
The Old Neighborhood

Almost 6 years ago.
Almost 10 years ago.
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.
Once the Irish, the Germans, the workers pressed together, clustered little Victorians, where they were born, lived, then died. Now babies in strollers, babies pressed against mom, against dad, toddlers wobbling, wide blocks of deconstructed, reconstructed, houses, pasted photos, smiling women and men, realtors, listing, listed, selling, sold. White buses, elevated people, wearing laptops like blankets, heading south to touch more technology. Hilly hills, wisps of fog, oceanic clouds, permanent winter like they say Twain said. Past and present commingle in gusts of wind, September summers, sometimes rain and rainbows.