Letting go of San Francisco

There is nothing in San Francisco that does not tug on my heartstrings. This city was my entry into the NA continent in ’65, and after the melodramatic passage under the Golden Gate Bridge in that August morning, I alighted on Embarcadero from a 20-day cross-Pacific sail from Manila to SF via HK, Yokohama, and Honolulu. At sunset, billeted with relations on the foothills of Oakland overlooking the Bay, the sight of a fogless bridge and the wharf overlooking my bay window served as the backdrop of the uncontrolled tears that streamed down my eyes. I was 20; twenty days before, my mother saw me off South Harbor in Manila Bay, to come halfway around the globe for graduate school.

I came back to SF a year later in ’66, and spent half a summer when I turned 21 by Union Square getting familiar with cable cars, Geary, Stockton, Market and Powel streets. SF has since become the city where the northern CA members of INHS60 (my high school class in the Philippines) do not hesitate to find an excuse to get together in South San Francisco. This visiting classmate is treated as a long lost brother. I showed up almost 50 years after I last saw a shadow of any of them since I skipped the class’ graduation!

More recently, my second daughter’s family of Irish husband and two boys moved to the foothills of the East Bay in the Oakland area. After being spoiled a week by my eldest daughter, her husband and her family (two grandsons, too) in Chicago, it was my second child’s turn to spoil this old coot on his farewell appearance in North America. They make home in Concord and thanks to the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), they are only a 30-minute rail trail from the Embarcadero and Market train station.

A colleague who lives by the Marina had me billeted at the Holiday Inn by the Fisherman’s Wharf one day last week with a family dinner. My daughter made sure I had protection from the evening winds that hit the unwary out-of-town visitor, letting me don an Irish Sport’s pullover jacket, and since I was within walking distance to the famed Lombard St. zig-zag road, graced with colorful flower pots this season of the year, I blended well, though oddly, with the numerous tourists in town as an Asian Irish sports’ fan. I thought of cracking crab legs at the Fisherman’s Wharf but I was informed that the service was expensive and the fare is, at best, crabby!

I was a student tourist in ’66 when I first came to be a summer resident in the city. It was my first summer in the country after a year of schooling in Kentucky. I thought I would be a bellboy at the Francis Drake Hotel but that summer, the friendly skies of United went empty when UA employees decided to strike, depriving the city of more than half of its regular tourists. A dent on the hotel occupancy left me without a summer job in the city.

An outfit that preyed on foreign students, who expressed themselves relatively well in English, lured us to conduct “market analysis” in neighborhoods—I joined them (a Norwegian, Swede, Chinese, and I comprised a team) in knocking on doors to “place” Colliers’ Encyclopedia into “qualified” homes.

Professor Mortimer Adler of the Great Books’ fame had a well-crafted sales pitch we used: “Just for the price of a pack of cigarettes a day (25 cents at the time), a set of encyclopedia with a wooden bookcase would be sent to qualified families,” we said, after an engaging and well-spirited 30-45 minute presentation, leafing through the plastic laminated pages of book samples. Bonus books were added if the targeted couple (we knocked on homes that had children’s toys in the yard) wrote a check of $375 for the whole set to cover the yearbooks that followed the next 10 years.

Our team stayed on wheels and motels during the week as we scoured the suburban landscape for our marks around UC at Berkeley and the foothills north to Richmond and south to Hayward, even putting on a week around Eureka’s lumber and timber towns, and cruising along Stanford U in Palo Alto when a cop gently reminded me that it was illegal to knock on people’s doors to sell something without securing first a permit from the local business bureau.

That’s when my sanity pinged back and immediately resigned from the sales force. I was never good at closing out a sale anyway, for though I supported the notion of “placing a library into qualified families’ homes,” I knew too well that the pitch was a ruse for a well-crafted sale. I was not selling Hoover vacuum cleaners but the method was the same, so I could just as well have been, and it was illegal.

My INHS60 classmates got together at an SSF residence and they provided a warm and convivial send-out for me. The Pinoy food added to the 10 lbs that already girded my girth gained since I landed in North America some four weeks before. The voices in Iloko spoken freely and fluently was music, and when one of our musical talents set her fingers on the piano keyboard, we started belting out what could have been easily serenade songs in our youth.

Over breakfast, I chatted merrily with my hosts before I was driven to the airport for my flight out. They were polite by not mentioning the obvious. I was wearing my shirt inside out. (They said they did not notice.) Not a fashion statement. I was old and forgetful (left behind my pony tail cap as well). But it was time to get out of town.