About 15 years ago, I lived on the northern border of Oakland, in the Rockridge district. There was a place there called the Buttercup Cafe, which had food that was both pretty good and reasonably priced. I had very little money then, so I usually stopped in for a cup of soup (all I could usually afford) after work.

I was something of a regular there, and got to know the waitresses pretty well. There was one waitress named Ruth, and on rainy winter evenings when it was slow we'd talk for hours about where we'd grown up and what we thought of the world.

She'd grown up hard and close to the bone, in a hard-scrabble little iron range town somewhere in Minnesota. Her dad was a Jim Beam aficionado, and I got the sense that there was some darkness there. She never talked about it, and I respected her too much to pry, but it was there in her eyes sometimes when she talked about back home.

She was talking one night about Northern California, and some of the differences from back home that she'd noticed since she moved.

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