“Most people who work for the City of Oakland know the town as it exists in space. It’s about 56 square miles stretching from Alcatraz Avenue in the north to Durant and San Leandro Creek in the south, from Skyline Boulevard in the east to the Alameda Channel in the west. But Betty Marvin knows the city as it exists on a map of time. From its founding in the 1850s to its industrial growth in the first half of the twentieth century, through the radical explosions and riots of the 1960s to the crime waves of the 1980s and the tech influx and gentrification in the 2000s. More than anyone in the city, Ms. Marvin is aware of the passage of time, how everything is forgotten and only sometimes remembered again. She sees documents and draft cards and unravels the mysteries of the dead. She plumbs the depths of our paper trails, canonical, and dry and often the only thing left behind after the full, whole and messy life is gone. She sees how random it is; what dies, and what is chosen to live on. So maybe to her it makes perfect sense that a writer would come in trying to tell the story of an address the very day after she happened upon it. It was Homer Williams’ time to become one of the remembered ones.” (more…)