Profoundly Fraught Umami-land

I’m freshly back from one of Phoenix’s livelier bedroom communities…while there I entertained the idea of immigrating to Arizona.

There’s no doubt that the pervasive pleasures of living in Arizona are an attractor.   There is a seductive ease I have difficulty refuting while I’m there.  It’s all at your fingertips…summery, expedient and come-at-able. It’s also cheap, rife with the touchstones of affluence, and all on one level.

However, the manifest glory of the Bay Area in general, and of Oakland in particular is indisputable.  One forgets, one forgets; one narrowly focuses on the crime statistics, the poverty, the tabloid pronouncements.  And then one peers through the window…across the expanse of lapis lazuli water, at the quality of caramel light curling gracefully along the verdant east bay hills and one can’t deny that Oakland with its troubles is also deeply ravishing.  At autumn’s threshold, the temperate air settles on the skin, pleasing in the most unaffected and natural way.  The downtown, though sparsely populated  feels oddly right-sized.  The disconcertingly nonpareil restaurants sport the spot-on patina of cool and outlaw, van der Waal's forces  at work.

  

There is the promise of land and space and certain svelteness  of character borne from a secular, worldly wise geography. There is the wild charm…an acquired one to be sure, but a charm nonetheless.

Of course, this is no Comfort Inn. The population is decidedly renegade and mavricky; brilliance tightly fused with a razor-sharp edge.  In spite of my substantial middle class misgivings though, each time I return I am struck dumb by the raw beauty of the place.

And once one succumb’s to Oakland’s beguilements a quick peek at real estate listing aren’t completely deflating.  Compared to the kings’ ransom  required to live in careworn San Francisco, there is the bracing realization that this actually could be a place you could make your own; you could stake your claim in metropolis: an urbanite’s reverie, surely.   It’s a potent antidote to the lure of Arizona’s more confectionary suburban indulgences.

Unsurprisingly, I and many of my fellow denizens find ourselves saying…yes, I know there are the proverbial Big Bad’s here..but I don’t want to leave…not just yet.

So I (we) stay, in full face of the attendant urban ills ; the intractable wretchednesses.

It’s profoundly fraught Umami-land by turns salty, sour, sweet and bitter.   For better AND worse  it’s my home.