At length did cross an Albatross, / Through the fog it came.
Okay, so this wasn't an albatross, either. Just your garden variety San Francisco seagull, but it did come through the fog, and we still had a close encounter off the end of a pier. (No, I can't remember which number.) There weren't any sea lions, but there was an Asian couple in matching Hawaiian shirts pointing at the Bay Bridge and Treasure Island. A man dressed like Colonel Blake from MASH who had about eight fishing poles strung at various strategic locations off the end of the pier - perhaps he'd only just arrived, because I certainly didn't see any evidence of fish. And a couple of boys in white t-shirts and dark blue jeans licking ice cream cones like kids from the fifties.
I got up last Thursday intending to walk down to the bus stop, about three blocks from my mom's house, and ended up walking all the way up Mission St. from 30th to the Embarcadero. I took a brief detour at Yerba Buena Gardens, right across the street from SF MOMA, and rested while I listened to an Afro-Cuban band wail in French, Spanish and English. They had this way of clipping off the end of words - they'd count out beats in the music "Un', do', tre' ... " One of San Francisco's ubiquitous itinerant population came and sat across from where I was perched on the edge of a huge cement planter at the back of the gardens, a skinny, worn fellow in boots, trousers, turtleneck, jacket, and cap, all in different shades of black, and in a balmy 80 degrees. He proceeded to share (with only faint nods and a tapering series of "Mhmns" as encouragement) the history of his addiction to speed. How it cures everything. How he'll never touch it again. How the woman he loves doesn't like him sober. But how the Lord doesn't like him all strung out.
I walked along the Embarcadero until I got trapped in the gaggles of tourists down at Fisherman's Wharf. There's nothing like the smell of fried fish and freshly-minted I Heart SF sweatshirts early in the afternoon. So I headed away from the Bay and marched up the hills, past Ghirardelli Square (out of the fish-frying pan and into the chocolate pot, but the tourists are exactly the same) and into the groomed and cultivated facades of Pacific Heights. Giant houses and tidy gardens, but the only people outside are Latino landscapers. I walked onto Russian Hill and meandered down Fillmore Street, peeking into "secondhand" shops whose gathered leavings are pricier than anything I've ever considered buying, with the possible exception of my Forester. And little French bistros, and boutiques with embroidered blouses and scarves that look like the ones at Global Goods but that are clearly hand-woven by blind Belgian nuns instead of by Guatemalan village women, because they cost about forty times more.
I ended up down at the Palace of the Legion of Honor, where I saw a Monet exhibit of about fifty paintings from various parts of the artist's time in Normandy. There was some Water Lilies stuff, but mostly there were a lot of paintings of the sea in different lights and moods. The beach, the sky. Haystacks, of course. Churches and little cottages. Hardly any people. For whatever deep-seated emotional dysfunction, I take exception to the act of standing in front of art and being deeply moved by it. I'm glad to see it, but I often have very little to say about it that I'd consider worth repeating. I think that looking at art is for me more an act of quiet meditation, of simply being in the presence of the work of someone else's hands. Observing whatever it happens to be that another person believed was important enough to make note of, whether that be a church, a stormy sea, or a collection of particolored circles. Or drips. But it was much ... clearer, to use a word that's far too inadequate, when seen in person, the ways in which Monet was indeed able to capture not only the physical aspect of a place or object but also its mood and emotional shape.
Enough of that, eh?
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