I choose San Francisco
because I miss ocean air.
I’ve been sleep walking
in a dusty valley
but the air
in San Francisco
is cold and saline.
When you walk through it
without a hat or scarf
it’s bracing.
You feel alive.
I choose 1967,
imagining the Summer of Love,
thinking I might land in the middle
of a concert to spend
a vivid afternoon
with Joni and Janis
Mama Cass and Grace Slick.
But I arrive in mid-December
on the ground floor
of the City of Paris Department Store
beneath the massive branches
of their five story high
Christmas tree.
I back away, to get
a better view, remembering
the many times
I’d begged my father
to bring me to this very spot,
and always he’d complied
despite holiday traffic.
I can feel my mother’s tight grip
on my tiny hand, guiding me
around large glass cases
of perfume bottles and ladies’ gloves,
dodging other shoppers and gawkers,
my gaze on dark pine needles
heavy with colored light bulbs,
Venetian glass balls, candy canes,
red ribbon, silver tinsel: the sight
overwhelming from below .
So I search for an elevator,
and head up to
the 5th floor mezzanine,
seeking a new vantage point.
Here the tree
is magnificent
but less imposing,
as are the decades,
a perspective I could not
have achieved any sooner
than now.
On the streets below
flower vendors offer
fresh roses—where
do they come from?—
even in winter.
Someday soon, a lanky
young man in an army
surplus jacket
will buy me a small
bouquet, rose buds
wrapped in crinkly
green paper, the blossoms
as innocent as pink pastel
party mints, and I will feel
a flush of flattery and infatuation
mistaking it for love.
I see them there, the youthful me
with her imagined prince, holding hands,
heading up the hill to catch
a cable car. We are as young
as this optimistic
landscape, looking down
at the clean blue
infinity of the bay.
In a year, or perhaps less,
I will learn I have been his beard,
and he will shame me
because I cry when
he confesses his infidelities.
Don’t I realize I am expected
to celebrate
his self-discovery?
I hear a siren
and turn quickly,
startled,
but it is not
an emergency vehicle.
It is a coyote,
howling,
calling me home
to river and
cottonwood trees.
I am an old woman again
with as much clarity
as I can handle
watching San Francisco fog
evaporate
in a warming climate.
Please let me wander
back upstream
past the delta
into the tangled mess
of berry vines and fennel stalks
that lend an earthy perfume
to my very own
backyard.
Photo by Patrick Robert Doyle on Unsplash
I was surprised to discover that few of my friends remember the late, great City of Paris Department Store and its magnificent Christmas tree, but then I learned the store has been closed for well over forty years. You may learn more here.
