The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

I needed to walk and I needed to buy a new pair of summer shorts, so why not combine the errand with the stroll. Off I went down Page Street, with its exquisite Victorian houses, impressive street trees and few cars (it is a designated “slow street”) to go to Sports Basement in the Mission. Crossing Market St., the atmosphere changed and suddenly I was in the land of homeless tents on sidewalks, that ugly reminder of our failure to take care of each other. I passed an entire car lot of driverless vehicles and noticed a new model being test driven round and round the blocks. 

 

So there it was, the physical manifestation of our cultural failures, the unnecessary soulless cars driving themselves at a price tag of millions and millions (billions?) of dollars invested in machines while our neglect of fellow human beings in need was everywhere in those blocks. That money that could be spent on affordable housing, accessible health care, mental health facilities, education poured into something we not only don’t need, but degrades us further by outsourcing our skills to machines. We’ll spend money on artificial intelligence, but not real intelligence, on Smart boards but not smart children, on drum machines but not music programs. The bad and the ugly. When you’re around it all the time, it starts to become the norm, but the recent trip to Slovenia was one of thousand reminders that there are better ways to organize a human society.

 

On I walked down Brannan Street toward the Embarcadero and the sun came out and the waters of the Bay shimmered and the Bay Bridge stood towering in its majesty and here was the “good” San Francisco I knew and loved. For over four decades, my family always celebrated the end of school with dinner at Tadich Grill or Il Fornio or Fog City Diner, all places near the waterfront where we felt the sweet release of finishing the year of hard, hard (but fun!) work. The Coleman stoves and tablecloths and kitchen utensils from the end-of-the-year camping trip packed away in the yellow trunk, the final classes taught and report cards written, the ceremonies involving samba dancing, mud pie desserts, gonging out the year and giving graduation speeches all done, done, done and a little after-dinner stroll by the piers our ritual “welcome to summer!” with all the glories-to-come it promised.

 

All of that is gone now, that cycle of intense work and sudden freedom smoothed out to a steady retirement schedule, less peaks and valleys and more wheeling on a flat Slovenian bike path with a few mild hills. Such is life’s cycle and I neither miss the other nor am relieved I’m done with it. But I could taste its echo walking happily toward the Ferry Building toward the N-Judah streetcar, my new shorts in hand to announce that “sumer is a cumin’ in.”