome, with a white smile in a dark face, the kind of guy who loves to dance, and has a way of talking to women that makes them feel that they might possibly be the most beautiful and desirable woman in the world. As a result, he was not that successful with women long-term, but he clearly had a lot of short-term fun. So much so that when it became evident that one of his wishes for his funeral was to have women pall bearers, the rush to volunteer was immediate and fierce.
Here are some other facts about Susanville:
- Things start early. Starbucks is open at 4:30 a.m. That’s so the prison guards and the ranchers can get a latte on their way to work.
- The local AM radio station, KSUE, has a very popular swap program every day, a program in which you can, for example, let people know you’re willing to swap your used generator for a ride-on lawn mower. And if you show up at 4:30 a.m. at that radio station, which is in a little house by the fairgrounds, there will be a guy there who’s wide awake, and he’ll read the announcement of your uncle’s death and the funeral mass to come a couple times a day, just to make sure the word gets out.
- You’ll discover, when you walk outside your room at the Best Western, after your mother’s woken you up to go to the radio station, that the air is cleaner and fresher than any air you can remember in a long time, and the moon will just be sinking beyond the edge of the horizon and you’ll notice that the sky is huge and open and so beautiful you want to stand there in the parking lot and not move because you know it’ll be a while before you see the morning in quite that way again. And you’ll see this is why your uncle spent most of his life up here. Because it is beautiful in a way few other places are.
- When the Irish priest in Susanville is on vacation, his place is taken by the Rwandan priest whose parish is up the road. This Rwandan priest will hug your mother more than a few times, and he will give a remarkable homily about life and death, which you know he’s seen a lot of, even though he looks like he’s barely thirty years old.
- People will invite you to come back to Susanville because your uncle was their friend. And you will come back — to a party in a few weekends, and to the big lamb barbeque your uncle gave every year, the one where the old Basques stand around telling jokes, charming women, living a good, full life. You’ll come back because you like this place, this early-rising, kind, surprising place.
And that is where I’ve been, and what I’ve been doing, since I last posted about how good the food at the Berkeley Bowl looks in the summer.
The Old Bowl
When I first moved to Berkeley — in the early 1980s — my roommates at the time were old (in their late twenties) and sophisticated (they knew their way around an artichoke). They shopped at this place they referred to as “the Bowl.” I imagined it was named after a big bowl of fruit, because that is what they usually brought home after they went shopping. They also brought home this wonderful cheese I’d never heard of before. It was called Havarti.
Berkeley was a paradise in those days. Now you can buy havarti at Costco, so paradise is more widely available in America, which can only be a good thing. I mean, even in this wretched economy, you can still afford the occasional good thing to eat and you have a much better chance of being able to find it than you did in the early 1980s. Cheese has a way of making the worst things seem a little bit better. At least that is what we believe here in Berkeley, which is why I live here.
Anyway, it turned out that the Berkeley Bowl was actually an old bowling alley that had been turned into a fruit and vegetable market which also sold cheese (at a long, exciting cheese counter) meat, seafood and, sort of as an aside, things like recycled paper towels and earthy moisturizers made by people who lived in Ukiah. To successfully shop there you really did have to have some skills, just not with a bowling ball. Basically, you had to be aggressive with your shopping cart, and willing to snatch fruit out of the hands of elderly ladies who wanted it too. But you’d go cart-to-cart with these ladies because you wanted those raspberries MORE, having grown up in a place where fruit (and tomatoes!) just did not taste so real, and fresh and amazing, thus making your desire for them really strong. At the time, I didn’t have a car, so I had no idea the real challenge of shopping at the Berkeley Bowl was finding a place to put it.
And now there is a SECOND bowl in Berkeley. It opened today (it is called “Berkeley Bowl West”) and it amazes me that this could be so — mostly because this means there will FINALLY be a place to park at the Berkeley Bowl in my neighborhood because all the shoppers who wanted my parking spot will be at Berkeley Bowl West. And I will not have to get into unseemly altercations near the apricots to score the perfect ones that have my name on them. Still, in honor of the time that has passed since I first discovered havarti and artichokes, the Bowl in my neighborhood is now called the Old Bowl. (At least that is what I’m calling it.) I am now the old lady you have to face down to get to the apricots first. (I will add that I am not really that old, and I imagine the ladies I thought were so old probably weren’t either. It’s funny how perception depends a lot on where you stand.)
Summer’s almost here. Three years ago, when I was just beginning to write this blog, I was up to my arms in raspberries, making jam. A day or two after I wrote about that, I was diagnosed with breast cancer and I haven’t boiled fruit and sugar together since then. This is to say that my hiatus from jam is over. Raspberries at the Old Bowl were .99 a basket when I was there tonight — I swear to God. And the apricots, which are slightly more expensive, are so beautiful this year.
This weekend, it’s jam time.
