One Fell Swoop
A year of San Francisco
On Tuesday I rode the bus to work with a friend who is moving eastbound. In four weeks he will be living in New York so he can hold a new job and pay rent somewhere else. Los Angeles was not an option for him because it happened already. His hometown is not someplace to be because he grew out of it. His time in San Francisco is expiring. So, New York is the next best thing. Our thirty minutes of standing on the bus was about the feeling of “what now.” I hastily flocked North and West, a gold rush of sorts. He can have the subway sunrises and leave the sunsets behind for the rest of us. (apologies for the following San Francisco sap)
On June 29th Grace turned 27 and my San Francisco residency hit 365 days old. A year ago, (last Saturday) my oldest brother and I followed each other up the five to Fell street. I remember parking on the Panhandle side of the street emptying the trunk of my car, running pans and pants across the street, when there was a break in traffic. A brim packed car felt more than necessary, but once the bags and boxes made it to an unfurnished apartment it felt next to nothing. Now my room has things on the walls and desk drawers full of notes and odds and ends. In a year I collected things that became legs to a life I started living in San Francisco. The past year was one in transit and orbit. Coming and going and staying just long enough for the next fell swoop. Learning names only to forget them, but remembering faces and the funny conversations.
I have always fantasized about city living. The constant crawling feeling that something somewhere is always happening. I love how cities look at night. I love how cities look in the early morning and how they also look on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Cities during the holidays and cities in the summer, and how it feels to live in cities when you need to wear scarves or when you get to wear a sundress. Cities do not make it easy, but that is the point. Learning the rules and playing your own game.
A year away from the cloudiest time in my life, my skin is on the fairer side, I have the bed to myself, music sounds so good, and now feel like I have my own home. A home that is not across the hall from my parents or off a cul-de-sac, but something furnished by hand me down desks and dressers, homemade art, dried flowers, broken glass, and conversations past midnight. My pink silk scarf dresses my lamp every evening and my room turns dreamy pink. It is romantic in the way it is romantic to be a young girl in a city who likes to read and write and gets lonely in the right ways. It is dreamy and drony and my little world is rose colored.
In a year things get framed, maybe by the seasons or flimsy formed habits, but really it is recognition. Knowing where to go and how to get there. There is a bay window I walk by sometimes that is a few blocks west on Fell. A neon Flamingo lives in the window. I stop long enough to look at it and remember it until the next time. I have always loved alliterations, and love to think about a flamingo on Fell Street. Our minds like to pick up on patterns—which some like to call coincidence. Marin is home to a street called Flamingo Road and it reminds me of a Cleaners From Venus song. Which makes me think of when my oldest brother showed me the song, “And the lavender girls…” Flamingos also make me think of my Grandmother (and shrimp too). Not that long ago I asked her how she ended up in Los Angeles. She had a layover in Las Vegas, met a handsome man at the Flamingo Hotel and he lived in LA so he told her she should too. So, my Grandmother convinced her best girlfriend to also trade Chicago for Los Angeles. For about six weeks, my Grandmother and her friend lived in the man from the Flamingo Hotel parent’s back house in Bel Air. She then moved into an apartment in Santa Monica. And that is how she eventually met my Grandfather. (Although a point to mention: she initially saw a photograph of him on the airplane and thought he was the most handsome man she ever laid eyes on, funny how things have a way of working out).
I have my paths that I wander through parks and weekly drives across the Golden Gate. They are the ways I go alone and try to quiet my mind, yet thoughts float in front of the crunching gravel and vistas of Mount Tam. Thoughts about the next thing and how I am to get there. I think it is symptomatic of finally having a reason to remain some place for some time. I remember being unsteady moving through San Francisco. Shy and new, and now I maneuver with purpose (for the most part). I have places to be and people to see. There are the bars and stores I know by heart, and they all belong to a city that found a way to capture mine. Amidst winter rain and the eventual blooms sense has been made. Patience might be a virtue, but maybe the dust has just settled (the growing pains have dulled).
I think about having to box up my life here and it is not ready to go anywhere just yet. San Francisco is casual and cool and full of landmarks. Landmarks like the mailbox I drop letters in, the book stores I like, the bus stops I wait at, and my first apartment–a home that is my own and away from the other one’s I came from. I wonder about my roots in all the places I have lived, and what is blooming where and what has gone to seed and dried up. I wonder where else I will live and grow and how I will end up there—although I think this feeling is symptomatic of my age. I am only 24 and there seems to be so much time for so little left to happen (Or is it so little time for so much to happen?)What did happen was one fell swoop that landed me living at 1556 Fell Street. Cheers to a year in the prettiest city that has given me reasons to think, cry, laugh, dance, write, sing, pray, and live.
