Family Traditions

On Sunday morning, my three youngest kids and I did something we've been doing for many years now -- meeting at a San Francisco cafe for brunch. It was classic Bay Area weather: sunny, breezy, the temperature flirting with 70, the air clear and dry.

The neighborhood we chose for this get-together was Potrero Hill, and its small downtown area was fairly bustling -- more cafes than I remembered were filled to spillover with mostly young patrons, lively, laughing, casually dressed, tattooed and pierced just like my kids.

The chatter rising from the tables including those inside wooden booths dating from the Covid era was light-hearted and bursting with the energy of a three-day weekend. I'd been pleasantly surprised that I quite easily found a parking spot a block from our destination after driving in from the East Bay.

Then I remembered that this is Burning Man weekend when some 70,000 people, many from San Francisco, gather at a remote part of the Nevada desert for their annual festival, so we would be avoiding the even greater bustle that would otherwise be the case in these popular inner-city blocks.

At this point it's no doubt redundant to disclose that I love San Francisco and I love my kids. They are truly San Francisco kids, having lived elsewhere only during college, from which all three returned convinced that few, if any other parts of the country can compete with their home city, at least when it comes to their particular sensibilities.

They are idealistic, progressive, creative people who share a dry wit and similar taste in food, music and film. They are unapologetic cat lovers. They can light up a room and be the life of the party when they choose to do so, They are not rich by local standards and not poor by global standards and they know about both of those things and also about the difference.

But on this particular morning, we saw no reason to focus on the heavier topics of mutual concern -- except for climate change in the form of the flash flooding that was trapping some of their friends at Burning Man plus a few digs at AI in the movies -- in lieu of the merits of Oat Milk, campy horror movies and a new eyebrow piercing one of my sons had just gotten on Saturday.

If there is a mythological narrative of the typical American young man, it is that he has a wild youth, followed by a somewhat delayed onset of maturity when he finally settles down and raises a family. If that is the myth, it's one that I did not live out personally. Not the wild part, anyway.

There was no wildness in my youthful years; I was quiet, shy, sickly and withdrawn. I never attended a school dance or even went on a date, didn't drink beer or get into trouble. That almost guaranteed a midlife crisis later on, but that's the way it goes...

There's a lot more I could write about all of that and maybe I will someday but if there is some sort of cosmic presence keeping track of such things, at least I should get credit for the settling down and raising a family part. In fact I settled down twice and raised two families, so perhaps I should get extra credit!

Anyway, it seems I've gotten distracted from my main narrative here. We had a lovely brunch, my younger three and I -- plus the older boy's wonderful girlfriend who snapped our photo.

As I made my way through the city streets back home afterward, I felt very much at ease, having just lived out another of our simple family traditions. And that in the end is pretty much what it’s all about.