This is when I start to feel that quickening in the year, the beginning of the festival season — Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas… My birthday comes at the end of October. I’ll be forty-two.

We went out last night for dinner and a movie. Dinner was at Mayes, an old, old place on Polk Street, dating back to the 1860s according to the sign outside. It had the kind of ambience I imagine when I think of the 1940s, a dark, rather church-like interior, red carpet, booths, a player piano in the middle of the dining room playing Cole Porter and old showtunes. The sheet music was from the 60s — Oliver!, Alfie, Stop the World I Want to Get Off. Our waiter ws a blond, bearded man with good posture and a bay window that made him look like a walking capital D, and he wore the dark suuit and apron that waiters have likely worn there for fifty years. I had lobster thermidor becuase the waiter said they served it there in the forties and it occurecd to me that my grandfather, my mother’s father, might have eaten lobster thermidor at Mayes when he visited San Francisco back then. The place was empty except for us and an Australian couple in the booth next to ours.

The fog really rolled in tonight. It’s almost 7:00 pm, I can see rooftops to the end of the block, and then everything becomes gray and indistict, with headlights barely visible on California.

Mayes briefly blinked out some years ago, became a Thai restaurant, though its large, iconic sign remained. That plainly did not work out because it became Mayes again.