Salt Lake City
I wanted to put a picture up of Tasha and Spencer, who we visited in Salt Lake City this past weekend, but the picture I took wouldn't post on the IF SF website so I had to settle for the picture of a sign I'd long admired on State Street instead.
State Street's a lot of fun, especially the buildings and signs that bring to mind what Edward Hopper, Ed Ruscha, and Joseph Cornell might have created if one brain had been shared by the three of them.
Being in Salt Lake City in late August is what I imagine it might be like to be a progressive at the Republican convention. It's quite hot and the built landscape is pretty much filled with examples of what happens when free market enterprise reigns and there's little or no governmental regulation.
I packed light, practicing for a trip next month to Iceland, Scotland, and France where I'm only taking a Kelty backpack. Instead of a book, for instance, I packed The New Yorker.
Spencer and Tasha are an inter-racial couple. They live below State Street with Treyvion, Tasha's 2-year old son who calls Spencer, "Dad," in a nice little house they're fixing up.
It was really fun to hang around with them for a couple of days. We had a couple of nice meals--including a watermelon salad Lea Ann made with onions and feta cheese--and stayed as cool as we possibly could.
The highlight was our time together in Liberty Park, which is kind of like SLC's Golden Gate Park. Trey played in the water for an hour. Spencer and Tasha and I threw a Nerf football around, we went on the swings, then sat on the grass watching Trey work his way around the playground, playing with other kids in the sand and on the bars and slides.
We left the park when it was almost dark. A woman about my age, late middle, parked beside us and was putting her grand-daughter in a car seat. Her car had California plates so we struck up a conversation. She was from San Francisco, "Nob Hill," she said. We told her we lived in San Francisco too, in The Presidio. "Oh," she said, "we're neighbors." She told us she was visiting her daughter and grand-daughter. Trey and the little girl were waving at each other as I was gathering up Trey in my arms so he could sit with me in the backseat. It was then that the lady said, "where's your family?" Lea Ann said, "this is our family", and the lady rolled up her window as fast as she could and drove away.
I read The New Yorker on the flight back to California. Jon Lee Anderson's piece on Syria is really depressing as is the critique on the tv show "Breaking Bad" by Emily Nussbaum. I looked out the window of the plane somwhere above the vast desert and wondered how many meth labs we were flying over, then continued reading.
A profile on violinist Christian Tetzlaff quotes him as saying "music is humans' most advanced achievement, more so than painting and writing, because it's more mysterious, more magical, and it acts in such a direct way." Music, "even at terrible moments, can make you accept so much more--accept your dark sides or the things that happen to you."
The story on the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, an expatriate writer who committed suicide in Brazil in the early 1940's, made me think of how fragile and resilient the notion of civilization really is; that it can survive almost anything. Zweig was born in 1881, 7 years before Wallace Stevens was born and about 100 years after Mozart died. I don't really know what to make of such a thought but it makes the time pass more quickly, especially in a circumstance as uncomfortable as a full flight on Southwest Airlines, and I was back in San Francisco almost before I knew it.