I’m in Illinois for a few weeks directing a production of Anton Chekov’s The Seagull at Augustana College. Rehearsals started on Monday, and things are swimming along nicely.

I mentioned earlier that there’s an Oakland connection to this particular production. Here’s how it goes: When I was a student at ACT in San Francisco (last century) I played Dr. Dorn in a version of The Seagull by Dakin Matthews. We’re using this particular version of The Seagull for the production I’m directing at Augustana. Dakin is familiar to Bay Area theatre aficionados as the former artistic director of the Berkeley Shakespeare Festival. What you may not know is that he was born in Oakland.

Dakin is a renaissance man of the theatre. He’s a dramaturg, a playwright, a director, an actor, and a teacher. I was extremely fortunate to have met Dakin in my artistic youth. His influence on my development as an actor and director is significant. Returning to the script he wrote for The Seagull is a real joy for me.

If you happen to be in Rock Island, IL, between the 30th of April and the 9th of May, I hope you’ll join us for a performance.

The phone call came during dinner with Jon, Sonja, Katie, and Dave at the Blue Cat Brew Pub in Moline. I had already gotten an email message, and when I answered my phone a cheery voice on the other end confirmed what I already knew. I have been selected as a member of the 2010 Teach For America Bay Area Corps. The celebration had already started.

I woke up with butterflies in my stomach this morning. Either I would be very happy or pretty disappointed by the end of the day. Over coffee I told Sonja I might grab a bottle of champagne and a box of tissue. Turns out I needed both—the news made me so happy I cried.

I don’t know yet which district will employ me, but I know it’s in the Bay Area, and I know I’ll be a special education teacher. The offer from Teach For America today is a first step in a long process that includes a series of qualifying tests and an intensive training institute in Los Angeles. There’s a long road ahead, but my goal of teaching in our public schools feels much closer tonight. I continue to hope that I am selected to teach in the Oakland Schools.

50 hours after I stepped onto the California Zephyr in Emeryville, I stepped off Train 6 and spotted my brother Jon on the platform in Galesburg. It was a long, beautiful trip. Not without its minor inconveniences and quirks but very satisfying. I met interesting people. I had good conversations. I might even do it again sometime.

I’m settled in at Jon and Sonja’s and getting ready for my next project. Over the next few of weeks I’ll be working on a production of The Seagull, but I’m also planning to spend a little time writing about some interesting things I’ve learned about Oakland in the past couple of months, starting with a story of how this particular production of The Seagull is connected to someone with roots in Oakland.

The ride from Salt Lake City to Grand Junction, Colorado features a hesitant beauty, especially in its winter palate. The greyish brown rocky features blend with the leafless sage and other dryland vegetation and one needs to look intently to see much that is eye pleasing.

East of Grand Junction that palate expands significantly. Even in winter, Glenwood Canyon is colorful. Red Canyon, Upper and Lower Gore Canyons, and Azure Canyon feature the green Colorado River and red rocks. Even the leafless trees add to the palette. Tufts of low woody bushes and native grasses add bright reds, orange, and yellow.

One of our last stops this afternoon was at Granby, CO.

We’re at a high elevation now, so the Colorado River is completely frozen. The Valley is narrower as we pull up the hill towards Winter Park.

My companion this afternoon is a copy of Anton Chekov’s The Seagull. This us a great way to study a script (on a train, winter landscape, glass of chardonnay, and a tin of cocktail peanuts). I’m finding a lot of delicious moments that will be fun to rehearse.

What a great afternoon.

My first day on the train was pleasant. The ride through the Sierras was gorgeous. We sat still in Blue Canyon for about an hour due to some freight train activity so we’re a little behind schedule. The train is both an excellent way to see the country and a great venue for people watching. I’ve really enjoyed the scenery and the community.

We’re currently cruising southeast from Salt Lake City towards Grand Junction, Colorado. I brewed a cup of coffee using beans I bought at Modern Coffee on Thursday (The Sermon, roasted by Verve in Santa Cruz). Very tasty.

It’s a beautiful morning.

This morning’s coffee retrieval errand was a lesson in customer service and satisfaction.

Anna and I are spending as much time together as possible in anticipation of our time apart over the coming months, so we decided to go out for breakfast at one of our old favorites, the Oakland Grill in the produce district near Jack London Square. Oakland Grill was conceived and opened by our friend Bill, who had previously been the proprietor of the Diggery Inn on Park Blvd. (Brother Jon earned his superior cooking skills as a line cook under Bill’s tutelage. Jon also made omelets at the Egg Shop and Apple Press, where Bill served as a consultant for a while.) Oakland Grill used to run pretty funny ads (featuring a cartoon gorilla in a chef suit) in the paper that reflected Bill’s sense of humor and disdain for children. (I think the disdain for kids was a ruse, but he worked pretty hard to appear serious about it.) Anyway, the cuisine is workmanlike and appropriate for a cafe in this particular location. I think Bill has long since sold the place, but the decor and menu is relatively similar. While enjoying your breakfast you look out at streets where forklifts and handtrucks are moving crates of produce from warehouses onto vehicles to be delivered to dining establishments all through the East Bay.

We enjoyed our breakfast and planned a few errands. I want to bring Jon a couple kinds of coffee for his espresso setup, so we stopped at Blue Bottle (a block south of the Oakland Grill). I explained my coming railroad adventure to the cashier. The barista, overhearing my needs, pulled away from his espresso machine to help with the decision about which beans to buy. All had been roasted on Wednesday, so we just needed to decide about which roast to try. Since they sell beans in smallish packages, and my goal is to bring Jon a sampler of options, we decided to take two bags—one each of the Roman Espresso and the Hayes Valley Espresso.

Then we hopped up Broadway to 13th for a quick stop at Modern Coffee. I hoped they might have some of The Sermon from Verve Coffee Roasters in Santa Cruz. Sure enough, I walked in and Robert pulled a bag of The Sermon from behind the drink menu and handed it to me. He and Kristen had seen my tweet about my morning coffee acquisition errand and set the beans aside. How awesome is that? Not only do they set the standard for an excellent shot of espresso, they set a very high bar for spectacular customer service. I’m sad I’ll be far away for two months and unable to visit them for a while. (It’s just one more thing to look forward to coming back to Oakland for in May.)

If you haven’t already visited Modern Coffee — it’s on the ground floor of the Historic Tribune Tower on 13th Street, just East of Broadway — then you owe it to yourself to stop in for a cup. Robert and Kristen are friendly, cheerful, and very thoughtful. If you visit, say hi for me.

The pothole just a few yards up Perkins from our apartment has been getting deeper. I think it’s deep enough now that one would do serious damage to one’s suspension by driving into this hole. Today’s rain (heavy at times) filled the hole and disguised its depth, so an enterprising neighbor put a broken chair in the hole to warn motorists away from the danger.

The Oakland public works department has obviously been here — you can see hints of orange around the hole which someone painted to mark the asphalt for repair. I think the markings were made sometime late last year. I guess there are other priorities. I love the chair, though. It was there yesterday, too, when Anna and I got home from our final trip to the DMV (yes, we now have California license plates — it only took three trips to the DMV and about 4 hours of waiting in lines). Unfortunately someone had removed the chair from the pond by the time I got downstairs after carrying in our packages into the apartment. Fortunately someone put it back this evening.

I thought we’d left deep potholes behind when we left Moline. The winter weather there absolutely kills roads, and there were some potholes there last spring that could have accommodated a dining room set.

I board the California Zephyr on Friday for a 49 hour ride to Galesburg. Jon said he and/or Sonja would pick me up at the station and bring me back to Moline. Thinking about the fact that I’m going to be riding the rails for two days, I decided I needed a plan. I rode from Little Rock to Chicago on the train last summer and the biggest disappointment was the breakfast I choked down in the dining car. Part of my planning process is preparing for how to pass 2 days without being able to cook (or depend on the dining car). I planned a little menu that accounts for every meal on the trip. I may break down and give the dining car another chance, but I want to have a fallback option, just in case the food is as inedible as that breakfast on the Texas Eagle.

I have to plan around the fact that I can’t refrigerate or heat anything. The menu includes a heavy rotation of apples and olives. Some cheese and a little salami will be in the mix. Grapes seemed like they’ll travel pretty well, If I put them in a container to keep them from getting crushed. I also plan to cut up a bunch of celery. Of course I’ll take some peanuts and a chocolate bar.

My other concern is overnight comfort. The cost of a sleeper is a bit steeper than I can afford for this adventure, so I’m making due with a regular seat. My experience on the Texas Eagle makes me confident that I can manage for two nights, as long as I have some accessories which I did not have on that trip. I popped down to IKEA and picked up a cheap feather pillow and a little fleece blanket.

The last item on my planning agenda is deciding what kind of coffee beans to get for Jon. I want to get beans that are very recently roasted so that they’ll still be pretty fresh when I arrive on Sunday. My friends at Modern Coffee in downtown have a pretty wide variety of choices from different roasters, but I’m concerned that the beans will be slightly older than what I can get if I pop down to Blue Bottle for beans roasted on Thursday. Of course the optimum time between roasting and brewing is a fuzzy line. There are some beans that seem to improve as they age for a few days after being roasted. Maybe I’ll bring him a couple of different kinds — an Oakland coffee sampler. (I’m also packing a little Fenton’s chocolate and carmel sauce.)

As I think about this, I realize I totally neglected to factor coffee into my menu plan. I think I may grind a few good beans for myself and take my tiny, single-cup french press and a good mug with me. Surely I’ll be able to get some hot water somewhere on the train.

Anna and I had coffee on Friday morning with Deb from Today in Montclair. We met and chatted at Metro Cafe, where Royal Grounds used to be on Mountain Blvd. The coffee was drinkable. There’s a great, tall community table where we sat. Royal Grounds, which occupied the space when we lived in Montclair, featured a slightly grittier aesthetic. (Which was why I liked it.) There was an art gallery in the back room that featured some very interesting installations. I remember sitting at Royal Grounds and interviewing Herb Kennedy, a teacher from Skyline, for an article I was writing for the Montclarion in the early 1990s. Kennedy was a beloved English teacher and sitting down to talk with him for this assignment was a real thrill for me, so seeing that Royal Grounds had died made me sad. Metro has done away with the grit and the gallery in the back. There was art on the dark walls but the space felt as though it had been sterilized.

When I say that the coffee was drinkable, I mean that it was like coffee in many coffee houses around the country. Not at all unpleasant, but unremarkable with respect to flavor overtones. I should say that drinking coffee, like drinking wine, is often something one does in a social context, and if you are engaged in pleasant conversation or happy to be sharing a moment with someone you like, the coffee becomes a secondary component of the moment. Under those circumstances, I don’t require the blueberry overtones of The Sermon by Verve. A warm drink that tastes like roasted beans is sufficient in that moment. Metro serves such a cup of coffee.

Later in the evening we stopped by the Wood Tavern on College. It’s a restaurant owned by Rich and Rebekah Wood. Rebekah is one of our dear friends from our Montclair days. Laura, Rebekah’s sister, was one of the boys’ favorite babysitter/companions when they were little. She took care of them and enriched their lives. Now Laura and Rebekah are grown women. Laura has a successful interior design business and Rebekah is a restaurateur. Wood Tavern is the second restaurant for Rebekah and her husband. Their first was Frascati in San Francisco.

Wood Tavern is the kind of place you need to call for a reservation. We walked in and snagged two of the last four seats at the bar. It was 5:30 on a Friday and the dining room was already full. We ordered a cheese plate and a couple of drinks and enjoyed the ambiance for a while. We’ll go back again (when we’ve remembered to call ahead for a table). Since it was crowded, and Anna and I don’t really like to eat dinner sitting at the bar, we decided to head home and make a big Caesar salad for dinner. Anna makes a wicked Caesar dressing. I grated some parmesan cheese and roasted some baguette into crunchy garlic croutons. We tossed them together with a bowl full of chopped romaine for a quiet, simple, romantic meal.

On Saturday we got up, drank a cup of coffee, and strolled up Grand to the Farmer’s Market and Trader Joes. It was a lovely morning. The sun was shining, there were big puffy clouds, and the neighborhood was crawling with walkers and bikers. The Oakland Teachers were out in force drumming up support and handing out flyers. It was very interesting to watch them as they singled out people on the sidewalk. From what I could tell, they were going after parents of younger children. When Anna and I passed each of three teachers stationed at strategic locations around the market, they smiled at us, but made no attempt to hand us a flyer or engage us in conversation. I imagine we look too old to have young kids (although we’ve seen plenty of parents in the area with toddlers who look like they are at least as old as we are). I had hoped one of them would hand us flyer — I’d have been interested in talking with a teacher about the school district challenges in Oakland. If I am fortunate (I’ll hear from Teach For America in a little more than a week) I will be joining that adventure in the near future. I know Oakland teachers are tackling issues of employment justice and equity, but I’d be interested to have the conversation and gain some first hand insight.

We toted our market purchases home, heated up a bite to eat, and then I rode my bike over to Home Depot in Emeryville to pick up a few items I needed to secure our makeshift kitchen pantry shelves to the wall. The system we devised was to mount a cable system we bought at IKEA in front of some repurposed book shelves to hold them agains the wall. The cable also serves as a front rail on each shelf to prevent the contents of that shelf from walking forward and falling to the floor in the event of a quake.

Justin stopped by later and we sorted through some artwork we had stored here for him. He also wanted to collect a cast iron skillet we promised him so that he could cook some risotto in the new apartment that he and Zina rented. It’s a studio on Hyde Street in San Francisco. Zina describes the neighborhood as “The Tenderhill” — it’s between Nob Hill and the Tenderloin, just a couple of blocks from St. Francis Hospital. The apartment is a cute space, with french doors in the dining nook that open onto the fire escape. It’s on the fourth floor of a four story building — a walkup. They’re artists, young, and in love, so it’s perfect for them.

Anna was hungry and asked Justin about a recipe for one of her favorite pasta dishes at the restaurant where he and Zina work. I did my best to re-interpret the dish using the ingredients we had on hand. It was pretty close. The recipe calls for a generous dose of butter to finish the sauce. I didn’t use as much butter as Justin suggested, opting to save a few calories for a small dish of Chocolate Chocolate Chip ice cream later in the evening.

This is my last weekend at home before a two month stint in Rock Island to direct The Seagull at Augustana. I’ll be boarding the Zephyr in Emeryville next Friday for a two day cross country train ride. I’m glad to be spending most of this weekend in the company of my beloved Anna. It’ll help me weather the coming separation to have this weekend’s fresh, tasty memories.

I’m feeling pretty official about my Oakland residency now. My new California Driver’s License just came in the mail (I was able to get my old number back — that’s pretty cool) so I pedaled over to the Lakeview branch of the Oakland Public Library and picked up a brand spankin’ new library card. I checked out a couple of books, including Dave Egger’s new non-fiction piece, Zeitoun.

Outside the library are a couple of things that made me happy. The first was the plantings of nasturtiums that flank the stairway. Nasturtiums (or nasty-urshums, as Justin used to pronounce it) are a very pretty plant, and the flowers are very tasty in a salad. We’ve also added the leaves to salads in the past. I love the way they look, especially after a light rain. The leaves have the same kind of distinctive graphical quality that Gingko leaves have.

The other thing that made me happy was the plaque placed by the door to the library that noted the building’s dedication date. The Native Sons of the Golden West dedicated the building to “Truth, Liberty, and Toleration.” Those values are as relevant to our contemporary society as they were in 1946 (when the building was dedicated).

Rocky came by this morning for a couple of visits. Anna had dumped a pretty generous dose of cayenne on the exposed soil of our planter boxes to keep him from digging up the flowers in search of peanuts and other goodies he may have buried before we moved here. He seemed a little tentative as he approached the flowers, but I also went out on the terrace to ask him not to dig. He just sat on the railing staring at me. I wondered how close I could get and I was able to get halfway across the terrace before he decided we were too close and he skittered away.

He was back, though, about ten minutes later, scrounging for birdseed that the birds had knocked off the feeder. On his second visit he seemed content to snack on the loose seeds rather than to dig in the planters. At one point, and I wish I could have grabbed my camera without startling him, he came up and sat on a little perch (the small stack of three little paver bricks in the photo) right next to the window which is next to my desk. The photo depicts my actual view of the little perch where he sat — I snapped the photo sitting right where I usually sit. Were it not for the glass, I could have reached down to pet him without getting out of my chair.

He stared at me for a minute and then went back to sorting through the seeds on the terrace.

I wanted to get out for a stroll this evening, so I put on my strolling shoes and pointed them towards the Grand Lake and Lakeshore districts. Within 5 minutes I could tell that there were acacia trees somewhere within 10 miles of the house. Not only could I smell them (it’s a nice smell which I associate with the coming of spring), I could feel a battle raging in my sinuses between the tiny yellow pollen bombs and my army of histamines. Sure enough, as I was marching up Grand Ave I noticed a whole row of trees with tiny yellow blossoms sticking up between the 580 freeway and Lakeview School.

When we moved to the Midwest it took more than a year for my sinuses to adjust to the new varieties of pollen and other allergy inducing airborne detritus. By year three I had developed a resistance to most of the irritants that we encountered. Now that we’re back it’s obvious that our Moline defenses will be doing us little good here. My sinus system has defenses built for the wrong offense.

I read somewhere that you can stoke your body’s ability to deal with local pollen by eating locally harvested honey. I’m heading out right now to see if I can find some. In the meantime, if you have suggestions for how to deal with the onslaught of the yellow dust, let me know.

All of this may be moot, however. I’m heading back to Illinois in a couple of weeks for a directing gig, so I may avoid the worst of it altogether. Maybe I’ll take some local honey with me anyway. That way I can start building up my defenses for next year.

I learned something today. When you have one of these crappy sealed top stoves that heat up with a coil underneath the cooktop, you shouldn’t turn on the stove if there’s an empty 9×13 brownie pan on one of the burners. Naturally, I didn’t intend to heat up the empty pan, but when I dialed on the burner to make my lunch I wasn’t mindful about which burner I was lighting up. Turns out I turned the wrong dial.

Unfortunately the UI of our stove panel doesn’t help much. It has an indicator light which shows that there’s a burner on, but it doesn’t indicate which burner. And since the glass is clear in the brownie pan, the burner didn’t glow as it normally does when there’s a metal pan on top of it I was unaware of my error for several minutes. My first clue that I’d made a catastrophic mistake was when the brownie pan exploded. Shards of glass flew everywhere. The pieces that landed on the nylon floor mat at the kitchen sink melted into the nap of the rug.

Addendum to that note: wear shoes when cooking.

On the upside, the lemon-ginger tomato soup with garlic croutons was delicious. Once I got the heat on under the right pan.

Today’s New York Times Bay Area Blog ponders the question of urban biking safety. Bike related fatalities are down 31 percent since 1975, even as bicycle ridership has increased over that same time. Writing for the NYTimes, Michelle Quinn notes that a significant 92 percent of fatalities were for cyclists who were not wearing helmets. Alcohol was a factor in 28 percent of deaths of riders over the age of 16.

My observations match those of Jackson West, whom Quinn quotes in her article. Jackson believes the decrease in fatalities may be due to greater sensitivity and awareness on the part of drivers of cars. I’ve encountered several courteous drivers who have shown significant awareness of me and my bike as I’ve ridden around Oakland. Let’s hope this trend continues. The improving bike lane situation is notable, too.

If your goal is to arrive alive and travel by bike, wear a helmet. It may mess up your hair, but it could save your life. And if drinking is your thing, do it after you arrive, not before you ride.