Day 33, Sunday, March 17: San Francisco

Carnegie libraries visited (all part of the San Francisco system): China Town, Golden Gate Valley, Noe Valley, Presidio

It was time for a comfortable bed and a lazy day, so on this Saturday night I checked into the Marriott Courtyard Richmond-Berkeley for two nights. I spent the morning driving around to some of my favorite spots from the two years I had lived in the Bay area during my postdoc. I was able to locate the small stucco house Lisa and I lived in when Kitt was born in 1996; it had been repainted a lovely eucalyptus green. I loved living there. 

The house did have a few quirks. A distinguished Cal historian had lived there before us, and his wife had forbidden him from smoking in any room of the house except the bathroom. Over the years, the ceiling had darkened from the smoke, and so every time we took a hot shower brown drops of nicotine-laden water would condense and drip down on us. My son Christopher did not have his own bedroom (Lisa and I slept in one, and the other was devoted to the one of us who was taking care of Kitt when he was crying), so we pitched a tent for him in one of the nooks. We called that place ‘the tent site’ and Chris spent the year sleeping there. The Berkeley Bowl, the local market which has the variety and quality of fruits and vegetables that are available on the east coast only in the fancy/expensive gourmet markets, is just around the corner. A butcher, a baker, and a candlestick maker had shops there. Ok, not the candlestick maker. In the mornings, I would put Chris in his seat on the back of my bike and take him to his childcare. I could bike to work, and bike home for lunch. I remember one glorious late afternoon when my Chris was playing in the backyard, Kitt was sleeping on a blanket, and I had the buzz of the first martini. It was idyllic. I didn’t think life could get any better.

It was in this house that I was told (by my wife) that, Mark, you have a drinking problem. I replied, defensively, that well maybe/yes I did, and I would show that I could control it. I pledged not to drink for a month, and I didn’t.

The moment that month was over, I uncorked a bottle of wine to have for dinner. Lisa was appalled. She had hoped that after the month was over I would come to my senses and with a clear head say ‘you know, you are right, and I’m going to stop’. Instead, I celebrated the end of that month like it was the ball dropping on New Year’s at Times Square and I’m going to pop open the bubbly. We got into a big fight, which I carried into the next day on an Arkansas alumni trip, sponsored by an alumnus who owned a winery. I showed Lisa who was right by drinking wine all day. 

My itinerary shows that this Sunday is a non-travel day. It seemed like the best day to drive into San Francisco so I could avoid the work-a-day traffic. Given what I had seen (through news media) and heard (from friends of friends, mainly) I expected San Francisco to have dramatically changed for the worse since the 1990s. I expected to see the homeless everywhere, their tents pitched on every corner, with needles and feces on every sidewalk. I didn’t see this, at all. From the tourist hotels by Union Square to the junkies in the Tenderloin, it’s not that far: head south on Powell and turn left on O’Farrell, and in a few blocks you’re there. 

Because it was Sunday, traffic was light. The Peet’s coffee I had drunk soon turned into Mark’s pee. I really had to go, and there was no obvious place to unzip. I suppose it is possible that I could have pulled over and peed by my car, as I had in Eufaula where the police officer lectured me, yet somehow peeing on the streets of Georgia felt easier than on my beloved San Francisco.

Noe Valley Library

Before I left for my trip, my sister Georgetown hyad given me several ‘urinate in a bag’ emergency kits. Today was a good time to try one out. I should have practiced, because when I used it now for the first time I managed to get half (and that was a lot!) of it in the bag, and the other half in the driver’s seat and on my slacks. (When it's full, the bag feels like a giant diaper.) Based on the media reports of San Francisco, I could have walked around with the big half-moon of urine stain on my pants and no one would have blinked an eye. Still, I felt self-conscious when I popped into a corner store to buy some San Francisco sourdough, which they didn’t have.