Richmond BART

Bright & early this morning, I drove a friend to Kaiser Richmond for an Unpleasant Procedure. I had a good chunk of time after bringing her in, so, naturally, I went out for a walk.

Right away, shiny signs pointed the way to BART. For all my years riding the Richmond line, I’d never seen the Richmond station, so I followed the signs past the Hacienda Grill & a beautiful old deco post office, & then through a new-looking affordable-housing village. When I came to the station, it, too, looked surprisingly new—freshly remodeled in the shape of a ship, to evoke the WWII shipyards that transformed Richmond.

All surfaces gleamed as if just painted, & in fact the parking lot was still very much under construction. I thought a picture including both the shiny ship station & the parking lot construction would be nice, but the light was all wrong for that, & my potential photographer for that shot turned out to have not just a phone in one hand, but a cigarette in the other.

There was hardly anyone around; we were between trains. Fortunately Photographer #2, a bored kid with a skateboard, was standing in the right place for a parking lot shot. I could not get a good read on his ethnicity, but “Middle Eastern” would seem to cover it. (Many competing ideas & acronyms exist for naming that region of the world; SWANA appears to have gained some traction but I never hear it in casual conversation, even in the PC crowd I run with.)

I wondered why he turned the camera vertical. Because I asked for a photo of myself & I’m vertical? I’d sort of hoped for a wide horizontal shot that would include part of the housing complex, but that wasn’t the moment to change my rule about letting photographers compose their own shots.

After that, I wandered further, eyes peeled for the Chinese restaurant that I knew must be nearby. I found it.