Homesick, Bicyclists, Garden stair

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF. | SATURDAY, MAY 15, 2010 - We long for home now. Even though we are here and our host is so patient, generous, Sister Margaret is, and we love her, we want to be home.


San Francisco is an amazing city. The bicyclists, in many ways, are way more urban here, than in Seattle. Here they ride in street clothes, most of them, they ride leisurely. It isn't strange to see a woman riding in cowboy boots. Many people are riding without helmets. It is more a style of riding, closer to European, where people feel safe among the cars. There must be bike commuters here, but you don't see many of them. Maybe it is just the Mission, or the Mish, as some people apparently say now. But some mornings I'm up early, running through the downtown, down Market Street over wet, freshly cleaned sidewalks, past homeless people walking up, and there aren't many commuters, few if any of the lime fluorescent jackets of Seattle. 


In Seattle, of course there are plenty of hip bike riders. Probably there are more fixies and probably too there are more bikes that are amazing objects of craftsmanship and love. Here, in San Francisco, the typical bicycle is an old 10-speed beater. It just goes, cruises, with a few updates. In Seattle, the main bike is newer, faster, sleeker. The rider is encased in candywrappers or super bright rain gear. There are a few beards and flannels, true. But in Seattle the people driving cars are more aggressive, and it seems, the bicyclists are more aggressive, maybe in response. Maybe things are entrenched. The cars and the bikes have not learned to share space as well as they do here.


But I haven't been on a bike here. Just been a pedestrian or in Yellow Truck. I haven't seen my bicycle in months. It is rusting in the cellar no doubt. And Seattle bike culture, for all its athleticism, all its fluorescence, is healthy, is good, and I want to return.


Both of us. If we were still counting the days, now we would be counting the days left until home. Before, the days pushed forward, into the unknown. Now they add up, they persist. Yellow Truck takes us to Beronio's for lumber, to Disco Hardware for the smaller things, the fasteners and the unremembered one last thing. The street grid is dense. The driving is easy on Yellow. We are rarely up over 30 mph. We integrate lunch with getting parts. The burritos are giant and delicious. The Mission at times, going down Mission Street in particular, so crowded, so bustling, all the double-parked delivery trucks, cars, all the Spanish being spoken, the thick English, the palm trees, the mothers and daughters tightly, casually arm-in-arm, feels like a foreign country.


The stairs. The reason we are still here. Finally yesterday, we cut the first stringer, 14 steps from balcony to garden. All this time we have been building the balcony that wraps the addition, instead of as before, when the stair descended directly down from the upstairs kitchen, stifling Sister Margaret's chi, blocking her view from her own kitchen sink window to the back garden. 

We redesigned the thing so the garden will open up to her, even when she's washing dishes, not just when she's sitting in the living room. It will be beautiful, already is looking good. And is solid. And is creating more space than we could tell on the laptops. And on the downside, we are constantly reminded of tools we didn't bring, the thing we need still from the store. We squabble. Then we save one another, with some last thought about level or plumb, a sixteenth of an inch, and how will this minute cut of house siding in the end relate to the cantilever of the balcony. Construction is so numbingly exact, so undeniably physical, so invisible, and also whole. The wood is. The screws are. We cut them, fasten them. They stay where they are. You have to get them just so. This is not even going into the resolving of the juncture of old meeting new. Nothing level or square in the old addition. Connecting to it, but not being misled by the descending beams. They descend in two directions. So on. And so on. But then, Nailed it! Occasionally we get to say that. And then too, something my Cousin Mike said years ago now, that is still with me, that you can always fix your mistakes. As tangible and immoveable as the wood and metal is, it can always be finessed, fixed, reanimated. Almost always.


So we live here now, in the back garden, building this stair. The garden faces west. The stair will descend into it. The light in the afternoon is the luminous haziness, a suggestion of the thick clouds that pack in against the hills west of us, below Bernal Heights, and the Bernal Heights radio tower, which is like Seattle's Space Needle, only with less materiality and situated in a foreign country.