Recovery

I put my hand in my pocket!

Now, I expect that for any of your hand-in-pocket events to merit an exclamation point, there would be an “and.” For instance, “I put my hand in my pocket AND there was my wedding ring that I thought must have slipped down the bathtub drain!” or “I put my hand in my pocket AND found a twenty-dollar bill that had been through the wash!” There was nothing in my pocket. Because I haven’t been able to reach my pocket to put anything in it. Which is the whole [exclamation] point.

During this plodding one-armed period, I’ve had no trouble remembering that all pocket-carried things must necessarily go in my left pocket. When setting out, I stuff it with Kleenex and keys and sunglasses and the phone as though pockets don’t even come in pairs. But coming back in the evening, I keep automatically trying to get my freezing hands out of the elements. And there goes the left one—swoosh— instantly warm and snug, while the right one—oof—painfully hits a an invisible force field a good five inches from its would-be destination. I’ve done this over and over and over. My brain goes: Brrr. Pockets. Ow! Dammit. like a slow-witted lab mouse.

Last Friday was much the same, except it wasn’t. Instead, my brain went: Brrr. Pockets. Ahhh. Better. Since this is how the cold hand + pocket relationship is supposed to go, I walked a block before realizing. “Holy shit! I put my hand in my pocket!” And then continued down the street beaming like billio.

For months, I’ve been adding mental exclamation points to formerly inconsequential actions. Or, to put it another way, both in terms of my level of achievement and my subsequent level of delighted pride, I am now a toddler.

Here is an incomplete, consecutive list of things that I’ve been announce-it-to-strangers toddler-proud to have done since August.

• Tie my shoes

• Slither myself into a shapeless and unflattering wrap dress and tie it closed (one hand + many teeth)

• Get a sliver of soap into contact with my armpit

• Sleep for four hours in a row

• Stand up in the shower

• Put on a cardigan

• Slice a loaf of bread (inside tip: use a vice)

• Button my jeans

• Change the sheets on a bed

• Flip on a light switch

• Carry a cup of tea from one room to another

• Put a grape in my mouth (this was a MAJOR one. I recounted it to a man in the Presidio who told me that when he’d had a similar injury, he once called down to his wife, “I put on my sock!” I felt seen.)

• Floss my teeth

• Touch the top of my head (!!!!) (I’m still pretty chuffed about this one because I keep my hair up there and it requires tending.)

• Put my hand in my goddamn pocket

• Drive ten blocks

At this rate, by February I may well be able to put on a pair of tights in under five minutes. And then, can pushing open the front door be long to follow? Surely not.

!!!!!

I get around

As we all know, I don’t write much more than I do write. Generally speaking this is due to lack of will or discipline or a simple, nearly constant failure to triumph over inertia. In recent months, a period when I have yearned to write, I have not been able to. Physically, that is. Ah, the irony. You don’t miss your water, et cetera.

That’s a long story. Well, it isn’t. It is actually a story that could be recounted in one terse sentence, but all my stories are long stories and I’ll tell you that one another day.

Having been welcomed back to the ranks of the typing-capable just over three weeks ago, it’s hard to know where to start. A lot of what I was moved to say / thwarted from saying had a tone that might be best classified as “despairing,” so the fact that the once-pressing details have already vanished from memory is probably no great loss for you. I personally would have liked to have the record as a low point against which to measure all my future bad days, rendering (dear god, I certainly hope so) most of them not all that bad after all. Heigh ho.

All that darkness has no place on a twinkling Sunday at the bright beginning of a new year, a new decade, and a new era of arm function, anyway. Let’s talk about the bus instead.

I have complained about MUNI for years—the slowness, the unpredictable schedule, the surly drivers, the crowds, the mentally-ill bubbling with unpredictable violence encamped in the back seats. It was all true and I don’t take it back.

But.

I do believe in the bus in the same way I believe in libraries. To ride the bus is to participate in civic life, to see who shares your city who you might not otherwise encounter. What’s more, knowledge of public transportation networks is, to me, a way of earning your cred as a local.

I have taken the bus more in the past five months than I have taken it in the past five years and I am full of previously unimagined affection and gratitude for this bonus prize of urban life. I am aware I am getting the bus at its very best. I live at the end of the line and always get a seat outbound and, inbound, if there isn’t one, someone with two functional arms gives me theirs. I have not (until tomorrow. gulp) had to take the bus at rush hour, so the passenger load is manageable. There are almost never crazy people on my regular lines.

I sit most often in the very first seat in the old and injured section of the bus. It is more community-minded than the headphones-on-girded-for-the-worst section in the back where, if I were my usual self, I too would be grumpily stuffed or clinging to a pole. In my section, people ask me what happened to me. In my section, people tell stories. In my section, we’re all struggling a bit one way or another. We are rooting for each other.

Returning to work full-time will change my relationship with these rides, fraying my patience and increasing my anxiety about being jostled. Plus, soon I expect I will be able to drive and my membership in this rolling community center will likely lapse. So right now, when my gratitude to all those kind strangers is still in full bloom, I wish them a full-hearted Happy New Year. May we all peacefully reach our destinations.

• The driver who likes me and asks me to stay on the bus during his ten-minute break instead of transferring to the sooner-departing one ahead so we could keep talking. He had pleurisy last year. And also went to Greece for a wedding.

• The wheelchair-bound vet who fought in Korea and approves of the fact that my father was born here.

• The woman who, having heard my sad accident story said, “Well, if it makes you feel any better, I teach Middle School.”

• The lady who had had her shoulder replaced and then, as result of some dental work, gotten blood poisoning so had to have the shoulder replaced AGAIN. She is very proud of her daughter who recently became a nurse.

• The lady who is only slightly more baffled by her cell phone than I am by mine. Her son insisted that she get one, but she maintains that she’s just too old to be learning all that.

• The French couple who were surprised when I explained to them in French how to get to the Haight and then guessed that they were going to see “La petite maison bleue” made famous in a song. They told me the word for “screw” when I trailed off and said, “like a nail that you turn?”

• The driver who usually doesn’t talk who chatted with me one unreal weekday morning of Christmas week as we drove through a deserted city in landscape-erasing fog. “OK. It’s just us,” I said. “Where should we go?” He smiled vaguely but then did a cartoon double take and craned to look in his rearview mirror. “Wait. Are you the ONLY person on this bus right now?” And I was.

• The driver who always patiently gives directions to strung-out dudes who can’t really track them. When his friend got on one day and asked how he was, he replied “I’m fair for a square” and then they both laughed. He checks on my progress and frets that I don’t have a boyfriend. He was once a student at the same elementary school where my mother taught. In fourth grade, he was the kickball champion.

• The driver’s friend who talked about how his grandchildren just think he’s some old man, but how if they’ve even thought about doing it, he’s done it ten times. And then the driver told a story of going home early one night and finding some young guy coming down his front stairs and read him the riot act. When he asked his daughter weeks later if that guy was coming back around, she said, “Daddy, you know he’s NEVER coming back here.” He shakes his head and says to his friend, “When I did that, I had the decency to go out the window.”
  Another day, the friend is talking to another man and he says he wishes Santa would bring him a ticket to Sacramento and to Arizona so he could give his great grandchildren a squeeze.

• The four-year-old boy who adopted me immediately and nestled into my coat to take a little snooze and then popped up and said “Play with me! Play with me!” His father and I play Rock Paper Scissors with him from O’Farrell to Market, his tiny paper palm wrapping around my rock fist in gentle triumph.

• The lady coming from chemo therapy as I come from physical therapy who worries about the spill on the bus floor and helps clean it up with another lady who drags paper towel over it with the end of her cane. She mentions that something is “down the peninsula” and I say, “I can tell you’ve been here a long time because you say ‘down the peninsula’.” She laughs, delighted, and tells me she was born in San Francisco. I tell her so was my father and that I think there is a San Francisco accent of that era because when she speaks, I am suddenly in the presence of my long-deceased great aunt Gen.

• The eight-year-old girl and her mother who I see on my way to Hayes Valley and then, to my disproportionate delight, again, hours later on my way home. Weeks later, a girl is figuring out the change for a purchase of pears at the farmers’ market and I say to the mother “I wish I had a market helper. You’re lucky.” The girl turns to look at me and says quietly, “We have seen you three times.” I think she means around the market and only after a moment do I realize she is the bus girl. I am terribly flattered that she remembers me, as though she were a celebrity whose hand I had once shaken at a publicity event.

• The driver who cranes her neck to look at the bus interior in her mirror after every pick-up to be sure that anyone infirm is seated before she pulls away from the curb.

• The elegant lady with the delicious citrus perfume who tells me in English heavily accented by some Eastern European homeland that my hands are beautiful. She tells me her daughter once had a similar injury with a long and painful recovery. She tells me she had washed her daughter’s hair. “I want speak good English, “ she says, blushing. “I shame.” I assure her her English is good and she points to her head to indicate her white hair or possibly her aging brain and says she’s too old to learn it properly. She has two more transfers to get to her brother’s house. She is intrepid.

• The driver from New Mexico who can’t believe he lives in San Francisco. He surveys me in the mirror and tells me I look like Princess Diana. He said that one time the clerk at a glasses shop told him he looked like Andy Garcia and so he bought extra frames.

• The three young women from Texas in inadequate outerwear (“I have a coat at the hotel,” one tells me, “but it was so warm when we left this morning.” Amen, sister. This is San Francisco every day of my life.) who ask me what to see and so I make them get off the bus with me and walk with them to Chrissy Field where the moment the Golden Gate Bridge suddenly leaps into view feels cinematic to me every time.

• The 25-year-old at the outbound stop who confesses she had just accidentally boarded the inbound bus AGAIN and was now correcting. She had only just moved to San Francisco, hoping for a fresh start and for new friends who are neither drug addicts nor liars. When she got back from Trader Joe’s, she thought she might go down and put her toes in the bay and maybe see some dogs. Which is as hopeful a New Year beginning as any.

So, it's been a while

The funniest thing is that I pay for this site. Silly little spendthrift that I am. Compared to paying for a gym membership and never using the gym (a thing I stopped doing a few years ago. Ha HA.) paying for a site where at least things I used to write still exist feels better. Not great, but better.

It's not that nothing happened in the last nine months or so. So many things happened. I saw about ten million plays (indeed, at one point, Imogen Poots showered me with stage blood. That was unexpected.), danced with strangers at a New Year's Eve ceili, read some excellent books (have you read Lincoln in the Bardo?  Or Sing, Unburied, Sing?  You should do that.), bade farewell to my upstairs neighbors and their numerous motorcycles, made some really good muffins, did a couple of shows, was busy to an unprecedented degree at work. I'm not saying that I couldn't have written about all of those things, but here we are.

In just two days, in my big Auntie Mame moment, I am taking my niece, a newly minted high school graduate, to Europe. She's never been, which means I'm the one who gets to see her face the first time she encounters the Eiffel Tower and The Globe Theatre, and the labyrinth of Central Amsterdam's canals. I can't wait. But I'm even more excited about getting to teach her how to read a Metro map and that buildings have door codes and that it's a good idea to hit the light switch on every landing, so you don't end up in the middle of the last flight in the pitch dark. I want her to know the quotidian details. And then, I want her to go back again and again. Fingers crossed that she'll want to.

Little Green Apples

On Wednesday night, a crowd of us gathered at the Great American Music Hall to celebrate Green Apple Books' 50th Anniversary by way of Porchlight. Several well-known people told stories filled with bookstore boosterism (possibly my favorite kind of boosterism) and a few people sang heartrending songs (definitely my favorite kind of song). One singer who had a very winning "aw shucks, ma'am. It's my first time in the big city" type vibe, proved upon later Google search, to be the critically-acclaimed author of several novels.  Another man, unscheduled to speak, was plucked from the crowd and introduced as a bartender and former Green Apple employee. Friends, to hear a Glaswegian recount being buried in an avalanche of hardbacks in the '89 earthquake is a delectation you do not know you long for until the very moment the Scottish vowels of "earthquake" unfurl before you. The man is a born orator. As far as I'm concerned,  he's the goddamn King of the North.

There was also a racy Mary Poppins burlesque number, complete with sparkling black umbrella and one faulty pasty.  Mergatroid, the Green Apple gnome, was there too, handing out free books.  Natch.

In other words, it felt like home.  My San Francisco.  It's still here after all. 

After the show, I went merrily along with with an assortment of book people and story people to Tommy's Joynt, the slightly dubious late-night hauf brau that has been on the corner of Van Ness and Geary my entire life.  I'm pleased to report that no one has ever looked more delighted with anything than the "aw shucks" singer/novelist looked with his cafeteria tray of roast beef dinner.  

After a couple hours of alcohol and general conversation, people recalled their adult responsibilities and headed home, leaving just five of us: me, Beth, the King of the North, and two of his friends who had happened along. He announced that duty required him to resume his post at the bar down the street. I demurred since it was nearly 1AM and a school night.  So, the four of them made their way down Geary, and I turned the corner reluctantly to go home.

From the end of the block, I saw three men leaning on what I thought was my car and braced myself for the imminent confrontation. As I got nearer, I realized that, not for the first time, I had confused someone else's prosaic black sedan with my own prosaic black sedan. Suffused with the particular brand of relief that is not having to talk to strange men at 1AM in the Tenderloin, I reached my own Toyota. 

As I unlocked it, something felt wrong. The interior light didn't come on as usual when I opened the door. Why?  It took me a strangely long time to diagnose the problem, considering it was not an unfamiliar one. I looked at the open glove compartment and the trash on the passenger seat and slowly, slowly it dawned on me.  "Oh." I said aloud. "Someone broke into my car is what."  I groped for the overhead light and once it was on, I realized that 1) nothing had actually been stolen. Including my dinner leftovers. Including my library book. 2) only the back, passenger side vent window had been broken.  This explained why I hadn't immediately understood what had happened.  The smallest of windows?  In the back? On the passenger side?  This is practically courtly behavior.  Never before had my car been broken into in such a gentlemanly fashion. Nevertheless, no matter how decorously one may do it, a break in is a break in and I didn't want my glittering evening to end so darkly.

I drove around the block and found a parking place right in front of the bar. When I walked in, my friends were sitting around a table just inside the door. "Heyyyyyyy!" they all called out happily, raising their arms in greeting, for all the world as though I were Norm, back at last, where everybody knew my name.  

There was just one empty chair at the table, waiting for me.  I stayed until 2.

***

I called for an appointment today and the window replacement will run me 120 bucks, which seems like a lot for such a comparatively small piece of glass, but then, someone else bought my Wednesday night gin and tonic, so I think it all evens out.

Le mot juste

I'm driving to work and listening to NPR.  Because swearing takes a lot of my attention while I drive these days, I miss the full context of the current news story. Something, I believe, about a large group of immigrants making their way over the border from Mexico, only to immediately turn themselves in to American authorities.

The newscaster in the studio is talking to a reporter on the scene. 

"Allison, I've been calling this 'a situation'; help me be more precise.  Should I be calling it 'a crisis'? Something else?"

"Well, Bill, I think it could be called 'an ongoing situation' and yesterday, it was really 'an event'."

We are now officially living in Will Eno'sTragedy: a tragedy.