my free advice - care of “Free Advice.” Now go outside and play in the molten nectar, already.
Free Advice is a service of my good friend Eliza Bombela. Wear it in good health.
The notebook returns to my hands with a simple surety that buttresses my spirit as I was not aware it so needed to be buttressed. It feels good to sit and scrawl again, fighting distraction, inertia and the jostles of traffic, a sense of homecoming inscribing itself on my soul. Back to basics. Return of the native. May it ever be so. Anyway, may it be so again soon.
For this morning I’m saying goodbye to four very different things. From the strengh in me gleaned from this bundle of spiral-bound college rule I’m clutching, let me now acknowledge the following things now gone from me:
1. Climate nerds already know what I’m saying here is true, and the rest of you will have to take it on faith: summertime in SF is often the opposite of summer. Cold fog rolls in wind-driven fists under pewter skies and there’s a chill that soaks right down to the bone. Summer arrived on the evening of June 20 this year, but even had I no calendar I’d have known the exact day it happened. That’s because I had occassion to visit the Crissey Field area of the Presidio on four consecutive days, at about the same time of day. The car has a thermometer for outside temperatures, which told this tale: Friday 6/20: 88 degrees. Saturday 6/21: 68 degrees. Sunday 6/22: 58 degrees. Monday 6/23: forty-eight goddamn degrees. Summer is over, suckers. Hope you enjoyed it while you had the chance. It probably won’t warm up again till football season.
2. Goodbye, Claire. Jamie, a bientot. It’s been one hell of a ride, guys - six novels, each in the neighborhood of 1,000 pages. Some of it’s over-written, sure, but much of it was lean, and much was crafted with appropriately lavish attention to detail. The plot was as thick and fast as that of any book I’ve read, and the action could be breathtaking. Many’s the time you made me groan, hiss, or curse aloud while on the bus; many more’s the times I wrenched myself scoliotic by the weight of those fat paperbacks in my messenger bag. It was a journey to savor, again and again and three times thereafter, through all six books. And now the journey is over. Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series is now firmly ensconced in my past. I can start to move forward with my life again. I can start to write, to read non-fiction, to wean myself off the gaelic scottishisms that arise unbidden and in full brogue from my subconscious when I fash myself or have a wee bittern of sporran or something. Great characters, great scenes, great fun to read. It’s been months I’ve been slogging their trail. Goodbye, Claire; take care, Jamie. Don’t let the door catch your kiltrump on your way out.
3. All this was lead-up, wasn’t it, for one real goodbye. It’s not like I’ve got a whole lot of friends at work; I like my colleagues and we get along well but we do not go out or socialize or anything like that. To the extent I’ve met anyone outside my immediate work responsibilies at all, it’s mostly been as a result of my participation in union matters. I got into the union stuff when Scott was the local president of our chapter. He’s always been a good guy and a straight shooter. He built a reputation on hard work and decency. He was among the first to celebrate with me when Zach came home with us a few years ago, and he was among the most frequent to offer me a kind word or “hello” on those days I couldn’t hide my bad mood. He got elected to another union office this year so I have been including him in my correspondence about bargaining, but he never wrote back. Turns out he’s gone - been gone for nearly a month. His nameplate is missing from his desk, which he’d never let get so dusty when he was around. There’s no email extension for him in the network anymore. He had been planning for years to move to the North country, where he had some property. It looks like that’s what he’s done. I didn’t get to say goodbye to him. I regret that. I miss him, and wish him well.
4. My ride: For close to three years I’ve had a strong, silent friend: 1BX. I live right off of Geary, so the 38 would be my usual bus of choice (including the 38L and BX), but Z-bot has been going to day care three days a week right off of California Street so I’ve been riding the 1BX downtown 60% of my mornings. It has always been a boring bus, full of people fixated on their blackberries or newspapers or mp3 players or some such. Office drones, like myself, made up to look good in a cubicle and not willing to share the pleasure of a beautiful morning with any of their co-riders. Like today, when I sat down on an empty bench, across from a mostly empty bench, and within ten minutes was surrounded by beautiful women, standing around me, sitting next to me and across from me, all of them actively ignoring myself and each other as they touched up their manicures, read their Oprah book club selections, thumbed their PDAs or just stared in gorgeous boredom out the windows at San Francisco. Well, those may have been the good times, buddy, and now they may be almost gone. On Monday Zach starts at a new pre-school, well out of the 1BX route. It’s also nowhere near my famous 38 line. In fact, it’s close to only one bus: the Presidi-Go. These are little mini-busses that service the San Francisco Presidio National Recreation Area, where Z will be schooled. I will have to traverse the main parade ground to get a little commuter bus, that will make only one stop on its daily trip from the old Fort to my old office. It’ll be the quietest, least provocative bus ride I could possibly imagine, a disney trip through frisco-land. Z will be doing a 4-day week at the new school so I do still get to ride my fun, grungy 38L downtown on Fridays, and back home every day. I’m shocked to say it but I think I’m actually going to look back fondly on my times riding the 1BX. So long, hot young office staff. If I miss you, you’ll never know it.
What are you going to miss next week?
After a few hot, suddenly summer days, and quite a handful before that that were pretty fully booked just with handling the necessities, we went to the Crissy Fields bay lagoon beach yesterday (two days ago now) and had a great time. I’ll have more to say about that later but for now it does make it seem all the more relevant to be putting something like this before you at this portentiously solsticial juncture:
We’d taken a day trip down to Monterey, Kel and the boy and me, to visit the aquarium with some friends. The day was idyllic and the kids frolicked in sun drenched corridors and darkened galleries with walls of iridescent water; they ran along walkways and evaded supervision and generally carpe’d the hell out of the diem. After the fish-viewing came the lunch-eating, and then a short visit to an overcrowded speck of beach just off Cannery Row for the surf-wading. Altogether it was a delightful day, but we all sensed that our appetite for the beach had been barely whetted. So we agreed to drive a little further down the coast, to a stretch of shoreline our friends thought worthy of recommendation.
We could see why they thought so when we arrived - the place was pretty cool. A moderate span of golden sand rolled up and down the coast, terminating just in front of us in a field of broken boulders that stretched out toward a rocky point that coalesced gradually from an open matrix of jumbled rocks scattered by the sea across a sandy stone shelf. These built slowly up into a fractured maze, falling denser and stacking up higher the further out it went, in a wide but distinct vein that built gradually to a berm that itself continued to rise until it terminated at a tall rocky point that jutted some hundred yards or so into the surf, with a fairly coherent structure and culminating in a pinnacle some 40 or 50 feet high. Breakers crashed impressively against the ocean-facing edge of this rocky point, but the tide petered out as it swept around it into a wide low range of rocky flats hiding tide pools in their deepest recesses.
The route out out to the point was too rough for Zach to traverse, so I carried him until we got over the rock field at which point he scrambled and scampered freely and with delighted excitement. We had company out there, of course - a dozen or so other folk were out with us - our friends and others, plus seagulls darting in and out of the towering spindrift from the waves that crashed against the rocky protuberance.
We stood on the promontory, me and Zach and Andy and Aliyah and Gabriel and Kelly and all of us and several others. But after a while we’d spent enough time out on that small rocky point so we clambered back down and across the flats to join Heidi and Jessica on the strand, where we then stood and basked and let the ocean mesmerize us.
As we stood and watched, a new family arrived at the point - adult children and older parents. Like us, like anyone, they seemed drawn towards the promontory, and delicately picked their way out toward it. The kids walked with surefooted confidence, but mom seemed a bit tentative, in her white capris and pink track shoes and pastel knit sweater. She was not in optimal physical condition; she tottered, arms outstretched as if grasping for balance, as she picked her way among the boulders towards her lofty destination. It took her quite a while and the effort it cost her was palpable - but she did make it to her goal, and when she did, she stood triumphantly with her family atop that audaciously jutting tower of rock and drank in the spirit of the sea.
We remained at the edge of the beach for several minutes, chatting and basking. After a few minutes, we also started noticing that the rocky flat that lay betwixt hither and yon was undergoing a transformation. The tide was rolling in. In fact, “rolling” didn’t begin to cover it - the tide was barreling, surging, waxing with a vengeance. What had once been numerous tiny separate tide pools were linking up into substantial ones; the tide visibly surged in gentle, inexorable eddies that reached out between the boulders, turning the high points of the flats into a series of water-slick islands that were shrinking in size and number before our eyes.
It was in impressive sight - though it seemed to escape entirely the notice of one particular family out on the rock. Everyone else out there scrambled back to shore nice and early in this process, but that newly-arrived family was just distracted by the beauty or something and they didn’t seem to notice their escape route drowning in front of their backs. Their predicament was growing more dire by the minute, as waves pounded the base of their refuge with incessant ferocity. By now I was watching that family and I could see the moment of their realization: the zaftig mom turned to glance shoreward and despite her large, dark sunglasses I sensed her snap to attention. Her body language shifted from the relaxed posture of a carefree tourist to the anxious tension of a woman marooned. She was stuck, and getting stuck-er fast. Tidal eddies swirled delicately but steadily across the rock field. I could see the water level rising with just a casual glance. The family on the rocks could not have seen things differently. Their situation was as plain as the sea itself.
A few of them plunged back toward shore at their first flash of awareness of their predicament, wisely choosing to minimize their exposure to the ocean water while they could. Mom, though, lingered on the patch of elevated rock which she’d fought so hard to attain. Even from a distance, and even though she wore shades, her disquietude was so intense as to be almost tangible. The pinnacle was tall and sturdy and clearly not about to be overwashed, but the exit route was disappearing before her eyes and she clearly did not like either of her alternatives - waiting for six hours for the tide to turn again, or to wading.
Her predicament seemed ludicrous to us - self-made, exacerbated by vacillation, and not worth the angst through which we could see she was putting herself as her features churned with frustration and indecision. We couldn’t help ourselves: uncharitable though it may have been, we began to laugh, and we weren’t laughing *with* her. This was *at* laughter, and I think in the end that’s what galvanized her into her eventual course of action.
She looked right at us - Heidi and me - from across a hundred yards of new tide pool, and scowled with the scowl of a mother insulted. Then she reached forth a pink-sneakered foot and began her wadeful trek shoreward. After a few teetering steps, thick fingers outgrabe for the occasional opportune handhold peeking out above the calm but still rising waters, she had her first slip and got soaked to the knee of one leg. Fury coursed through her; her back went rigid and her jaws clenched with the kind of effort usually associated with childbirth. Two of the adult kids trot-waded back out to help her, and she accepted their assistance with alacrity, if not good humor. With their help, she struggled back to shore, both legs drenched and her dignity fairly waterlogged as well.
Heidi and I had taken the lengthy period of her exodus across the waters to compose ourselves. We were no longer laughing at her when she got back to the beach, and in fact we offered her a halfhearted cheer. She was not fooled by our veneer of civility. She’d heard us laughing, I could tell by the way she stared at us. We shrugged to each other, Heidi and I, and prepared for the long drive back home. We’d seen that the path back home could sometimes be the most perilous one, but then again, we were paying a little attention to the forces of nature as well. We’d already avoided the rising tide, and things weren’t likely to get much trickier than that.
MORAL: There are so many to choose from here, aren’t there? I think I’ll go with “If you ignore the obvious, you’ll get it anyway.” I’d be curious whether any of you who happen by might have derived a different lesson that you’d share in the comments. For god’s sake it’s not like I’m asking you to give blood or anything. Although that would also be a nice gesture. I’m just saying.
It’s been a while since I’ve had a good rant, at least here in blogville, so I’m…
A Light at the End of the Trouble