12-23-08 It is the spring of 1946. I am nearing six years old. It was Saturday and the four kids of my immediate neighborhood young friends were going to go to the movies, some dozen blocks away. Suffering from peer pressure, no doubt, I must have pleaded with my mom to be allowed, for the first time, finally, to go with Mike & Spike, probably older by a year and two and were experienced in this going to the Saturday matinée business. Loni, my age, and her younger brother, Marc, and I got to the Haight (movie) theater, about eight blocks north, up Divisidero from our side street to its junction with Haight Street, which runs, west-to-east from Golden Gate Park to downtown San Fran. We got seats down near the front and, after the cartoons and newsreel, the movie was Canyon Passage: A western full of bloody actions between cowboys and Indians. Somewhere in near the middle of the movie, when the Indians came and burned the settlers' cabin and shot flaming arrows into the breast of the wife as she struggled out the burning front doorway with her infant cuddled close, and as she fell across the flaming threshold, the good luck horseshoe that had been nailed over the doorway fell onto her final heaving screams.
This scene was too much for my very sheltered, barely six-years old self, and I jumped up and ran out of that movie theater and somehow avoided getting run over by the traffic of the busy main thoroughfare that Divisidero Street is—appropriately named so as it pretty much divides the city of San Francisco into halves. Divisidero runs north-south, across the fairly gently sloping sidehill at the base of Buena Vista peak, up whose steeper eastern slope my side street toward home—Buena Vista St.--struck up two blocks to a left turn up an even steeper sloping short block to my place on (41?) Buena Vista Terrace. The apartment was up a flight of interior stairs on the second floor, skinny, rear-to-front, apartment.
It was quite a backwards-flashing Adam who, two decades later would drive, and otherwise navigate those same neighborhoods I had lived around as a child, to, as an adult, still recognize (read: feel) that level of a sense-of comfort and security that one's intimate experience of one's immediate lay of the land does deliver. Folks were exploding their minds all over the place then, 1966-67, and I admit to having done some rather wacky traipsing around and through, more as an intrigued local tourist than as any kind of non-sympathetic outsider, or overly-enthusiastic insider. I found the cultural conditions, or probably more appropriately, lack of cultural system norms' usual etiquette of those times a fascinatingly curious affair, attracting like a magnet.
'Wow,' I was always bemusing myself to be there, in the thick of it, often, observing and or while experiencing the abandonment of general good sense, in general.
And just as quickly gladdened my heart to remember that I have always found my way safely to home ever since then. This is a rather astonishing realization, for this moment.
I have gathered, ordered, and had bound the previous six months' worth of my computer output copies of; and read through the near hundred pages of collected correspondence, littered with bits of poor literary style output of complaint. 'Wow,' I think to myself, that 80% of them are letters-to-son. So: The thought has erupted that says to me that I ought to close this soon-old year with a sincerely-proferred apology for having grown, again!, to dump too much toward you. And I apologize, and I apologize, and I apologize. And hope to keep a new year's resolution type inspiration to not send so much, nor any other than positive commentary.
Stay well. Stay warm. Open your heart to love where it flows from and try to understand the beauty in it all and don't let yourself become overly-fixated upon the too-sad, too-bad, low class stuff. I can only wish you and yours as well as anyone could hope for those that they love and have care for. And I guess that I really do love and care for you and your developmental futures dealing you at least some fair portion of good times and decent, pleasant, pleased, pleasurable momentary pastimes a-plenty, etc. ĽűɅ frum ȡǟȡ ⁜⁕⁂☺☼☻☸☄
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