Under the Baobab Tree

St. Helena and Yountville

Things here in Napa are improving. Yesterday I took off from the Horror Resort in my rental car with the only objective being to get as far away as possible from this hell hole. I went north, found a Starbucks in downtown Napa with a lousy Internet connection and warm coffee in which I sat "working" and watching the torrential rain. We have record-breaking low temperatures here in Napa which means all my Orlando conference resort attire is utterly useless to me. I realized freezing to death in the Starbucks that I needed to amend my objective to include buying warmer clothes.

So I kept heading north and found myself in a marvelous little town called St. Helena. It has a main street with fabulous little shops and yummy wonderful restaurants and no deformed tourists at all. I sat at the bar of a restaurant and ate a yummy risotto cake and cucumber soup and read a magazine for a long while. I drank fabulous coffee from the Napa Valley Coffee Roasting company. I watched vineyard owners come in and gab with the proprietor. They were from famous places like Cakebread and Duckhorn. I watched the torrential rain.

When the rain eased I walked down the quaint street and found a store that sells nothing but Life is Good attire. Two floors of Life Is Good. I stocked up on extra pairs of socks, a warm fluffy scarf, a fleece number, etc. Warm clothes, warm coffee, no weird Horror Resort smells, and good food. I was starting to feel better.

Then I kept going down the street and found a store with millions of bazilliions of beautiful costume jewelry items from around the world. I bought a ton of that too, thinking I would dress up my new socks with baubles and stun the town. We'll see if that works.

Then I kept going and was sucked into an art gallery with a lovely woman and beautiful art. I walked out half an hour later having purchased a beautiful oil painting of poppies and grasses painted from the vantage point of someone lying in the grass. It will arrive in DC in three weeks, after the "crate man" comes back from vacation. That will give me time to find a place in my thimble-sized condo to hang it. I love art. LOVE ART. Love it. The art gallery woman was impressed that I was from DC, "You have to be pretty smart to live there, don't you?" I suppose, I said, why? "You have to know all about politics and stuff. I don't understand any of that. We just do yoga and drink wine here in St. Helena." I said I thought that sounded much better than life inside the Beltway. We became fast friends. And she told me the word the locals use to describe deformed tourists. "A lot of people come through the gallery, but most of them are unqualified," she said. "Unqualified?" "Yes, they are not really going to buy any art. You could hit them over the head with a fabulous painting and they would say, 'but I don't like brown' or something." Ah, I said. I'm staying in a lousy hotel full of "unqualifieds" I told her. She nodded sagely. I will have to work that word into my daily vocabulary.

Then my friend Lisa showed up from San Diego and we set about getting down to conference business. Which involved renting an SUV with a driver named Ryan who took us to Yountville with 10 of our conference friends to a truly wonderful restaurant called Bottega. It was not my dinner, I was just a guest, but our 10 friends were rather unruly and so I ended up sitting at the head of an enormous wooden trestle table trying to bring order to the meal. It was challenging. I was up there like the Duchess of York, banging my fork on one of the ever multiplying wine glasses and demanding that people focus on the menu or, barring that, at least let me order for them. The waitress took heed. Several times someone tried to order something gawdawful and the waitress looked at me and said, "do you really want me to bring that for them" and I would say, "no, whenever anyone tries to order the octopus, just bring us those wonderful savory pastries with prosciutto and cherries instead." It worked out rather well and the other guests were so unruly they didn't even notice that what they ate was not precisely what they had ordered. I found this all so draining though that when it came time for me to order my dinner I looked wanly at the waitress and said, "Just bring me the best thing, whatever that might be." With pleasure! She said. Then I told her that despite my Duchess of York role, I was not in charge and that she should present the bill to Lisa, who was occupied with the unrulies. She did and Lisa signed without really even looking at what she was signing. I thought, "hmm, is there a career opportunity here?"

Attached is a pic of me and Lisa at the enormous trestle table in Yountville....before things got truly out of hand.

Lisa and I in addition to being colleagues are good friends mainly because we spend our money on the same things -- clothes, horses and art. I only ever see her at conferences -- San Diego, Barcelona, Orlando, here, etc. It's the secret to the success of our law firm -- now we are just lobbying for even more ceremonial roles in the firm. We were thinking we could be, you know, "Firm Emissaries" or something. Give us a location, with good food, clothes, and art, and we will go there and "emiss" or whatever it is emissaries do.

What's wrong with that?


P.S. My favorite new wine is the Goldeneye Pinot Noir. Closely followed by the Duckhorn, which happens to have been the red wine of choice at Orlando last weekend as well. GO FIRM!

Coincidences of Life

I met a man at my local watering hole last night who is a pilot for South African Airways and who spends his life on long-haul flights between Jo'Burg and Dakar, Dulles, Frankfurt, London, Perth, etc. He is my age just about (couple years younger). I ended up staying out way too late talking this marvelous, hilarious man with whom I felt as comfortable as my own brother. I laughed literally for hours. About practically nothing.

Today I thought, how odd. Part of the reason we laughed so much was that I spent my very earliest years in life living in South Africa, and later lived in a nearby, landlocked country called Zambia for elementary school. Most of what we were laughing about were things that no-one else I know can laugh with me about because no-one who hasn't spent time in Southern Africa would get it. E.g., the hilarious talk show on the radio when we were little about the Indian pharmacist in Durban. The odd way black Africans name their children (I told him about people in Lusaka named Elastic Banda and Bicycle Phiri -- he knew a man who named his first child Mistake, and four children later, had a son he called Last One -- the gas station attendant who named his son Fillitup). The staggering chauvinism of white African men. The ingenuity of the very poor and radicalized in Africa who routinely blow up ATMs with bombs to get the cash out (smoldering cash machines are not unusual to see at petrol stations -- I saw several in Nairobi last year). The way it is impossible to speak English with an African accent without having your whole face light up with smilies -- it must have something to do with the eyebrows. The bizarrely named burger chain in South Africa, Wimpy's.

To us, these things made us laugh hysterically. I realize that might seem somewhat insane.

There were also some serious things that I was shocked to find that I had in common with this total stranger. I mentioned early on that I had gone to elementary school in Lusaka. To me, that was the golden era of my childhood. Most people don't know where Lusaka is. This man, however, exclaimed, "Lusaka! Omigod! That is the most beautiful place in the world. I want to retire to Lusaka, it's so wonderfully lovely lovely." Wow.

We talked about life in Southern Africa growing up during the Rhodesian war. We used to drive from Lusaka to Jo'Burg, which took three days, to go shopping for toothpaste etc. We had to cross the Limpopo River to do it and the river was a no-man's land for the Brits and the Rhodesians. Craters from bombs everywhere, the famous fever trees from Rudyard Kipling's storied shredded and blown to bits, no hippos or crocs anywhere. The crossing was so dangerous we had to go in a caravan, which usually meant loitering for days in Bulawayo waiting for a caravan to form and set off (no cells phone or Internet in those days of course so Dad would literally go to the saloon every day to check on progress and to try to get us across as soon as possible). But finally getting to South Africa was like arriving in the promised land -- stuff everywhere! A consumer paradise for a kid like me living in a country at war.

We talked about the Monomatapa Hotel in what was then Salisbury, Rhodesia -- now Harare, Zimbabwe -- where it turns we both had spent many a week on leave. I had gone to see if was still there on Google Earth a while back but this charming man had actually driven by it recently. I told him how we were in the Monomatapa on the day that Zimbabwe finally got its independence from Britain. We stamped into Rhodesia at the Limpopo River crossing on our way back from a shopping trip to South Africa and then stamped out of the brand new country of Zimbabwe a few days later at Lake Kariba. I still have my passport from then with one of the very first Zimbabwe passport stamps ever every stamped. He agreed that was exceedingly cool.

He told me what Zambia and Zimbabwe are like now. I haven't been back there since 1981. He said the roles are reversed -- where Rhodesia was in better shape then Zambia when I was a child, he said Zambia is not a first world country compared to Zimbabwe. He told me the same was true of Malawi, but that Mozambique is still a complete shambles of a disaster (we both blamed the Portuguese with vigor).

We talked about the decades when we were young when South African Airways was not allowed to land in black Africa anywhere and so stopped to refuel on its way up and off the continent on Sal Island, in Cape Verde. We use to hitch a ride on that flight back to the states when we lived in Guinea-Bissau -- the SAA crew was always stunned to see 11-year old me and my mother get on at the empty island in the middle of the ocean that sported nothing whatsoever but the airport at one end, a road down the middle of the island to the other, to a hotel built solely for SAA crew. We were always the only non-SAA people in the hotel which meant I was the only child and I could never get anything to drink because the hotel did not stock non-alcoholic beverages. Literally did not stock them. We learned to bring something from home for me to drink. It was even funnier when on the way back when we got off at Sal Island -- the crew would look concerned for us, "Here? You're getting off here? Are you sure? This isn't really a real place, you know." Yes. We would be the only two people on the entire 747 getting off permanently at the refueling depot.

So of course SAA is seared in my childhood memories. And here was this man who was actually the pilot on that same exact flight, which now lands in Dakar instead of Sal because apartheid is over and the Senegalese will let them in. And not only that, he was getting ready within 12 hours to go pilot that same exact flight. I suppose I should have realized that SAA still flies that route because it's the easiest way to get down the continent efficiently, but it gave me a weird time warp feeling. I go to Dulles about once a month myself, and I now realize there is someone in that airport everytime I go who is getting ready to fly SAA to Dakar. It might even be this guy. And even funnier, his father was also an SAA pilot and chances are good that his father was the pilot at some point on our haul to Sal Island.

And then it emerged that he lives on a farm outside Jo'Burg when he's not flying and that he rode horses as a youth. Which is no surprise really -- virtually every white African rides horses and it's a very brutal, manly activity in Africa. So of course I yammered on about my three horses and foxhunting my escapades riding in Zambia as a child and my recent horseback trek across the Masai Mara in Kenya etc. So then of course we had to start imitating the noises hippos make when the sleep and the explosive call of the Great African Bustard and the bizarre way a secretary bird stalks around looking for snakes.

And then we got off on the reciting lines from our mutual favorite movie about Africa, the Gods Must Be Crazy. More painful laughing. Mutual agreement that each of us needed to go get a copy of that movie, made in 1980 in classic South African cinema schtick.

By this time it was hideously late, hideously. But this charming fellow is going to let me know when he's back through Dulles or New York -- he gets his flying schedule every month on the 16th. Every route he flies forces him to spend four days layover in whatever place. I can't imagine that -- life as a permanent business trip -- but it means he'll be in DC four days a month and we already have plans to go riding out at the farm.

We'll see if that actually happens but it's the thought that counts. And now I have a new friend with whom I talk about things from my childhood.