Before Departure: Packing and Eating

THE PACKING

There are agonizing parts to any move, temporary of otherwise. Besides saying goodbye to a city I love and the many people I love who are in it, the painful part of a move is packing.

I hate packing, this is perhaps why I have not moved house in nearly seven years.

In my case it’s not quite as arduous as real moving, I am keeping my flat here in San Francisco, though I will be taking some things with me. In my absence, the sister of a friend of mine will be holding down the fort. She will be staying in my office.

That means I have to pack up my office.

Did you ever have a room or corner of your house that becomes the storeroom—the place you stuff the things you don’t have time to deal with? That is what my office has become. In addition to the piles of books—an occupational hazard from working in publishing—there are boxes and stacks of newspapers and magazines that I still intend to read, someday. Then there are the Japan boxes.

When I left for Japan, some nine years ago, I packed up my life. I remember what a challenge it was to decide what to pack up and what to just get rid of. I was packing up a college life, knowing I would come back years later as a different person. What would my future self wish that I had kept?

When I did return, five years later, I barely looked at the boxes. They stayed in my mother's garage until this past year when she started giving them back to me. Every time I went to visit she gave me another box to take home. Fair enough—she’s been more than generous in storing them all this while (thank you, mom), but I didn’t have time to sort through them. They got put into the office to await the day when I did.

That day never came.

My poor office got so neglected and overrun that I didn’t know what to do with it. I made a couple of attempts to sort through the mess but it was overwhelming. My dear friend Mrs. B came up one day last fall and spent an afternoon sitting on the couch and knitting while I tried to sort through the boxes, providing moral support and making sure I didn’t bail out and go for a bike ride instead, but it was a pebble in a dam. I had moments of thinking that it might be okay if my house burnt down, because that way I wouldn’t have to deal with my office.

Before I go hightailing it up to Seattle, the office must be cleaned. It’s a pay to play scheme here: no clean office, no heading out of town. And let me tell you—it took awhile. I had planned to leave a long time ago, but week after week I was still chipping away at the dang office.

Beyond the boxes from college and the boxes from Japan there were the piles of work to sort through—my editing work from the past five years. I found files for book projects, business cards I used to belong to, and a copy of the letter that helped me land my first job in publishing (my goodness, was I young, eager, and earnest). The more recent piles contained food magazines and cookbooks. It was like life archeology, peeling back the layers of what has been.



Halfway through the project I began to see the metaphor and appreciate it. My life is changing, I can feel it, and this blog has a lot to do with it. As much as I have been happy to help other writers with their work, things are shifting and I want to be doing my own writing now. For a long time editing was a safe place for me to be. I feel confident in my skills as an editor, something I've never felt about my own writing. But working as an editor also helped me avoid my own writing; it’s much easier to focus on someone else’s work than put yourself on the line.

This blog has changed that. This little corner of the internet has given me a place to write, to develop my voice and my confidence, and a lovely group of people—amazing sweet and encouraging people—who drop by from time to time, tell me when they like something, and give me a reasons to keep writing (because if I stopped, maybe, just maybe, someone would notice). For a writer, especially a developing writer, this is an incredible gift.

So, things change. Instead of hiding from writing, fearing or dreading it, I want to be doing it more and more. I’m less enthralled with editing these days. There are things I still enjoy about editing. I love helping an author get to the point where they have a breakthrough and see how a piece is supposed to work—that, "wow, I get it now" moment is still a thrill. And I am grateful to my editing experience because it has taught me so much about the craft of writing, and allowed me to support myself doing work that I love, but these days I want to be doing a different kind of creative work. These days I want to be writing.

I thought of this as I packed up my office and cleaned off my desk, this huge battered desk that I love. I haven’t seen the full surface of it in months. It’s been covered with papers and files having to do with this editing project or that. As much as I hate this kind of sorting it began to feel cathartic to wrap everything up. I was clearing the desk, making space for new things to emerge. New writing sorts of things.

When it was all cleared, a big bare surface with nothing there apart from the collage of photos and things that make me happy reflected in the shiny black, I can’t tell you how good it felt.



By the end of it all—a process that took more weeks than I care to admit—I had disposed of nine bags of recycling, two bags of garbage, three boxes for Goodwill, two boxes of books to be donated, and a box of early Martha Stewart magazines that my friend Rosie had called dibs on. At the very end, my office was so clean and empty that it echoed. It was so tidy and nice that I wasn’t sure I wanted to leave.

But after weeks of cleaning and packing, leave I will.

THE EATING

The only bright spots in the ordeal of packing up an office and a life to leave is that gastronomic geekiness of a final food tour—the last meals you eat before you leave a place. What sort of things must you absolutely taste before you say farewell?

When I was in college, in a small town with few interesting food options and no ethnic food worth speaking of, my final meal before leaving for school was always the baked burrito with green sauce at Cactus Café in Mill Valley. That mixture of rice and cheese smothered in a piquant tomatillo sauce and baked until oozing was the last thing I wanted to eat before leaving, and the first meal I requested when I came home.

I’ve moved on from baked burritos (though that one is still good when I have it, about once a year), but there were some things I wanted to make sure to taste, and some people I wanted to taste them with. In between hours of sorting through college scrapbooks, old love letters, and photos from Japan (how many shots can you take of a rice field and what on earth do you do with them later?), I escaped for special bites with special people. Are these the best things to eat in the city? Maybe not, there’s not an upscale restaurant on the list, but they are some of the things I like the best—the flavors I will miss when I am gone.

At the Ferry Building Farmers’ Market, I met Cookiecrumb and Cranky for some Mexican food, but we ended up at the Ferry Plaza Wine Merchant with Heidi and Sam—all five of us drinking champagne and having nibbles. I hear Sam is the one to blame for starting this tradition, but having experienced it, I have to say I think she is on to something. Bread, cheese, and champagne, all before noon, is a decadent pleasure worth trying some time.



I had lunch alone (with my to-do list) at Osha, while my car was being serviced, and ordered my favorite Pad See Euw (though I cannot recommend the Osha on Geary, stick to the Valencia or 2nd Street locations). As you know, I love these pan-fried noodles with broccoli something fierce.



I had lunch with Shuna at Tartine (which I totally forgot to photograph). Yummy sandwiches and salads of tender young spring greens, I especially like the pickled carrots that come with the sandwiches—I even ate Shuna’s! Afterwards we walked down to Ritual Roasters for a Sumptown coffee and a sweet treat.



I tried to go with Rosie and Mary to the Bi-Rite Creamery for ice cream. I’ve heard amazing things about both the roasted banana and the salted caramel—they even have excellent soy ice cream. But they had the utter cheek to be closed on the Wednesday we tried to go there (I have it on good terms that they spend that day frantically making more ice cream to replenish the dwindling supply). Instead we ended up having pear smoothies and talking about life in the late afternoon sun, across the street at Dolores Park Café.



One night I went walking along Chrissy Field with my friend Marianne, along the bay and up to the Golden Gate Bridge just after sunset when the sky is getting dark. As you reach the bridge and look back the entire city is miraculously lit up and looking like a modern urban fairy tale. On my way home I called Jen, who invited me to crash the dinner of delicious Japanese food that she had made for Jeanne and herself. I fell in love with a salad dressing she whips up—you know, the kind that makes you want to lick the bowl. I need to get that recipe.



I got to have brunch at the Thai Temple in Berkeley with my favorite about-to-be-two-year-old McKenna and her dear parents, my friends Frank and Erin. This out of doors experience is one of my favorite ways to start a Sunday morning, and their mango and sticky rice is the best I’ve had in the Bay Area. Afterwards I stopped by the Meathenge to see my favorite Hillgrilly, who whipped up some grilled sausages and what very well may be the best asparagus I’ve ever tasted (sorry, no pictures—too busy chatting).

And one night, after two years of saying that we should, I finally took my friend Seren to Primo Patio, a mostly outdoors Caribbean joint just down the street from my old office. We’ve been wanting to see if their Primo Sauce is anything like the Fry Sauce that Seren craves from growing up in Utah (the verdict: a little spicier but very good). It’s been five years since I worked in that neighborhood but the owners still remembered me, and the food is as yummy as I remember it being. The bulli bulli beer and lime drink was just as good as I remembered it too. Seren had most of the fries and Primo Sauce, but I had most of the bulli bulli.



Then we walked around the Embarcadero and under the Bay Bridge, all lit up like a strand of pearls in the night, and I wondered how on earth anyone could ever think about leaving a city as beautiful as San Francisco.



But pack up and leave I did.

Can you guess what was my final taste of the city, that last bite that I just had to get in?

It was tea leaf salad and sumusas from Burma Superstar, a favorite addiction of mine (they were sold out of the nan gyi dok noodles in coconut curry, my other addiction there). This restaurant is deservedly popular, with lines every night and at lunch as well. Their tea leaf salad is a flavor experience like nothing I had ever tasted before—a salad of fermented tea leaves, mixed at the table with chopped romaine lettuce, tomato, and an assortment of nuts and seeds. It’s completely addictive. Outside of the Bay Area I don’t know what I’m going to do to get my fix, so it was my last meal before hitting the road. Eaten as take-out, surrounded by boxes, in a spurt of last minute packing.



And the next morning, early, it was off to Seattle!