Jicama

At least twice a week, I get a specific salad from Whole Foods. There are beans and corn and tomatoes and cilantro and onion and it seems way too many things in it. All of these things seem to fit very well together, and then there’s this strange white cubed thing. Looked it up and it’s jicama. Every time I eat the salad, I think that this white cubed thing is perfectly good, but I just don’t know if it belongs in there.

This city has been wondrous. I’ll go hiking in Muir Woods and marvel at those soaring cartoonish trees, I’ll take a Tuesday off of work to lounge on a sailboat, with the America’s cup a few hundred feet away, I’ll have a latte with a crunchy cannoli with vanilla cream oozing out of every crevice at Caffe Greco in Little Italy, but I have this weird problem: I’m jicama in a beautiful salad – I don’t know how to add to it. I look around me and I see the warmth from friends and family in SF, I feel how invigorating it is to be surrounded by brilliant, hopeful people, but I still feel a little removed from it.

Around two months ago, a man gave me the best compliment I’ve ever received; he said that ironic as it is, Miami will be losing a lot of warmth when I go to San Francisco. Perhaps that’s my addition to this city then. Because as inspiring and active as San Fran is, it certainly needs warmth. That’s a pretty good gift then, no? Maybe you do need jicama.