San Francisco: A Love Story

Over the course of an adult lifetime spent mostly based here in San Francisco, I've witnessed the transformation of its population by continuous waves of new arrivals, mainly immigrants from Asia and Central America, and by young, artistic or entrepreneurial migrants.

I came here as one of the second type, at age 24, never having lived in a big city before. So San Francisco is, for me, the prototype for a city, even though I realize, through the massive number of trips I've made to other cities on this continent and around the world, that this place is typical of nowhere!

No, San Francisco in unique, but you can find other somewhat similar venues if you consider only a few of its strengths -- climate, physical beauty, architectural heritage, racial and ethnic diversity, collective intelligence, radical culture, nightlife, cuisine, liberal politics, wealth, entrepreneurial spirit, historical significance -- and I could go on and on, but not all of them.

Nobody except us have it all.

I do love this place. But the main source of my love is a belief in the ability of people to find renewal here, by the Bay, next to the mighty Pacific, buffeted by the whitest fog and bluest sky imaginable, not to mention the purest air.

A week ago tonight, I stopped by a local club, in the Mission, where a singer friend of mine was performing, an author was reading, and a photographer was signing copies of his photos. All of this was going on inside one small club just off Mission Street, with a cover price of $12.

If you've never tasted San Francisco's brand of culture, but want to, contact me and I'll be happy to give you a top ten list of "do not miss" ways to begin to understand how we live here -- not how the national media says we live, not how the talk-show maniacs who demonize us say we live, not the comedians -- but us, the residents of the best city in America, bar none.

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Working Holiday: How It All Fits Together

It's a national holiday today, so I can take it off from work. Funny thing about freedom, though, it doesn't always work out the way you'd hoped. Freed from my dreary routine, I decided to take a walk.

Taking my camera, I figured this was a chance to enrich the "pending SI" file I maintain on my laptop. That is where upcoming photos of the streets around me are stored for my photo blog, Sidewalk Images.

Today, however, we came up empty, my camera and me. We saw all the assorted stuff -- plants, trash, cars, people, pets, fixtures, buildings with their slants and angles -- but we couldn't take any photos.

So, I did what I had to do. I published no image, just my admission of the failure of obtaining any image.

Turns out photographers can lose their voice also.

Since I haven't been eating much lately, and in celebration of the holiday, I had steak and eggs for breakfast. On my recent walk with friends in Mill Valley, I'd secured a handful of Laurel Bay leaves, which I grilled the sirloin in.

Steak?

I got it cheap. Safeway has these periodic sales, where you can get them for a buck each. The nice thing about bay leaves is they not only infuse the meat with taste, they aromatize your entire house.

A natural air freshener.

So now I sit here, back from my empty walk, with an empty day and an empty agenda. The silence again closes in around me, and the writing voices erupt. "Do this!"

"No, do that!"

It's Veteran's Day, a time to honor all of those who have served our nation, even when the cause wasn't a just one. They never got to choose; they followed orders. They were brave even when they didn't know whether it mattered.

Maybe it always matters to be brave. Courage comes in many forms, large and small. It's hard to be brave enough to put yourself out there, to do what you can, even to be free.

My camera is held together by duct tape, anyway. It's really hard to take photos anymore. The duct tape stretches, and the photo-taking fails. If only I could use duct tape to fix all the other parts of my life that are broken, solving this mess would be easy.

But something tells me it's not going to be easy, not this time.

A Lonely Engagement

There are patterns everywhere.

The trick is to locate and identify the patterns in our own lives, especially the destructive ones.

Last night, after hours of work, I discovered that this is what the novel I'm writing is about, apparently.

Each time I go back in and open up the file, I rewrite it slightly from the top.

(This has long been my habit as a writer. I write very quickly, but then, edit, edit, edit until the draft feels right.

(Not so much here, of course. A blog is meant to stay informal, looser...)

But the novel, which is still in its early stages, is about a journey through time and space, but much more critically, through the maze of events and relationships that either reveal or conceal the necessary degree of self-knowledge to say, write a book.

It's an addictive activity, once you start, but it occasionally turns brutal. The only way this book ever can succeed, in my eyes, (forget financial success), is if I can attain a degree of emotional honesty that normally proves too intense to sustain.

At some point, we all want to retreat back to the states of denial and articles of faith that normally permit us to live out our routines without thinking too hard about it all. The problem is no one ever writes a good book of the sort I am attempting now without setting these regular routines aside, and pushing further into places most of us, especially me, rarely wishes to go.

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Morning Dew, Afternoon Light

My 8th grader and I went to the big public school enrollment fair the other day. He cracks me up.

"Let's just go in there, grab the applications, and get out of there, okay?"

Once inside a massive hall, the noise was overpowering. Parents and kids pushed toward tables manned by volunteers. The first person I saw was the principal of his brother's high school, a man with a perpetual smile -- an optimist.

I don't recall any of the principals of my schools ever being optimists. They seemed more like prison guards.

My kid hung back while I exchanged pleasantries with the smiling principal; he hung back again when I greeted a bunch of kids wearing beanies from the school that is his top choice.

It's the school with the reputation (and record) of being the top academic high school in these parts.

He sat in the back row of a short question-and-answer session offered by that school. I asked if he had any questions; he said no. So I asked one, about the nature of the "personal essay" that is part of the application process.

I think it is odd that a B+, a B-, or a B all count as a 3.0 grade. When I was a professor at Stanford a few years ago, I used a pretty complicated mathematical scale to award different numbers for those letter grades.

But, to get into a high school, you could earn all A-'s and have a 4.0 GPA.

While we were driving home, he was studying the applications carefully, reading parts of them out-loud. This is an attention to detail that bodes well for him getting into the school of his choice.

That, plus the fact that he very rarely gets a "-" behind his A's.

***

Life in my house goes quickly from a noisy hub of chaos to a venue so quiet you could hear a pin drop. The strokes of the keys on this laptop compete with the ticking of a wall clock to remind me that I live alone, it is chilly outside, and we are in the midst of enduring the shortest days of our year.

The bottom of time.

The holidays now approach, a time of dread some years; occasionally also still of joy. I think that, for me at least, I must have been better at living in denial in order to enjoy the holidays in the past.

Given the recession, and the state of my own disarray, not to mention that of my profession, maybe this year I'll focus on celebrating small triumphs, like being able to push out this blog post.

Yay!

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What You Saw At The Beach

These shots are from today, on San Francisco's western shore. If you click on them, the images become bigger. These images like that (to be clicked)...











Self Image, Ocean Beach

Garden Soup on an Autumn Day

My friend noticed this as we arrived at the Polo Fields -- a shaft of sunlight in the woods near the soccer fields.



The field also looked surreal in the early morning light. The game didn't go well, for the girls. They lost, 0-3. But the playoffs are not over yet and they'll play again next week.



Back home, my 11-year player had an idea. "Let's cook something."

"Something" turned into an organic vegetable soup. We picked a few tomatoes, green onions, sweet basil leaves, and other plants, cooked them in a cream base with potatoes, carrots, garlic, and other ingredients into such a delicious comfort food that even my big, tall meat-eating boys snapped up their portions happily.

What is endlessly wonderful about parenting, as long as you're open to it, is all the things your kids teach you and introduce you to. I could write volumes about this topic. (I suppose, given all of my posts, I already have done that, actually.)

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