Cars (petrol, hybrid or electric, it makes no difference, really), skyscrapers, slums. But here, here a poet can come to sing his song to the greens and browns of nature, and witness it singing back.
A couple strolls by, arms linked at the elbows, smiling, a Nikon camera dangling from the man’s neck. There is a punctuated look in the woman’s eyes. Romance, keyed in by the scents of begonias and rhododendrons. It’s become a visible flush of redness on her face. I can tell she hopes it will become something more.
A chipmunk descends from a tree, marked by a small plastic sign as Picea orientalis, Oriental Spruce. He observes the layout before him, the inclines and dips of the soil. There is food here, a treasure trove of it; he seems fairly confident. A tail shivers in anticipation. Nearby a bird – a hermit thrush, I’m almost certain – swoops down and takes a perch on one of the rocks jutting up from the water. The breath from his wings ripples the surface, changing a still mirror into one of undulating motion.
There is a poem here. I can feel it. Woven into the greenery, the humanity, the natural ebb and flow of life. A poem, waiting to be found, waiting to be spoken. One that will sing of something brighter than the dark world that gives it birth.
And then, there in the distance, I catch it. The little brush of motion from the branches, customary and expected. I turn my head slightly, but I know what’s there. I’ve known since before the motion came. It’s familiar now, this sight, seen on eighteen months of afternoons just like this.
The little boy emerges from the boughs of the faux Asian foliage. He takes three steps to the edge of the manmade pond’s crafted waterline, to where his toes almost touch. He wears the same worn overalls, the same once-white T-shirt beneath them that I’ve seen him wear more times than I can remember. His blond hair is dishevelled, as all little boys’ should be. He holds a stick in his right hand and pokes it listlessly at the water’s edge, sending new ripples across the pond. He gazes vacantly out at these results of his movements. The jade treetops bend in a breeze that doesn’t descend to the tops of our scalps.
The boy is mesmerized. I am mesmerized. The bird on the rock clucks from somewhere beneath its beak then flaps its wings to take flight. The little boy doesn’t notice. His gaze is still on the ripples of the water, meeting other ripples, colliding gently in the swell of a scene fabricated by man, yet hauntingly serene. Almost inhuman. Almost free.
And I cannot quite see his eyes.
There is a rail workers’ strike today. It’s the third this year, and I feel as a result as if I’m becoming an old hand at dealing with them. Taking the train normally saves me thirty minutes of traffic and $28 in a day’s parking charges, but a bus still beats out the car for second best. No reprieve from the traffic, but it’s a $2.50 ride and there’s a stop by the shop where I work, so I can hardly complain.
It’s meant a morning on a hard, plastic bench seat rather than a padded one, and a bit more jostling of starts and stops than my generally impatient personality would prefer. But the wheels on the bus have gone round and round, and I’m fairly certain I’ll get from point A to point B alive and unscathed.
I’d live closer to work if I could – the traditional commuter’s lament. There’s nothing in particular to recommend Diamond Heights, the neighbourhood south of the city that I call home, apart from the fact that it’s outside central San Francisco proper and, therefore, the grossly overinflated San Francisco housing market. The Planning and Urban Research Association designed the district as part of the Community Redevelopment Law of 1951, transforming most of its shanties into liveable quarters, one of which I call my own. On a rental basis, of course. To be honest, I can’t really afford living there, either, but it’s a full three or four degrees less unaffordable than even the smallest flat in the city would be, and those are the kinds of maths that make the impossible seem feasible these days. So it’s home. And it has the glamour of having diamonds in its name.
I can’t say I entirely mind the commute. As the sun rises over the hills in the morning, its rays bouncing up off the sea, San Francisco’s not a bad city to look at. I don’t know if it’s the beauty of the bay on its inland side, with its islands and hills and bridges, or the mystery of the endless, borderless ocean stretching out on the other, but something gives this city an aura – an otherness I’ve never felt replicated anywhere else. A sliver of land wholly encapsulated by the natural world, as if the earth herself had drawn a line around the silicon and steel and said, ‘This far you may come, you may make your homes and monuments. This far, but no further.’
The bus rounds a corner, swerving its metal bulk to avoid a tiny, parked Nissan, and pulls onto Lincoln Way. I’ve taken this line before, I know the route, but even so my heart flutters ever so slightly. It flutters because Lincoln brings us alongside my haven. Dylan Aaronsen’s perfect heaven. The place I most love.
There, on our left, is the park. Somewhere in there: my little pond, my little bench. It will be a while until I can visit them – can retreat beneath those trees, away from all this noise – there’s still the morning’s work ahead. But just the sight is soothing. I suppose I’m an easy person to soothe. I wonder, for a moment, if everyone is like that, where merely the sight of something loved makes the demons run away and peace descend a little closer to the present.
Apart from the modified commute, this morning has been ritualistically predictable – both before and after. In some sense there’s little to say of such a start to a day. As one who’s never fully cottoned on to the social media trend, I find myself unexercised in articulating the vacuously ordinary and unremarkable, in ‘sharing’ something as mundane as the fact that I chose brown socks today rather than black, that I bit my cheek while brushing my teeth.
It’s simply been The Routine. Coffee, perhaps (definitely) too much. Two eggs. A scan over the emails that accrued during the night, mostly adverts and spam and announcements of new digital titles ‘We’re Sure You’re Going to Enjoy’ (though the whole phenomenon of digital books generally eludes me). Then the commute, then work, such as it is, with its customary temptations and boredom-inducing normalities. It’s hard to look at the day-to-day flow of a life and not conclude that the vast majority of it is wasted, cycling through conversations that have been had before, actions that have been done before, chasing goals that never provide the sense of completion they promise. It was that kind of morning. The expected kind.
I have no status that allows me to escape the dross of life through rank. I’m not the sort that can claim a renowned profession or a compelling job title, so mornings generally lead organically into the mundane of the day; and I don’t particularly mind this. It’s neither as exciting as it could be, nor as boring. I’m satisfied to reside in the middle.
There is one definitive job perk, though, and that’s my midday schedule. An extensive lunch break is one of the benefits of menial employment, and there’s little more menial than being a teller at a health food retail shop, selling vitamin capsules to yuppies whose only question is some repetitive variant on ‘Is this the organic version? I really want the organic version.’ I’ve been gainfully employed at Sunset Health Supplements for two years, and despite the persistent desire to toss our vapid customers off the nearest bridge (and we have a few good ones for that, here in the city), I have to admit that not once have I been denied an ample midday escape. One that gives time to walk down the bustling rush of 7th Avenue to Golden Gate Park, then the twisting bends of Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive to the iron gates mounted under pine-green signage that reads San Francisco Botanical Gardens. Two
