I am standing in the windows of my daughters’ second floor apartment in San Francisco. Double Decker buses regularly roll by the windows and the view goes both ways. We look out at the passengers as they peer in at us. I have become accustomed to that in this city. When I first started visiting San Francisco I saw the inhabitants as characters in a play. How theatrical they all look. Clothes as costumes, accessories as props, and people as troupe. Somehow everyone here is younger and has more energy, more imagination and resources then the rest of us, it seems.
Cities have always been a place to reinvent oneself, and San Francisco is becoming my second city. I want to visit as often as my daughters will have me. Their place is between Haight Ashbury and Buena Vista. I won’t give out the address but Grace Slick of The Jefferson Airplane reportedly lived here. This means more to me than it possibly could to my daughters. She had to have been the age they are now. We all were at that time. And here I am now, dreaming of reinventing myself yet again. Cities give us this sense of permission. Interesting, the anonymity we can feel in the city. It’s the small towns that invade our space.
I dream of putting a writing table in a bay window such as this, looking out to colorful Victorian architecture, stain glass windows lit at night, pedestrians, the small circle of people at the bus stop, and those riding by eye-to-eye. I am thinking I may never run out of material here. And although I have never lived in San Francisco before, I am thinking that I will feel I have come full circle.
a little elbow room
a little elbow room 