Resting yesterday alongside 819 Ramona St. on an afternoon walk, my helper Isaac and I noted once again that the building started life as Palo Alto’s first Black church. Black meaning African American, one of a number of uses for the racioethnic designator BLACK. As it happens, Isaac, from Fiji, is a Polynesian black person, with BLACK used to refer to people from the Polynesian islands (Tonga, Fiji, Samoa, etc.) with dark skin, curly hair, and broad facial features. It then occurred to me to wonder if Isaac was misidentified as African American on the basis of his BLACK features, as I am misidentified as JEWISH on the basis of my prominent nose and my body language. So this morning I asked him.
Archive for the ‘Palo Alto’ Category
Varieties of BLACK
May 1, 2026After the rain, around the block
April 15, 2026Yesterday (4/14), my helper Isaac and I took a walk around the block (Ramona to Forest to Emerson to Homer and back to Ramona), taking advantage of the end of days of rain. Officially we were visiting the oregano plant on Emerson St. (see my 4/14 posting “Things I didn’t know”, in the section on “a labiate plant with fleshy leaves”), but we traversed a largely changed scene: the cat’s-claw creeper on the arbor over my entry was coming to the end of its 4 or so days of bloom; the calla lilies on Ramona St. had finished their days of blooming and dropped their flowers; the rose bushes in Forest Ave. that were all buds before the rain were now a solid mass of beautiful single white roses; there were big passion-flowers on Emerson St.; and the Chinese elms on Homer Ave., totally bare on our last walk, had fully leafed out in green, turning a whole block into a pleasantly shaded path.
And on the street strip on Forest, a bunch of bare 4-foot sticks had been transformed into a dense display of bright-white dogwood blossoms. Much like these:
Living tubes, no sex
April 4, 2026Walking the neighborhood with Isaac brought us to resting by a planter of weird plants — tall, stiff, hollow tubes in sections, living green things with no hint of flowers or seeds — outside Joe and the Juice at 240 Hamilton Ave. (at Ramona St., a block and a half from my house). I noted how tough the plants were (with some moisture, they grow ferociously, and their stems are naturally coated with silica, so that the stems can actually be used to scour pots and pans). Unfortunately, I forgot the evocative names of the plant — common name horsetail, botanical name Equisetum (Latin for ‘horse bristle’) — or the significant fact that the plants had neither flowers nor seeds because (like ferns) they were modern plants surviving in much the same form as their ancestors from prehistoric times, before the invention of sex in plants, and produced spores rather than seeds.
An impressive stand, in the wild, of the species Isaac and I rested by at Joe and the Juice, Equisetum hyemale:
The prehistoric plants included gigantic horsetail trees
Neighborhood walking: botanical notes
March 17, 2026A follow-up to my 3/16 posting “The breakfast walk”, in which I looked at a few of the businesses and offices on the walk
from 722 Ramona St., between Forest and Homer (my house) to 566 Emerson St., at the northwest corner at Hamilton (the Palo Alto Creamery, a standard place for Saturday breakfast with my daughter Elizabeth in the old days), along a route fixed in its details
with a promise that I’d do a separate botanical posting, about some of the flowers and trees along the way. Necessarily much more selective — there are many hundreds of plant species in those two and a half blocks — and sensitive to date as well as location (customarily, my first example blooms and my last example fruits around now, in the Ides of March / St. Patrick’s Day period); and so it is this year)
The mosaic mural
March 17, 2026Briefly noted.
In an earlier posting today — “El Palo Alto” — I wrote:
the elegant Nobu Hotel Epiphany … preserves (from the earlier Casa Olga hotel) the 6-story-tall mosaic mural of El Palo Alto, the coast redwood tree for which the city of Palo Alto is named
Which caused my helper Isaac to ask two questions:
— 1 mosaic mural? Aren’t murals paintings?
— 2 Who created the mural?
I have no clue about 2, but 1 is straightforward:
El Palo Alto
March 17, 2026In yesterday’s posting “The breakfast walk”, one notable feature of that walk was what is now the elegant Nobu Hotel Epiphany, which preserves (from the earlier Casa Olga hotel) the 6-story-tall mosaic mural of El Palo Alto, the coast redwood tree for which the city of Palo Alto is named:
(#1) The Casa Olga mural
(#2) The mural on the much-expanded Nobu Hotel Epihany
I remind you that this is a short distance from my house, but has just become part of the urban landscape, taken for granted — as indeed we take for granted the many actual coast redwoods growing companionably on our streets (reaching straight into the sky, towering over a hundred feet, easily hundreds of years old). (There’s one such tree only about 50 feet from my front door.)
And I remind you that the tree in #1 and #2 is not an abstract or imagined coast redwood, but a specific Sequoia sempervirens — El Palo Alto — that grows in a little urban forest park, alongside the railroad tracks (originally Southern Pacific, now Caltrain) at the border between Palo Alto (in Santa Clara County) and Menlo Park (in San Mateo County), only abut 7 blocks from my house.
The breakfast walk
March 16, 2026From 722 Ramona St., between Forest and Homer (my house) to 566 Emerson St., at the northwest corner at Hamilton (the Palo Alto Creamery, a standard place for Saturday breakfast with my daughter Elizabeth in the old days), along a route fixed in its details (there will be a map, with commentary). Now notable in that the Creamery is the only business or office on that route that has been there all the time since Jacques and I came to Ramona St. in 1986. This is urban life, with everything in flux.
A gyro bowl from Nick the Greek
November 20, 2025Another chapter in foraging for food by restaurant delivery. I had a desire for some gyros, an old favorite in the wide world of demotic cuisines, in this case Greek: from Merriam-Webster online (considerably amended):
noun gyro (plural gyros): /jíro/ [North American] a sandwich especially of lamb and beef [roasted on a spit and sliced], tomato, onion, and yogurt sauce [tzatziki] on pita bread [AZ: the name comes originally from Greek, but has been thoroughly Anglicized, so that the phonology and morphology of the Greek name are no longer relevant to the American name]
The dandelion caper
March 9, 2025This posting is in a genre I’ve come to think of as Kharkiv Opera: a pleasant, playful, or joyous event staged in the face of terrible times; from my 3/2/25 posting “Three men walk into bar”:
the Ukrainians have been managing to mount opera performances in an underground bomb shelter in the city of Kharkiv. They sing and dance and enjoy one another’s company.
Today’s pleasure is the enjoyment of the plants and flowers around us, something that has been with me since I was a child at my father’s knee (so, for 80 years now), and was shared with Ann Daingerfield Zwicky (who was a wildflower enthusiast) and my guy Jacques Transue (whose passion for gardening matched mine), and survives now in my little patio garden (with super easy-care plants on it that I can look at through French doors while I work at the computer) and in occasional short walks in my neighborhood (with my sturdy outdoor walker to rest in as needed, and with the company of a caregiver, who I can talk with about what we see, while we refer frequently to on-line sources in Spanish and English).
Rengarenga flourishes on Ramona
June 22, 2024Antipodal reduplicative flowering just down the street from me in Palo Alto, discovered on Thursday on a little neighborhood exploration with León Hernández Alvarez (hereafter, LH). A gorgeous display of an exotic plant in the otherwise featureless recessed back entrance of a company that’s sandwiched between my condo complex and the one to the south.
Here’s the building:
(#1) 744 Ramona St. (from Google maps), with nothing inside or outside of the building
And the plant in bloom (quite a surprise in the context of #1):
(#2) A mass planting along paths in the Sydney, Australia, Botanic Gardens (from the GardensOnline site); at 744 Ramona, it’s a somewhat smaller planting in a big pot, but still quite stunning
So, four things: the plant, Arthropodium cirratum, native to New Zealand; the location in my neighborhood, 744 Ramona St. (the backdoor to 745 Emerson St., which runs all the way through the block); my little venture around the block, the first in many months; and LH, in a return engagement as my all–around homecare person (well, for 4 hours a week).