Under the Steinbeck Oak

by Tad Wojnicki

I drive Main Street behind the National Steinbeck Center, watching the zooming and vrooming. Since the Center opened in 1998, I’ve seen visitors from all over the world, showing all possible driving styles and an infinite variety of street-crossing habits. I keep going two short blocks until I reach a seedy parking lot behind the Cherry Bean Café.

I park my ’80 Mustang, grab my scratchbook, and slam the door. My car sinks well into the parking lot, sponging and fixing the smells of the neighborhood. Sucking in the air, a blend of blooming flowers and bath salts, I look down Main Street to Mount Toro. Farmland is felt. Fresh furrows get plowed nearby. I smell the sweet smell of dirt. I scent new fruit, the perfume of the globing, juicing apples, oranges, and lemons. It’s so thick, I get a slight headache.

The Steinbeck Center is full-blown Postmodern, but it sits well at the end of Oldtown, lifting its dome off the globing fruit, mixing its hues with the furrows, sucking its warmth from the sunbaked Toro breast.

I like to sit at the Cherry Bean, at the bandstand table overlooking Main Street, nursing my cup and giving things a thought. For years, when I was rustling up pennies for their Steinbeck Blend, they let me steal refills. One perfumed morning, they gave me hell.

Damn good brainstorms come upon me here, like that day, three years into writing my novel, when it hit me that what I thought was my story was, in fact, not my story at all, but rather an old Bible story, “The Expulsion from Paradise.” I just happened to have lived it....

Tad Wojnicki lives in Paraiso Springs and teaches at Hartnell College. E-mail: wojnicki@aol.com