Long Day

With a baby to care for, and to feed at least three times a night, day blends into night and back into day...in other words, time takes on a different quality, and life takes on a distinctly different rhythm. I don't know quite how to describe it. It's not that time has stopped, or that one day blends into the next. But the old demarcations between the different dates on the calendar seem to have softened. The individual days require so much energy that I can't quite focus on individual dates. Also, each hour of the day has its own character--much more so than before. Five o'clock in the morning (if my baby wakes me up then) is invariably grim; seven-thirty (if my baby has allowed me to sleep in a little) is much, much better, and sometimes delightful. Four o'clock is often when baby is tired and I feel restless--a good time for one of our quiet strolls through the city, when the little guy sleeps and I let my thoughts wander.

Today at four o'clock we were in the Lower Haight, near Duboce Park and Fillmore Street. I stopped at an old soft brown and gold-colored Victorian house to admire the architecture; when I inquired, the man sweeping the sidewalk in front of it told me its history. Apparently it was constructed by distant relatives of Mayor Gavin Newsom's, in the late 19th century. What was perhaps more interesting was to hear that I was passing through the "Mint Hill" neighborhood. A tiny subsection of the Lower Haight, Mint Hill (named for the old Mint that used to be nearby) consists of the houses between Fillmore and Buchanan, and between Haight and Hermann. This sort of very local history intrigues me, just as the very old history of San Francisco (the Spanish explorers) has its own attraction--these histories that are almost, but not quite, lost. The man sweeping the sidewalk seemed to identify still with his neighborhood as "Mint Hill"--and I can understand why--the houses in that area are well-maintained and perhaps not quite as gaudy as in other parts of the Haight. But he said that the old Mint Hill neighborhood association has been subsumed by the Lower Haight neighborhood assocation; so in twenty years, the name "Mint Hill" might be known only to a few of the people that live there.

What really marked this day, however, was the devastating news about a friend of mine, about what happened to her child. I cannot write about it more directly than that, at this point in time. Suffice it to say that hearing this news this morning, I kept thinking all day what a remarkable, remarkable blessing it is to have, not just children, but loved ones, any loved ones at all, in one's life--and to know that they are happy and healthy.