palo alto what a mystery

I'm back. I say that as if returning from somewhere other than my home, when what I am actually doing is staying still in this town for more than a few days for the first time since I left for good. I spent a month here in April 2002 to unsuccessfully rehabilitate my posture, and several weeks on either end of my Taiwan trip in 1999 getting fired from temp jobs for stealing, at the age of 18, microbrews from company fridges. (This included a phone call from a nosy wench at Adecco telling me that "Not only is that stealing, it's also illegal" (I think she meant I was underage) and rudely informing me that I would never be hired out to another Veritas Software or Washington Mutual or Shoreline Amphitheatre for a temp job from Adecco again.)

My return flight is a red-eye on August 23, so I'll be here for about seven weeks, with the exception of a week in Vietnam traveling and getting typhoid with Bernie Han. In my haste to get to the airport, which had been fouled by foiled terrorists in London and Glasgow, I left my little jigger of anti-typhoid antibodies in a ziploc baggie in the fridge - which is where I also left Boo's dish of frozen water and forced him to endure eight thirsty hours in the belly of a Boeing 767. As is customary, I woke late and David rushed me, Stephanie, and Boo in a Honda Civic crammed with my crap to an airport at ORANGE ALERT and I barely made it through check-in, the security, and the gate before we lifted off. I put a ear up to see if I could hear Boo crying underneath, but there was nothing but the deafening roar of airplane engines carrying a dog 30,000 feet up to his unpressurized, temperature-unregulated doggy death. Boo came out on the other end of our flight decently, if a little parched and stir-crazy, and my parents promptly whisked us away to the San Mateo Chinese supermarket we always go to on the way home from SFO and they fed Boo pounds of Chinese junk food as he lay expectantly panting on the backseat.

I'm back and I'm in a little office of a big firm. I'm seeing Palo Alto with new eyes. Longstanding questions have been answered, questions like How do the businesses on California Avenue survive? and Who drives around in the middle of the day? (Lunch business and business lunchers, respectively.) I also learned, on my way to one of those lunches on California Avenue, that my favorite bookstore ever and the repository of my self-education in science fiction/fantasy, Know Knew Books, is going out of business and that the kindly, portly bearded guy who patiently rung up my 10% student discounts on books that were only worth $1 will be closing down his business and selling off all of his stock of Piers Anthony and Ursula LeGuin. Why do these things happen? The pretty associates drive me around a Palo Alto buzzing with unknowable commerce and I see the bank terrace where I fitfully made out with my boyfriend late one night in 1996, I see a park where Josie and I plotted our escape via Caltrain from Palo Alto, a fountain (still foaming) that high school jokers would fill with detergent from time to time. It's weird, but at least the office atmosphere is very slow compared with New York and I can have one smiling conversation after another about how great the weather is in California, always and forever.

I'll bike to work for the rest of the summer and pass by all of these places every day. I'll take Boo out to my old middle school before work every morning, where he will dutifully shit on the same baseball diamond where my dad took me to play catch. I threw a ball around for Boo this morning and it only took two throws for him to slip and go flailing around on the sprinkler-slicked grass and give me this doleful look, like he'd never chase a ball again. Stephanie is angry that I'm here so we distract each other with puppet shows via webcam until 3 a.m. her time, so that through exhaustion we avoid confronting the fact of this distance until the following day.

But darling, even when I'm gone I'm still in Palo Alto!