My Ivy League Plumber

What is fun about Berkeley is that your plumber can be a Stanford (the Ivy League of the West) graduate. And your Stanford Graduate Plumber^TM isn't a plumber because he can't get another job because he's overeducated, or because plumbers are reveled here a rich and gold collared by the aging housing community and therefore a good way to make a living. It is because your plumber likes meeting different people and playing with the tinker toyed/Rube Goldberg aspects of pipes and hydraulics. And what is even more fun is that your Stanford Graduate Plumber^TM is so world traveled. As he is wrenching the gas thingamabobby behind your oven, he talks about his six months in Australia working with the Aborigines. My girls and I sit around him like we are in circle time, listening to our plumber talk about driving a jeep through dust storms, sidestepping scorpions and starting educational programs to the world's first people.

Our tile guy was once a highly respected computer engineer in Israel. He spent three years fighting in Lebanon. Now he earns enough money doing tile in Berkeley to send his four kids to private school. He has strong opinions about the current crisis that is Israel, and how much safer he feels the U.S. is for his children. I listen to his politics with the the admiration of someone that has just been an observer, as one that never had to deal with the grittiness and challenges of true life and death struggles.

I can only live in a place that is smorgasbord of experiences, ideas and culture. The pleasure of this sort of place is that you can inhabit, temporarily, the lives of people that have lived life so differently.