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The air is remarkably clear after morning showers
and a long haul in taxi 1010 from SFO to Stanford Hospital with
a sales representative from a pharmaceutical company. Her husband,
an experienced database programmer, can't find a job among thousands.
They would move their thirteen-year-old
daughter, ten-year-old son and themselves from Portland, Oregon
anywhere if anyone was hiring. Before leaving Palo Alto, I stopped
in a pastry store off Sand Hill Road and bought a cinnamon raisin
spinner. A little girl wanted to learn how to make change for a
five dollar bill, less the dollar seventy-five. Her mother's eyes
had an air of desperation as she shooed the girl away, who ran to
shepherd an even littler boy digging into a stack of filters under
the coffee counter. Soon I was back on Interstate 280 –
Hundreds of patches of fog hung motionless across dark verdant hills
under a huge canopy of stratocumulus undulatus. Hungry for another
and another cinnamon raisin twirl, I kept driving north as memories
of all this drifted though my mind like steam devils.
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