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What's the flavor of Merced, at the heart of California’s agriculture?
It's like... rum punch: the sweet of clean country polite, the classy of grand buildings, and the genteel of hot summer slow, blended with the hard of torn "rent here" signs, and the burned out of dirty handout-seekers.
It is the cozy and simple of good 'ol fashioned Americana.
And lots to scratch beneath the surface.
Step 1: Spotting Brenna out among the blackberry bushes, be sure to bring her sangria, as you go out to help.
Step 2: Choosing an outlying bush, position your feet between the low hanging branches as the thorns will catch your ankles.
Step 3: Any dark black berries are ready to pick; they're easy to spot against the light green leaves, and among the yellow and pink premature berries. Separate the dark berries from their base with your thumb and forefinger, gently pulling the berry toward you, and leaving the white end of the stem behind.
Step 4: Collect the picked berries in the palm of your left hand while you pick your way to others. Continue to pick your way over the entire bush, everything within arm's length, under leaves, from up high, and down low.
Step 5: Once the pile in your palm is full, dump it into Brenna's stainless steel bowl and return to the bushes for more. She's telling you that the gold mine of berries are deep inside the thistle, but there's enough within reach to pile up until she has enough for two cobblers.
Step 6: Enjoy!
The man who took the spot at the shower handle bar across from me on the 5:15 West-bound N-Judah, in the spot left free by Ms. Cole & Carl, wrote furiously into a small blank chapbook the whole time we faced one another.
The cover of his book was worn into various shades of brown, darkest against the spine, and whitest against the edges, buckled and bubbled by love. Two call-out bubbles were embossed one on top of the other up against the upper left corner of the front-- its only designation save a name and phone number penned in the same scrawl across the top which the man laid out in short, crammed lines with repeating words and leaving a wide right margin, as if it was a poem, or a to-do list.
Mr. North Face-Button Down would depart from the the page long enough to stare off, for a moment lost in thought, before returning to the page to scrawl for a bit. Then he'd stop again, pen to mouth, before back to the page for more scrawling.
He wore a brushed silver band on his left ring finger, curly head of brown hair bent into his book, and Hugh Jackman chops. Before long, he pulled the books' ribbon page marker out and along the page he'd written on, and I watched him exit my stop, walking all the way down the block.