Cool Gray City of Love (and Lunacy)

As I read Gary Kamiya's Cool Gray City of Love, I'm reminded of my experience as a new mom, exploring the hidden corners of San Francisco with my baby boy napping in a stroller.  (I wrote about many of those explorations in the 2009-2010 posts for this blog.)  I do miss those days.  And yet--do I really wish to return to my old life in San Francisco?

Yes and no.  I will always hold a soft spot in my heart for The City.  Ever since I took Caltrain up from Palo Alto at age seventeen, then rode the 30 Stockton up to North Beach--feeling a tremor of excitement race through me as the bus passed the Jack London birthplace plaque, on the wall of a Well Fargo Bank on 3rd Street; ever since I discovered City Lights (best bookstore ever) and Cafe Puccini (best cappuccinos ever); ever since I moved to a little efficiency apartment at Bush and Jones (on the edge of the Tenderloin or the base of Nob Hill, depending how you looked at it) at age 18, then spent most of the next ten years moving from one rental situation to another, one cafe to another, one poetry reading and bookstore to another.

Kamiya writes about San Francisco with the same enthusiasm I felt in those days and which I still feel to some extent.  He turns something of a blind eye to the noise and dirt, the junkies and the schizophrenics, the filthy rich in their SUVs cruising to the opera, to the latest "hot" bar or restaurant, or to one of their absurdly expensive private schools.  Some would say that those extremes--the homeless and the extravagantly wealthy--are always present in any big city; but in San Francisco in the first part of the new millenium, the extremes are ever more observable, and problematic.  Dozens of homeless sleeping in the Powell Street BART station every night; women in neon-glow evening gowns taking their poodles to the Opera...pedestrians getting rammed by bicyclists, people shouting obscenities as they walk down the street...it gets old.

However--I do understand Kamiya's undying love for San Francisco...and share it, though in my case it's a love tempered with a fair measure of disgust and caution.