DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

“Dude, what’s with that water?”

“What do you mean?” I asked back, reaching for the bottle.

“Is that… Is there anything in the water?” He smiled to mask an unseemly suspicion.

“Nope, just water.” I shook the bottle dismissively.

He paused for a second, processing his options, and then said in a somewhat accusing tone, “But it’s yellow.”

He was partially correct. If you fill a plastic bottle with well water, and there are even just a few parts per million of iron in the water, or a few dozen as in our case, the bottle will turn slightly orange over time. Or yellow, depending on the room lighting and the accuracy of one’s color perception. I explained this, and he looked relieved, and said “Oh!” with rather more emphasis than I expected. I stared at him for a few seconds, and as realization dawned I said “You didn’t think —”

“What?” he said with less innocence than was genuine.

“You thought I was drinking my own pee!”

Thai curry — one of my favorite things. I wrote out a shopping list for a red curry recipe I’d clipped from the newspaper last year. One of the ingredients was something I had never heard of: haricots verts. I mindlessly wrote “haricots verts” on the shopping list, assuming there would be a bin in the produce aisle labelled “Fresh Organic Haricots Verts”. This is farm country after all; my neighbors grow a lot of things I’ve never heard of.

But my expectation was unfulfilled: my wife returned from the store with all manner of vegetables, but no haricots. Not only was there no bin, she reported, but the produce guy was mystified. This is a guy who sells vegetables for a living, and he’s never seen haricots, organic or otherwise.

Fortunately, curry recipes are very forgiving, in that one can incorporate just about any vegetables at all. My wife had bought bell peppers, spinach, zucchini, tomatoes, green beans, broccoli, etc., a veritable vegan smorgasbord. And I used nearly all of them in the curry, except for the green beans, because they take too long to prep.

A few days later I was looking in the vegetarian cookbook to confirm the boiling time for the green beans. You’ll never guess what haricots verts are.

“Eww, what’s that smell?” she asked as I was cooking dinner. It’s not exactly the sort of question I like to hear when I’m cooking dinner. Just for the purposes of illustration, here is an example of the sort of question I much prefer to hear when I’m cooking dinner: “Damn, boy, where’d you learn to cook so good?” Or even “So you’re saying it takes only a pinch of sugar to neutralize the acids in fresh tomato sauce?”. Or even “please, please share with me the secret of your incredible tofu scramble, I’ll do anything, anything you say, please!”

So I responded in a way I often do when I don’t want to engage in a potential conflict. It’s a coping strategy, perhaps not ideal, but has the benefit of being really easy to execute: I didn’t say anything. I figure it’s sometimes better to ignore than get irked, irate, incendiary. I pretended that whatever she’d caught a whiff of could not possibly have come from my stovetop machinations, and even if it did, she was going to have to eat it anyway.

Later on, after dinner, we realized that the moment she’d asked about an offensive odor was probably just after I’d leaned over the stove and, apparently, scorched a big patch of the fleece I was wearing.

Fran Bennett used to be Frank Bennett. Her story is remarkable. So are the photos:

• “before”: looking like the third Allman Brother, circa 1980, Frank Bennett
• “after”: Fran Bennett

What’s even more remarkable is that her marriage survived the transgender process. Read the two-part story:

1. Free to be Fran
2. Uncle Frank Signs Off

Last week my old friend Bruce pointed out an article in the Chronicle about the closing of a boarding house in the Marina district of San Francisco. While the loss of an historic institution is of general interest, this story caught Bruce’s attention because he used to live there. And he sent me the URL because I used to live there, too.

It was my first week in the City, and at my first post-college job. I’d needed a temporary place to live until I networked enough to find more appropriate accomodations. The Marine View Residence was available and convenient. And unusual.

Rent was charged weekly and included two hot meals a day. The other residents were wholly unlike my new co-workers, and although I didn’t appreciate it at the time, I had a lot more in common with the people at breakfast than with the suit-and-tie victims at lunch.

The room I could afford was tiny, and I had to share a bathroom. The neighbor with whom I shared the bathroom often had overnight guests; most mornings I’d wake to the sound of them showering — running water and two male voices through the thin wall.

I found a picture of my old room at the Marine View, taken in late 1989. The room is admittedly nondescript, more interesting for the junk strewn around than for the structure itself. Picking out the highlights… there’s a CD player on the desk, connected to a pair of Sony V6 headphones (which I used until recently, when they began to rot). There are papers stacked on the desk, the floor, and the bed; this is a filing system I employ to this day. There’s a pair of dress shoes on the floor, a symbol of the thing I loathed most about my first job, aside from the work and the people of course.

There is what appears to be a pair of light blue briefs on the nightstand. I wish I could claim I’ve never worn light blue briefs, but the idea that those belonged to someone else is even more disturbing.

The most interesting thing about the picture is the thing that isn’t seen — there is no computer in the room. Believe it or not, there was a three-year period in which I owned no computer at all. Today, I own eight.

I regret that I’d closed the curtains for this picture. In a Hollywood movie, or a nicer apartment for that matter, the curtains would open to reveal a glorious View of the Marina skyline. But in fact, for $700 all I got, besides the sagging bed, two meals a day, and three colors of hair on the soap, was a view of the backsides of neighboring buildings.

I’m nostalgic for it all the same. I haven’t thought about the place in years, but still. I remember the way my neighbor would leave the bathroom window open, and I’d step in barefoot onto 30°F tile and curse his existence once again. I remember going on “photo safaris” around San Francisco on the weekends, shooting rolls of film of all the popular landmarks. I remember learning where the various neighborhoods are and thinking I really had a handle on San Francisco. I remember walking 1.5 blocks from the bus stop to the front door after work, and feeling pain in my legs because the street is so steep. I remember having opinions about coin laundromats.

It’s important to look forward. But it’s fun to remember where you’ve been.