Page 14 THE VILLADOM TIMES I • July 20, 2011 just isn’t cool to smoke anymore. It never was. Ask anyone with cancer or emphysema. Racialism also seems to be selectively vanishing. When my daughter and her husband first got to California, one church made them feel unwelcome. It was the end of summer, and Emily’s skin did its famous American Indian imitation for her. They found another church, and are very happy there. When Emily attended Governor’s School in New Jersey some dozen years ago, the school officials took a look at her photo and put her in the same part of the dorm as the African-America and Hispanic students. The segregated dorm section girls promptly nicknamed Emily “Pocahontas” and assumed she must be a world-class expert in canoeing. A few years later, my star tutorial student, later a Princeton graduate, told me that the Governor’s School graduates and parents in her own summer at Governor’s School were encouraged to come up to sip whatever was served with the governor, while the African-American kids in a superb dance troupe were obviously kept at a safe distance. My student thought this was terrible. Even the fact that she, a Korean, was accepted at that point didn’t excuse discrimination against others. Some of my Asian tutorial students still get “the look” – “You don’t belong here.” One girl was told in Paramus that she wasn’t wanted at one particular store. The place that didn’t want her money later closed. I observed none of that in northern California with reference to Asians, and very little toward African-Americans and Hispanics. One of the features at the San Francisco Zoo was a special guest appearance by Captain America, a six-foot-eightinch red-white-and-blue white guy with killer muscles, and a costume that was outlandish except in comic books. Two Hispanic men who looked about half his size came out of their food concessions and had their picture taken flanking him. All three of them were laughing. About 10 percent of the Asian women I saw were with white guys, and they didn’t get any funny looks. Since San Francisco’s largest non-white minority is Chinese, tolerance for economic reasons is an excellent idea in pragmatic and idealistic terms. Some men were with other men, too, and nobody looked at them funny either. Nobody asked and nobody told. Letting people alone if they let you alone is what makes America work. Now for tourist tips: Our first stop was Muir Woods, the redwood grove about 10 miles from the Golden Gate Bridge on a road that nobody should attempt in a stretch limo or a motorcycle at high speed. Do not attempt to park on a weekend more than a minute after opening time, which is 9 a.m. The parking is intended to keep people from trampling the redwood trees, not to make sure everyone gets to see them. Enough said. The redwoods were awe-inspiring, and the whole site has such an ambiance of grandeur that even Kate, who is seven months old, was chortling with delight. My wife says that Kate wants to be a park ranger. My one disappointment was that I couldn’t talk everybody into a seaplane excursion on the way home. My son didn’t make the trip with us. Nothing can keep that guy, a great fan of his senior uncle, who flew for the Emperor, out of light planes, or away from the controls if the pilot is truly brave. He met us at the airport on our return. He stayed on the ground this time. Second stop: The Leland Stanford Junior Museum just off the Avenue of Palms on the Stanford Campus. Do not miss this. This is not a junior museum, any more than Stanford is a junior college. It’s named for the son of Leland Stanford Senior. You can do the whole museum in a morning or an afternoon. It’s free except for weekday parking, and there is something in every room that will surprise or impress visitors. The most powerful painting I saw was Benjamin West’s “Resurrection.” I knew West mostly for his patriotic paintings, but this was religious art at its finest. Jesus looks triumphant, strong, masculine, and above all fear, with the lance wound in the side still visible but healing. This could be my favorite piece of religious art. I had never seen it before, even in reproduction. The Stanford Museum had one or two folk masterpieces that can awe and astound, and many that can inform. The enormous dugout canoe made by Yurok Indians from northern California and a colorful carved totemic gate were startling. Indian baskets are assembled rather like the Greek pottery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and are just as relevant to detailed cultural studies. The collection of the art of Auguste Rodin is, if not comprehensive, certainly formidable and contains studies of works in progress and completed works. Portraits of the Stanford family and the Golden Spike that completed the Union Pacific Railroad add local charm. Last stop: The San Francisco Zoo. The charm of this zoo includes a friendly staff, lectures by the keepers, and a collection of animals that provide amusement and entertainment. Key attractions were an African grassland exhibit with two towering giraffes, some zebras, antelopes, and ostriches, and a family of gorillas in an area laid out for them. Hasani, a mischievous gorilla youngster was a real crowd-pleaser. The San Francisco Zoo is highly digestible – enough for a morning or an afternoon to enjoy yourself without feeling that you missed anything. If this is the future, it works. Lincoln Steffens once observed, “I have seen the future, and it works.” Mercifully, he was wrong, because he was talking about the Soviet Union, which isn’t the kind of future I would have wanted. I recently experienced a kinder, gentler future when my wife and I spent some time in northern California on our first visit to our granddaughter. It was my first overnight trip to California in about 50 years. Palo Alto – Yuppieville to its detractors – is about a halfhour drive from San Francisco, and an interesting place in its own right. We did some exploring each day. The first thing we both noticed was the profusion of foliage of all kinds, and the absence of lawns, especially in front of private homes. A half-hour walk to a farmers market in downtown Palo Alto introduced us to the sort of tropical flowers and exotic shrubs that generally turn up in travelogues about the Pacific Islands: hibiscus, birds of paradise, jasmine, and bougainvillea. These plants were growing next to the houses. Two blocks from my son-in-law and daughter’s place, there was a redwood tree growing in someone’s front yard. Huge palm trees were as common as sycamores are in Bergen County. The second surprise is that plants flourish in a location where they aren’t much seen in Bergen County: between the curb and the sidewalk. There are no curbs in Palo Alto. Everything from gladioli to pampas grass sprouts in the places that are callously seeded with lawn and mowed around here. California’s approach gives every resident a pocket garden between the front yard and the street, and those spaces provide more oxygen-generating leaf space than grass. My wife had a wrestling match with what looked like a rubber tree plant about twice her height, but she was careful not to damage it. She lifted it out of the way of the baby’s stroller and propped it up against a utility pole, unbroken and intact. Curbside gardens put some of the pleasure back into being a pedestrian or, if you’re athletically inclined, a jogger. The front yards planted with shrubs, trees, and flowering plant, without large expanses of grass, which is another great idea. California experiences rain mostly in the winter. The grass on the hillsides turns green in the winter, but it’s yellow or brown in the summer, and people just deal with it instead of installing massive sprinkler systems. Fog is a regular occurrence, and I presume that most plants, once they get started, survive on the ambient moisture. I never saw anyone sprinkling with hoses or mechanical devices. Maybe they did it at night, but the exotic flowering bushes and trees just seemed to grow by themselves. I also observed that cigarette smoking is just about passé. That is not just a good thing, but a great thing. The whole time we were there, I saw one man smoking and I saw one cigarette butt, oddly enough in a crack in the sidewalk on the approach to the Leland Stanford Junior Museum on the perimeter of Stanford University. On the flight to California, the airline threatened everybody with dire consequences if they tried to disable the smoke detectors in the restrooms in the 737. In Palo Alto, nobody said anything. They didn’t need to. Cigarettes seem to be finished – and it’s long past time. No matter how many bribes the tobacco growers pay politicians of both parties, it Seeing a future as it must work Care to share As part of special activities to mark Christian Health Care Center’s centennial, Hillcrest Residence at Christian Health Care Center in Wyckoff conducted a food drive as a community-service project. Residents and employees who wished to “care to share” donated food to benefit the Star of Hope Mission and Oasis – A Haven for Women and Children, both in Paterson. Pictured, from left, are Hillcrest residents Eleanor Lodema, Mary Scillieri, Josephine Esposito, Margaret Van Der Meer, and Marion Dunn. (Photo credit: Steve Hockstein, Harvard Studio)