The park is bursting into full-color this month. Two short walks through it the past two days, in heat ranging from 90 to 102 degrees F, helped me appreciate that it is one of the most beautiful places in the country.
The only tasting of its edibles I indulged in was a single leaf of the peppery Nasturtium. Delicious.
I didn't go in to the Japanese Tea Garden, where the Cantonese-speaking girls tie their Saris incorrectly, but its plants and structures beckoned peacefully.
It's a time when we all need to experience beauty as much as possible. The economy is sinking, more and more are, like me, out of work.
Budgets are tight. Stress is high.
Everyone tries to cut costs. Yet in this city, the museums and cafes are still crowded, so clearly many still feel that they can carry on as usual.
But more and more people I talk to confide they are no longer eating out, or going to movies, or driving to stores so much as cooking, renting movies, and walking to closer stores.
That's easy in San Francisco. We are an old-fashioned city of neighborhoods. Every district has its own residential sections ringing unique commercial strips. It's an extremely ethnic city, with an amazing diversity of people, bringing a correlative diversity of food, accents, fashion, music, assumptions, biases, habits, religions, beliefs, fears, hopes, and dreams.
The city acts as an enormous blender, smoothing all of this richness into a blended smoothie of many flavors. A cultural smoothie. Once you've tasted its sweetness, you can never go back to your own tribal parochialism.
Our differences are, quite simply, our beauty. See it. Touch it. Taste it.
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