September 5, 2002

Way early on the morning walks last month in San Francisco, I watched policemen make a route, using batons for alarm clocks to rouse the homeless people from any indentation large enough to shelter a human form. Down by the square, heard a fiddle whine to find a tune for a forlorn voice singing: "Mustang Molly, better slow yore mustang down. One of these early mornings, you gonna be wiping yore weepy eyes from riding too fast around dis town."

Country boys from Mertzon make low scores on street knowledge. Yet we learn to stay back from outbreaks of human misery until the scene becomes homogenized by workers joining the idle ones. Go bogeying into early morning rehearsal — or worse, early morning withdrawal tremors — and chances run high that you will be ruled out of bounds and punished for the indiscretion.

For a long time, I thought the buskers around train stations and sidewalk concert halls, playing those deep wracking Southern blues on warbling saxophones or palming pain-enshrouded harmonicas, were the reason train rides and train whistles made me sad. Blamed the subway dirges for my sadness until I made this last trip to San Francisco to ride the train across the Bay to Berkeley. Waiting at a station, a fragmentary memory returned of how Mother used to mutter as the passenger train passed through Mertzon, "Just wish he was on that train." A second flashback followed of a small boy I helped in a big train station in southern France, with a tag tied around his little neck giving directions to his grandparents' home.

My friend thought the impending train ride underneath the Bay was causing my apprehension. I denied being scared. Blamed being uncomfortable on meeting the new people over in Berkeley. See, my old pal Horace Kelton discovered he had a sister living in Berkeley two years ago — a poet, just like he is. A redhead so full of life, she writes church music after juggling sick babies around in a pediatric hospital on the graveyard shift as a nurse. Horace and I have been friends for 50 years. I wasn't going to take a chance of missing meeting an extension of a guy I liked as much as I do him.

And she was fun; knew how to entertain us, too. Took us to a book store run by a codger not quite as old as his books, but in overall contrariness and seasoning way ahead of any human to ever walk in or out of a California book store. His inventory, all collector editions, reached such huge proportions that the 12 foot tall polished wooden shelves rolled on rubber wheels, propelled by a crank to open and close spaces. "Old Dominic," or whatever his name was, might be rolling open a section for a customer and at the same time be threatening a reader nearby with being squashed by the adjoining shelves coming together.

Regular customers delighted in watching newcomers bound from an aisle that Dominic was fast cranking closed. I was looking for a copy of Conrad Richter's "Sea Of Grass," but once he hit the crank, I didn't want an extra copy bad enough to become a compressed book lover. At checkout, I told the curmudgeon of a book peddler I wasn't coming back unless he put a warning whistle on his shelves. If he even smiled, I missed it.

One guess why the book dealer was so soured is that he was close to the vigor and energy of the youth being expanded on the nearby campus of the University of California. Be hard on an ol' cuss to be around such a lively student body.

Horace's sister took us up on a high point overlying the university's magnificent facilities. Overlooking the red tile roofs of the cream-colored stucco buildings and filled with the pungent Eucalyptus odors wafting in sea air around us, I understood why student discontent festered down there in the 1960s. Man's burdens aren't limited to the squalor of the ghettos. Backpacks laden with pamphlets strapped on the shoulders chafe the skin. Hands blister and fingers cramp carrying protest signs. Sit-downs are no joke on hot sidewalks. Life can be mighty difficult now knowing whether your next check will come from your parents or your grandparents.

Going back on the 10 o'clock train to San Francisco, no musicians or abandoned kids boarded our car. At the downtown station we scurried up the steel steps, ignoring the crusaders, the panhandlers, and the guy selling the homeless newspaper. (I wanted a copy, but couldn't risk losing the momentum of escape.) Broke free up into the everybody world of tourists strolling hand in hand and young lovers walking the crosswise gait of the entwined. On the last turn, the fiddler blocked the sidewalk confronting a competitor over dominion of his corner. Smart as a city guy, we dodged into the street and avoided the fight, continuing a bee line for the hotel...

September 5, 2002

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