A pretty day, with a blue sky specked with mare’s tails.

There’s a beautiful mural on our street. It’s painted on the side of the building on the corner of Tehama and Fifth, and it shows a seascape, or rather, the reflection of a seascape in a row of tall, arched painted windows — a rocky coastline leading up to a span of the Golden Gate Bridge and off in the distance a schooner with white sails. A bare-legged little girl in a white dress is perched on a boulder and attempting to peer into one of the “windows”, and a gull appears to be about to smack into one of the panes. The girl, the gull and a couple of boulders are the only “real” figures in the picture. The rest is a fantastic reflection, the image, I guess, of what the artist would have liked the painting to look out on, instead of grimy buildings, a stretch of parking lots and the M&M Bar.

The mural is a nice cool patch in this neighborhood with all its hot, blacktopped grime.

The painting was by John Wehrle. It was destroyed when the building was demolished in 2014.

At the time I was living there, the building held the offices of music promoter Bill Graham, and for a long time I assumed Graham must have commissioned the mural. In fact, according to SFMuralArts, it was a previous tenant, a bank, that had “Reflections,” done. Graham’s offices had not been there long, had moved there after neo-Nazis firebombed his other SOMA offices in 1985.

There was a basketball court in the parking lot that fronted the mural, and I can remember, usually at dusk, seeing a few white guys in jeans shooting hoops, hearing the smack of the ball on the tarmac, voices. Who knows? Maybe Bill Graham was one of them.