Last summer I visited the painfully exquisite 9/11 Memorial & Museum, in lower Manhattan. Through a carefully constructed flow of architecture, images, sounds, and objects, the institution skillfully recreates that terrible September morning and its immediate aftermath. I walked past burnt fire engines and video loops of planes smashing into the World Trade Towers. An…
Those of us with siblings or close cousins are familiar with a game in which one family member recalls a childhood memory, only to have its veracity challenged by another: it didn’t quite happen that way or didn’t actually occur at all. Our recollection of past events is clouded by time, emotional (self-)manipulation, stories re-told,…
1970. I’m 10 years-old, waiting for a haircut at what’d now be called an old-fashioned barber shop in West Covina. The chairs are filled with men, most likely in their 30s and 40s, but to my adolescent eyes they seemed Biblically ancient. I desperately wanted to grab one of the Playboys strewn around the side…
When I first started working in Africa, as a U.S. Peace Corp volunteer more than 30 years ago, John F. Kennedy remained a warming American glow. In West Africa, where I was deployed, Senegalese would praise the long dead President, alluding to his charisma and grace. Kennedy’s popularity was no doubt burnished by his late…
A couple of years ago my wife, Debbie, and I joined a tour of Lower Haight homes built more than a century ago. Mostly Victorians, their facades were exquisite in ways San Franciscans sometimes forget to appreciate: carefully crafted moldings, vibrant color contrasts, one-of-a-kind windows. Their painted faces create a festive public sphere, like a…
Late last year, John B. Anderson died at the age of 95. Anderson, a former Republican congressman from Illinois, unsuccessfully ran for his party’s nomination for the presidency in 1980. When he failed in that quest he launched an independent campaign for the office, ultimately securing almost seven percent of the national vote. I first…
“Ugh, I don’t want to go there!” my 16-year-old daughter, Sara, exclaimed. “It’s so boring!” We were on one of our frequent meandering drives in and around San Francisco, a favorite Sara activity. She loves to wheel around freshly found neighborhoods, especially those with long, lovely, boulevards: Lincoln, Folsom, Twin Peaks. While I enjoy these…
Last year’s heat waves – peaking at a scorching 106 degrees in San Francisco in the fall – may be the new normal. There’s nothing we can do about whatever natural temperature patterns are at play, and little reason to believe that humans’ contributions to weather changes will diminish much, at least in the remaining…
No parent would willingly allow a stranger to enter their home, slip down the hallway unseen, enter their child’s bedroom, closing the door softly behind them. Yet that’s exactly what’s happening through the portals of mobile devices, all too often leading to actual physical encounters arranged through such applications as Tinder, Snapchat, and texting. Nine…
Straws – those slender plastic tubes from which to sip frothy, sweetened, coffee drinks, sodas, and other beverages – are awesome. Children transform them into toys, sucking in chocolate milk at different speeds, in a kind of stutter-step race to the top. They hold one end to trap the liquid, allowing it to pour out…
The following three dialogues imagine the conversations sparked when newlyweds arrive for the first time at one of the spouses’ ancestral homes, to which the couple will be moving, with a fourth centering on an exchange amongst nannies. Readers are encouraged to create their own scenes, mixing and matching the various scenarios and characters into…
In August my wife, Debbie, and I followed our daughter, Sara, to the Edinburgh Fringe, which by all accounts is the “world’s largest arts festival.” Sara was performing in Alice and the Blackhole Blues, a play concocted by her high school theater group, which, over the course of its opening night in San Francisco to…
“You’re a hypocrite!” my eight-year-old daughter, Sara, would shout, during arguments over how much television she could watch or when she should go to bed. It was the worst epitaph she could deploy, closely followed by “no fair!” In the black and white world of childhood, acting in ways that contradict what one says they…
Anyone who has spent anytime walking, bicycling, or driving in San Francisco lately knows that it’s a chaotic mess out there. Vehicles – Ubers; Lyfts – pullover abruptly to disgorge passengers, eyes leashed to their Smart Phones, in oblivious selfy-ness, appearing to believe that the zombie-apocalypse has left them alone in the world, except for…
One of the most famous stories in the Bible occurs in Genesis, in a passage commonly known as “Noah’s Ark.” In it, God, enraged over human behavior, decides to wipe out everything, in an extinction-by-flood event. Somehow, in the midst of the deity’s hairy-eyed examination of all things wicked, Noah gets the Lord’s attention, and…
Urban Dictionary defines being “on the spectrum” as “a phrase used to describe a person with social tics and/or awkwardness, usually associated with autism or Asperger’s syndrome.” As in, “That kid seems a little off to me.” “Yeah, totally; I think he’s on the spectrum.” In a colloquial sense, being on the spectrum is a…
San Franciscans tend to approach social problems with a mix of expansive generosity, quasi-selfishness, and hubris. We’ve lavished billions of public dollars on Laguna Honda Hospital and Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, facilities dedicated to serving the most vulnerable among us. We loudly proclaim our desire to maintain housing for a mix of incomes, but…
I’m a loser. Over the years, I’ve repeatedly lost my wallet, keys, and precious childhood mementos. When I was a teenager, I lost jobs. As I young adult, I lost self-respect due to a lack of dating integrity. I lost an election. I lost my innocence, painfully scrapped away, year by year, by life’s grater. …
We humans have been trying to understand our reality, while working hard to mask it, since our first spark of awareness, perhaps seven million years ago. Our quest has been dominated by a biological imperative to, initially, survive, over time, thrive; and a deep desire to find an alternative truth to shield ourselves from the…
Sara arrived like a beautifully wrapped present. The package was smaller than we expected – four pounds, eleven ounces – but we were delighted to receive her; she was perfect, just what we wanted! As the weeks, months and years went by, the wrapping was steadily shed, revealing new wonders: an openness to the world;…
Despite decades of trying, or at least talking about trying, to tackle the problem, there are at least as many homeless individuals in San Francisco as there were 30 years ago – a few of them the same people – and very likely more. There’s no single answer as to why this is the case,…
Donald Trump’s vanquishing of a football team’s worth of Republican Party presidential candidates has prompted intense reflection on how it happened, much of which lands on the same question: can democracy be trusted to produce competent political candidates? One perspective gaining traction in the shout-o-sphere is that the collapse of mediating forces – backroom dealmakers;…
Change is a bitch. Or maybe more like a cheetah, stalking us from tall weeds. Once, on safari in Tanzania, I saw a cheetah stealthily tracking and killing an antelope, a Kirk’s dik-dik. The dik-dik was cartoon-like in its behavior, happily bounding, in spurts, away from its herd. I could almost hear the animal humming,…
Hamilton, which opened on Broadway last summer, and has been sold-out ever since, offers a spirited remedy to the current milieu of bigotry, nativism, classism and nascent apathy. The musical revolves around the title character’s role in the American Revolution, and features a gallery of standouts that, until recently, have been virtually frozen in time: …
I was born into privilege. Not the wealthy kind. My parents, struggling to raise five kids on my father’s aerospace engineer’s salary, cut coupons, dressed us in off-brand on-sale items, and got by on powdered milk, bulk cereal, and day-old bread. My privilege was of a superior kind, one that serves as a kind of…