17 reasons
Gah. I just lost a lengthy blog entry to a power outage. It was my most brilliant piece ever. If you’d read it you would have laughed and wept and nominated me for the Nobel Peace Prize. Alas, gone.
A sunny and happy and busy weekend, featuring brunch at Atlas, a trip to GG Park with Claire, dinner on Bryant Street, breakfast at Tartine, a trip to Parque de los Ninos Unidos with Claire and Rowan (everyone thought Rowan was mine, funnily enough, probably because he kept calling me mama), roast chicken and Bernal spheres with the Chung-Lockes, a visit from Francisco who will fix our bullet-holed skylight and tiled porch, a trip to Bernal Heights playground with a side trip to Chloe’s Closet for me, lunch at Geranium, Osento and Borderlands with Shannon, and lamb chops and panettone with the Locke-Chungs.
Jeremy calls lamb chops meatsicles because Claire likes to, y’know, gesture with them. She’s very committed to carnivory.
Parque Ninos Unidos used to be a toxic dump where the kids played anyway. Years and years of work on the part of dedicated activists got the place cleaned up, and now it’s a fabulous playground and clubhouse and community garden. It’s the sort of thing you daydream about, but that hardly ever happens. This is one of the big reasons I love living in SF; another is embodied by the Mayan dance troupe with the feathered headdresses and shell anklets and big big drums, rehearsing outside El Metate and enchanting the infants.
People occasionally raise a polite eyebrow at our choice to raise the kid in a micropartment in the middle of a city. I worry about it sometimes myself, but never really wish for anything else. It’s a short walk downhill to cat litter or platanos con crema; a slightly longer but still pleasant walk uphill to brunch and books. There are four good playgrounds within a stone’s throw, and as of next year Claire’s two best friends will be half a mile up the road. There are underground film festivals and red-tailed hawks and Arab horses and great blue herons and redwood trees and a good symphony orchestra and six or seven decent science museums.
But that’s all pretty superficial. More to the point, I think, is that there’s the EFF and Nanowrimo and Burning Man and Moveon.org and 826 Valencia and Craigslist and Kerry signs in every window, replacing the Dean and Clark and Kucinich signs that used to be there. This city just feels more and more like home.
