The Julia Morgan House of Chimes

Dizzy

I meet Mimi at the Rockridge BART station, after a free cable car ride and a mad dash through the last seedy touristy stretch to Market, where a black man sings gospel and the usual creamy complexioned silken black haired Asian girl stands, ambiguously.

The House of Chimes

Once in Oakland I must first throw the ball for Dizzy, the ebullient border collie. I toss a soft blue rubber ball down the three flights of steps. She stares with intense, almost angry urgency and then flings open the gate with her paw, scrambles down the several flights making a few wide turns into the garden just for fun. She flies down among swirling palms and deep hues, she swirls her feminine train and sometimes collapses on it for a moment as if to enhance the view.

Then we take her to Piedmont Ave and the beautiful Julia Morgan Mausoleum, The House of Chimes. It is a multi-layered neo-gothic confection unfolding into chamber upon chamber of cremated remains in metal boxes, shaped like ponderous books, amidst angels and fountains and chapels. Then we climb up the old cemetery of Armenians and Italians and Scottish and Chinese bodies, far more idyllic than Pere Lachaise but with the same chapels and angels, and the tiny graves of countless Scottish and English and Chinese families, the eminent and the modest. The cemetery mounts a green and yellow grassy knoll to the back of Mimi's own street, while below it borders the deceptively tucked in bungalows of Oakland, and the sweet and tart shops of Piedmont Ave. We pass the beloved antique shop that has blessed both of us with ornamentation for our daily lives. Then we go to our second favorite shop where I buy silk yarn from an alabaster-skinned lesbian who patiently listens to two gigantic deep-voiced women and their potholder problems.