north beach has changed, the spontaneity is gone, we used to just go out, to shop at city lights bookstore, to eat, to have a drink, to be in the city together, listen to music, jazz, or whatever, the city used to be a community, no one really knew what might happen any given night, at vesuvio’s or caffe trieste, or on broadway, people being people, san francisco people, with their freedom and self-expression, the edifices remain, but the past is past, now they shop amazon online, order uber eats, reserve on opentable, scrutinize tripadvisor, calculate with gps, where to go and when, the city has had a partial death, and no one really cares, why go back to the old ways? we are now more and more, part of the machine, technology guides us, separates us from –lets just go out and be.
Tag: Community
Self-Checkout
no more checkout clerks
at the grocery store
now it is us and the machine
little bar codes, red light
that beeping sound of
credit card accumulating debt
and no one smiles anymore
or says hello, or says
how about that football game
no, that is all in the past
now it is us and the machine
and sometimes we wonder
is this progress?
30th Street Senior Center: 1996
My first job in San Francisco was as a bilingual volunteer coordinator at the 30th Street Senior Center. In all my years of travel abroad I never spoke more Spanish than at the senior center.
Leadership San Francisco: Class of 2017
Paraguayan Heaven
Sitting shotgun in a truck, 3 of us squeezed in the front (Cayo, Ernesto, Me), no seat belts, sipping yerba mate. I’m speaking Spanish, asking questions about recycling plastic and filtering water with chlorine. Cayo drives, points his finger up at the windshield, motioning to each vehicle we pass on the two lane Caazapa highway. Yvaga, he says, cielo, heaven. That’s where you will go when you die, his finger silently communicates. Watching this ritual I see the other drivers smiling at us, their fingers also pointing upward, telling us the same thing.
Cayo asks me about California. The Paraguayan campo has no cable TV, no CNN, no movie theaters. He doesn’t question me about celebrities or our president, he asks about the land, trees, animals, what the air smells like, feels like. I tell him about non-native eucalyptus trees, how they suck water out of the earth, take nourishment away from other plants. He understands. The conversation is easy, like the cumulus clouds that float like cotton above us.
Ernesto speaks and at first I think I comprehend, the cadence sounds the same, but then I’m lost in a time before Spanish, before South American roads. I close my eyes for a few seconds, a lightness takes over. I’m hearing a Guarani language not of an evangelizing church or of plundering capitalism, but of a people, a community. A few minutes later we slow down, pick up a hitchhiker, normal in this part of Paraguay. I see the guy sitting in the truck bed, a large heavy sack between his legs. A man on a journey, we both watch the road, I look out the front, he looks out the back.
Daniel W. Polk 