Berkeley Bowl pilgrimages

In the last year of pandemic isolation, my one and only excursion in contact with other people has been my weekly grocery shopping excursion to Berkeley Bowl, aka The Temple of Produce. It has been here since 1977, when I was an undergraduate, and was originally in a former bowling alley, hence the name. You can get everything there, but the main attraction is the huge produce section which has just about every variety of fruit and vegetable you can imagine.

 I live walking distance away, but for the past several months my sister has been driving over from Daly City. We get to see each other, and and I don't have to schlep heavy bags back from the store now that I don't have a car any more. 

I feel comfortable shopping there because they are observing the most sensible hygiene and social distancing measures: they only let a certain amount of people into the store at a time; they wipe down the carts between use; there are markings on the floor to regulate how people line up to check out so that everyone stays a good distance away from each other; masks are mandatory and for a long time they provided gloves at the entrance. If we bring our own bags, we put our stuff into the cart and take it outside to bag on tables, to prevent cross-contamination and bottlenecks.  In the early months, there were often long lines (although they moved quickly) to get in, but we haven't had to wait in a line for months now. I can get almost everything I need there. The only thing  haven't been able to find lately is compact flourescent lightbulbs so I'll have to go to Ace Hardware for those.

Here's a demo of a recipe for lemonade using the shiso leaf, from the wonderful Berkeley Bowl Cookbook:

School spirit!

Today was the last day for one of my classes. I was so impressed by the progress the students had made. I feel like celebrating! Even though I never walked through my own college graduation, I did attend this very football game in 1974, and whenever I feel peppy about college, I remember this:

Top Dog

It was fun to stomp around Berkeley with my nephew. We took pictures, hiked up the hill to the Greek Theater, bopped around campus, and sat for a while at the fountain in Sproul Plaza. Right on cue, a golden retriever trotted up with a tennis ball, jumped in the water and played until he was whistled away by his human buddy. A noble tradition!
During all the years I lived in Berkeley, I was probably never farther than 5-6 blocks from Top Dog on Durant. About once a week, I'd get a calabrese, a sausage that has fennel seeds and a mildly spicy flavor. With hot mustard, mmmm. They tasted best when we were coming back from seeing a band in SF: take Muni to the AC Transit station, catch the last bus back to Berkeley, then walk up toward home from Shattuck. The last stop of the night, at about 2:30 AM was Top Dog, open all night.

Berkeley nostalgia

It is February, so the plum trees are blooming in Berkeley. I went off to college at UC Berkeley in 1974, and ended up living there, with time out for travels, until 1988. I never owned a car there, so I walked, biked or rode buses the entire time, except when a roomie or boyfriend with a car gave me a ride. I'll be going back for a brief visit over Spring break to see my family in SF, and I'll take day to get over to the East Bay to see one of my colleagues deliver a keynote talk at a graduate student conference. Here's a picture of the courtyard in Dwinelle Hall, where I spent a lot of time over the years, reading for my classes.

Berkeley has probably changed enormously since I've left: I haven't been back much. So I'm going to take a virtual tour through Walking Berkeley, a site that combines the idea of "walking every street in your town" with photos and stories about the history of the places. I plan to walk in the Botanical Gardens, and visit the Rose Garden.

Back to school

In 1974, I went off to college. What did I know? Pretty much nothing. I suspect that freshman today are primarily concerned, as I was, with the huge changes in their lives. I went along to football games with my new friends, even though I didn't really care about football, because it was great to be part of a group.
What thrilled me was the BAND and the amazing back-bending, high-striding, baton-flinging guy in the tall bearskin hat.

In a week I will begin teaching a freshman seminar, and I thought I'd try to imagine what it feels like to begin college today, in 2006. Probably my students are as blissfully unaware as I was of the Big Picture, and just likely to be more interested in the latest hit song or teen styles (I wore some stylin' elephant pants and super-groovy platform shoes), and fitting in. One of my goals is to help them feel more connected to their learning than I was. Are there any special ways to do this that I don't already do with my older, more experienced students? It's entertaining to read the Beloit College MindSet List for the Class of 2010, but it's also sobering to read some of the more vitriolic comments responding to the publication of My Freshman Year by Cathy Small/Rebekah Nathan. I'm not sure which is worse, the students who dismiss professors as chumps, the professors who dismiss students as lazy drunks, the non-academics who dismiss university life as "not real life," etc. I know I have something valuable to offer my students, and I'm humble enough to know that I'll need to work hard to face the special challenge of connecting with freshman in a meaningful way.

The author of this new book What's Liberal About Liberal Education? Classroom Politics and "Bias" in Higher Eductation available for purchase from the publisher, Norton, warns us that some people think that we perfessers are out to indoctrinate the youth of today. Oh, if it were only that easy!