Union Street near Octavia

There are times when I arrive at my psychiatrist's office early, so I sit outside on the steps of the restaurant next door and watch the women go by for a minute or two.

All of the women are beautiful because I don't know them, because they're going someplace without me, because the weather's nice and they've been granted permission to live in San Francisco, one of the most beautiful cities in the world, a city where beauty is still important but where it's being broken up into little pieces to be collected later and displayed as art on the walls of the better homes in Noe Valley and The Mission.

The most beautiful women are the women who don't know they're beautiful. Because I'm not really looking for them, I don't see them until they've almost passed by, and because I don't know them they engage my attention differently; I'm not looking at them the way I sometimes look at women, I'm looking at them in awe of the beauty of their walking along Union Street all by themselves in the late afternoon, in awe of the way each one of them brings new beauty into the world whoever they may be and wherever they're walking, while I'm waiting to see my psychiatrist.

I sit on the steps just a few minutes. Then it's time to get up, walk down Union, press the code that opens the door, walk upstairs, sit down and begin talking with the psychiatrist.

Today I'll tell her that there are people I love who sometimes are people who least love me, or who love me but love the wrong thing about me, love the thing I least love about myself, and that they're men. And that sometimes I think these men I Iove think that my mother loved me more than their mother loved them, that I made more money than they made, that I was taller, better looking, didn't have the disease they had, or that I could throw a baseball farther than they ever could.