Walking about San Francisco

Today I was fortunate to have been invited to a lunch with a couple of people I used to work with. I had planned to either ride my motorcycle in to the city or at worse drive to the BART station I used to drive to for a mass transit ride into San Francisco. Unfortunately the "maint req" light flashed on in my Prius yesterday. So late yesterday I called and was able to get an appointment for 8:15 AM this morning to have it serviced. While I felt fortunate to get an appointment for the very next day, it did lead to a couple of things: First, I set my alarm clock last night. Second, I got in to San Francisco early.

Now, I did get up in time to turn off the alarm clock before it actually went off but I didn't want to chance it. I also left in time to make it on time to Putnam Toyota in Burlingame although there were times that the volume of vehicles and slowness of the traffic made me think I might be late. (Even though I didn't really care if I were late, thinking about it and trying to avoid being so is just part of my Type-A personality.)

After dropping off the car, I walked the short distance to the Burlingame CalTrain station and for $4.25 one way rode into San Francisco. CalTrain's San Francisco station is at 4th and Townsend, a good ten blocks from where I was to meet them. Since I was walking anyway I thought that since I had time, I should just make it a "walk about" of San Francisco. But somewhere on the path from the CalTrain station to a Starbucks near where I used to work I decided that that walk was sufficient.

The portion of San Francisco I walked through today was dirty. Not as dirty perhaps as New York City but I did pass booze bottles, open trash bags, trash, puke, spit, and miscellaneous unidentified debris that quite frankly I didn't want to examine closely enough to identify. This may have been just a phenomenon of the area and time in and at which I was walking because I have often seen retail businesses that get the sidewalks in front of the businesses clean at least once a day. I did walk the same path back to the station and most of what I noticed this morning had been cleaned up.

Even as I found myself falling back into my commute habits, (I bought a paper and did the puzzles rather than interact with any of the other passengers.), I couldn't help but notice what I call the commute face on every one I saw. Truth be told, it was probably on me as well. This is basically a completely emotionless face. It negates interaction before it can start. It says, "Don't engage me. I'm not interested."

Part of my walk took me past 201 Third Street, where my very first San Francisco office was located. A lot has changed around that spot, some of which was changing while I worked there. (I was there when the hotel that was being built across the street had something big and heavy fall from one of their cranes and crash into and through the fire house next door. Fortunately for the duration of the hotel construction, that fire station was shut down. Several of the restaurants around were not only under new management but under new names as well. Somewhere I read that the average age for all restaurant businesses is five years. This supposedly includes the ones that have been in business for centuries.

After my coffee, I walked to the Ferry Building and the Sur La Table located in it. Then, with time still to kill, I walked to Stacey's. There were at least three new books that I didn't have but I only bought one of them. (When I arrived home the other two were on my front porch as I had pre-ordered them from amazon.com.)

The one change that struck me the most poignantly was the flower shop that I used to buy half-priced flower bouquets on Fridays for Marilyn. When my office changed, I didn't buy her flowers nearly as often but I did so most anniversaries. She didn't always appreciate chocolates, because she liked them all too much, but she always appreciated flowers.

Today would have been our 31st anniversary.