Today saw the valley and the redwood forest and lots of ribbon of highway. Yeah, baby, still hanging out Left Coast style.

Besides see the ancestral home of the laptop I type on at this exact moment (Cupertino), I saw M.’s new place on the border of San Jose and Cupertino, his new office and had lunch with the boss, the mountains, the gates of Paul Masson (responsible for my earliest awareness of the family importance of a cheap, jug wine), Stanford my friends’ house in San Leandro (K. and M. have been working hard on their house and it looks fabu) and had great sushi in Hayward.

In and among the adventures, I touched and smelled giant, centuries’ old redwoods, picked oranges from the orange tree in the front yard of M.’s new digs, ran my fingers through three kinds of sage and smelled the spice in the indigenous garden around chez K. and M. and put a lemon in my pocket from their tree.

Meanwhile, M. and I have been together round the clock, and despite my best intentions we still seem to be laughing and chatting together without friction. (OK, there was that moment in which M., surrounded by mountains and redwoods, stopped to admire not the scenery, but his own visage in the mirror. But, his new glasses do look good on him. I was aghast at his vanity. For me, “shall I compare thee to a summer’s day,” became M. versus redwood. I mean he’s cute and all, but would Woody Guthrie have written about him?)