San Francisco, 2009-2019
The first year we lived in a smalllish single-family house on Washington St. between Steiner and Fillmore. The bed was small but the bathtub was so big it took almost 20 minutes to fill it with water. Lea Ann was testing out San Francisco to see if she liked it; the moment I stopped trying to sell her we started having little adventures, meeting people, living like we'd lived in Los Angeles our more or less normal lives but in San Francisco, separating slowly but surely into our unique sovereign individualities while also enjoying doing the things together that made us both happy.
I hadn't thought it through completely, not figuring into the equation how many people from Los Angeles would like to visit, as much or more to see San Francisco as to see us. Friends slept on the small, hard couch or stayed in nearby hotels. I remember one friend, a poet from LA, sleeping on the couch one night, asking if he could make up a bed in the bathtub, but I can't remember him actually doing so: under oath I'd say he hadn't.
In 2010 we moved into a duplex in The Presidio, a sturdy brick building built sometime in the 1930s for denizens of the nascent military-industrial complex. I called myself 'Commander Roddan' for fun and ate and drank at The Presidio Social Club. My office on the third-level had a view of the GG Bridge: from my desk there I wrote the book "Mare Island" and published books of poems and novels by (mostly) San Francisco writers under the IFSF Publishing imprint. I'd joke about it being the international headquarters of IFSF, but the duplex did serve us well: Lea Ann and I could be alone together in the place, she in her basement studio making pottery and I upstairs in my office, twiddling my thumbs while looking out the window and counting the euycalptus trees along Lover's Lane.
Aunt Lois fell at her home in Palm Desert sometime in 2011. We were in Scotland, traveling, when the phone rang: my brother said he'd taken her to a Christian Science nursing facility in Pasadena, Ca. No medication, no x-rays for Aunt Lois, age 90, a Christian Scientist. Somehow Lea Ann got our flight changed and we were back in the States post-haste. As fate would have it, the only Christian Science care facility in the western US is in San Francisco: when I use the word 'fate' I could also use the words 'divine mind' were I still a Christian Scientist, but I'm not a Christian Scientist and fate seems more appropriate to me in the case of Aunt Lois, as she was now, more or less, in my care. I don't mean this literally, as she's taken good care of over at Arden Wood in the west Portal neighborhood, but figuratively, as she now lives in The City; therefore, as the executor of her estate etcetc. she's in my consicousness much more than she was when I lived in San Francisco and she lived in Palm Desert as a free and independent human being.
The Aunt Lois experience--cleaning out her house in the desert and getting it sold, situating her in San Francisco (by the way, she didn't like San Francisco, called it "the last place I'd ever live")--did reveal the psychological underpinning of the pleasure I was finding in living in San Francisco: that I was, for the most part, free from responsibilities while living in San Francisco; or rather that I was responsible principally to myself which is, of course, another form of responsibility, a responsibilty that was impinged upon by my responsibility vis-a-vis the Aunt Lois' situation and my geographic proximity to it.
O well. Eight years later Aunt Lois is now 98, and still at Arden Wood. And I, oddly enough, have moved even closer to her, moving from The Presidio to a house in The Richmond in 2016, though the time that's passed since has lessened the feeling of responsibilty I once had for her: weekly visits now seem to be more than enough for both of us.
So far, The Richmond is proving to be a daily demonstration of what our first SF landlady said of San Francisco: that it's essentially a small town and that you'd soon run into people you'd seen before, some of whom you would actually know, as opposed to Los Angeles where everyone you knew was spread out over a vast landscape and the chances of seeing anyone you knew by chance were greatly reduced. San Francisco is a provincially cosmopolitan city, and while I may not actually know my Chinese, Russian, Vietnamese, young hipster neighbors that I see out walking along Geary or Clement I feel like I've seen them before, if not in The Richmond then in The Mission or The Sunset or in Potrero Hill.
Potrero Hill! How it's changed in the ten years I've lived in San Francisco. Almost beyond recognition. I had lunch there the other day with my friend Tom I_____, who's lived and worked in PH for years, and almost all we talked about were all the construction projects going up around the neighborhood. As we drove to lunch on 16th Tom rolled down the window and gave the finger to one of those Google map cars, cruising the neighborhood to figure the coordinates for the next condo project. That's the spirit, I thought.
I've made some good friends in San Francisco, and lost some good ones too, though if I lost them they couldn't have been too good to start with. Only two deaths, though there are more coming I'm sure.
I still haven't gotten the tattoo I thought I'd get here, and now that I've been here for ten years I know I won't. IFSF's published ten books from its San Francisco headquarters, including two works of fiction by Thomas Fuller, Monsieur Ambivalence (2013) and The Classical World (2018) and the award-winning memoir, Kiss Me Again, Paris by the redoubtable Renate Stendhal. And more books are coming!-- a contemporary 'take' on Goya's Caprichios by the artist Sheila Newbery; a new novel by Fuller, The Autobiography of Poetry; and, for lack of a better genre classification, a sports book by yours truly, Golf is Ruining My Life.