A Sacramento Weekend
I’ve been fighting off a cold for the past few days, so Friday night we went out for some restorative frozen yogurt. Then we faced off over Scrabble, and, though I lost, it was not without trying my hardest to incorporate my two new favorite words: bunya and hod. Incidentally, those seem promising choices for the names of any future children we may have.
Saturday I went to yoga, and then we spent the day simply relaxing at home. I read more of M.F.K. Fisher’s Among Friends while Andrew worked on his website. We had dinner at Café Marika, a tiny, five-table Hungarian restaurant in our neighborhood, run by a husband and wife team. Our meals were delicious—pork schnitzel and goulash, served with a potato and mushroom soup, spetzel in a tasty paprika sauce, and an apple pastry for dessert. (Total bill: $30. A small city has its charms.) Later, we watched Man on Wire, a documentary about Philippe Petit’s amazing tightrope walk between the towers of the World Trade Center in 1974.
On Sunday, we went to the farmer’s market, then it was off to another yoga class for me while Andrew stayed home and read the Times. Then Andrew went for a run while I read the paper. Later we went grocery shopping; for dinner we made meatloaf, roasted potatoes, and sautéed Swiss chard.
Sometimes, after a perfectly nice weekend like this, we wonder if we’d dislike Sacramento so much if it were on the East Coast—if, instead of a West Coast city among parched fields, with a 108-degree summer looming, it was a small city in New York or Pennsylvania or Connecticut. The answer, I’m afraid, is that we wouldn’t. Dislike it, I mean. In fact, were Sacramento to suddenly become snowy and find itself on EST (with far, far fewer strip malls and new housing developments), we might just be content. Too bad we can’t hitch it up to the Volvo like a mobile home and pull it along to greener pastures. Just as a lovely house is damned by its proximity to a sewage treatment plant, so too may our adopted home be tainted by its distance from the East.
Saturday I went to yoga, and then we spent the day simply relaxing at home. I read more of M.F.K. Fisher’s Among Friends while Andrew worked on his website. We had dinner at Café Marika, a tiny, five-table Hungarian restaurant in our neighborhood, run by a husband and wife team. Our meals were delicious—pork schnitzel and goulash, served with a potato and mushroom soup, spetzel in a tasty paprika sauce, and an apple pastry for dessert. (Total bill: $30. A small city has its charms.) Later, we watched Man on Wire, a documentary about Philippe Petit’s amazing tightrope walk between the towers of the World Trade Center in 1974.
On Sunday, we went to the farmer’s market, then it was off to another yoga class for me while Andrew stayed home and read the Times. Then Andrew went for a run while I read the paper. Later we went grocery shopping; for dinner we made meatloaf, roasted potatoes, and sautéed Swiss chard.
Sometimes, after a perfectly nice weekend like this, we wonder if we’d dislike Sacramento so much if it were on the East Coast—if, instead of a West Coast city among parched fields, with a 108-degree summer looming, it was a small city in New York or Pennsylvania or Connecticut. The answer, I’m afraid, is that we wouldn’t. Dislike it, I mean. In fact, were Sacramento to suddenly become snowy and find itself on EST (with far, far fewer strip malls and new housing developments), we might just be content. Too bad we can’t hitch it up to the Volvo like a mobile home and pull it along to greener pastures. Just as a lovely house is damned by its proximity to a sewage treatment plant, so too may our adopted home be tainted by its distance from the East.
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