Author and Artist
Dare We Dream in Concrete?
A fictional travelogue; three minute read.
Since before sunrise, I’ve been walking on the city’s gray concrete streets. Forgetting to eat, always moving, daydreaming. The ups and downs of my love life are tracking hilly San Francisco.
I started my journey in Pacific Heights—a borderless country club for the well-connected filled with stately mansions garlanded with manicured hedges and gated entries. Like a covey of debutantes at a cotillion, Architectural Digest homes curtsy to each other.
Pacific Heights doesn’t overlook the Pacific Ocean. Instead, like a shawl draped over a matron’s aging shoulders, Pacific Heights cascades along a hillcrest facing San Francisco’s fabled bay. From the west, the ocean-cold waters enter the Golden Gate, imprisoning Alcatraz Island, ebbing and flowing around posh lives lived in Marin County and washing up against the gritty shores of industrial Oakland.
In Pacific Heights, I’m a tourist.
Lululemon and Vuori women are parading their pedigreed dogs. Only the dogs notice me.
Further on, I turn right on Van Ness Avenue. During the 1906 Earthquake, buildings on Van Ness were dynamited to make a firebreak. This bit of San Francisco history is my favorite example of exploding private property rights to serve the larger public good. A down-to-earth case study for my high school civics classes.
Wearing blue jeans, hunter green shirt and scuffed shoes the color of a rusty cable car rail, I stand impatiently at a crosswalk. I’m tucked into a cluster of other San Franciscans waiting to be released from a red light. When it turns green, we step ahead—separately.
Unless there is a hand to hold, walking is a solitary thing.
The city’s happiest soundtrack is playing. Kids laughing at a playground. Couples conversing, cuddling. From atop Nob Hill, church bells celebrate a wedding.
Across honking Van Ness Avenue, City Hall overlooks Civic Center Plaza. Women in skirts and tank tops stroll arm-in-arm. Two teens—one is in a hoodie, the other in a denim jacket—are headed in the direction of the public library. No one is alone.
Seated at one of the plaza’s bistro tables, a woman with a lime green roller suitcase, wearing a bright red top and black slacks makes a point of showing off her perfectly manicured turquoise fingernails. A woman of interest.
Once a male colleague—he goes through life with a permanent grin on his face--told me his secret to happiness was always being in love. At the time, I had no reason to ask if he meant being in love with a person, his work, a hobby or maybe even an entire city.
A poem chiseled into a concrete wall asks, “Dare We Dream in Concrete?” A city, after all, is not much more than its citizenry cemented together by circumstance and reinforced concrete. Then, in the cracks of its fractured pavements, some lucky city dwellers find each other.
Without its sidewalks, San Francisco would be as strange as a city without people. As strange as a city without lovers—and the lonely. As strange as a city without me.
I stroll into the Yerba Buena Gardens. The benches and lawns are full of picnickers—pretty women on their lunch hour. If one of them were waiting for me, if there were someone, I’d have detoured via Union Square to buy flowers.
