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.