Waking Up: The City

As the sun comes out along the northern coast, everybody turns his face toward the warmth. New hopes are born.

Even an endless-seeming recession can't dampen new dreams. "For Sale" signs still crop up around the city; small groups of potential buyers (or maybe just dreamers) turn up for Sunday afternoon "open houses."

The kids fill the parks; the old folks stroll along Stow Lake. The joggers hit the park or the beach. Far offshore, the Farallon Islands float above the mist.

This year, more than most, I feel like a bear, blinking awake after a long, cold winter. If hibernation isn't the right description exactly, I've at least spent a long time asleep.

Waking up to the light, now winter's dark has passed, opens many questions. Which further aspects of the way I have been living should be cast aside?

This is a year of rapid change for me. When I think back to that room near Alamo Square, recovering from illness, squinting at the distant downtown lights at the Christmas holidays, I'm not sure whether I was imagining the feelings that fill me now.

I'm not sure I could have.

Life is reborn every spring, whether we notice it or not...whether we appreciate the fact or not.

Far to the north of here, my youngest grandson has started crawling this weekend. Up in Oregon he has mastered moving across the room before even turning eight months old. He copies his heroes, his brother who's three, and his nearby cousin who's one-and-a-half.

Here my schoolkids work through their 9th, 8th and 5th grade schedules, growing smarter and more confident day by day. It's spring soccer season now; my daughter's first practice was rained out Friday but took place today.

As she and her teammates ran about the field at St. Mary's, I happened to be standing on a hill whose name I don't know, several miles to the southwest. Responding to the motion of small figures moving far away, my eyes turned in her direction.

My mind had been on another matter, a different conversation. But I was aware of the time, which meant that in the back of my mind, she was there. The clocks had turned today; did she remember? Do her cleats still fit?

A parent's thoughts drift -- sometimes just outside the range of consciousness -- but they are always there.

She and her cohorts were far too far away for me to differentiate who was whom, so I just imagined her running and jumping, much as the great Jacob Lawrence once imagined a childish Harriet Tubman.



All of those bright sprites, cartwheeling across the green. My imagination suddenly merged with his imagination, as we collaborated on remembering the past and anticipating the future.

It's spring-time. The impossibly green leaves with their pure white blossoms snake up and down the branches of the plum tree, doing their part to help feed us this coming summer.

The earth is fully awake now, so our time has also come.

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