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

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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"

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Check out Suzie Beringer's work on Instagram: 

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

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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

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June from my window

J