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The Flying Goat.
The day was Monday and it started with a beautiful request. Go to Healdsburg and sample from our vineyard at Eddie's Patch, home of Toby the German Short-Haired Pointer. Eddie's Patch vineyard sits on a hill with panorama of rolling hills in green and gold and sunburn. It was about 60 degrees when I arrived. The sky was swallowed in pale blue and the Harvest moon lingered in the West as big as the rising sun in the East. The vines were rebounding from some rain. The berries plumped up a few short days ago, drinking in excess and now hang dehydrated and limp. Hungover. I couldn't stop standing in place. Eyes darting at the vines, hands grasping at clusters. I talked to them in my mind and they listened and told me it will be ok. The warm weather forecast will strengthen them again, make them tight and full of vigor. I stood satisfied and moved on, up and down rows of vines, snipping a methodical random from their perch to return and press them in my hands. To extract them of their darkest, deepest serum. I said to them, they will come home and we will show them love and care and let them realize their potential. A parent rearing a child. In the home, in the hand, of someone who appreciates them. Then to the glass of another appreciator. I set off down the winding road. With Bonnie Somerville lyrics lifting from the crush car's Bose speakers. Through the gates and on to Limerick Lane. Across the railroad tracks and rolling on Redwood Highway to Healdsburg Avenue. It was still early morning. The day was going to be a warm one, the grapes listened to the weather forecast as I did. Touristy Healdsburg plaza was thumbing the sleep from its streets. Lights in stores were slow to illuminate and the wide armed yawn of restaurant owners were sweeping floors for the first feet to walk clean through. Some of the residents were stumbling into their cars and mumbling that it was another Monday. Damn work week. I yearn for an extended weekend. Or a weekend at all. A Sunday morning free of working with young wine. A Sunday with a four-inch thick newspaper and a comparable sized cup of coffee. That day will have to wait, so the grapes chuckled from the back seat. Today only a coffee was in order. No newspaper, no news. Just weather to predict our future days. I slowly wheeled the car into a perpendicular spot four doors down from The Flying Goat. A small coffee house chain in North Bay California. The most agreeable coffee the area has to offer its residents who wake up to many heady fog covered mornings. But not like this one. Three days of light rain drained any cloud cover. Gone. Gone today and hopefully tomorrow. As the sun began to remember again how to warm us outside, I was prepared to give my innards a kick-start with some coffee. Inside the cafe of tall ceilings there is sparse metal furniture along the walls, a high bar with high stools and the scattered pages of newspapers and coffee consuming clients seated about. There was no line to make me wait. I stepped to the barista. A lank kid with carrot colored hair. He has served me before, the first time he handed me my change and asked me if that was an octopus on my chest. I jerked back, dropping quarters and nickels on the counter, they bounced semi-ceiling high. I grabbed for my neck. Worried a two hundred pound tentacle would circle me to suffocation. I gathered myself, looked at the faded white design on my t-shirt. A circle of circles circling in a snake-charming symphony and said, o, no, I bought this on the $.97 rack at the Old Navy. I don't know what it is. But it was the type of hip shirt you would find resting on the hanger shoulders of a skeletal teenager on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I looked again and thought it would actually dress up under a blazer and could be found on a hip new movie star in the pages of a celebrity gossip rag. Today, no octopus in site, just my eyes on the espresso machine. I ordered a Macchiato. Napoleon Dynamite thrust his arm in my direction and pinched his thumb and forefinger about two inches apart squeezing down on an invisible small cup. His tense fingers replicated a stressing noise as if ceramic was under pressure to shatter into pieces. The crowd turned in wonderment. Why a sip when you can wrap two hands around a creamy foamed top Cappuccino with pine tree design made of espresso drippings zigzagged from the tines of a stainless steel fork. Yes, I confirmed silently, the small one. I need one hand on the wheel; I got a group of grapes waiting in the car for a tour of the cold house. A moment passed with hot milk wheezing over the thousand pound drip of coffee in an empty cup. I placed the paper receptacle between fingers and tipped sparingly. I sped to the winery and breathed out a few brew words to the clusters before they painted my hands with their viscous juice. It was my first coffee during harvest and probably my last. The buzz went straight to my right foot pressing on the gas pedal and with the petrol burning out the exhaust, so went my energy for the entire day. My emotional high was short lived and gave in to physical fatigue. My day will be long and a weekend without work will have to wait.
Post - October'06 Back to home...
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