The changes in the seasons are minimal in San Francisco. Like in Spring, the weather slips back and forth from the heat of summer to chilly weather with just a taste of autumn in the wind. This year, before the trees turned brilliant fall colors, a strong wind and rainstorm blew most of the leaves down. The brownish leaves skittered across the streets and sidewalks and piled up against the buildings.

We've noticed in our neighborhood that the sun becomes the main indicator of change. The sun has shifted to be more northeast than straight east in the morning. We are getting reflected light from skyscrapers through our windows in the morning that the sun hasn't touched before and we see the long, dark shadows created by the slant of the sun in the afternoon.

One of my aunts kept track of the weather each day. She and my uncle were farmers so that was important information for them. I keep track of other things: what I eat, my weight, books I've read, and movies we've watched. Like my aunt, doing something on a daily basis works for me.  Time and the changes that come with it are threads that run through my art and writing.

This week I decided to take objects from my collection of art supplies and pieces of nature I've picked up and do a drawing or painting each day for 30 days. I want to concentrate on the shadows because the shadows are often the most interesting mix of colors. I am keeping each design simple so that I can complete the painting or drawing in one sitting. Creating a good painting, for me, depends on a good drawing underneath.

Crows live in San Francisco and they also seem to have daily practices. Usually, we see solitary ones perched on light poles or on the railings on the Embarcadero. In the last weeks of October as the sun began to set, masses of crows started circling in a wide aerial path through the city. They landed for a few minutes on the billboard north of us or stood on the edges of roofs. They are more than a murder of crows, more like a dark storm, as they sweep through the spaces between skyscrapers. They are not as disciplined as a murmuration of starlings because they don't follow a leader or a pattern of flight. Our first sighting made both of us anxious as they plunged and cawed near our windows. Was this an invasion?

At 5:30 P.M. they all land for a few moments and then just as mysteriously as they arrived, they are gone. We wonder where they go at night and why they have suddenly started circling the city. As night falls earlier and earlier, we can still see them start to gather and hear their caws, but by 5:30 it is dark and we can't see the crows circle through the city anymore. Time and change are always constant.

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If you care about gun safety and violence, you could work on a project to complete 30 origami boxes in 30 days. You will be participating in the Soul Box Project.

See one column of many of the boxes here:  https://www.instagram.com/p/C6IO996Lllb/?hl=en 

or on Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/soulboxproject/

 

30 DAYS ON A CREATIVE WALK

Collaged by M. M. from my cut-up watercolors

A group of friends sat at lunch recently. We were discussing the changes in ordinary things from earlier years to today. We noted the difference from clocks with hands to digital watches and the use of credit cards instead of paper money. Our comments began with how easy these changes have made our lives. Then we remembered our own childhood and our time raising children and how analog clocks and paper money helped teach time, fractions, and the value of money. Without a clock with hands how do you explain what time looks like, or what parts of an hour mean? Without paper money, how do you explain the value of money, setting budgets, and counting? Suddenly we were thinking of creative responses to our questions and we wondered how teachers now explain something that is so simple and so fundamental without using the tools we had.

We all are creative thinkers, every day. Every time we ask ourselves the question, "What if...?", we are using our creative thinking skills. Our culture tends to relegate creativity to a group of people who are artists, musicians, dancers, or writers, but we are all problem solvers. Scientists, inventors, cooks, plumbers, doctors, and all human beings employ creative thinking skills. Otherwise, we would all be still sitting around fires and living in caves. Oh, that took someone with a little creativity to figure those two actions out too.

30 Days of Creativity by D. W.

I recently gave a talk about creative thinking and presented the group with a set of exercises to show that they don't have to be an artist to be creative. We all have that creative drive within us. We just need to practice it. I hope you give these exercises a try.

1. An exercise that came from the Peace Corps. How many ways can you think of to use a tin can?

2. Take a walk and observe what is around you. Do you see a space in your neighborhood for a small park? What would you add to the space to make it an inviting place? If you walk in your downtown, is there a plaza that doesn't draw people in? What woul you do to change that plaza to make it a place where people want to congregate?

These two exercises are fun to do, and even more fun to do with other people. Creative thinking is often more productive in collaboration. Someone will almost always come up with a new idea. One of those AHA moments we all have.

30 Days of Creativity by F. C.

Rules for the next exercise:

There are NO Rules!

Take a blank calendar and in one of the squares once a day for a month, doodle, write, and use your imagination to fill the squares with whatever wanders through your mind that day. I hope you will be surprised at the end of the month with the results. If you don't like what you have made, you are becoming a more creative thinker. Being creative means dealing with failures and mistakes. Creative people learn to move past failures because they often fail. That's one of the pivotal points of creative thinking. What do you do with your failure? Start over? Reimagine what you made?

I often end up with watercolors that I don't like. My solution is to cut the watercolor into one-inch squares (there's a satisfaction in that act), toss them around together and make a new arrangement with the small squares.  Several of my adaptions from ugly paintings have been selected for gallery shows. They have let me let go of that critical voice we all have.

What would you make from all of these Inches?

Two sites for blank calendars:

https://www.wiki-calendar.com/download/Blank-Calendar.pdf

https://www.saturdaygift.com/wp-content/uploads/Blank-calendar-grid-templates-free-printable-landscape-SaturdayGift.pdf 

A REMINDER OF FREEDOM

A kite from Ai WeiWei's exhibit seen through a broken window

The foghorns echoed throughout our apartment on the morning we decided to go to Alcatraz. I had been to the island in 2014 when the Chinese artist Ai WeiWei's exhibit was installed, but Bill had never been.  The comments by Trump about opening up the prison again motivated us to go. The National Park Service runs Alcatraz, the former notorious prison. We wondered if the government shutdown would affect our visit.

We purchase ticket earlier in the week during our San Francisco sunny, warm "summer" at the end of October. It is now November and the foghorns reminded us how quickly weather can change on the San Francisco Bay. All we could see out of our windows were skyscrapers wrapped in fog. The Bay has disappeared, but we decided to give Alcatraz a try.

We boarded the ferry, looked out towards the Bay, still covered in a wall of fog. As the ferry moved though, the fog receded in front of us so that by the time we got to the island, the sun was shining down on us. Our luck had changed.

Alcatraz crumbles more with each wind-blown rainstorm. The prison cells still stand at the peak of the island, but the decay is evident all around. Toilets and sinks in cells are broken, windows are cracked, some buildings are nothing but rubble. In 2014, Alcatraz became the perfect place for WeiWei's exhibit, which wandered through the crumbling buildings. At the time WeiWei was being persecuted by the Chinese government for his outspoken creative views. The Ai WeiWei installations on Alcatraz expressed ideas about freedom and incarceration, and the constraints on freedom of speech because of censorship. Though the WeiWei exhibit is long gone from the island, the memory of the messages remain in my mind. Alcatraz, a place with all of its history of incarceration, brutality, and censorship, made that exhibit twice as powerful -- similar to walking through the shadows of Auschwitz where that history still lingers in every brick and corner.

The Recreation Yard at Alcatraz

After listening to the National Park employee explain the rules for tourists, we walked towards the steep trail that leads to the top where the prison cells are located. A sign diverted our attention and led us to an exhibit about the Native American occupation of the island in 1969. The stories of the takeover filled several rooms and explained the island's previous history as a military prison for conscientious objectors in WWI, rebellious Chinese immigrants, and Native peoples who were unwilling to move to reservations or allow their children to attend the so-called Indian schools that tried to erase native tribe cultures.

The new exhibit was a truth-teller, a surprise to me after I had read that many, more comprehensive versions of our history are being removed from other nationally supervised places, such as at the Smithsonian. The exhibit shows how the Alcatraz takeover by the All Tribes group helped to develop unity among native tribes, and publicized the history of Native peoples since the migration of Whites from our eastern shores. The stories include the removal and attempts at genocide of Native Tribes and the destruction of their cultures. A summary of what the year and a half occupation by the All Tribes achieved concluded the exhibit. The island occupiers became leaders in their communities, championing the ways of native peoples, showing reslience and the importance of peaceful, non-violent actions. Today, we see some of the results of takeovers in our recognition of who lived on the land before America, the return of land to various tribes, and, recently, the removal of four dams on the Klamath River that helped salmon return to their original spawning grounds while restoring an eco-system that been lost because of the dams. The exhibit, like the WeiWei exhibit, explored themes of freedom, incarceration, and censorship, whose ideas are just as timely and powerful as they were in 2014. We still have much to do.

Article about the 50th Anniversary Celebration of the All-Tribes Occupation:

https://www.parksconservancy.org/park-e-ventures-article/alcatraz-occupation-anniversary-stories-first-person-native-american-rights-indians-of-all-tribes

General history of Alcatraz

https://www.bop.gov/about/history/alcatraz.jsp

Because of the development of the Red Power movement, land has been returned to Native people as well as the removal of dams on the Klamath River, Watch the videos to see how the dams were de-constructed:

https://news.mongabay.com/2024/10/largest-dam-removal-ever-driven-by-tribes-kicks-off-klamath-river-recovery/ 

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I have resided on Tongva, Tamien-Ohlone, and Miwok land in California, and Lenape land in New York City.

COFFEE AND BOOKS

photo by Bill Slavin

Early in his career, Bill worked on a consulting job for the U.S. Post Office, with the result that for the next couple of years, whenever we visited a new town, we would drive around to the back of the post office to view the loading docks. Yes, a quirky thing to do on vacation. This past weekend, we spent a relaxing time in Pacific Grove and Carmel, walking along the Coastal Recreational Trail, taking photos of waves crashing into the rocks along the way, and watching the seagulls, pelicans, and plovers fly about the sandy beaches.

We spent the rest of our time looking for comfortable places to sit since we brought a stack of books and magazines to read. We walked up and down the Pacific Grove streets to see what had changed since our last visit and then headed to one of our favorite places, the town's bookstore and cafe, The Bookworks on Lighthouse Avenue. We wandered through the bookstore with its good selection of books, including a wall of classics aimed at younger readers with Winnie the Pooh, Mary Poppins, and John Steinbeck nestled together. We found a couple of interesting books to add to our waiting stack, walked back into the cafe, grabbed a cup of coffee, and opened up a book to read for a while.

Besides the post office, bookstores are always on our list of things to do while we are out of town. We have found wonderful independent stores such as Bookshop Santa Cruz and also the smaller Two Birds Books in Santa Cruz, as well as a local coffee house, Cat and Cloud. In Carmel, we head to River House Books, which is right next door to Carmel Valley Roasting Company, a good place for a cup of coffee. The original owners of the bookstore recently retired, but the store was purchased by the Lulu Chocolates owners, right next door to the cafe, who have kept the store's tradition of books we can't find anywhere else. How can a reader lose with coffee, chocolate, and books all together in one place?

On our way home to San Francisco, we stopped in Menlo Park at Cafe Borrone, a large cafe next to a sunlit plaza with plenty of seats under colorful umbrellas. Right next to the cafe is Kepler's Books, a store we frequented when we were first married and living in Mountain View nearby. Kepler's is still the best with its large selection of interesting books and themes to choose from. Within the store, tables were set up with displays of banned books, best books from several different decades, as well as shelves of manga with their complex illustrations.

Bill and I sat at Borrone and joked about how our vacations used to be full of physical adventures, such as skiing, cycling, and sailing, but this time we realized we needed a rest from our vagabond existence of the last couple of years. Sitting in a comfortable chair with a good book, a piece of chocolate or pastry, and a coffee was just the right antidote for us this past weekend. We didn't even drive around the back of the local post office.

In Santa Cruz:

https://bookshopsantacruz.com

https://twobirdsbooks.com/about-us/ 

https://catandcloud.com

In Pacific Grove:

https://www.bookworkspg.com 

In Carmel:

https://carmelcoffeeroasters.com     

https://thecrossroadscarmel.com/shopping/river-house-books/   

In Menlo Park:

https://www.cafeborrone.com

https://www.keplers.com

 

A MANY-SIDED COIN

"Under the Influence of Ben Shahn" by M. Slavin

Last Saturday was a beautiful day to be outside. The sun was brilliant,  and the wind didn't roll down the streets to whip around our faces. Even the weather seemed to be supporting us as we marched toward San Francisco's Civic Center. 

As Bill and I moved with the joyful, peaceful No Kings crowd, we decided to shift to the edge of the marchers so that we could find a place to sit for a while. A young Latino walked towards us, looking at the marchers, and muttered, "It's all White people."

If I had the wherewithal, I would have stopped to ask him about what he meant, but from an early age, I'd learned, as a small woman, not to stop to talk with strangers in any city. I'm still thinking about his comment. He was mostly right. The crowd was majority White, but other ethnicities filled the streets too. Or maybe he was expressing the same idea that the 92% Black women who voted in 2024 might be thinking, "We told you so!" or maybe he was a Trump supporter and didn't like the large crowd.  Or he could easily be resentful of our White privilege to be able to freely walk the streets in protest while people of color are being dragged from Home Depot parking lots, from their homes, and off the streets. I wish I had asked him what he meant.

As we walked home, we turned the corner onto the Embarcadero and merged with a large group of young people clustered at the corner of Mission and Embarcadero. They were not part of the march; instead, they all stared down at their phones, moved in unison down the Embarcadero, and stopped in front of the Google office just past Folsom. A virtual scavenger hunt was in progress. So focused on their screens, they barely looked up as we passed them to catch the streetcar.

At our stop, we looked back at the Bay Bridge and saw a long, slow line of cars coming into the City across the Bay Bridge, and wondered what else was going on that would bring so many people in. We watched as several sailboats came into the docks near Oracle Park. When we got home, we ran into a few residents carrying protest signs. We all expressed our enthusiasm for being part of something so huge and so peaceful as that day's march, and also wondered among ourselves what the next step would be.

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Ben Shahn is one of my favorite artists. He was alive and working on artwork from World War I to the end of the 1960s. His art contained images of Sacco and Vanzetti, union workers, and other protest figures. His calligraphy is a style that is popular now among calligraphers. The Jewish Museum in New York City has a retrospective of his work until this Sunday. If you can, go see it. You will see a different view of our history.

https://thejewishmuseum.org/exhibitions/ben-shahn-on-nonconformity/ till October 26

Shirley Chisholm, Ophra, Ida B. Wells, and Ruby Bridges, all Black women who made their mark in history and fought for equality, voting rights, and inclusion. Find out more about them:

https://blackwomenvote.com/about 

https://www.today.com/popculture/celebrate-black-history-4/black-women-in-history-rcna12963

RAINY DAY CHANGE

 

Seen on the Street: Ghost leaves after the rain

We had weather yesterday! It feels like fall, finally. Rain hit our windows and streaked down to the ground. Rain in October in California, just a hint of what's to come. After our dry-as-usual summer, rain is welcome in the state. Rain can be celebrated until we end up with one of those torrents that wreak havoc with neighborhoods and landscapes. But today is a good day for a little rain and a good day to find a good book to read.

I am behind in my reading. I picked up Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, which was published several years ago and has already been made into a movie. But it is worth the read. The main character is a woman and a chemist, and her story includes all the prejudices and misogynistic behavior that women have endured, especially while seeking a career in what was considered a male profession. The book reminded me of a college friend, one of three women at a tech college. She was first in her class in engineering. When she applied for graduate school, if she put down her first initials with her last name, S. A. Smith, she received numerous positive responses. When she included her full name on applications, Susan A. Smith, she got no response at all. Lessons in Chemistry is still relevant today and a good reminder of the rights of women that are being lost. On my list of favorite books for this year.

Other books that caught my eye include Olivia Hawker's The Ragged Edge of Night. I've had my fill of World War II novels, but I couldn't resist this one. It's a novel based on the true story of the grandfather of the author's husband, and what he did as a German living in a small village in Germany during the war.

I needed some uplifting this fall and turned to We Are the Change We Seek, the Speeches of Barack Obama. His words are a good reminder of the promise of America, of our ability to learn from our past and to overcome dark and difficult periods in our history.

Louise Penny is one of my favorite mystery writers and I am giving her more credit because she is a Canadian who has spoken out about the direction America is heading. I've missed several of her latest books. She is prolific. Her characters, Inspector Armaud Gamache, the police officers who he has carefully chosen to work with, and the quirky people who live in Three Pines still entertain. Penny reminds me a little of Alice Hoffman since she imbues the world in her stories with threads of history and a life force running through the natural elements of her story.

Two other recommendations:

Ten Birds That Changed the World by Stephen Moss

Charlatans: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Hucksters Bamboozle the Media, the Markets, and the Masses by Moise Naim and Quico Toro

CITY SOUNDS

"Mark Making" for my first Inktober exercise

October marks two years since we moved into San Francisco, halfway through five moves after we sold our house in the suburbs. We don't miss our house and all the work entailed in keeping it in good shape. We have been on an adventure exploring different parts of the city, some of them familiar, others, new discoveries for us. We travel as much as possible by public transit.

The 22 Bus opened its doors, and we stepped out, expecting to hear all the noises of a city. Instead, at the stop in front of Galileo High School, we heard stone silence. Not a rumble of a bus, not a car gunning past us, no fire engines or police cars, no shouts from people walking on the street. We were stunned by the lack of noise. We expected to hear the calls of birds at least, but even they were silent.

The 22 Bus goes from Mission Creek through UCSF, with stops at Valencia and Fillmore streets, and ends near Chestnut Street on Laguna in the Marina. Two- and three-story stucco houses line the narrow streets crossing Laguna. Some of the streets have trees lining the walkways, while others are just concrete paths through a city. We miss the sweet chirping of small birds, such as finches and sparrows, that are so prevalent in the suburbs. We expected to hear them in the street trees near the bus stop, but all we heard was silence instead.

We used to belong to Cornell's Feeder Watch, and we spent time counting the different species of birds that landed in our former backyard. Counting birds is much easier to do in South Beach, where we now live, because there are so few birds. In the Spring, we hear finches calling out to prospective mates, and some street trees fill with their chatter during the Summer. If we step across the Embarcadero to the wharves, we can watch seagulls circle and circle, then squawk as they make a landing between the docks where the halyards of sailboats clang in the wind.

When we first moved into the city, we were surprised by the large flocks of crows. In Danville, more and more crows had moved in, battling with solitary hawks for food and nesting. But the city didn't seem an inviting place for crows. Lately, though, they have been banding together at sunset. They line the edge of the roof of the brick building across the street, then fly up to the huge billboard that faces the Bay Bridge. Restless, they disappear with sunset.

Doves used to nest in the porch eaves at our old house. Their relatives, pigeons, are city birds and feast on any scrap dropped on the ground. We watched as an older man flung down torn pieces of bread, instead of feeding using birdseed, a mistake that many of us make. The pigeons didn't care and gobbled up every crumb.

Occasionally, we see a hawk sailing high overhead or a group of pelicans skimming the water on the bay. Both of these birds are keystone species, as predators that influence their environment.

We notice the absence of birds because we came to enjoy their presence. In the city, we don't hear woodpeckers, another keystone species. At our former home, we regularly heard their rapid tapping as they made holes around the trunk of a birch while they sought insects for a meal. The holes became home for other species as well as a way to keep insect populations in check.

Several weeks ago, I published a post called "Keystones." Since then, I've been working on an illustration for the essay, which will be published this month in Story Circle Network's Substack called True Words from Real Women. But now, I need to figure out a way to add keystone birds to my drawing. October is also Intober, a challenge to do an ink drawing each day of the month.

by Martha Slavin

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Check out the prompts for Inktober and pick up a pen:

https://inktober.com

You can help count the birds in your area. Join Cornell's Feeder Watch:

https://feederwatch.org