Thinking at Night

Good day!

I listen to a little radio all night long, most nights.  I guess I do it mostly to stop myself from thinking. Thinking leads to memory, often, and as often as not, memory leads to regrets.

But this night, (morning, really), I lay awake and thought about San Francisco.  In the summer of 1959, Theo and I came home to California after six or seven months in Mexico.  We'd agreed that he would be going back to school in Berkeley to get his master's, and that I'd teach.

He did enroll in school, and I did interview in the Bay Area until I got a job in Oakland teaching third grade.  All that fall, he studied and went to school, and I went to work, throughout the week. On Saturdays he studied with a friend, and I got on the BART (its then-equivalent) and rode over the Bay, not under it, to San Francisco, where I got off and walked to Union Square. In my hands were a number of pieces of piano music, and the first thing I did was to go into the
Alameda Theater, a huge, hollow, echoing multiple space, and rent the use of a piano for an hour's time each Saturday morning.  I'd sit all alone at a piano in a small room, and practice my pieces by Ravel and Debussy, a feat I 'd been missing for over a year and was now to enjoy again.  Two ladies who were in charge of the place loved my playing and were impressed. Was I preparing a concert? It amazes me that I was that "good," that people would really have thought that I was some kind of pro.

After I'd played for a time, I went out onto Union Square. There were a myriad of first class stores to go into and explore then...the two Magnins, and then to Podesta Valdocci's flower shop, and the pet shop down that little lane....among others.  There were two delicatessens there near each other, David's and Solomon's, and I always chose Solomon's as it was smaller...I ate a simple bowl of chicken soup with a kreplach, or a nice sandwich of chopped liver, still my favorite "Jewish" food.

Then I roamed more until it was time to go home. The White House, the City of Paris--huge department stores with a wealth of goods I 'd scarcely before imagined.  I'll never forget the ribbon counter alone at the City of Paris...what wealth indeed.  I marched into the White House and asked for three yards of handkerchief linen and marched out with it in my arms. Nowadays, you'd have to find a clerk who knew the word "linen", and then"handkerchief linen...," if you were lucky.  And you'd have to be very lucky to even find a fabric department anyway.

I've often been sorry that I didn't walk more, all over San Francisco, on those days. I could easily have done it, for I could walk miles then.  But,t hen, I had all that music with me...and I had to do that...and as I now realize, I was dressed in a rather stiff formal little suit-dress of light brown wool plaid, stockings and the appropriate undergarments, and high heels. I was in the City, after all!!!  Nowadays, I would be in pants, good walking shoes, and a strong but light windbreakers, and I would be walking everywhere--if I were in my twenties again, or even thirties, forties, fifties or sixties!!  I think of the clothes we wore then--stockings and not even pantyhose at that--they had not been invented.  The next year at the very Sather Gate near which we resided there was to take place the beginnings of a social transformation the likes of which we could not have imagined at that time.  But I got pregnant that fall of 1959, and woke up in December with a persistent "morning sickness" which left me no more time for rambling  around in San Francisco or elsewhere.  And by the summer of 1960, Alexander came upon the scene and there was no more time nor space in my heart for anyone but my family and my new baby. YAZZYBEL