Chris Delyani's Blog, page 2

The Stairs to the Tower

Shortly after I retired from my desk job to pursue writing full-time, in 2022, my better half and I launched what we dubbed Wandering Wednesday. On Wandering Wednesday, we’d take a day excursion somewhere in the Bay Area, if only to get out of the house and stretch our legs. Lately, we’ve been using our Wandering Wednesdays to take urban hikes around the historic staircases of Oakland. But this past Wednesday, we found ourselves across the bay in San Francisco, on a hike to that Art Deco fixture of the San Francisco skyline: Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill.

Click to read more:

https://chrisdelyani.substack.com/p/t...

Making Signs for the Oct. 18 No Kings Rally

I’m married to someone who, a few months ago, took up stained glass as a hobby. The trouble is, the possibilities for stained glass designs are limitless while our display space is all too finite. He’s been rotating his designs in our windows: a cat, a crescent moon, a rainbow-colored hot air balloon. But we’ve kept in place a sign that he made not long after the nationwide No Kings protests in June.

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https://chrisdelyani.substack.com/p/s...

Take Me Out to the Ballers Game

I grew up an easy T ride away from Fenway Park, in a family of diehard Boston Red Sox fans. Then I moved to California and married a diehard San Francisco Giants fan. These are the main two reasons why I’m not a huge Oakland A’s fan, even though I’ve called Oakland my home for the past 25 years.

But when the A’s and their owner, the reviled John Fisher, abandoned Oakland after 57 seasons, I couldn’t help feeling robbed.

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https://chrisdelyani.substack.com/p/t...

Lunchbox Memories at the Schulz Museum

At the end of Anne Tyler’s novel “Breathing Lessons,” the heroine, Maggie Moran, imagines herself one day ascending to heaven and meeting St. Peter at the Pearly Gates. He hands her a bulging gunnysack of beloved objects she’d somehow lost during her lifetime: a dress, a keychain, a necklace of clear brown beads. Tyler's gunnysack was uppermost in my mind a couple of weeks ago, on an excursion to Santa Rosa to visit the Charles M. Schulz Museum. If a bag of lost stuff is waiting for me at the Pearly Gates, that bag is no doubt holding my Snoopy lunchbox.

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https://chrisdelyani.substack.com/p/l...

Dancing Dinosaurs at Oasis SF

The first “Jurassic Park” movie debuted in June 1993, less than a week before I moved across the U.S. to try my luck in San Francisco. What with packing and moving and settling into my new city, I never got around to seeing it. I couldn’t have imagined then that I wouldn’t watch “Jurassic Park” until a couple weekends ago, more than 32 years after its original release. Or that I’d be watching it on Netflix to prepare for the hilarious “Jurassiq Parq,” a live musical parody of the film playing at the Oasis nightclub in San Francisco.

Click the link to read more:

https://chrisdelyani.substack.com/p/d...

Oakland’s Art Deco

I’d already signed up for the Oakland Heritage Alliance’s two-hour walking tour of Oakland’s historic Art Deco buildings this past Sunday when the president, fresh off his calling up federal troops to police Washington, D.C., for no good reason, hinted his desire to send troops here. For Pete’s sake. But after spending a stress- and crime-free morning checking out Oakland’s historic architecture, all I can say is, if the troops do come here, they’re going to end up looking ridiculous.

Click to see what I saw:

https://chrisdelyani.substack.com/p/a...

Touring My Neighbors’ Gardens

During the pandemic, I used to work from a laptop at my kitchen table, my cat Buster curled up in the chair next to me. If my eyes needed a break from the screen, all I had to do was look out the glass sliding doors at my husband’s garden, twenty years in the making. There they were, the apple tree and cactuses and hummingbirds and finches and bees, all of them living their lives without the least concern for the havoc the virus was wreaking around the globe. I’d never been more thankful for my husband’s green thumb.

Almost five years later, I had a chance to check out some of the other gardens flourishing in my Oakland neighborhood, thanks to the dedicated volunteers at Temescal Open Edible Gardens.

Turns out my better half isn’t the only one in my neighborhood who knows a thing or two about growing things. I wasn’t able to visit all 21 (!) of the gardens on the tour, but the ones I did visit greeted me with sidewalk art and, in one case, its own banner:

https://chrisdelyani.substack.com/p/y...

My Date with Harvey Wallbanger

I made a 1970s cake recipe and wrote about it:

https://chrisdelyani.substack.com/p/m...

Canada: True North, Strong and Free

Some of my favorite childhood memories took place in Canada, on family trips to Ontario to visit my aunt and uncle and cousins. We needed no passports back then to drive across the Peace Bridge from Buffalo into Ontario. To me, except for the speed limits measured in kilometers and playing Sorry! on a game board written half in English, half in French, I might as well be spending time in my home country.

Then I grew up and moved to California, and, until a couple weeks ago, hadn’t stepped foot in Canada in more than 30 years. This time I crossed the border by car on the western side, from Washington State to Vancouver—and needed a passport to gain entry. Once there, I saw reminders everywhere of the country I’d traveled to:

https://chrisdelyani.substack.com/p/t...

Save Us from the SAVE Act

Click the link to read about a skit my local Invidisible chapter staged regarding the doublespeak-y SAVE Act, the latest GOP-led effort to attack voting rights:

https://chrisdelyani.substack.com/p/s...