N is for North Beach

Mario's Bohemian Cigar Store Cafe

I walked through North Beach this morning and it’s been a while. Predictably, as it happens, things have changed.  I moved to San Francisco’s North Beach in 1991. My first child was born a year later, and we spent the first year and a half of his life walking and strolling around our neighborhood before we moved to the burbs and his brother was born.

First off, Tower Records is now Walgreen’s.  This is partly just the way it goes, record stores are not profitable enough to occupy two corners of prime real estate in San Francisco.  But Walgreen’s? Bleh. Strike one for charm.

pagoda theater Go Giants!

What’s still thriving? The Chinese laundry and alterations shops, tourist bike rentals and Coit Liquor. The Pagoda Theater is gutted. Once an actual theater, then a blue movie house,  when we lived nearby it was a movie theater specializing in Kung Fu flicks. It's Deco façade is now stripped of neon and the front is boarded up and nicely graffitied. (Go Giants!) The theater was supposed to be renovated, then a parking garage was to be dug out of the basement and the building converted into condos.  Now the plan seems to be about the impending subway and the theater being an entry point. Strike two.

A few doors up Powell is an empty restaurant called Bottle Cap which used to be Ed Moose’s historic WASHBAG.  Erased with periwinkle blue paint. Same with Moose’s across the park. Just another restaurant. Out front Prius cabs and helmeted tourists in three wheeler go-carts, slow as neon slugs, manuver around as if in a San Francisco’s North Beach theme park.

Mario's on Columbus & Union

What’s still around, thank god, are Mario’s Bohemian Cigar Store and Saints Peter & Paul church. On the east side of Columbus and the north side of Union Street, it is sunny and warm spring weather. On the opposite shady sides, it is down jacket weather with icy gusts of wind.  Inside Mario’s my ambitiously mustachioed barista whips up a double cappuccino and a roasted red pepper and eggplant panini. Unchanged since the first time I order it in high school. The bells of the church chime noon as kids screech and yell in Washington Square Park. This remains the same.

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M is for Monday

For this Monday. Today. A daily siren sounds at noon at Stinson Beach. I was there today when it blasted, with my daughter and the dog.  No school today – optional parent teacher conferences – we opted no and made it a beach day. An hour later we were home and I learned of the horror at the Boston Marathon. The first explosion happened at the same time the beach siren went off. I am so grateful for this day with my daughter and send healing thoughts to all in Boston and to those who were victimized by this violence.  I am shielding myself and daughter from all visual coverage.

My son and I spent last weekend touring the campus and local beach scene in Santa Cruz. He plans to start college there in the fall,  needed to check it out the living conditions.

Now, Monday, laundry and dirty dishes and snowdrifts of dog hair have gathered in their favorite spots.  Food-like things crunch underfoot as I walk by the piles in the kitchen and reach for the leash, sending our 13 year old Aussi-Border collie  into a complete Bieber fever spaz attack complete with sneezing. If she could bounce on her hind legs and clap, she would.

It is windy and chilly but I am seriously scoring in the sand dollar hunt. The dog is going nuts, hunting eviscerated crabs and chasing anything thrown. My daughter is walking behind me, head down in a hardback library book, fighting the wind to turn the page. She observes with all the wisdom of a twelve year old. ‘You know what the greatest thing is about Robert Downy Jr., besides everything?’ then goes on to tell me some antidote from an Avengers fan page.

Prepping my second son for the launch pad has me slowing down with my daughter.  The time between seventh grade and the end of senior year is a much faster five years than from kindergarten to fourth grade. So this day belongs to the beach, sand dollars, a half and half soft serve cone at the Parkside, and a screening of Mean Girls when we get home. The dog hair, crumbs, laundry unreturned emails and unscheduled blah blah can keep. 

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B is for Beach

I grew up in the desert, so I am never able to go to the beach without being in complete awe.  For twenty years now I have lived within a 20 minute drive of the beach, and each time I go I can’t believe how I’ve taken it for granted.  The waves never stop. I go about my week, or maybe two, before I go back and the waves have never stopped.

I like a fairly deserted weekday beach, with some fog.  I like a beach that requires fleece.  Tropical sunburn bikini beaches are just for wimps.  If I had the opportunity to hang out in Maui I would, but I really like the Marin beaches just fine.  Body surfing in San Diego is fun but if your feet don’t get a bit numb, it just isn’t the same. 

I collect sand dollars and sea glass, throw sticks for the dog,  find weird dead or rusted things at low tide. Mostly I appreciate that  it’s always there.  All that churning salt water and briny wind is cleansing.

I found myself drawn to the beach the morning of 9/11.  Just sat on a log and watched the ocean do its thing.  Last December I took my dog to the beach threw sticks and a found ball for most of an hour, then sat on the log while I waited to hear the outcome of my son’s arraignment in Seattle.  I let the beach remind me that I’m not in control. 

The waves never stop. The hiss and roar have been continual, since before any of us and will keep rolling long after us.  Oblivious of us.  When we are gone the sand dollars and sea glass will just pile up.  

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