species of spaces

Grant reminded me recently of a great Kushner quip: “Heaven is a place much like San Francisco.” Claire has been reading the Miroslav Sasek book “This is San Francisco”, and so nowadays whenever she sees the Golden Gate Bridge or Alcatraz or a cable car, she asks “Can we go to San Francisco?” I sound like a trendy vicar when I tell her: “Honey, San Francisco is all around us.

I mention this because today we went to a clothing swap at my yoga instructor’s sister’s house, and it turns out that my yoga instructor’s sister is married to Brewster Kahle of Internet archive fame. They live in one of the old officer’s residences in the Presidio with this quite awesome view out over the Palace of Fine Arts and the bay. Claire played the piano and while we all frantically tried things on, Julia slept beatifically amid the piles and piles of clothes.

Afterwards Carole, Jamey and I took the kids down to the Warming Hut, and Claire lost part of her cheese sandwich when she was mugged by a starling.

On Kevin Kelly’s recommendation I just watched one of the most amazing films I’ve ever seen. “Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life” is a 1925 documentary by Merian Cooper, who went on to make King Kong. The filmmakers travelled from Turkey across Arabia to what is now Southern Iraq, then followed the migration of a Bakhtiari tribe over the Zagros mountains. You watch fifty thousand people walking barefoot over Zard Kuh, the highest peak.

I close with a witty observation uniting these various anecdotes, an observation I haven’t thought of just yet.

Leave a Reply

Comments are closed.