They spent much of their time enjoying themselves, hiking, entertaining, traveling, sometimes doing volunteer work.
Author: Jinx
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The gentleman the other day at the finger wharf had told us about a good Italian restaurant over on Challis, not far from the hotel — Fratelli Paradiso. Michael and I walked to Challis, a pleasant street rather like Hyde here in San Francisco, a mixture of residential buildings and small, upscale restaurants. This was definitely not raffish King’s Cross. Fratelli Paradiso proved to be a bit hard to pick out among the restaurants because there was no visible sign, so Michael had to ask one of the employees. We went inside and sat down.
It was dark. Very dark, mainly lit by candles and the slightly day-glo fluorescent green stripes decorating one wall. There were menus but by candlelight they were unreadable. There were specials hand written on the wall, but white, elegantly seriffed lettering against a dark background — perhaps a blackboard. Too dim to tell. A good looking young waiter came to our rescue and recited the menu in heavily accented English that only required a couple of repetitions. I ended up seizing on the first thing I understood, a kind of artichokey pasta. I always like artichokes. Michael had a penne with a meat sauce. The food came in large attractive bowls. Mine had something slightly green (couldn’t make out much more, even lifting the bowl and holding it close to my eyes) that tasted very lemony and nice. Michael said his was good too, but eating even good food you can’t see clearly has something slightly oppressive about it. I was glad when we had paid our bill and were back out on the sidewalk.
On the walk back to the hotel down Darlinghurst Road that night I noticed for the first time the little rectangular metal plates set in the sidewalk, memorials to long-dead businesses and local characters. Darlinghurst is a bit more active and crowded in the evening than it is during the day, but Michael waited patiently as I stopped every few minutes to write another inscription down in my notebook:
The Astoria: Cheap eatery, roast and three vegs
Christopher Drennan, 1870-1932, poet, academic, drunk, could usually be found ‘quoting bawdy passages from the classics. You could approach the presence as long as you brought him a schooner of beer.’
Oversexed, Overpaid, and over here
Kenneth Slessor:
Where the Black Marias clatter
And peculiar ladies nod
And the flats are rather flatter
And the lodgers rather odd,
Where the night is full of danger
And the darkness filled with fear
And eleven hundred strangers
Live on aspirin and beer…The California Restaurant and sandwich bar, Established 1930s by Dick McGowan, ex-US Marine:
bar stools, club sandwiches, percolated coffee with creme, the second cup free, decor modern, clientele rowdy.
(The space marked by the above inscription is now a McDonald’s. Dammit.)
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Daily writing promptIf you had the power to change one law, what would it be and why?
which has, twice in my lifetime, resulted in presidentical candidates who lost the popular vote being handed the presidency.
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Good Lord, what a gray, still day.
Sometime yesterday afternoon Red Pants came and got his little black device. Michael’s right. He was probably recording the birds, who were very loud in the emptiness usually filled by the rattle of cables, the hum of cars.
They were loud yesterday, anyway. Not a peep right now. Not a black speck of a bird in the sky. Not a leaf stirring in the treetops down the street. If it weren’t for the single car I see slowly climbing the hill in the distance, I could be looking at a photograph.
I wish now I’d gone up to the roof yesterday, when the sky was blue.
Aha! He’s back! Wearing black sweatpants this morning, and this time he’s set the dark rectangle on a different part of the roof, though still near the street. Now that I have a better view, it looks more like an Ipad or a laptop computer than a radio. He turns to walk away, dialing a cellphone and raising it to his ear. Bye-bye Mr. Sweatpants!
I listen carefully. Yes, I can hear birds after all. Just not as loud and raucous as they were yesterday.
Now that I have a sense of when I’ll be able to access healthcare without risking bankruptcy, the three weeks until May 1st seem terribly long. Can I stay healthy until then? At least if the lock-down ends in May, I won’t be quite as afraid of going back to work in the office downtown. Which right now seems like an impossible dream.
Years ago when I worked for Waldenbooks in Greensboro, one of my co-workers told me about how she had gone through a terrible illness. She was young and strong, but got knocked flat by a virus that almost killed her. She told me that while she was sick and confined to her bed, she felt so horrible for so long that she stopped believing she’d ever been well. Maybe it was the pain, or maybe it was the high fever, but she literally thought there had never been any other world for her but the weak, nauseated, head-pounding, hard-to-breathe present.
On colorless days like this, I can’t believe I ever had the option of leaving this apartment. I never went for my weekly walk down Polk Street to the Marina Pier, never hiked all the way to Cole Valley or climbed through the gardens of Telegraph Hill. Michael and I never took Muni Metro to go to a movie at the Castro Theater. We never rode out to the avenues for broth dumplings. I never spent an evening listening to the marathon Moby Dick readings at the Maritime Museum.
The opposite was true yesterday, when the sun was out, the sky was bright, and I had work to do for the library. At the end of the day, as I fixed dinner, I had to remind myself that I had not actually gone in to work but had done everything at my desk here. That’s the difference a blue sky out my window can make.
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It was built in the late 19th or early 20th century. It has a large back yard with space for a garden and a secure fence. There is a lot of green around it, but it is still within walking distance of shops and cafes and at least one library and one rep movie house. Internet access is good. The kitchen is big and up to date, with lots of counter & storage space. Two ovens would be nice.
In addition to the kitchen there is a living room, a bedroom, two studies, and two bathrooms. The climate allows for distinct seasons and snow once or twice a year, but the winters are not too harsh. It is close to relatives and friends, and in a highly literate area.
A pleasant, silent, honest, non-judgmental housekeeper comes in every other day to clean.
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It’s the first week of the 43rd Annual San Francisco Film Festival, so I haven’t seen much of Michael. So far I’ve seen only two films. Wisconsin Death Trip, which I liked, and Peau d’homme couer de bete, which I did not care for.
We went to the opening night party on Thursday night. Michael had to film that evening, and he called from KQED just before heading out. I walked down the hill to the Regency Ballroom, which had the usual floodlights and Will Call table.
For the first forty-five minutes I wandered around the huge, dark ballroom, sampling the food at various tables — pungent soft white cheese spread on nutty bread, Calistoga berry juice, handrolls with peanut sauce, chocolate crepes, Aidelle’s sausage…. The music was very good, but loud. When I found Michael standing and talking to a couple, I could barely make out what anyone was saying. Barring a dance club, I’ve never understood the point of gathering large numbers of people in a room and then blasting them with music so it’s impossible for anyone to communicate without getting a sore throat. Eventually, we moved upstairs to a quieter second floor lobby nerar tall open windows that let in fresh air. We all talked about ghost stories, movies, what we loved and what we hated, and ate sorbet until they turned on the lights and send a security guard over to kick us out.
Outside on the sidewalk, the conversations continued. I talked to a thin, bearded older man who either knew me from a previous festival or was pretending to know me from a previous festival. He told me he spoke seven languages and had travelled all over Europe.
At the time, Michael was co-hosting a show on independent film at KQED. The result was, as his partner, I found myself in more conversations than usual at film events. Michael had some level of facial recognition from being on television, and I still suspect some hungry filmmakers were, quite understandably, trying to network with him through me.
I liked the book Wisconsin Death Trip was based on, so it’s no surprise I liked the movie. Of Peau d’homme couer de bete I have absolutely no memory. Who knows? If I saw it now, I might like it.
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Daily writing promptYou get some great, amazingly fantastic news. What’s the first thing you do?
Open the boutique bottle of whiskey we’ve been saving. Make Manhattans.
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Went to the Waldenbooks on Geary.
At Powell Street there were two evangelists, the usual black man in the white suit, red feathered hat, and AIDS pasteboard, and an old white guy with a megaphone, which I thought was kind of unfair. On the corner of Powell and Geary was yet another evangelist, waving a black, floppy-covered bible, pacing and declaiming alongside a meek little old lady who was wordlessly passing out tracts.
Then I passed a demonstrator, apparently against the Iran Iraq war. A lady on the street behind me crowed, “I’ve never seen a real, live demonstration before!” She was plainly from out of town.
In front of Neiman Marcus I walked past a group of people demonstrating against the wearing of furs.
This is a very opinionated city.
At Waldenbooks I bought a new diary (this one is about finished) and a paperback true-crime anthology.
The black evangelist with the red feathered hat and pasteboard was for years a fixture at the Powell Street Cable Car turnaround, where he could moodily grumble into his microphone at a captive audience of tourists queuing for a ride. I remember him as very dapper, with sunglasses and a well-trimmed beard in addition to his hat and three-piece suit. He would bring a small carpet to mark out his territory, and a chair where he sat next to his sign, along with a posted warning that he would charge a fee to anyone who photographed him — thus following the venerable San Francisco tradition of making a spectacle of oneself, then objecting because people notice. (The Castro did the same thing for years, its residents costuming wildly on Halloween Night, then complaining afterwards in letters to the Chronicle because “outsiders” were taking pictures.)
I was a regular in the area, so the black evangelist’s occasional growls were frequently aimed at me. Whenever I walked by, he’d raise his microphone to his lips and mutter into it something about women who weren’t virgins being unworthy of marriage. Obviously, that ship had sailed and there was nothing I could do about it, so I never bothered to respond.
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Daily writing promptAre there any activities or hobbies you’ve outgrown or lost interest in over time?
When I was a teenager, I took riding lessons once a week for about a year. This was not one of those upscale places where young ladies wear riding habits and learn to sit very straight on a thoroughbred. I wore my oldest jeans, a plaid shirt, boots, a floppy hat and in cold weather, an ancient overcoat, and it was about saddling the horse and staying on. The stables were owned by a family we knew, and I remember it as a frayed, friendly place. It smelled of horses, hay, and, on especially hot and sunny days, the cotton field nearby. I learned to ride on a black mare who only once ran away with me, and who always came back to nudge me gently with her long, blunt nose when I fell off. One of my favorite memories is from that time, a moment of resting in late dusk, sitting on a fence near the woods at the edge of a field, stroking the mare’s head and hearing church bells in the distance.
Horses are an expensive, elaborate hobby, requiring commitment and equipment. Life went on, and I went on. But I do remember with affection that strange bump in my life where I spent a year riding that horse.
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The Rocks, apparently the oldest part of Sydney, is a collection of 19th century buildings with thick walls, small rooms, and sometimes very uneven stone floors. There is a museum, but most of the area consists of shops and eating places aimed at tourists. At the museum, as at the Hyde Street Barracks, the interested visitor is shown various things that were found inside walls, under floors, and tossed into a nearby well that was used as a dump by 19th century residents. The bowls of countless clay pipes, a hat, a shoe, and a small illegal rum still by a long-dead owner which, according to the accompanying text, explains his rather quick wealth. Rum was apparently a form of currency back then, which made moonshining tantamount to counterfeiting and a very serious crime. He probably dumped the still down the well when it looked like he was about to get caught.
I was hungry. I wanted to eat, but the fact is, I found The Rocks confusing. I’d walk into what I thought was the entrance to a restaurant, be pointed by a helpful employee towards the back, go through a couple of small rooms, then find myself on the patio of a completely different restaurant, with no clear idea of how to get out. I tripped and fell twice on uneven floors and endured the humiliation of being helped to my feet and anxiously questioned about my well being as someone handed my glasses back to me. Finally I decided the thing to do was just get out of the Rocks and find a place less permeated with history. I did dip into a small bookstore where I found a Ruth Park book on Sydney, so the visit was definitely worth while.
As I left I passed another class of schoolboys — this time dressed in home-made 19th century costumes, sitting on a bench being lectured by a female teacher dressed in a poke bonnet and long skirt.
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Fish and chips at Circular Quay. Exactly what I wanted and needed, and therefore the perfect meal. I sat at an outdoor table, savoring fried food (and a generous squeeze of lemon) with a coke, watching the sun bounce off the water, gulls fight and crowds of weekenders pass, and listening to two painted aborigine buskers play something cheerful and secretive on a didgeridoo on the sidewalk nearby. At least it seemed cheerful and secretive. Didgeridoos always sound to me like someone talking just after taking a long toke on a joint.
Pam Troy 