October 3, 2002

A boy dressed in a tattered orange suit, disheveled as windblown newsprint, walked right by me in the corner grocery store on the Tuesday morning we left San Francisco. Muttered these words to a wall lined in six packs and 20/20 wine: "Woe-be, woe all the misery be, using an ash can for a headboard and the morning sun for a blanket. Woe, woe, deep this misery be, using the curbstone for my doorstep and the black asphalt for my yard."

I've written before that 750,000 people live on the 47 square-mile township of San Francisco. Two hundred fifty thousand more pour into the city to work during the week. Ten thousand make up the poor, homeless wretches. I called the office of statistics for the percentage of Asians in the population. The man who knew the answer was on vacation. His subordinates had never bothered to find the sum.

But without knowing, I'd guess the largest Chinese population in the U.S. lived in San Francisco, judging by walking down the streets of Chinatown. The Japanese section is much smaller. We ate lunch one day in the Japanese section. Must have been mating day on the Asian calendar, as all the tables except ours were taken by young lovers eating the traditional fish and rice dishes accompanied by Coca Colas.

Contact by the males amounted to elbows on the tables offering open hands, fingertips facing her across the table. Females responded by brushing fingertips from the same pose against his. Impossible to gauge the thermal energy rising from the finger brushes. Eating with chopsticks, herding a mushroom cap and a piece of tuna as a buffer to corner rice kernels, I couldn't appraise the force of the hormones swirling in the young diners' bodies.

Five Japanese businessmen passing from the bar through the dining room held less of the mystery of the East, or the West. The youngest of the five showed his companions a reverse karate kick, setting off an explosion of laughter by the other four men common to any culture fueled by liquid refreshments at noon. Finger brushing stopped and the click of chopsticks ceased. The hostess whispering and cajoling the five into postponing the floor show was the only audible sound in the dining room.

One display of Caucasian culture we missed was a young lady protesting the tigers being caged by the circus in town. Her photograph in the San Francisco Chronicle showed a comely lass crouched quite naked in a galvanized mesh cage, black stripes painted on her bare skin. Just my luck to be leaving town too soon to go by the protest site. In the 40 years I've written for a newspaper, a caged naked lady would rank high among the coverage. Other than once being on the scene in Mertzon during a gasoline price war of two hours' tenure, my beat extends to raccoons causing fresh-weaned heifers to stampede at night to an account of the day Les White brought an 82-pound yellow catfish into the Mertzon Locker Plant to be butchered.

The Chronicle gives animal rights and animal happenings good coverage. A lead story in the second section of the Sunday edition wrote of a new patient rights bill before the city council in San Diego protecting dogs and cats at veterinarian offices. Side issues came to mind, like age of consent, full knowledge of procedure, warnings of consequences of procedure (i.e. should a puppy be told about docking his tail beforehand?), and a vague mind boggle whether in cases of artificial or natural breeding programs, should the issue of consenting adults be addressed.

Somewhere in Connecticut, I think it was, folks were too scared to take off their clothes to protest about tigers. A tiger lover was running his cats loose on his farm, or play place. The neighbors were plenty nervous being so close to free-ranging tigers, but I don't think the caged tiger lady in Union Square wanted the circus to turn the tigers loose in the city. I hope she didn't stay in the cage so long the sun rays deflected by the mesh spoiled her stripes.

By January of next year, the City of San Francisco promises to have completed a subway line from the International Airport into town. We might have saved a little dough riding a van to make our flight. San Francisco is an exciting town filled with good food and grand sights. But it'd be a bit easier to take if the homeless people were spread over more space.

October 3, 2002

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