Dime Store Aesop

Today, Bella, Shelby and I took our trice-weekly trip to our favorite park. As we made our way up the hill, Shelby disappeared into a thicket, following some scent or other, and emerged with a slight limp. A cursory examination revealed a thorn stuck in his front paw, which I removed. I can only hope that some day, when I am thrown into the arena to be devoured by small dogs, Shelby will remember this favor, and spare me.

Later, on our way down the hill, we ran into a boy who had gotten separated from his mother and couldn't find his way back to where he left her. After some consultation, we determined that he had two dogs at home, had been somewhere near the top of Corona Heights before he got lost, and had followed me in the hopes that I would know where to go. So, we decided we should walk back up the hill together to see if we could figure out where his people were. Then I remembered that I had my cellphone, and we called his mother and arranged for a rendezvous. And so everyone was happily reunited.

Then, when me and the dogs were making our way home, I stepped on Bella's paw, causing her to yelp like a harpooned seal. I will not be spared in the arena, after all.

Weird.

Just a few minutes after our dinner guests left tonight, Brian and I heard what sounded like someone screaming. Brian ran outside, I called the police. When they arrived (4 cars!), no one was to be found. Brian says he heard someone yelling up the street from us, then nothing. We both heard them say, "Help." Brian heard them say, "Leave me alone."

Living in the city, you get used to hearing scraps of other people's lives, their drunken yells and their early morning car doors. But this cry was weird. It reminded me of the coyotes we used to hear some nights when we lived in Vermont. It was so distorted that we couldn't agree if it was a man or a woman.

The police didn't find anyone, though. Which makes me wonder if we made the whole thing up. Maybe it was someone who'd had too much to drink, and didn't want their friends to walk them home. Maybe it was a couple having a fight. But the weird thing is how strange it makes the nighttime street seem no longer like a friendly block of people and dogs and stained-glass makers, but instead a wall of houses, where every dark window could hide a secret danger.

I Probably Don't Really Want to Do This

But I kinda really do.

Too darn

It's hot. I always say that I miss the summer heat but really? Not so much. Not when it's actually here. The only times I like it are a: after dark, and b: when we're here in Brian's basement. Speaking of the Brian: how many times can he watch the same Sopranos episode? A: a lot.

This is becoming an annual tradition: the weather's hot for a few days, and I write a blog post about how we San Franciscans have a deal with the Powers That Be: a few earthquakes, the occasional heaping of scorn from the Bible Belt, and in return we get weather that hardly ever falls below 50 or rises above 70. Is that too much to ask?

Apparently.

I've been trying to casually work this into a blog post, but it just won't cooperate.

So there's this urban legend I heard once, about this woman who's in an ice cream shop when she notices Jack Nicholson is standing next to her. She plays it cool, completes the ice-cream-for-money exchange, and heads outside -- only to discover that she no longer has her ice cream with her. As she's standing there trying to figure out what on earth has happened, Jack Nicholson walks out of the shop, sidles up to her and whispers, "It's in your purse."

So anyway, last Tuesday found me in the airport, passport and boarding pass in hand, waiting for my delayed flight to Vancouver. I'd just left an embarrasingly smooshy face message on Brian's voicemail when I truned around to discover myself right next to a small family who'd just disesmbarked from the plane I was going to take up to Canada & were sorting out their strollers and such. The mother looked familiar. I checked out the baby. Familiar. I checked out the dad. Familiar.

Ohmigod, y'all. It was Maggie Mason.

I stood there, openmouthed for a moment or so, then rushed away, all star struck and much too shy to say "helloIhaveyourbookandwowyouguysarecuteinreallife." And then I spent fifteen minutes trying to figure out what on earth I'd done with my passport (I'd stuck it between the pages of my book in all the excitement).

In other news, The Ice Cream for Money Exchange is totally the name of my new band.

A good weekend, so far

Friday, Brian and I went for a walk along the beach. The sand was full of ladybugs and washed-up jellyfish, and we had to walk carefully to avoid them.



Then my cousin Molly picked me up and we caught the Marie Antoinette exhibit at the Legion of Honor (just in time, too -- it ends this weekend) and went for a ramble down by the ruins of the Sutro Baths.


(Which are, by the way, one of my favorite places in San Francisco).


Then we went to see one of Hope's friends sing at the Savannah Jazz club down in the mission. I drank French Martinis and ate fried plantains and felt very grown up.

Then today Hope and I went to the farmer's market and then birdwatching, and we ate the yummiest fennel and beet dinner ever, if I do say so myself. And the grass at Heron's Head was just so pretty, I had to take a picture. There were some ducks nearby, but my cellphone just wasn't up to wildlife photography.

Fort Fun!

It was marvelously sunny today, so we headed out to one of our favorite city parks:



There were four of us: Hope, Brian, the dog, and me. Hope's car is a two-seater by nature, but has this teensey vestigial back seat that I folded myself into for the trip. I had to sit sideways with my seatbelt wrapped awkwardly around me and my feet wedged against the opposite wall, but at least I had a decent view of the dog, who was sitting cozily on Brian's lap in the passenger seat up front.



At Fort Funston, Re Dag (the dog) and I played ball in the surf while Brian and Hope went for a run. The tide was coming in and washing sand and sea water against my bare toes, and I called my parents up to inquire about the weather they were having. I didn't let on that I'd overheard at the farmer's market earlier today that it was snowing in Boston.



Finally, Re Dag and I, both soaked to the skin, met up with Brian and Hope by the stairs leading up to the hang gliders' launch point. We heaved ourselves back up the hill to the car, where Re Dag fell asleep on Brian's lap, and I tracked sand through the nonexistent backseat.




The end.

Marching with Milk

IMG_5151
Originally uploaded by sfjim123

I'm in the bottom left of this photo, taken during the filming of some protest scenes for the Milk movie last night. If you click on the photo, it takes you to a larger version & you can see my orange poncho.

I Heart Milk

Right now, they're filming Milk, a movie about the life and death of Harvey Milk, on location here in San Francisco. Certain parts of three blocks of Castro street have been made over for the movie, with storefronts returned to their 1970s facades, and era-appropriate cars parked on either side of the street.

It's a funny effect -- fliers and signs from 1974 visible in one store window, while next door Gay Porn DVDs and erotic devices Barbarella herself could have never imagined sit proudly on display. Walking down Castro street the other day with Brian, I was reminded of one of my favorite passages from Civilization and Its Discontents, where Freud describes the mind as being like a city where nothing is ever torn down.

...in Rome the palaces of the Caesars and the Septizonium of Septimus Severus would still be rising to their old height on the Palatine and that the castle of S. Angelo would still be carrying on its battlements the beautiful statues which graced it until the siege by the Goths, and so on. But more than this. In the palace occupied by the Palazzo Caffarelli would once more stand -- without the Palazzo having to be removed -- the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus; and this not only in its latest shape, as the Romans of the Empire waw it, but also in its earliest one, when it still showed Etruscan forms and was ornamented with terra-cotta antefixes. Where the Coliseum now stands we could at the same time admire Nero's vanished Golden House. On the Piazza of the Pantheon we should not only find the Pantheon of today, as it was bequeathed to us by Hadrian, but, on the same site, the original edifice erected by Aggrippa; indeed, the same piece of ground would be supporting the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and the ancient temple over which it was built. And the observer would perhaps only have to change the direction of his glance or his position in order to call up the one view or the other.

Here in San Francisco, perhaps because it's my adopted home and therefore one I'm less likely to take for granted, I often feel like I'm catching glimpses of other eras, walking on streets downtown where there are shipwrecks in the landfill beneath the cobblestones or passing the spot on Ashbury street where Charles Manson and the Grateful Dead were once neighbors with a convent of French nuns (only the nuns still remain). Seeing the past made real on Castro this week is an odd sort of delight, a sense of a world made new and old again at once, and a reminder that our lives, our pasts, do not perish entirely, so long as time and memory conspire to keep us present in the people and objects that take our place.