Three years ago today I played a game of bocce. I was in Seattle.
Two years ago today I did not play bocce. I was in Seattle. There was a foot of snow on the ground.
A year ago today I woke up in the deep suburbs of the Bay Area on the generously carpeted floor of a sparse spare room in a recently inhabited track house in Livermore. The night before, not realizing it was a joke, I participated in a 6-person game of parcheesi that, by laws of statistics I don’t care to go into now, can end in no less than five hours. It was the birthday of our host, he had just moved back to the area and was staying at his parents' house, and this was what he wanted to play so there passed the evening to the soundtrack of top forty radio, the most pronounced repetition of which included the hook
Pour up (drank)Head shot (drank)Sit down (drank)Stand up (drank)Pass out (drank)wake up (drank)faded (drank)faded (drank)
This hook repeats in the song and the song repeats absurdly in the evening. Our pieces slowly, slowly circle the board, almost arrive in the center, get landed on and go all the way back. There is no drinking.
I woke up and went to play the piano in the living room, taking my wallet so I could sit on the bench evenly, placing it on the piano, playing a few chords, getting up and forgetting it and moving on with my day, interacting with the world without money. We researched a court in the area and learned from our host of one in a new park in Dublin, another bedroom community adjacent to Livermore, at the time, unbeknownst to us, the 2nd-fastest-growing city in California. There was also a Campo di Bocce, a chain that I had also visited in Los Gatos, around six in the morning after driving someone to the San Jose Airport in the dark. I should say I visited the outside of it. I called the Campo di Bocce Livermore and asked how we went about playing bocce at their facilities. It was a figure in the double digits so we went to Emerald Glen Park in Dublin, California. And, as I have found in some research, [a]s one of the premier group picnic areas in the Tri-Valley, the Emerald Glen Park Group Picnic Area is a great place to hold outdoor gatherings.
The park was expansive, with a rolling crest running through the middle so you couldn’t see its boundaries from its center. The bocce courts were located on the northwest periphery of the park, next to the picnic shelters and barbeque pits. Classical facades punctuated the area giving the impression of a Di Chirico painting, that this sandy immaculately landscaped setting existed outside of time, an contributed to by the game itself that placed the gathering collection of spheres into the picture. Also it was hot and it was January, so the sun was low and when one looked in its rough direction a daze set in and the colors blended together like paints. It seemed a contradiction of expectations: one finds that the carefully architected city park is a leftover anachronism speckled throughout our cities, from the preceding eras that were more public, centralized and picnic-oriented. The private suburban park is oriented toward children (safe, not fun prefabricated play equipment, carefully manicured soccer fields), an extension of the identical front lawns to simulate further a sterile bucolic atmosphere, devoid of culture, bums, smoking and everything else that happens in a city. Yet this park is brand new, is at the new edge of an expanding suburb whose history is now—unincorporated until 1982 and the Poltergeist-era of track housing explosions—and is decidedly a city space, with a skate park, a rose garden, public restrooms and "a site-specific artwork designed for the water element," entitled Divided Sea.
Although Dublin has roots back to the 1850s American exodus to California, it is almost entirely a product of the "Little Boxes" era of the state. The Lincoln Highway, which first connected the coasts one hundred years ago, specifically running from Times Square to Lincoln Park at the west end of San Francisco, passed through the town along Dublin Boulevard. But in 1910 Dublin wasn't even mentioned in the census. The post office was established in 1860 gave, what was named Amador's or Amador Valley, the title Dougherty's Station, and served until 1908. In 1910 this rural area next to Livermore and Pleasanton was represented in the Murray and Pleasanton Townships, which included "Livermore Town" and "Pleasanton Town" and tallied in at 4,137 persons and 2,883, respectively. The development that began to occur in the 1960s on the route 50—which replaced the Lincoln Highway—south of Dougherty took the population's center away from history and toward the freeway, which would become the 580 a decade later, mutating rural life into the weird SUV-centric animal so ubiquitous today. Neither Dublin nor Dougherty is on my 1966 California highway map. The Dublin post office opened in 1963. The Dublin/Pleasanton Bay Area Rapid Transit station opened in 1997. The West Dublin/Pleasanton station opened in 2011. Both were accompanied by significant transit-oriented development. The pallino is the center of a bocce game centered on a bocce court in a park at the center of a sprawling development 25 miles from San Jose to the south, 25 from Oakland to the west, 35 miles from Stockton to the west, in between everything in the the middle of nowhere.
I got back to Oakland before I realized I didn't have my wallet.
The park was expansive, with a rolling crest running through the middle so you couldn’t see its boundaries from its center. The bocce courts were located on the northwest periphery of the park, next to the picnic shelters and barbeque pits. Classical facades punctuated the area giving the impression of a Di Chirico painting, that this sandy immaculately landscaped setting existed outside of time, an contributed to by the game itself that placed the gathering collection of spheres into the picture. Also it was hot and it was January, so the sun was low and when one looked in its rough direction a daze set in and the colors blended together like paints. It seemed a contradiction of expectations: one finds that the carefully architected city park is a leftover anachronism speckled throughout our cities, from the preceding eras that were more public, centralized and picnic-oriented. The private suburban park is oriented toward children (safe, not fun prefabricated play equipment, carefully manicured soccer fields), an extension of the identical front lawns to simulate further a sterile bucolic atmosphere, devoid of culture, bums, smoking and everything else that happens in a city. Yet this park is brand new, is at the new edge of an expanding suburb whose history is now—unincorporated until 1982 and the Poltergeist-era of track housing explosions—and is decidedly a city space, with a skate park, a rose garden, public restrooms and "a site-specific artwork designed for the water element," entitled Divided Sea.
Although Dublin has roots back to the 1850s American exodus to California, it is almost entirely a product of the "Little Boxes" era of the state. The Lincoln Highway, which first connected the coasts one hundred years ago, specifically running from Times Square to Lincoln Park at the west end of San Francisco, passed through the town along Dublin Boulevard. But in 1910 Dublin wasn't even mentioned in the census. The post office was established in 1860 gave, what was named Amador's or Amador Valley, the title Dougherty's Station, and served until 1908. In 1910 this rural area next to Livermore and Pleasanton was represented in the Murray and Pleasanton Townships, which included "Livermore Town" and "Pleasanton Town" and tallied in at 4,137 persons and 2,883, respectively. The development that began to occur in the 1960s on the route 50—which replaced the Lincoln Highway—south of Dougherty took the population's center away from history and toward the freeway, which would become the 580 a decade later, mutating rural life into the weird SUV-centric animal so ubiquitous today. Neither Dublin nor Dougherty is on my 1966 California highway map. The Dublin post office opened in 1963. The Dublin/Pleasanton Bay Area Rapid Transit station opened in 1997. The West Dublin/Pleasanton station opened in 2011. Both were accompanied by significant transit-oriented development. The pallino is the center of a bocce game centered on a bocce court in a park at the center of a sprawling development 25 miles from San Jose to the south, 25 from Oakland to the west, 35 miles from Stockton to the west, in between everything in the the middle of nowhere.
I got back to Oakland before I realized I didn't have my wallet.
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