2 January 2008, Another Day of Wandering

Returning from a month in Marin County where I almost totally avoided a computer and could not overschedule myself as I do when I am in Oakland, I was not, and am not, certain that I want to be carried back into that routine. However, here is one of those typical days, repeated on 2 January. It started in the morning with doing tai chi with my buddy Martha. Her neighborhood around Church and 29th Street still has an autumnal look...

The rain made the building where Mother Theresa's order lives (beside the church that was the location of the film, SISTER ACT) look especially somber, streaked with rain.

Martha had prepared the canvas for her next painting, the canvas, lying flat, looking like a pool of orange. Her arrangement of things in her and Thom's apartment are artistic compositions in themselves.

To keep from taking too many trips to San Francisco in the week, I try to arrange a lot in single days, which makes for more free time in Oakland, but can make for very long days in San Francisco. How to kill the time between one site and the next? I take books, writing to revise, but then sometimes too I just let the day carry me along to unexpected places. Next I went for my appointment at the V.A. Hospital. I try not to be too depressed by the men worn down or broken by war.

But then you can wander around behind the V.A. hospital and get a panoramic view of the entrance toward the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay, and the buildings, probably WPA constructions, have wonderful decorative work.

Next is the writing group with Louise at 7 p.m. in Glen Park, but that leaves quite a bit of time to fill, so, when I start out on the Great Highway, intending to take Sloat to Portola to O'Shaughnessy to Glen Park, I find myself stopping by the beach beside the Great Highway. When I first came to San Francisco, that was the favorite destination, being a guy from the plains who had never seen an ocean, but I had not dropped by this area for many years. On such a winter day, there were only solitary walkers along the sand, or lovers, and two people walked into the ocean to surf.

The houses on the street facing the ocean, the Great Highway between them and the Pacific, have a look peculiar to the houses in that area.


Before it grew dark in the Glen Park district, I saw the signs of San Francisco's January spring.

It grew dark long before 7 p.m., and I wandered around looking at the holiday lighting of the houses, and found too that people were playing games in the night on the lighted field in Glen Park.

Back home in Oakland, after the writing class, I took the time to begin to look at photos taken in and around the house where I stayed in Marin. Before Kenneth and Rafael left for Nicaragua, I had overlapped with them for a day, and I saw a startling image on the glass door to the garden where bird feeders hang that draw the yellow finches, hummingbirds, and other birds. I went and interrupted Kenneth who was at his computer. "Would you please come look at something?" I thought perhaps he had stenciled an image on the glass door, but he said, "That happens sometimes. A hawk may frighten a bird and it flies into the glass. Sometimes it kills them."