Downtown in the Rain

Something about being downtown in a big city in the rain takes me back to my childhood, although I'm not sure I ever was actually in a big city in the rain during my childhood.

I grew up in Royal Oak, which in the post-World War Two era, when I arrived, was a fast-growing suburb of Detroit.

My memories of Detroit are pretty much limited to taking the streetcar downtown to Hudson's and my grandparents' house, which I probably did only three or four times; and visiting my uncle's hat shop on Saturday nights, which I probably only did a few times as well.

Oh yes, one visit to a Red Wings' hockey game at the old Olympia Stadium, and a couple baseball games at the recently demolished Tiger Stadium.

I doubt it was raining on any of those visits, but whatever, today I took one of our local buses downtown, sitting wedged between a toothless old woman comparing her youthful experiences in jail with a middle-aged man still dealing with his own legal troubles.

They were contrasting their own lives of crime with today's youth, and agreeing that kids today just don't understand what they are getting themselves into when they break the law.

"They talk tough, but who they impressing? The cops ain't impressed. They know they just gonna be laying down for a long, long time. Like ten, twenty years..."

Sometimes it's hard to envision an inner city where the majority of people would not be hurting in some terribly visible manner -- addicted, disabled, seriously ill, desperately poor, homeless, mentally ill.

The happiest people I saw today were a small group of Down's Syndrome folks out for their own trip downtown.

Ducking into a mall cafeteria to escape the rain, I happened upon a raggedy bearded fellow who had more holes in his clothes and shoes than the donut display he was gazing at.

Since I was early for an appointment, I decided to sit and watch the shoppers -- another class altogether. mainly smartly dressed young women, some with kids along, these folks seemed focused and relatively content by contrast.

Many already clutched shopping bags that were full, but more consumption apparently would soon occur.

Considering that we are in the middle of what appears to be a permanent transformation of our economy as this, the richest society in history, adapts to a new global reality, I couldn't help wonder how much longer such shoppers will blithely continue to flow into places like this one.

How long will there be enough cash -- or plastic -- in these people's pockets to sustain a lifestyle whose time has passed?

This musing led me to consider how I might continue to adjust my own living standard southward. (All such musings are personal in the end.)

The days of middle class people being able to live in cities and pursue creative careers have crashed and splintered into a thousand pieces. Being a writer, an artist, a community organizer -- living in any sort of manner outside of capitalism's main corridors -- in a place like San Francisco has become unsustainable.

For today, however, I have the hood on my jacket to protect me against the rain, and friends who care about my fate...

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Obama's Lonely Road

--JJ

Everybody seems to be either in the process of headed on the way up or on the way down, as if we are all on a giant teeter-totter with only the occasional guy standing on the fulcrum standing steady.

Or maybe that's just my perception.

It can be a struggle to maintain perspective on a world that is filled with swirling images, shifting feelings, and confusing signals.

One can perhaps be forgiven for becoming disoriented.

***

Since perception has long since eclipsed reality in American public life, it is increasingly obvious that President Barack Obama's major problem is not what he is trying to do, or even how he is going about it, but how he has lost control of how his story is being told.

That would seem to be a media problem, but media only provides the pipe for the story-tellers and it is they who are the problem -- from all sides, from all political positions.

It's been said by some that America doesn't deserve Obama; he's too good for us. A brilliant Japanese blogger, Akihiko Reizei, noted recently that Obama is trying to be reasonable in an unreasonable political climate; a centrist where there is no center.

The rightists, for their part, are not even trying to appear reasonable. They are running against a left that barely exists outside their imagination, but nobody much cares about reality in the U.S., so the mere fantasy of a left is all that is needed to sustain these tea-party activists.

Obama's only path to success in this kind of environment, according to the blogger, would be to embrace the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which of course has been only lukewarm to his initiatives -- precisely because he is a centrist, not a leftist.

The blogger pointed out that if he at least builds the support from his party's liberal base, he will have some political perch from which to operate. As it is, he is increasingly isolated and unable to maneuver.

It seems unlikely that Obama will migrate left, at least this early in his first term, but once the Democrats suffer serious losses in the midterm elections, which I expect to happen this fall, he will face little choice.

The reason is that moderate Republicans, like John McCain, are coming under withering attacks by their party's radical fringe. These conservative extremists will gain many seats in Congress, if current trends continue, further polarizing the country's already toxic public discourse.

Obama may choose to maintain his centrist posture, as the only adult in the political fray, but if so his will be one of the loneliest Presidencies in history, and he will accomplish little when it comes to policy reforms.

As a matter of pragmatism, he will need to move left to avoid the reality noted by Reizei: "the middle road is a lonely road."

That simply is a road too few modern Americans are willing to share with him.

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Searching For Something That's Lost

If everything happens for a reason, this must be a weekend of reasons.

Today, in a light rain, I could smell the eucalyptus buttons at Glen Park, where my 15-year-old was about to play an indoor soccer game, and I hoped it would help take my mind off a range of worries that have been following me around like multiple shadows knitted to my frame.

Later in the game itself, he scored a late goal to pull his team within one in a comeback attempt. Since he is a defender, it was a long shot, from mid-court, that he knifed into the right corner of the net, eluding the keeper.

I'm not sure I've yelled that loud in a year.

It was good therapy, as I've intimated, because of some new curve balls life has thrown me.

Maybe that is what sports is good for -- taking our mind off of our troubles. If so, the highlight of this day was his goal.

***

His little brother is in Mexico on a school trip, hopefully having a wonderful time. (We have no way to communicate from here.) Friday night, about 24 hours before getting on the plane, he was pacing around my apartment in such an excited manner, it seemed as if he could barely contain himself.

At 13, with bushy red curls, he is growing taller almost before our eyes and nearly rivals his athletic brother in height now.

He packed lots of books for his journey, including a recent addition from my bookshelf, William Shirer's riveting Berlin Diary.


***

Meanwhile, their little sister had a sleepover Friday night here with her best friend; plus my own friend fell and twisted her ankle badly that day, so I had her bedridden, with the ankle elevated and iced.

That made six of us in this place Friday night.

***

All of this was the good or at least acceptable stuff, the routine developments in busy lives. Yesterday's outdoor soccer game (photo above) was good too, another useful distraction.

Last night, I attended a friend's 50th birthday party across town, in a rare example of me socializing at night.

Still, the shadows are following me, as I go about these attempts to continue living my life as if I am somehow in charge of how it all turns out.

Admitting my powerlessness is a constant struggle. Practicing my faith is another one. Finding that indispensable source of my lifelong optimism, against whatever odds, that I'll overcome the major obstacles now confronting me is essential, I know that.

But how can I find it again?

That was the question echoing back to me today as I walked through the rain.

Where did it go? I must have lost it somewhere along my way...

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A Tree on a Hill

This is meant to resemble a tree in Alamo Square, where I've spent time with a few friends and my kids during the past three months. You can live in a city for decades, as I have in this one, and never get to know certain neighborhoods, but for a number of reasons, my chance to get to know the Alamo Square area finally arrived.

It is a heavily residential neighborhood, with high-rise apartment buildings among picture-perfect rows of Victorians -- so perfect they are the ones that grace many a postcard sent from San Francisco.



Thus, busloads of tourists stop here, competing with the locals walking their dogs, playing frisbee, or reading on the benches.

I'd visited this park a few times over the years, but never had gotten to know it. During the holidays, while recuperating nearby, I spotted the tree, a Monterey Pine I believe, its branches permanently bent (but not broken) by the westward wind.

It stands on the southwest side of Alamo Square, and for whatever reason, I identify closely with it, especially when I view myself through the eyes of my children, who visited me often while I was staying there.

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Family Origins Matter at Times Like These

Most of us come from modest backgrounds. In the midst of the worst recession of my lifetime, I think back to the lives of my grandparents, on both sides, and how difficult they were.

Above is a photograph of my Grandma Weir's wedding ring. The few people I've ever showed it to just shake their heads at how inexpensive and simple it is.

She was the wife of a farmer and they lived in a tiny house on the small plot of Canadian land they farmed.

They had six kids; her husband (whose name I bear) died young. Nothing about her life, start to finish, was easy.

She died in a rest home in her 90s. I don't know why or how I got her ring; perhaps after her death my Dad (her youngest child) was given it, and maybe he then gave it to me.

It's odd that I don't remember these details. It bothers me.



I have only a few other items from my father's life, including a packet of old black-and-white photos and some hand-written pages of a novel he had wanted to write. Plus a few of the golf balls he initialed on the last night of his life.

The second photo tonight is of a Day of the Dead poster his youngest grandchild made honoring my father recently. The two of them never met; she was a tiny infant when he died the night before I had hoped to introduce them.

But I'm quite sure they would have been fast friends had their times on this planet overlapped. They share a sunny disposition, an optimism, and an easy love of other people.

My father's life, from a material standpoint, was easier than his father's. He also lived much longer, into his 80s.

Almost all of us in the so-called middle classes in America are trying to come to grips with reduced expectations about our lifestyles going forward, and despite any personal stress this is causing me personally, I recognize that this is a good thing for us as a whole.

For too long, we've been the world's voracious consumers, swallowing every good sent our way. Our rate of savings has been too low, and our credit card/mortgage/personal debt way too high.

As I confront a set of rather difficult choices in my time, I think back on my ancestors, and then I don't feel so bad. Every generation faces its challenge. The answers for me may lie way back there, when they coped with scarcity and hardship we can barely imagine.

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The Insanity of Hope

Oblivious to us, the trees are bursting with insane hopefulness. Here below, things can be more complicated. How hopeful any of us feels can prove to be a minute-to-minute thing.

Life in the richest country in the world, in the richest society in history, is filled with uncertainties for many of us. That there is a middle class here, increasingly, is a myth, at least depending on the zip code where you live.

For some time now, I've been aware that the choices I've made, especially to raise two families in one of the most expensive cities on the planet, were directly at odds at the career I chose, the writing life I've attempted to pursue.

Back at the beginning, I could not have imagined my successes. Looking back over my annual statement from the Social Security Administration (the one that calculates your future payments, once "retired") I see palpable evidence that there were some very good years there.

I can remember moments when all seemed secure, or at least secure enough that my worries were about more abstract subjects than they have been lately.

Today, however, I'm incapable of abstraction; it is impossible to achieve when needs that are more concrete scream out daily for my attention.

Is telling a story abstract or concrete? Is it necessary? Can we live without it?

What about the story-teller?

Among my friends are those who have told one story extremely well during their career, and benefited handsomely. Others have told many stories quite well, but never gotten a break.

I guess I'm somewhere in-between, and now, at this stage of life, facing dilemmas about how or even whether to proceed with the work of recounting a life filled with stories.

Just the people who would need to be mentioned represent a very long list. Today, during a long phone call, I discussed one such friend's work from a quarter-century ago, work now virtually forgotten, plus the friend is no longer with us.

But the caller had discovered the work and would like to recreate how this terrific effort was accomplished. I am, apparently, one of the few people alive who knows some significant details about this particular episode.

Though this indeed is a remarkable story (sorry that I must be discreet here, for now), there are dozens of such tales that live only in my memory. So few have been put down on paper, or on the screen here at this blog space.

When I am focusing on these kinds of things, I feel a responsibility, if only to posterity, to get it down and get it right.

But that will take work, and work takes energy, as well as time. And, in order for me to accomplish any of this, the current chaos that is squashing me simply must calm.

There must be some calm. Some of the awful uncertainty hanging over me needs to be eased. I must know what and whom I can depend on.

Then the financial resources have to be there, so I can breathe long enough and feel safe enough to re-enter the room of abstraction, that room where all stories start...Nothing is more concrete than that.

Otherwise, all will remain silent, and the stories will eventually pass with me.

-30-

Do Not Pass "Go"

First, I fell in love with this photo. Mainly I publish these kinds of shots over at Sidewalk Images, but this one belongs here.

Maybe if they're lucky, I'll let the SI folks have it later.

In racing, there are lanes, of course, all the same length even though racers start at different points on the track.

It can be disorienting to watch because it seems as if some racers have an advantage -- and, according to people who run in these events, there are advantages to where you start, though not because any one route is shorter than any other.

In life we all start at different points also, but there are distinct advantages -- not all people get off to an equal start.

In fact, we individually get off to radically different jumps and follow radically different routes. All that is certain is we all end up at the same finish line sooner or later.

Lately I've been reading a couple different histories, one by the late Howard Zinn; the other a lesser known work called "Wherever There's a Fight" by Elaine Elinson and Stan Yogi.

This latter book shows how California was built on the backs of exploited minorities. San Francisco, the proud liberal City, once had the largest vigilante force in American history.

Here, and throughout the state, minorities were beaten, raped and lynched for no other reason than their race or ethnicity.

Natives, Latinos, African-Americans and Asians in particular were singled out for unspeakable acts of repression.

It is only by understanding this racist history that any of us can move forward today -- that is my premise.

This perspective represents a point of contention, however, between people like me and conservatives who believe the past is past and no longer relevant.

Though I realize I am utterly incapable of convincing even one conservative that I am right about this I know that I am.

But they are in no mood to listen. The evidence? The opening speech at the recent "Tea Party" convention contained overtly racist appeals to prevent today's immigrants from being able to vote.

Those who fail to understand the past are condemned to repeat it. In this case, that does not mean that white conservatives will be able to return to their racist activities of the past -- they will not be able to clear the country of minorities no matter how badly (albeit secretly) they may wish to.

But by revisiting the racism that is our common legacy, by unleashing dangerous forces like those now toyed with by ignorants on the right, the future of the U.S. as a viable democracy hangs in the balance.

This country either will be a free country for all, welcoming all, or it will collapse in a pile of dust, swept into the dustbin of history that awaits all racist societies.

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