In front of my North Oakland home my car’s sat idle and dusty for two months. There’s nowhere to go with it: the bookstores that I frequent are shut, some for good; bars I’d normally wander into on a weekend night on the assurance of seeing friends are closed; same goes for the cafes that tolerate my using them as makeshift offices. I no longer drive to Cal’s campus in Berkeley to teach. Instead, in the mornings I go for coffee, meandering through the residential streets to the east of San Pablo Avenue until I hit Alcatraz.