Friday, April 29, 2016

The sound of woodpeckers

   I have been hearing the knocking sounds of woodpeckers for the past couple of weeks around a certain few trees near Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park as I walk in the early morning. I say 'around' a few trees because I really cannot tell exactly where the sounds are coming from, and this morning was the first time I made any real effort to determine a more specific location.
   I have avoided knowing more fully since I am generally there to focus on my walking as a kind of meditation, but also because the idea of not knowing the origin is beautiful to me. I only looked a bit more intently today because I so enjoy seeing woodpeckers.
   I find it interesting, and perhaps a bit contradictory, that I should so embrace the mysterious and unknown the way that I do, as I often find myself creating a knowable routine to give myself a feeling of predictability and security in the world. Whether it is conflicting. or maybe just a sign of more complexity to wish for both the enigmatic and familiar in my life, they seem to fit for me. Perhaps each side allows the other to flourish more fully.

Friday, April 22, 2016

Memories of Lucky Penny

   I saw a penny on the ground while walking in Golden Gate Park a few mornings ago, passing it without a serious thought about picking it up. It was unusual for me that I didn't kneel down to retrieve it, and as I walked on a bit further, I thought about why I hadn't. I have always thought of lost money in the street as being lucky to find, and this could have been a lucky penny.
   As those last two words came to mind, I immediately starting thinking about an old-time neighborhood diner near me and Fernanda's apartment with that name.
   Like so many older and unremarkable restaurants in San Francisco (and I'm guessing many other cities as well, including my home for forty two years, New York City), places like Lucky Penny always seemed somehow like they would be in business forever, though I could never fathom how it had stayed solvent for so long.
   Serving not such great food (although Fernanda always liked their veggie sandwich), The Lucky Penny was wonderful to me for its' true diner feel, filled as it was with an often older and wide cross section of apparent ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds, which I see less and less of as this city continues to attract the wealthier classes. There were always black people there, too, who I have always enjoyed sharing a culture with, but certainly see less here than I did in New York. Although I didn't go there too often, it was reassuring to know that the Lucky Penny was there. It's burgundy colored and sometimes ripped vinyl booth seats seemed like an integral part of a real, traditional diner experience.
   There was something very egalitarian about it for me, seeing all of those different kinds of people together, in one place. If I was there in the morning, the restaurant would often have booths of young people eating off a night of drinking or drugging, as the place was twenty four hours a day, three hundred and sixty five days a year. These people never bothered me, only reminding me of my younger years, and adding to the sense I had of the place as a repository for all.
   I vaguely remember hearing that the Lucky Penny would in fact be closing some time before it actually did, but don't recall if I ever knew the actual date it had been scheduled to do so. I passed it one day as I drove down Masonic Avenue, and it was closed. It was the first time I had ever seen it that way.
   I don't know why I have not written about the closure of this landmark before, nor seemingly even thought to, but it's interesting to me that I was moved to do so by my split second decision not to pick up a potentially lucky penny that morning. Perhaps the loss of that opportunity led to the recollection of another.

Thursday, April 14, 2016

Balboa Sushi House

   The afternoon that I began writing this blog entry I had been walking on Balboa street to buy a nice desert from a Russian bakery near my apartment called Cinderella. The  bakery is located just down the block from my favorite San Francisco Japanese restaurant, Balboa Sushi House, and as I passed the place, I looked in to see if the co-owner, Annie, was available for me to say hello to (I felt badly if I passed by here without at least looking in to smile). There were a few people standing outside the place, and as Annie peeked out for a moment, she saw me and came over to tell me that her husband had died the day before.
   A young man came out to join us, and Annie introduced him to me as her son, just in from their native Korea. Annie hugged me as her son bowed and thanked me, and she proceeded to tell me about her husband's heart attack in the restaurant the night before, how suddenly everything had happened, and that he had too young to die. It was very sad and somewhat unreal to me, as I imagine it was for her, too.
   She went on to thank me for being so nice to her over the years, and told me that she loved me. I didn't know what to say to her when she said that, but I must say that it was really touching. I wondered whether Annie had said those words a bit too easily somehow, as I often question if people really mean it when they say things like that to people that are in some sense strangers, at least in my eyes. I rely didn't know anything about Annie, not even her last name.
   Wondering if I should be feeling those feelings too, I realized then that it had been nearly ten years that Fernanda and I had been going there, and I really did feel a warmth for her in my heart when I would enter her place. My desire to consistently return there was partly for the sushi, but mainly for the warm service and sweet decor, filled as the restaurant was with plants, small figurines and various artwork and mementos from regular patrons.
   Annie, with her colorful clothing, ran the front of the place, while her husband made the food in the back. I had only met her husband once, when he came out from the kitchen to say hello after I had told Annie that I had never actually seen him. Interestingly, when I called to order takeout a couple days before, her husband picked up the phone, which he had never done in the years that I had called there.
   Strange that I had had this encounter with him, only the second verbal exchange in these years, just a couple of days ago, and now he was dead.
   Annie was so gracious with me today as she mourned with friends at the restaurant; I really felt like I meant something to her, even though really just a customer. Perhaps the reason she had told me that she loved me was because she has a lot of love in her.
   She told me that she will be returning to Korea to live. It seems that the strongest ties that she had to San Francisco was her husband, and the restaurant they ran together.
   As I think about Annie and the loss of her husband, I feel that there is less sweetness in my life, too.









 

Saturday, April 9, 2016

On not being here

   Although looking too long into a stranger's eyes has always felt to me like a bit of a potential altercation, I did grow up in a crowded city with an active street life, so people seemed to be looking at and negotiating the surroundings we shared. It may not have been a great space, or perhaps it was one that felt contested, but still it acted as a common denominator for us.
   Although I didn't think about it much back then, many of the same things that impacted me also affected those around me. Even people who were extremely intoxicated or publicly under the influence of drugs seemed to be existing in this shared space more than so many of the people I see contemporarily; smartphones have taken many away.
   The insistent downward attention to technology creates a new public space, but one that seems filled with a kind of ghostly presence. The people that I see appear present physically, but often no more than that. They pass me on the street, though rarely look my way. They seem to be neither completely here nor wholly somewhere else.
   As a person that has often found it hard to see others in a three dimensional way (finding it difficult to take into account other's histories, fears and insecurities), the predominance of smartphone technology in the world we share has made this even harder for me as it relates to strangers; they almost literally strike me as two dimensional in the places that we share.
   I long for the days, though probably remembered ideally, when strangers and I would meet in a shared environment, and although sometimes contested or even antagonisitc, neither could say that we were not completely there.
   Of course, we really are still together, but I do now often feel alone.

Sunday, April 3, 2016

Political people

   This morning as I walked around Stow Lake, so glad to be back to a spot I enjoy so much after a few days away in the mountains, I overheard a snippet of a conversation which got me thinking, giving me fodder for writing this blog entry this morning.
   Spoken by a woman who appears to me a politically progressive person in her late 40's or early 50's that I often see towards the tail end of my walk, she said, "...it shocked me because he's such a political person."
   Of course this was just the smallest part of a dialogue which I was not privy to so have no idea in what sense or context the sentence was uttered, but what I perceived was that the woman was describing a person that she had previously thought was 'political', but who no longer gave her that impression.
   I immediately recalled my younger years and the radical Marxist ideas which I was so interested in, particularly the concept of hegemony as elicited in the writing of Antonio Gramsci. In his work, the concept of the person as a political entity in capitalist societies is hidden, so as to appear natural, allowing the ruling classes to continue their domination.
   As I thought about what I had heard, I imagine that what this woman had been talking about involved this very idea, in that she probably assessed that the person she had spoken of had either lessened their interest in, or ceased to become consciously involved in 'the political'. It appeared to me a classic example of the kind of political recuperation and naturalization that Gramsci felt was so important to address in Marxist theoretical analysis.
   These thoughts had been such an important part of my life for some years, and although I am pretty uninterested in being politically involved for the past half decade or more, I still believe in Gramsci's ideas, and cannot forgot that I am always political.
   Although my ideas of myself have changed and hopefully continue to as I grow older, socially and politically, 'myself' has not.