In New York City, where dooring is a bloodsport, Transportation Alternatives hands out medals for bravery just for riding to work. Though I miss the Brooklyn Bridge views, bike commuting in San Francisco is a joy.

I bought a map that color codes the hills in pink and red, and marks bike paths of every flavor. I live on a red hill, the kind where you stop for a rest halfway up and see a roadsign that notes that, whatever about that last one, this next block is a HILL. Trucks are not advised on my HILL, and I dismount before I am dismounted.

But once I get to basecamp, on Precita Street, it’s a straight, flat shot to work, and the weather is always mild. It could be Amsterdam, riding on generous bike lanes past crumpled junkies. San Francisco bikers are a relaxed and friendly tribe, swapping notes at the traffic lights and warning out-of-towners away from the hilliest routes. Here, I feel like a full road-user, not SUV prey, at least until the Oakland cars roar off the freeway onto Brannan Street. I wear my dork gear proudly: reflective jacket, reflective velcro clips for my jeans, reflective stickers on my helmet. (At night I arrive in bars with squashed hair and smudged hands, carrying a bike seat, saddle bags, and a helmet. Hel-lo, San Francisco. Come to mama.)

There’s a bike cage in the parking garage at my office building, and we have full showers and lockers upstairs. On a good day, there might be eight bikes, though the hundreds of car spaces are full.

I haven’t yet grown tired of Danny O’Brien’s account of his cable show on some lost public-access channel, and their obsession with segues. At the commercial break, his co-presenter would turn to the camera and say, “And now for some short films about capitalism.”

My God, it explains everything.

Via the wonderful 43 Folders.

Bohemians are useless at saying goodbye; and they never want anyone else to leave. So, they don’t say goodbye; they vanish, or they cease to be bohemian, suddenly or gradually assuming responsibilities they have for a long time postponed.
—Inigo Thomas, “Leaving New York“No matter how long you have been here, you are a New Yorker the first time you say, That used to be Munsey’s, or That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge… when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.
—Colson Whitehead

Just slip out the back, Jack
Make a new plan, Stan
—Paul Simon

Departure is permissive. As it draws close you get to say the unsaid and try on wishes for size. I love its carnival intensity, and maybe that’s why I’ve done so much leaving. But in spite of all that practice— or because of it—I am useless at goodbyes. After a fortnight of cake and beer, and with a week left in New York, I excused myself. I spent my last Friday night not with old friends but on a first date, scaring the bejesus out of the guy by announcing that from here on in I was only in the business of hellos. Well, I thought I meant it.

That Sunday I put on my snorkel jacket and took the 1 train to 215th Street at nine in the morning. Broadway slices skinny Manhattan top to bottom on the diagonal, and I wanted to walk its length in tribute to the place I’ve loved. The moving boxes were still stacked, not packed, in the hallway, and my to-do list lay undone. I carried a print-out of Inigo Jones’s recent Slate piece for vague directions on how to cut across to Fort Tryon Park to begin my pilgrimage.

It was the best of New York February: crisp and brilliant, and warming towards a balmy thirty after too many frozen weeks. The winter trees stretched like models and I made a little prayer to the Olmsteads for their grace in planting gardens for generations they’d never meet. Below the Cloisters museum, middle-aged firemen played volleyball, showing off a little for a passing audience.

On happy days, when you need it least, everyone wishes you more joy. “Baby, you have a beautiful day now, y’hear?” yelled the flower stall guy, and I did, helloing my way down Broadway. In Washington Heights, the, the Spanish signs were formal: COAT $10! GRAN ESPECIALIDAD CON MOTIVO DE “SAN VALENTIN.” I thought about a pupusa stop, but it was too early, and I could count on San Francisco to provide Salvadoran food, if nothing else. And I was too early, as always, for services at the United Church of Reverend Ike All Welcome, but that was okay. It’s important to leave a city unfinished so that you come back.

Outside the Hispanic Society of New York—another Inigo Thomas tip—a man sitting on the steps groused while I petted his dog. “Oh yeah, that’s it. Pay attention to the dog. That fucking dog gets more attention from females than I ever did or ever will. And it’s a girl!”

I jotted down a Toni Morrison quote in a Morningside Heights bookstore: “In this country, American means white. Everyone else has to hyphenate.” Around 115th Street, near Columbia University, Broadway un-hyphenates briefly and drearily. “Those women are so hostile,” someone said outside Starbucks. Her friend mentioned his soy intolerance, and she reminded him of her lactose difficulties. Barnard College was running a production of The Vagina Monologues, as if they were in short supply.

Then a detour to Amsterdam Avenue to visit the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, still in progress after more than a century. I like the notion of house of faith that stays unfinished. It seems more flawed and more alive that way, like its worshippers.

At the northwest entrance, I found that Christo had gift-wrapped Central Park as a going-away present. His saffron flags flapped and glowed like monastery robes drying in the sun. A man rapped on a saffron gate post. “Ple-astic? Ya think it’s ple-astic?” It’s vinyl, someone said. “Voi-nyl, thank you.” Bikers reached up to bat at the flags. So did a three-year-old on his father’s shoulders, mad with joy.
“And there’s another flag! Oh, Daddy! I missed that one. But there’s another one!”

I felt mad with joy, too, at The Gates flaming on the snow and the thousands of open faces looking up. The Gates taught that the fleeting deserves as much—or more—attention as the fixed. At first I wished I had a camera; then it was enough to smile for strangers’ photos. On the East Drive a pearly limo glided north. “That’s Christo and Jeanne-Claude,” someone said, “They’ve come to see the reactions.” I imagined a second installation: The Reactions. The crowd cheered the smoked windows. “Thank you! Thank you, Christo!” And Jeanne-Claude.

Below the park, I stopped at Prada to touch the bags, and became the owner of patent-leather silver sneakers that seemed both daft and comfortable enough for a journey to a new life. They were shiny as mirrors. I made a note not to wear them with a skirt. “I see Paris, I see France…”

Around the corner, on 55th and 5th, I visited the apartment I’d lived in my first four years in the city. I hadn’t been back since. The Manolo Blahnik store on the ground floor had moved; it was another Italian restaurant now. I walked past twice, very quickly, glancing into the lobby and hoping not to see the Colombian doormen or the old lady next-door I’d never said goodbye to. Darker and shabbier than I remembered it, and hard to look at now.

The lobby of the Algonquin Hotel has discovered wireless internet access, but the service is still surly and slow. I waited and waited for five-buck coffee: “Is coming. Is brewing the new coffee.” When it came at last, it tasted as though it had been on the boil since I first stayed there, fresh off the plane.

Then down, down Broadway—galloping now, ten miles of rhythm in the strides. I wasn’t seeing the February people any more, or paying attention to the shading from discount cameras to designer furniture as the block decades dropped. I was back with the moments that had stitched together my time in the city; ducking left and right in sidestreet pilgrimages. My first New York job at Times Square. The old Vindigo office on 25th Street. The theater where I’d seen Andrew’s play. The school where I’d done bootcamp training for my volunteer job. Farrar, Straus & Giroux on Union Square, where I’d learned to file and grudge. My first bowl of pho. A final, blistered pause on the corner of Broadway and Houston to wave up at the office I’d left the week before.

In two hundred blocks I’d traced another layer on the palimpsest of my New York, which is not the same as yours.

Even in Kyoto
Hearing the cuckoo’s cry
I long for Kyoto
—Basho

Oh, the possibilities in a blank page.

Stone Yamashita notebooks are seducing me away from the Moleskine. They’re the size of a Foreign Affairs, and have thick, creamy, tear-off pages that are lined on one side and squared on the next. The brown covers come with four provoking titles, the choice of which reveals something to you and about you. My first notebook said CH-CH-CH… on the front, and CHANGES on the back. The latest bookends DESIRE with FEAR, and I hope the sheets in between represent the middle way.

There are pages set aside for tempting lists:

Inside, there’s a tiny, printed inscription:

On my first day, two months ago, my SY[P] co-workers gave me a neat stack of San Francisco guidebooks and a household address book that they’d filled with notes on opthalmologists, florists, car repair shops, hikes, plumbers, restaurants, dentists, and babysitters. This streak of inventive empathy, made elegantly tangible, runs through the culture from the stationery cupboard to the client presentations. It’s what makes them excellent, and it makes me glad they found me.

“In Mexico the family seems to be a centripetal force; in the US it is a centrifugal force.”
—Carolo and Marcelo Suárez Orozco, Transformations: Immigration, family life, and achievement motivation among Latino adolescents Stanford UP 1995

On her visit from New York last weekend, Kit had joked with Jake’s brother, her host, while we sat in Mission-Dolores Park. “Are we those relatives?” she said. She meant the ones who take over your guest room or sofa instead of booking a hotel room; the ones who impose. They told of the codes they use to tell out-of-town family they’re welcome but not that welcome: “I’m not sure if you’d be comfortable here, just because there’s a little drug action on my block sometimes…” Someone else said it was kind of sad to have your parents still crashing at your place once they got to sixty. You—or they—should be able to afford a hotel room by then.

As a child I memorized books about English boarding schools and American summer camps, and latched on to independence as a high ideal. I don’t think it was prized in Ireland, especially, but my parents indulged me anyway. (At least until I confused independence with geographical distance so thoroughly that they switched tack with my younger sisters, hoping to keep at least one of us at home.) I was sent on French exchanges and grim au pair summers; let off to London the day I turned 18; allowed to go to college in Dublin and not call home as much as I should have. At twenty I spent a year living in Valencia’s thriving drug district. The Spaniards I knew made it clear that no loving family should let a daughter roam like that, and I looked down on them in turn. Their own kids lived at home until marriage, but I was an adult.

Maybe that’s why I can still push west with a few boxes of books, at an age when my friends are bound more deeply to their places. But now I wonder—I’m a late developer—what’s so great about this Anglo-Saxon cult of individualism? I decided to move to San Francisco when I realized that for all I loved New York, I couldn’t pass the Chemo Test: though my pals filled a room for a surprise goodbye party, I wasn’t sure who I’d call if I got sick. I think of Caitriona’s son, Liam, and am wrenched at the thought of him ever joking about his embarrassing Irish ma wanting to stay at his apartment.

On Sunday I went to a birthday party for a three-year-old friend, where the guests were a mix of Irish and American. The rowdier smallies mauled cupcakes and rear-ended plastic trucks into the kitchen walls, and the placid ones sat on their nappies and supervised the backyard vegetation.

I talked to a Cork woman whose five-year-old son was a hit with the girls at the party. After years in the Bay Area, she was trying to move back to Ireland. It was too hard here as a single parent, she said, and she felt there might be more support at home. You could rely on basic health care, and probably still count on decent free public education. But since she had a good job, those weren’t biggest factors that pushed her home. What wore her down was the lack of community here, the lack of a set of friends and neighbors that the kids could run in and out to, and whom you could call when they were sick. People are friendly here, she said, but still you have to arrange the playdate at a set time and place. It’s always about the kid’s social development, never about giving each other a bit of a break.

I’ve watched my Irish friends with children, and that web of casual support is still there, at least among the ones who aren’t wealthy. “We’re bringing our lads to the park,” Joy might say, “and sure why don’t you send Maya along with us so you can get a few things done?” I thought this was how it worked everywhere. But in San Francisco, Noreen says, she knows one single father in her apartment complex with whom she can trade babysitting from time to time. The kids have no chemistry, and the father regards the time as a bartered commodity to be precisely measured, rather than a way to look out for one another. In itself, the calculation becomes exhausting.

I don’t know how her experience fits with the spirit of the party, which seemed free of the high-impact “parenting” that defines upper-middle-class families. These relaxed parents seemed happy to be nouns, not verbs, and I felt you could drop a snotty-nosed child or two at any of their houses, in a pinch. Tonight I’m going for drinks with a pair of sisters who just bought a three-unit house with their partners and a friend. Laura’s baby is a month old, and Dorothy is due soon. Their lucky babies will grow up with family in a common backyard.

Still, it’s true that American cities have started to price and market many services here that are part of the social contract elsewhere, at least for now. Places like New York and San Francisco, where so many of us live far from our families, are turning to trained and paid doulas for the pregnancy wisdom they no longer get from the community. Human mammals now seek advice from “lactation consultants.” Childcare is bought and paid for, even for a run to the shops. Adult children don’t give up their beds in tribute to the parents who reared them; they show their love and success by buying them a hotel room—and preserving that precious independence.

But “I can do it by myself!” is a line for a three-year-old, not an adult.

Further reading: Doug Rushkoff, intellectual imp, on the American childrearing experience:

Nothing like having a kid to turn you into either a communist or a capitalist.The long radio silence has been due to the intensity of parenting an infant. Sure, it’d be intense under any circumstances, but I can’t help but believe that the difficulty attending to the 24/7 needs of a baby are compounded by the dissolution of both the extended family and community of days past. Indeed, I’m beginning to believe that the fact that human females pretty much require assistance in giving birth might be a way for nature to enforce a bit of community on our species. Human beings do better in groups. Read the rest

From Andie in South Africa, further reading on the housing bubble: Riotous Real Estate.

The poet who sits next to me at work taps out strategy documents with a brisk two-fingered peck. She never learned to type, she says, because she feared ending up a secretary. When I started out, just a few years after her, I’d taught myself to touch-type but was determined not to admit to the slightest knowledge of mark-up language or web development. At the time, London was so desperate for those skills that I thought it would mean spending ten years adding tables to online annual reports. Then when the rest of the world figured out that a marquee tag wasn’t, in fact, rocket science, my wages would drop from fifty to five quid an hour, and I’d have learned nothing interesting or saleable. I thought it was better to pretend to be the person who could tell those guys what to do.

That was a mistake. I may spend more time typing than tweaking web layouts, but I still wish I could do a better job.

When my blog comments broke last week, I took it as a sign that I should support technology startups—the clan I come from—and upgrade to the paid version of Movable Type, the software that runs this site. It took an evening of tense FTP negotiations with my database before I managed it. Since I first installed it two years ago, Movable Type’s parents, Six Apart, have taken out most of the non-expert instructions and introduced dead-end navigation on their support site. Presumably, we poets are now supposed to use their subscription service, TypePad.

(At lunchtime, sneaking out to a tag sale at Red Dot on Fourth Street, I was star-struck to notice that the Six Apart office is kitty-corner from mine. Their front door is appropriately unglitzy.)

Now a recent burst of posts is forcing me to look at this site again, and it’s painful. I’ve never liked this typography. The serif font of the body copy works badly on screen, and the kerning always seems a little off. Photos are not so much placed as abandoned. The site doesn’t validate against web standards, because I galumphed all over the templates when I was learning two years ago, leaving open tags and half-digested hacks strewn about. It’s not fully accessible to disabled readers, and it probably degrades like a sloppy drunk on phone browsers.

The navigation is clumsy. As the months go by, the sidebar gets more and more cluttered with archives and content categories, but Movable Type doesn’t make it easy to summarize old posts on flexible sub-pages. (I’ve already stripped off the blogroll, which was hopeless outdated.) I’d like to use this site as an outboard brain, but haven’t found a good way to keep track of all the lists and clippings from my magpie mind—book blurbs, heroes, playlists, web subscriptions, recipes, fleeting obsessions (sweet Kalamata olive jam!), and Things I Love/Hate About San Francisco.

I’d like to turn comments back on for old entries, now that I have a better way to manage them. So many people wash up here from Google searches that I’d like to give more context on old posts, at least to the visitors who aren’t looking for “schoolgurl loleeta knickers.” Trackbacks need de-spamming. I should offer more and better syndication choices, and an accessibility statement to be proud of. I want to find a spot for the podcasts I promised Bernie. I want to make a site that’s elegant and clean enough to merit a colophon.

My curse is that I know enough to know what’s failing, and not enough to fix it without a week to read up, noodle, steal and swear. I sketched a layout and a list of design requirements in my notebook (those who can’t, brief) and then wandered around to see who does this well. Shirley Kaiser, over at Brainstorms and Raves, say, or my Brooklyn friend Michael Barrish. (Michael, I miss you.) La Dooce. Dean Allen, still. Or Leslie Harpold, who says of design, function, and web standards that “pretty is as pretty does.”

Spare change for a frustrated, incompetent aesthete? Advice, sympathy, sample stylesheets, and donated archive templates gratefully accepted.