TAKE THE BUS

This week we all need something that will help us crack a smile

When we moved to San Francisco, we sold one of our cars, parked the other car in our apartment building's garage, and set out to find public transportation that could give us a view of the city from many perspectives.

While living in New York City, Tokyo, and Paris, we got used to riding public transportation of various kinds, but found buses and bus schedules to be the most confusing. The stops aren't always easy to find, the routes  aren't always clear, and sometimes, the information is written in languages not your own. San Francisco does a pretty good job of making a bus ride easy. The signage is often in several languages, the stops almost always have red plastic covers protecting the seats under them, and the wait for a bus isn't too long.

One of our favorite rides is the Stockton 30, which starts near the Caltrain Depot on King St. in Mission Bay. We can climb aboard the 30 on Townsend St., which is in the historic district near Oracle Park. The area around the street was slated for development with major business offices to replace auto repair shops and tennis courts. The pandemic put a halt to those plans, leaving empty spaces amidst the old brick buildings, with some of the names of former businesses still discernible on the exteriors. Restaurants like Delancey Street and Town's End still operate as does the Local Tap, which has been around under various names since 1938. Many storefronts along the street remain empty.

Once we board the bus, we travel towards Union Square, with it busy plaza where people stop for coffee, listen to music playing, or gather around a table in the sunshine. At the entrances to the square on Stockton, we can see two of the many large HEART sculptures that dot the City. The bus goes past the Apple Store on the corner and the Ruth Asawa fountain next door. We slip through the Stockton Tunnel and arrive in Chinatown, a tourist attraction but also home to many people who crowd the street to reach numerous stalls brimming with fresh vegetables and spices. A turn onto Columbus and the bus passes through North Beach, which used to be called Little Italy. Again, the streets are packed with people and the restaurants, such as Original Joe's, Piccolo Forno and Victoria Pasteria, invite people to eat outdoors and enjoy the action on the street.

There are 44 bus lines in San Francisco. This map shows the routes of just 4 of them.

The 30 turns on to Chestnut Street, another lively neighborhood. Another Apple Store, a bookstore, casual restaurants such as Tacolicious, la Fromagerie, and the Tipsy Pig, and numerous clothing stores survived the pandemic and welcome shoppers including us. One some weekends, music fills the small park near the center of the neighborhood.

As we reach the end of the 30 bus line, we pass Ft. Mason where my favorite art store, Flax, is located in one of the refurbished military buildings and the Marina Green, where we can watch people flying kites and sailing frisbees overhead. We end our bus ride just before we reach the Presidio. One end of the town to the other.

We have just started to explore the 44 bus routes in San Francisco. We keep our eyes out for other bus lines. We've re-discovered well-known neighborhoods such as the Fillmore and Union Street by riding the 22 bus. The 31goes from Townsend near us to the other side of town north of Golden Gate Park to the Richmond District and its thriving street market.

Two other MUNI lines start near the Caltrain Depot. The N Judah, a streetcar, travels from the depot passing under Market Street all the way along the south side of Golden Gate Park to end at Ocean Beach. And the T starts in Chinatown past Moscone Center through Mission Bay past USCF and Dogpatch ending at Bay View and Visitacion Valley. We still haven't ridden these two lines all the way to their other ends, but they are on our list.

Since we started riding buses from one end of town to the other, we have realized that not only do we see much of the city, but we also see how many people of different ages, ethnicities, languages, and behavior inhabit the same 49 mile space that we do and we are richer for that.
 

Enjoy a latte at your favorite cafe. This one is from Blue Bottle in Mission Bay

TALES

Ikigai: iki means Life. Gai means reason  Ikigai: reason to live

The Ingenious Low-Born Noble Don Quixote of La Manche is my all-time favorite novel. I re-read it several times. Not liking the changes he sees around him, Don Quixote begins a quest to bring back chivalry only to discover that people have moved on from his antiquated ideas. His adventures led him to realize the value of people from all walks of life who have adapted to new ways of dealing with the uncertainties experienced every day.

I think of the friends who have gone on a long walk and how they have been enriched by their adventures. They have completed the Camino de Santiago in Spain, hiked the Pacific Coast Trail, or just walked from one end of the Iron Horse Trail in Danville to the other or just around the block. The length of the walk doesn't matter as much as the silence or companionship or alertness these walks bring. Like journaling, a long walk is a way to sort out ideas and aspirations. After reading Walking the Kiso Road by William Scott Wilson, Japan-ophile that I am, I thought of doing the same. The Kiso Road is part of a longer route that spans from Kyoto to Tokyo and is another path taken by wanderers who stay in a different inn each night along the route. I haven't done the walk, but I was glad to share Wilson's experiences while reading the book. It's never too late to dream.

Some journeys are not so much about physical exertion as a way to change mental awareness. In her eighties, Florida Scott-Maxwell wrote her book The Measure of Our Days about life and the effects of aging. At her advanced age, she was still asking questions about the meaning of life. One phrase caught my attention, "Love your strengths." I thought that the second part of that phrase could be "Live through your weaknesses," because so often our weaknesses turn into our strengths.

The novelist Amy Tan has found a new source of inspiration, not so much by walking, but by looking out her windows to observe and draw birds. Her book The Backyard Bird Chronicles is another example of how we can slow down and observe time passing by watching the actions of other creatures, who give us a glimpse into their lives. Through quiet observation, we can find inner joy and a better understanding of how the world works.

Taking a walk can be more than stretching muscles and grabbing fresh air. A walker may quest for insight, sort out spiritual motivations, and reflect on the passage of time. I recently read the novel The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce. Harold Fry sets off on a walk across England to reach a dying old friend and meets people at each stop who open up his compassion and bring new ideas to him. Harold went from bewilderment about his own unexpected choice of walking to making time to listen to the people he meets to despair about his belief that he isn't good enough to complete his journey to acceptance of his past. All are themes that run through our lives.

These books about quests remind me that we all have common desires and questions. That we can all do the unexpected. That we can change and adapt. Throughout our lives, we continue to search for answers. A simple thing to help ourselves: go for a walk.

Some of my favorite books about walking:

The original novel of pilgrimage: Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (if you didn't read this one in college, you may need some help with Middle English)

Robert MacFarlane's The Wild Places

William Scott Wilson's Walking the Kiso Road

Rachel Joyce's The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

Robert Moor's On Trails

Paulette Jiles's News of the World

Elizabeth Farnsworth's A Train Through Time

Kathleen Dean Moore's Wild Comfort

William Glassley's A Wilder Time

Amor Towles's The Lincoln Highway

Read more about Don Quixote here:

https://www.spainthenandnow.com/spanish-literature/cervantes-what-is-it-about-the-title-don-quixote

Check out Brad Andrews' version of a walk:

https://www.shambhala.com/journey-japans-kiso-road/ 

ELEMENTAL

Photo by Bill Slavin

Staying up late gives me a chance to view one of the best times in the City. Out my windows, I can see the fog whispering around the skyscrapers in the distance, wrapping around the Salesforce Tower with its moving lights display. The tall buildings slowly disappear and won't appear again till early morning. The apartments across Mission Creek have a few lights on making sporadic dots along the creek. The last streetcar clangs across the 4th Street bridge and turns the corner on its way to Bay View at the south end of the City. The baseball game is over and only the giant illuminated scoreboard shows what happens in a corner of my window view. The Fourth of July with it myriad fireworks displays that sound like bombs dropping all around us is over. The rush of cars that travel to exit points to cross the Bay Bridge or out to the Peninsula have all gone home. Our neighborhood is quiet. Sounds carry well here, but there is little noise at this time of night even in a dense city such as San Francisco. The unhoused person who sometimes ventures into the park near our building early in the morning and screams to wake us up like a haunted rooster hasn't wondered through yet. Dog walkers and dogs are silent. The waff of Chinese music from the tai chi class won't sound till late morning. The chatter between the class and the man feeding the seagulls near them is still. I pull the shades and climb into bed and sleep like I never did when I was working or busy with responsibilities and worries that occupied my head every night. The quiet in the City is a surprise and a comfort.

Photo by Bill Slavin

************

Check out Eric Rhoads who writes The Sunday Coffee column and who asked readers to answer this question about the two candidates for President:  "Would you trust this person with your grandchildren's lives?"  Something to think about.

https://coffeewitheric.com

WRITING IN CIRCLES

There is always something new to learn. I thought I had heard every art tip out in the world until I took Suzie Beringer's "Once Upon a Circle" Zoom class at this year's International Calligraphy Conference, held in Iowa this year, and why I was on Zoom.

Suzie sat in her art studio surrounded by all her equipment sorted in labeled, plastic containers. Suzie is a meticulous labeler. She says it makes getting to work much easier. Every tool has a small label on it indicating what it is or that it belongs to her. She draws in a journal every day. She buys little porcelain bowls at Daiso to use for mixing colors and metallic powders. She laminates examples of alphabets for easy reference. She uses small synthetic brushes to apply ink to her dip pens. She wears a cotton glove with the tips cut while she works, which keeps the oils from her hand off the paper. She cuts up small pieces of tracing paper and Viva paper towels to streamline her work. To make precise circles, she recommends moving the paper around instead of the drawing compass. These tips were a small portion of what we learned in her class. Suzie, like several people in the class, claimed she wasn't a math wiz. Yet here we all were working with the implements that we once used in geometry.

I've been immersed in design elements all my life (line, shape, color, value, form, texture, and negative and positive space). They are like the multiplication tables, engrained in my memory. "Once Upon a Circle" was the perfect way to begin a refreshment of my own skills in design. In the class, we spent the week working with circles and lettering in ways that I hadn't tried before. The supplies we used included 140# watercolor paper, a drawing compass, circles cut of of Contact Paper, watercolors, permanent ink and dip pens, and pencils of various hardness. Most importantly, we used Free Writing to fill the spaces where we wanted the lettering to go. Free writing, a technique I've used in writing classes and in my writing journals, let's my mind wander as I start with a word and expand from there. As an example, here is a version that came up when I started with the word Explore.

Explore Seek Question Learn Invent Sense Discover 

Be Curious Experiment Blossom Believe Open New Doors

Rough Draft

The larger phrase in the center of the circle came from Pablo Picasso. Using someone else's words in calligraphy bothers me. First, because there is the question of attribution and copyright infringement. The latter isn't important if you aren't selling your work, but why not use your own words instead? Free writing gives me a quick alternative to sifting through my writing for words that inspire me. Again, a good tip from Suzie Beringer to have things on hand before I began.

Rough drafts for words in circles and spirals

We had a great week in the class challenging ourselves to create calligraphy that would fit within the confines of a circular shape. Trying to fit a set group of words around a circle or spiral requires thinking ahead about the space remaining and placing letters so the entire space is utilized. For those of us who weren't math majors, we spent this week doing hidden math work using drawing compasses, protractors, rulers. We needed to find the radius, diameter and circumference of circles as well as measure the space between lines. Fitting the letters so that they looked evenly spaced around the circle became my biggest challenge. More than anything, what that takes is a practiced eye. (and a lot of erasing!)

"Move Towards the Light"

************

Check out Suzie Beringer's work on Instagram: 

https://www.instagram.com/penstrokedesignstudio/

************

Carrie Classon, the wife of one of my cousins, writes a weekly column for various newspapers. This week's column is timely and touching. This link will take you to another page where you must click on another link to see her column. It is well worth the effort.

https://preview.mailerlite.io/emails/webview/341793/125660168277985054

************

June from my window

J

 

CELEBRATIONS

When I heard that Willie Mays had died, tears came to my eyes. I was surprised by my reaction even though I have been a baseball fan all my life. I probably saw Willie Mays play while watching TV with my family when I was young. He might have been in my baseball card collection. He was up there with Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, and Yogi Berra on my favorites list, though I only saw some of the players in replays on TV.

Willie Mays became a well-known figure around Oracle Park, the Giants home in San Francisco, long after he played. The stories of his kindness, generosity, ability to reach out to anyone, and zest for life permeate the ballpark. But I was surprised by my tears until I realized that Willie Mays represented more than baseball. He was one of those people who represents the best of us.

Before signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, President Lyndon Johnson said,

"Those who founded our country knew that freedom would be secure only if each generation fought to renew and enlarge its meaning.

Americans of every race and color have died in battle to protect our freedom.

Americans of every race and color have worked to build a nation of widening opportunities.

Now our generation of Americans has been called on to continue the unending search for justice within our own borders."

We attended the second annual Juneteenth Parade in San Francisco to celebrate the end of slavery in America in 1865. The parade was a joyful gathering of people who watched groups parade down the street showing off custom cars, riding floats, and tossing beaded necklaces so that kids could scamper to catch them. The crowd was alive with joy and laughter as they clapped to the music of drill and dance teams. Again, I was surprised to find tears in my eyes, but I also thought that this is how it should be: a celebration of a time when America made the right choice, a step in continuing to make more choices through the years. I see hope in the celebration, but Johnson's words from 1965 are just as important today. We need to get back to the basics of helping people, being kind, and working to widen opportunities for everyone. The Fourth of July is another holiday when we can reflect on the importance of democracy and freedom. 

I'm in for making our country a better place for everyone. Aren't you?

Cavallo Point faces the Golden Gate Bridge. A former Army camp, the property has become a park, boat launching pad, fishing spot, hotel, and restaurant. A place where folks who drive Cadillac's CTV come to compare and show off their cars. A place for everyone.

Check out the complete speech that President Johnson gave:

https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/july-2-1964-remarks-upon-signing-civil-rights-bill

A group from the Gerald Ford Foundation and the Jimmy Carter Center have devised a pledge they are asking any person running for office to sign:

https://principledcandidates.org/aboutus/ 

Happy Fourth of July!

URBAN LIFE

Flaneur: the French word for a cool, aloof observer of urban life

Do you know someone who fits that description? Are you? If you've eaten in an older Parisian cafe, you could be a flaneur because the mirrors placed at table level all around the room allow you to glance at other patrons. If you have watched any of the Bridgerton series, you will recognize the promenade of the upper class in the city parks who want to be seen by others. You may notice a solitary figure there who is amused by the sight. Today, few people have the time or interest to be part of such a parade, but if you spend time on social media, you could be today's version of a flaneur.

I think of myself as a flaneur when I bring out my sketchbook, and my new fountain pen, and try to catch the expressions or appearance of someone nearby. I'm also a window flaneur. From our eighth-floor windows, I can see a tai chi group that meets every weekday morning. I watch as they slowly move from one pose to another and swing their swords around them. I notice the young couple in morning sweats with their dog hopping along beside them as they jaywalk across the street. The man sitting on the park bench each morning feeding the seagulls reminds me of the old woman in the movie Mary Poppins who sits and feeds the birds. Often I see groups of girls walking briskly down the path, phones out, yoga mats tucked under their arms, ready for their morning workout.

When I walk into a cafe in our neighborhood, I see rows of people with the same posture, hunched over their computers, their backs to the windows or walls. Their common concentration on their screens reminds me of old movies with views of business offices where numerous clerks sit at desks working over typewriters in unison, the motion of their hands on the keys like an orchestra making music together.

I don't think of myself as cool or aloof, but I do enjoy observing urban life and recording what I see. Drawing from above everyone is a challenge that I'm just beginning to try. The perspective is very different than the one I see when I am sitting in a cafe observing other people on the same plane as I am. My drawings are awkward as I try to understand the difference. From my seat at ground level, I capture my delight in the wagonloads of toddlers being transported to the Children's Park across the street from our apartment. 

CHANGE IN THE WEATHER

Day one of the first heat wave:

I used to love the first day of an early heat wave in the East Bay with still enough moisture in the air to be manageable unlike summertime when the temperature stays above 100 degrees for days and sucks the moisture out of the air and energy out of my body. During the first day of the first heat wave, I got on my gardening clothes and my clogs and relished digging in the garden when it was 90 degrees. I liked the heat on my back and the sweat that came as I worked to pull out dead plants and replace them with new ones. That first day brought the knowledge that California's rainy season was over. When I finished, I liked to stand in the shade admiring my work as a slight breeze wafted across the yard.

Day two of a heat wave:

Enough of the heat. I pulled the shades and windows closed till late afternoon. I stayed inside in darkened rooms hoping that the heat would cool down at sunset as it often does in California. I was in an endurance race with heat that drained me, and I dreamt of sitting in a metal tub of cold water like my sister and I used to do as children.

I don't miss gardening (except when I step into a friend's lushly planted garden by the Carquinis Straits) or when I walk through the plant selection in a gardening store. (What am I doing in a gardening store when we have no place to plant a plant?)  I don't miss the upkeep of a big house. Our apartment with two bedrooms, two baths, kitchen and living room is just the right size for now (but without a room for a studio or a balcony for outside sitting). 

Our new place will have sunny windows that will give us a place for a plant or two. I carried two indoor plants from our old house throughout our moves this year. One, an Areca Palm, has been with us for almost 30 years and is a survivor. I had to place it outside our old house because our cats loved to chew on its leaves. The plant stayed under an overhang, facing east, all year long through freezing cold and heat waves. It has adapted well to indoor life in San Francisco throwing out new shoots and flower buds. If you look closely at the palm, you will also see the remains of a bird's nest tucked into the middle of the stalks of the plant. A finch attempted a nest there for several years. All that is left is the carefully constructed nest. I've thought of re-potting the plant but decided against it. It is doing fine without my meddling.

We are coming up to a year of being vagabonds. We sold our house last June, wandered to the beach for a while, considered Minnesota and Colorado, moved to San Francisco, bought a condo, traveled to Portland, and discovered a city that might be a better place for us or maybe even Seattle, which made us think over our San Francisco decision for a minute.

We are glad we have had the time to consider and discover where and what we want at this point in our lives. We are staying right here in the Bay Area. If I'm repeating some themes in my posts lately, it is because we continue to rethink our priorities, interests, and assumptions each week, each day. Just like during the days of the heat wave, our minds are contemplating the good and bad of each decision. A couple of friends suggested that we have carried our home on our backs like snails and turtles and that we will make a home wherever we decide to stay.