Some of San Francisco's Worlds

Cable Car operator

To get down to the BART station I can walk, or I can take the $5 cable car. I chase a car and fork out my $5 only to realize that I am just a few short stops from the wrong destination. Oh my god! The conductor throws up his hands. We are helpless, there is absolutely nothing we can do! (Now which country's bureaucrats does this remind you of?) These stocky Latinos, half local color, half showmen, make a grand display of their personal favor to me, and put me on a cable car going back. The tourists love them. (How long you been doing this kind of work? They ask the operator. Second day on the job. No wonder the main sights he points out are liquor stores.)

But to get to the Embarcadero is a leisurely walk down Lombard through the seedy-chic of North Beach and up the slope again to Coit Tower. A man is attacking a packing crate with a pick axe like an early 20th century dock worker, blond and scraggly. Up Telegraph Hill and then down from the lofty forested Coit Tower past Chinese homes. A few men come home with their fishing poles.

Coit Tower

Down concrete stairs where a large black man in a ragged stocking cap sits, pedestrians apologizing delicately to him. Past racy store fronts, XXX Entertainment, Adult fantasy, and old battered garbage cans instead of multi-colored plastic recycling bins, I glimpse the swooping bridge to Treasure Island. The X-rated clubs turn into sterile modern business buildings, the parking lots are now immaculate, on to a waterfront restaurant and its clientele of suits and tourists.

To the right a pier of gray wood and wrought iron threads far out over murky waters. A sea gull lands near me and shares the view, stretching its gray speckled neck, its glistening eyes undisturbed by my humanness. A thickset Hispanic man hauls a shopping cart covered with fishnets he's going to cast in the waters. Only the fact that he inspects the contents of the trash cans on the way suggests he's any different from you or me. Business people walk down the jetty with their lunches.

I meet my sister and nephew for sunny grilled salmon (the online reviews predicted "mediocre food, apathetic service" but it all seems friendly and delicious.) My sister explains that in this neck of the woods serving staff who do not fall on the floor in abject devotion to your happiness are considered apathetic. No wonder my San Francisco friends are so traumatized by the French dining experience. (I confirm this later when I am, on the one hand, elbowed out of the cotton underpants section of Victoria's Secret by aggressive shoppers and, on the other, amazed by the apologetic staff. All these shoppers need is a couple of hours in a Parisian Department store to straighten them out.)

We walk along the Embarcadero. On the bay side are gleaming white renovated pier buildings, converted to high end businesses and restaurants; on the land side, the tender grasses of the landscaped park with its sculptures and radial seating arrangements are occupied almost entirely by the mentally ill homeless with their shopping carts and bag, stocking caps, emanating their special odors under the brilliant sky. Beyond them is a liminal area, an open air market selling tie-dyed hippy clothes. Then blocky capacious walkways and plazas lead to the Financial District.

We take BART to the Asian Art Museum, on the windy plain of the Civic Center which, appropriately, has a bronze statue of Ashurbanipal braving the rough gusts. The Museum is a modern day temple to the subtle nuances of the East. Whereas Paris' Museé Guimée is packed with an exhausting inventory, the San Francisco version is airy, its multiple floors remote from one another. The Chinese ceramics of 3,000 BC can be fully digested before strolling to the distinctive pungent style of ancient Korea. A special exhibit on Bali takes you into the daily religious festivals with film, photos and artifacts, round faces flowery and smiling even as the cremation pyre is lit. In one film a six-year buried father is exhumed, and the village peoples--unusually solemn, must be the smell--wash the loosely strung pelvic bones. Demons glower and gamelon music hypnotizes. We have a chrysanthemum tea in the museum café of Chinese lacquered furnishings, and then a sorbet down the street at another remote Oriental kingdom, a diner dedicated to a deceased guru.

And, like every other day, I climb back home up wind-tossed streets, to my Russian Hill aerie.

Walking for the Mentally Ill

Yesterday we took part in a fundraising walk for NAMI, the National Association for the Mentally Ill. We parked by the simple stucco houses that line Golden Gate Park. A bright day welcomed the brokenhearted warriors of the cause to Lindley Field. These are friends and family of the mentally ill, whose life lessons could not be more real, more devastating, and more compelling. Their clients could not be more vulnerable.

Golden Gate Park is larger than Central Park with gigantic trees, like sequoias and eucalyptus, and many of the bright flowers I had just seen in Sardinia. We descended to the soft green grasses where local NAMI groups gathered, tented tables signing them in. People wore t-shirts painted with brains full of jelly beans, or with brains shooting lightening, or bearing photographs of someone they had lost to the tragic diseases. People carried handmade quilts or banners proclaiming faith in god. Among them were mentally ill people, a half-dressed woman in a wheelchair being carefully tended, or solemn young black and Indian men sitting stolidly on the grass. or the ravaged faces of people who live in their own nightmares and can only be partially present. Dogs cavorted, women with long gray hair wore bright headbands, people munched and brought each other cups of coffee, groups drifted together and a bagpipe band warmed up. Then flocks of white doves were released and beat a hasty spiral high above, where unfortunately a pair of hawks soon appeared. We worried about the flock of doves but it only soared higher. A judge spoke of the cruelty of sentencing that unfairly targets many mentally ill people, and their lives of continual punishment. Hundreds of group leaders paraded on the stage with rousing group names like the NAMI Raindancers. It was quite the bittersweet celebration of life.

We took off through a floral arch, followed by ambulances, just in case. The money had already been raised, the only thing left to do was walk through beautiful Golden Gate Park, past the bison pen where my sisters had met from their separate worlds 30 years earlier, into the sinus-tingling chill which turned to penetrating sun. Signs along the path reminded us: "No Stigma" "One in 4 adults experience a mental disorder every year" and names of sponsors. The hawks danced in the sky above us, no doubt attracted by the tiny dogs scrambling along. But luckily for them, and for any potentially unstable walkers, the dogs remained intact.

At the finish line a girl band blasted 60's songs and the old hippies among us rocked out along with some of their wards. The proceeds will help so many more get off the streets.

But the next day, walking down to Market Street, I wonder if the physician can heal herself. People lie on the sidewalk, scraping at it. A wizened old woman in a wheelchair, peaked cap and tattered woolens mutters to herself. A round old woman howls like a cat in heat. Countless men limp by with their beers, babbling to themselves. A thick young man stands with arms upraised, like a statue of Sisyphus. Then I pass the chess boards, among clouds of marijuana smoke, and see that some people are seriously focusing. But so many others under the bright California sun seem so alone.

Family Detour

Eugene, Oregon

Portland to Eugene. Sitting right next to the bulbous silver turboprops straight out of Hollywood, unwinding with deafening noise as the propeller spins within arms' reach just the other side of the window. Its smoky shadow in the insubstantial air ploughs boldly into thick clouds, tumultuous as being on a motorcycle. Below velvet fields marked by tufty trees, black rock mountains, the overlapping profiles of blue and gray Oregon ranges. Placid broad rivers enrich the land.

The flight attendant stops to talk to me, her bright smile more real than I expect. She soon tells me that she too writes morning pages--aha! I left my notebook in Portland! (That has been gnawing at me, leaving behind those insignificant yet highly personal pages.) Could she pick them up for me? Alas, she's off to to San Gimignano! Another coincidence, a place I have loved in Tuscany. Too many coincidences leave us both uneasy, and she writes out her email address.

Eugene

Short visit with my 90-year old father. We watch the movie of the Freedom Riders. My father had been, at the time of my birth ten years earlier, employed in Montgomery as a consultant, to devise a scheme to equalize the black one-room schoolhouse, and the big modern white high school. The same man had been governor those ten years earlier. We feel a moving connection with the courage of those young people. But my father's 90-year old wife is uneasy with the cruelty of the Southern crackers and wants to go to bed so I'm left watching alone. Not before my father talks about the dust storm in Texas, during which one sister was born, and the call girl next door who babysat me while Mother went to the hospital. Or the snowstorm in Wisconsin, when another sister was born, so severe that a police car took Mother to the hospital. But my father's wife doesn't like to hear about these memories.

Next day, the Eugene airport. The plane is delayed 5 1/2 hours. Ah well. The space, the soothing mountain ranges through panoramic windows, and the space to practice tai chi, in that gentle airport. The mists of passage in the nurturing air of Eugene. It all fits, flows, falls in place, it is fine. My big elf ears listen for the rhythms of the empty space. And finally we board.

View from the terrace, SF

Green celtic sworls of land are soon lost in opaque whiteness, the obscurity that has kept the plane from its appointed rounds. Beneath the shearing clouds emerge green bristling valleys, and huge cloud faces, fabulous noses. Snow is trapped on piney mountains that sometimes curve into the backbones of ancient volcanoes. Mountains have long skirts of white snow, or are topped with powder. So much snow. Till the clouds part for San Francisco.

Meanwhile, Jacques is in London, accompanying his anxious daughter through her exams, and I miss his spine-stiffening presence. But now I can float a little longer each day. I can walk all over this sparkling city of San Francisco. The chill Alaska wind kept me from arriving, and still rips at the terrace of the apartment where I'm staying, but now the light of the sun intensifies, showing the blue hills of Marin over the gray bay. In the morning the parrots rise in screaming flocks. In the evening, a thin little dove perches near me in the fierce sun and wind. She watches me and settles in, until the sun's departure leaves her in chill and she rises into the air.

Nearby Coit Tower

Journey to the Pacific Ocean

From Charles de Gaulle to Zurich, whose airport gleams with sleek wealth and requires of you two passport controls and extra documentation, we take off up and over Europe. Stark snow covers Iceland, her black veins of land and confections of breaking glaciers hovering above smoky water. Then Greenland's black peaks, so solid and elemental, blanked by white. Then Northern Canada of frozen waters, unimaginably rugged and snowy land and ice.

We fly down over the flat brown patchwork of America which gives way to Idaho, to rounds and swirls and bulging creatures of earth, green dragons imprinted by the forking waterways of the fecund land, mountain ranges like millions year old reptiles basking in the extra heat of global warming, their veined horn skin stretched over bony ridges. After the beast comes the beauty, mountains push high and higher out of the whorled land, ranges in high remote kingdoms that proliferate in advancing tribes. The river valleys of green and the brown river snake of Idaho, and snowy rock mountains march across the most beautiful land, the Northwest. Still more pure is Oregon, breathlessly serene mountaintops.

And then Nevada, which leads to the green Cascade mountains, the land's rippling muscle that finally, in the Cental Valley of California, reveals man's ugly imprint, clothed in banal highways and cities, brutally demarcated industrial agriculture. Then, exhausted eyes (after reading several New Yorkers, Economists and a Donna Leon novel during the 11 hour flight) sight the San Francisco Bay. We circle over promontories of swirling browns and reds, like a huge art installation on the California Coast which stretches out along the white flecked Pacific, which nibbles at the crests of green ridges of land. Then the little city of San Francisco, its wooden houses climbing up and down hills, its core of skyscrapers like the heart of Manhattan, Coit Tower, the bubbling land.

A pungent Alaskan air whips through San Francisco and breaks open the foul daze of the airplane air, as I stand under the mocking brilliance of the California sun, waiting for the Super Shuttle. And now we are driving through rush hour traffic in America! But this America still has its original hills, where Monopoly houses stand obediently, and flat industrial neighborhoods sprawl like the old Cannery Row, a familiar little city on an intimate scale. We drive up to the top, where tourists always stand atop the crookedest street, Lombard, and I am soon in my temporary home of solicitous concierges and overflowing palms and azaleas and wisterias. And then a friend and I go out for a walk into the blustering San Francisco wind that chills into darkness. We walk and walk and walk past the somewhat dour natives of this overgrown urban village of striking mansions and unpretentious wooden houses and modern architectural atrocities, on and on till I got home frozen and dazed.

First stage of the journey, completed.

Field Day on Strauss-Kahn

And now for something completely different about my adopted country.  Dominique Strauss-Kahn, darling of the Socialists, sole hope for France against the reviled Sarkozy, throws it all away worse than Bill Clinton! But much worse, because this is attempted rape, not a consensual blow job.  Competent head of the IMF has reverted to being a "rutting chimpanzee"! 

What's with these guys?  She is an African immigrant, a maid at his $3,000 a night suite in New York, and he an aging fonctionnaire walking around in the buff---

Jacques' comment:  So what's new?  The IMF has been screwing Africa all these years--  What else is new?