Beans and Memory

I went to the shop stall in the Ferry Building to buy a bottle. The man working there was talky, a little. We took a shine.

"I want to buy some dry minerally rosé," I said, even though it's spring and there was a "rosé event" in progress in the wine store at that very moment and he could already tell what I wanted for other reasons as well like I'm a mid-aged white lady and that's all we really want in life, most of us.

At the register, he accidentally found out about and then complimented me on my purchase of some very large white beans from the bean stall. He had been to Hungary once, where someone's grandmother had made him a stew with beans like that. He still dreamed about that stew, he said. And every time he saw white beans he thought to himself he should make the stew.

I like the Ferry Building a lot. So does this Shanley. In this picture we had just come back from a writing convention to find that the wine stall was closed. All the stalls were! We were forced to eat in a restaurant. That's the worst thing that can happen to you in the Ferry Building.

"That's funny," I said. "I got these because a long time ago someone made me a dish of beans with oil and then parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme, and I never stopped thinking about it." It had been a woman I worked with at a bakery in the mid-1990s. She was fiftyish, pixie-ish, wide-eyed, sweet, and married for many years to her physical double and temperamental opposite, whose misnomer was Penny. She, Penny's wife, had been a stripper in the 1960s, which she wasn't at all shy about revealing, but she didn't seem to have found it very interesting, although she would giggle at the thought. When May Sarton died she was visibly upset. "Such a gentle soul," she said of the poet. I don't remember Penny's wife's name, but I remember she would dance around among the ovens and rolling tables and industrial loaf-rolling machines like a completely unselfconscious elf. I house-sat for them once and it was among the happiest times of my life; the place was cozy and wood-lined, full of trickling dark-stone fountains with mosses and succulents among the Buddhist sand puzzles. Cats, too, of course, at a time when I had none and was starved for love anyway.

The home of rosé is about remembering, while California is about reinvention, closely related to forgetting. As we get older, California will want to start remembering--already it's too hard for people to face Indian extermination; we're ginger with memory when it comes to the Missions but I don't think it can last. I'm not even sure why memory is so important to me, but it always has been, even if sometimes I'm French about it and remember everything wrong or just feelings. But I want to have a sense of building, not just the sense of inventing or even growing. I'm one of the last group of people on earth who will have expected to lose contact, and who will lose contact with the people in their past, who won't be able to use a search engine or online social networks to find people they worked with at a bakery twenty years ago even if they don't remember her name. I wonder what that will do for memory.

Buddy at the wine shop stall didn't register the Simon and Garfunkel reference in Penny's wife's bean dish, didn't know he himself was doing their bidding in a culinary sense, because when they sing "Preserve your memories/ They're all that's left you," don't they mean keep stew-dreaming? Wine-drinking? The bottle I bought from the bean fan was French, with a stupid name likely designed to appeal to Californian women, but I know they got it wrong; neither I nor Penny's wife want to be told we're "angels." Elves or poets or bakers, maybe.

As we grow to know ourselves and our rosé better, as our culture builds on itself after all that invention, look at what rosé has become in my neighborhood: the mostly empty bottle you find on the street on a weekend morning. Forgotten, forgettable, meaning less and far from precious. I like it.