Tues. January 5, 2016
A Day in the Life of...
a completely screwball SF Gal, roaming the North Point of San Francisco on a rainy day,
with her umbrella, an antique watch, and an iPhone.
Picture the girl,
smiling atop the Fort Mason Hill,
as she looks West, the sky opens up over the Golden Gate Bridge...
She beams, decides she must capture this with her iPhone, and removes phone from pocket.
Perhaps this is when she lost her grandmother's gold, engraved, antique watch that her parents recently repaired and gave her for Christmas the first week of December... Truly incredible gift, now MIA after one month. (Anyone on FB here now must swear not to mention this watch to my parents or you will be immediately unfriended, and don't try to be all, "Oh it wasn't me" about it... I'll hunt you down, and my finger knows how to use the checkbox that will send you far, far away, into a galaxy no longer near me on Facebook... But, I digress)
Back to our Mary Tyler Moore character, beaming on the hillside over Fort Mason...
She snaps a few shots of trees, the bikes reflected in the wet pavement, she walks up the hill towards the hostel, then across to the mesa with a military canon. She briefly imagines being shot out of said canon, crosses past it and sees Alcatraz glowing in the distance.
The sky is cloudy and that deep Steele blue with just a dancer's translucent scarf of purple just holding it back from itself. The sun pierces the darkness and warms the wet pines with glistening crystals and light, birds shoot out of nowhere like they've never seen the day before. A patch of blue sky appears, and the cherry red Balcutha schooner peaks through the trees, like a smile of a dreamy toddler holding both legs of his mother and peaking through to cautiously calculate who you are, but tempts you just the same.
She decides at this very moment to love life. She thinks of her family, the past and all the people that lead her to this moment. Born the year after her parents passed through the Summer of Love in San Francisco, she has always believed she was meant to be here, but she wants to live big, explore and travel the world, like her Swedish grandmother did.
She descends the staircase in high heeled boots like a model on the runway, only to ponder how the small red fire extinguisher she saw 25ft to the left yesterday is now on the right at the bottom of the staircase. She reaches the bottom of the second flight to a blanket of green nasturtium leaves, tickled with light rain. Imagining the fire of reds and oranges that will soon come, she turns South towards the office and heads back to work. A black crow on the wire reminds her of #MikeDeni of #Geographer, staring down at her while she had the audacity to order a Cosmopolitan at the Big One. She spoke to the female bartender and smiled, as she noticed Mike, barely visible in the wall of black that was stage right. Originally, she thought he was smiling at her, but she no longer can tell. He was wondering about her, as she too was wondering about him. Perhaps that was enough for now. Shaking hands with the keyboard player and quickly returning to the dance floor, she disappeared into the night...
Oh, right, the watch.. the waterfront, the Bad and Ugly? Sure, sure...
Back in the office, a young bearded co-worker is refilling the Xyron machine at the comp table near her desk. It's close to 6pm, and most people have left. He turns his phone on with music. She is just about to realize the Bad news that her grandmother's watch is missing from her left wrist, but then, the second song on his playlist is "Awake" by Tycho. She can not help but start swaying her body to this trance music that she heard live on New Year's Eve... She has to duck down below her computer screen to keep him from seeing her moving and revealing a brush of ecstasy across her lips. She then returns to the realization that the timepiece is lost, and she struggles to look for it against previous desires to go introduce herself to her co-worker and tell him how much she loves Tycho....
The search brings her upstairs to the lobby of Williams-Sonoma and the bathroom, where she decides it's possible that the watch fell off when she came in from her walk and had to use the restroom. removing her gloves and coat may have caused the watch to fall off. then she sees the caution tape across two sinks. Peering through the tape she sees rocks mud dirt both sinks. She wonders if the watch was flushed down the toilet causing the sinks to back up. Ugly and sad it would be, if the watch was now sitting in a P trap at the office, costing her employers extra money as the stock market tumbles. Wondering if she'll still have a job or a watch tomorrow, she heads out into the darkness and light rain to make the commute back to the North. Exuberance, time and money, now lost or flushed down the toilet, she remembers holding hands with her grandmother at the art museum, and feeling like all was right in the world.
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