Discovery Channel viewers have picked a shortlist of the five greatest Americans of all time. It’s one of those memes that starts on the BBC or the CBC and spreads to US television, like The Weakest Link or those LiveJournal “If you were a bodily fluid, which one would you be?” exercises. This particular soap opera is sponsored by Tide.

The top five does not include Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Edison, Frankln D. Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, or Mark Twain.

It does, however, include Ronald Reagan.

Another valentine to engineers as writers: today I got my favorite-ever subject line for an email birth announcement, and a photo that didn’t topple my mailbox. Welcome, Milo Smith! Live long and prosper.

As a kid, I worried about Santa Claus’s feelings. For weeks—months—he was all we thought about and talked about. We laboured over letters with our tongues stuck out, explaining that we would please like a Ballerina Sindy Clear Casters a selection box and a surprise please. We listened to the radio on Christmas Eve, dying to hear Santy read our names. That night, excitement edged towards panic as the hours refused to get out of the way. Then—sandy-eyed after bad sleep—the breathless unwrapping. What is it? What is it? Strap-on rollerskates. Here’s the Sindy. A Timex watch! And Clear Casters? No, the selection box. (Disappointment.)

And as the wrapping paper piled up, Santy disappeared from our consciousness, like a porn star after the money shot. We stood ready to catalogue our swag: “Was Santy good to you?” the aunties would ask. “What d’ya get?” said the other kids, jostling to compare. But beyond that, we didn’t give him a thought. No reports, no thank yous. No more being-good-for-Santy. Stupid old stupidhead forgot the batteries again, anyway.
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In Ireland, we didn’t get to prove our “scholastic aptitude” with a multiple-choice test of our parents’ ability to pay for Kaplan prep. Instead we faced the Leaving Certificate, a national examination that would, we sincerely believed, determine everything in our future except the color of the curtains.

For two years we consumed seven subjects. Over a June fortnight, we regurgitated this knowledge into thirty hours worth of essays and proofs. The first day, we might dispatch Yeats, Scott Fitzgerald, George Eliot, and Shakespeare for good, and then choose from a list of titles the last original essay composition we would ever write. The next day, we would think about calculus, trigonometry, and quadratic equations—intensely, for six hours, and for the very last time.

Our results—graded on a national curve—were converted to points, which could be traded for college places. Five points for an A, four points for a B, and so on. These were totted up by a computer in Athlone, which existed in our minds as a Borg, a god, and an oracle in one. This Central Application Office computer already held the ranked college choices we had sent off months earlier. Under this system, we applied not just for a college but for particular courses at that college, and entry requirements shifted every year with demand. No school plays or humanitarian awards could sway the calculations of the Borg; only the Leaving counted.

Like democracy, it was the worst possible system, except for all the others. In a small country, high school credits and college interviews would have turned into a riot of patronage. The Leaving Cert was rigorous, anonymous, and required some thinking as well as regurgitation. The shared ordeal bonded each cohort forever. Unlike our English neighbors with their narrow A levels, we weren’t forced to choose too early between science and arts, or languages and business subjects. But nor were we encouraged to read much beyond our textbooks, or to distract ourselves with the Enrichment Activities with which our American counterparts were lining their résumés. Our main Enrichment Activity—apart from underage drinking—was studying for the Leaving, with its promise of a college place leading to a good job. That fitted a country that had been in recession since we were babies. The Leaving favored those freaks among us who enjoy exams and have good handwriting, but even for us it was miserable.
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A day out with Tim usually involves some combination of getting dirty, eating soul food, trespassing, scrambling, decayed waterfront, poison oak, housing projects, bushwhacking, and a canoe. This life has taken a toll on his car, a 1991 Honda Accord station wagon, which was once admired by the Puerto Rican kids as a potential lowrider, but is now beneath their attention. The windshield is cracked. The rear-end has been replaced with a slightly different shade of charcoal, after a disagreement with a garbage trailer up at Lake Superior. The color doesn’t quite camouflage the caked mud and dust from its daily commute up a dirt road. Strewn inside are all the necessaries—canoe and kayak paddles, firewood, mosquito netting, tools for fixing the car’s many problems, bags of laundry, dozens of magazines, pads and ropes and bungee cords, oil, coffee mugs, and several changes of clothing. There is often a canoe strapped to the roof, in case the Ontario plates don’t explain enough. It is unstealable.
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Engineers, scientists, and military officers often turn out good prose. Their sentences may not always be limpid, lyrical or arresting, but as writers they are capable of a clarity and precision that academics and marketers often can’t or won’t match. Their work demands it. When a software engineer writes vague instructions, her program breaks. When a scientist notes observations imprecisely, her experiment suffers. When a Green Beret commander gives a rambling order, his guys are put at risk.

But a literary theorist who expresses his ideas in clear language betrays the “expert” mystery on which tenure depends. An MBA student who avoids crass jargon might fail for seeming not to know it. A marketer who relies on simple, direct language must know exactly what the product can do for the customer—and understanding that takes effort.
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If you’re getting tired of blogs—and Christ knows, there’s fluff in these navels—I recommend Philip Lopate’s anthology, The Art of the Personal Essay. This is desert island stuff: 75 essays, from Seneca to Richard Rodriguez. It stops just in time, before this last decade’s boom in pity-me memoir and precocious autobiography.

As more of us choose tell the world our opinions on our breakfast, it’s good to be reminded that a fine personal essay can make us feel more alive. And that soul-baring, like strip-tease, intrigues most when it reveals slowly and artfully.

Try this catalogue from Sei Shonagon, a tenth-century Japanese court lady who kept lists worthy of Live Journal. The essay is called “Hateful Things.”

San Francisco is a divided city, and the African-American neighborhood of Bay View/Hunters Point is where it projects its fears and its power-plant pollution. Tim has wanted to take me there for months. It’s Red Hook without the architecture or the Statue of Liberty, he says, but 3,000 miles from Brooklyn we have to take what Red Hook we can get.

Nosing around the Allemand Brothers boatyard, we meet El coming back from a jog around the India Basin Shoreline Park. He is imposing and friendly, with long white hair and sideburns, and a sports announcer’s voice. Tim asks him about the rumors that the boatyard is going to close.
“This used to be a full union boatyard,” he says. “John and Flip, the brothers, have been here for sixty years. John died in December. He would have been 93.” He jerks a thumb at the office shack, and we hear radio sports. “Now it depends what Flip wants to do with the place.”

He points to a tall crane. “John was driving that thing until two weeks before he died.”
“Sounds like Sal,” I say.
“My 78-year old landlord is like a mountain goat,” Tim explains, “Still running a sawmill and a dozen building projects.”
El shrugs. “See, Flip would say he’s just a kid.”

El lives on a houseboat moored to the boatyard slip. It’s far removed from the architect’s million-dollar restored Icelandic car ferry a few miles up the bay, but even though it looks like a floating toolshed, Tim is drawn to it. For as long as I’ve known him, he has wanted to live on a houseboat. “I take it out once a year to scrub it down and and repaint it,” El says. “Wooden boats, you have to maintain them.”

We have permission to wander. Tim admires the lines of the Taba II, a peeling wooden sailboat. Tacked to the transom is a faded photo of its glory days under sail. It turns out to be the first boat that John and Flip built, in the 1930s, and it got them their first boatyard jobs.

“To me, this is the heart of San Francisco,” El says. “The water. The bay.”

It may be, but its arteries are clogged. Allemand Brothers is in the shadow of the huge Navy Yard, once the largest shipyard on the west coast and now toxic landfill. On the other side, there’s a huge, coal-burning electricity plant. They’ve built a narrow concrete path around it that goes out to a pretty but polluted salt-marsh, where the shore birds pick their way. Fishermen of the apocalypse haul catch from the power plant’s cooling streams.

The few factories add more filth to the air, and on the radio later that day we hear a fierce Hunters Point grandmother talk about what this has done to the kids. Asthma, itchy welts, and nosebleeds. Stunted growth. Learning trouble. Visits to the emergency room, where doctors hesitate before bringing out expensive oxygen tents for the Medicaid patients. She believed them, she said, when they told it her it was caused by genetics, ignorance, and poor diet in their community. Only when the healthy Asian immigrant kids came down with the same illnesses after a few years in the projects did she start to fight to get the power plant closed down.

A Saturday farmer’s market opened in Bay View a few weeks ago. It’s struggling, but it marks the first time in years that fresh fruit and vegetables haven’t been a bus ride away.

We passed a store that was as dark and low and cluttered as a Bolivian bodega. The sign said “Keys cut”, so I went in. Inside was festive, with kids milling around the soda coolers and loud weekend chats. The owner belly-laughed when I asked him to copy my mailbox key.
“Oh, I gotta change that sign,” he said. A very old man in a walking frame stood at the counter.
“WHAT?” he said.
“Just a second. He don’t hear so good. I have to tell him again,” said the store owner. “I said, HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LOUIS. MAY YOU HAVE BLESSINGS ON THIS BEAUTIFUL DAY.” The old birthday boy shuffled out, and the owner turned back to me. “Now, I had a key cutting machine. Then I gave a guy the key to service it. And he never came back! Can you believe that? He took my key!” He shakes his head. “Same thing—I had a salting machine. You know what that is? Well, I gave it to a guy to fix—and he never came back.” Belly laugh. “I say, let it go. It’s not worth caring. They didn’t take from me that which is most precious to me, my life, or my faith.”

He looked just like Cedric the Entertainer. A small boy tried to take the bag of snacks he’d paid for, but the store owner held it. “Now, just a second. I was talking, and I didn’t pay attention to who paid me. Was it you? I gotta make sure the right person gets the change.” The kid nodded, still trying to slide the plastic bag from under the huge hand. “See this boy? This boy is a great fisherman. Been fishing his whole life. And he’s getting pretty good. The bigger he gets, the better he gets. Ain’t that right?” The boy nodded again, and escaped with his change and his bag of treats.

“My name is Sam,” said the store owner, and we shook hands. Sam held up a empty sachet. “None of that soda for me. I’m drinking an energy and vitamin supplement. GIN-seng.” I examined the empty packet. “I take no sugar, no refined flour in my diet. No sir. See, I used to weigh 495 pounds.” I goggle, and he laughs again. “I’m down two hundred.”
“You must have covered that wall of coolers.”
“That’s right! He sure did!” Sam’s friend said. “There’s a photo of him from a few years back in front of this great big pick-up truck, and he just about covers it.”
“Covers it. That’s right,” said Sam, and preened. “And never had a health problem.”
I asked what made him change, and he took it as a diet question.
“I’d tried just about everything. Nothing worked. Then I finally found this thing—it’s kind of like the Twelve Steps. With a spiritual aspect. With faith, I can take each new day, count my rich blessings in this beautiful life. I’ve been running this store for thirty-one years. Thank the Lord for every day.”

There’s a sculptor’s yard next-door to Sam’s. It’s stacked high with ship’s containers, each rented out to artists who weld and twist and hammer giant sculptures for Burning Man. The entrance is festooned with metal stars. An middle-aged white guy in rainbow braces showed us some kind of a cage, possibly for giant desert squirrels. When he realized blowtorches weren’t part of our repertoire, he lost interest faster than I did. We watched a nice young man strap a huge glittery mattress to the top of a truck, and moved on.

Outside, Louis, the old birthday boy, watched his family load picnic supplies in the back of their car.

On 24th Street, a full-size salsa band struck up joyous Saturday afternoon music. Traffic stopped to watch. So did the beer-in-brown-bags brigade. In in the apartment overhead, this little girl joined her dad. (Photo by Tim.)

Across the street, these neighbors swapped gossip. That’s Bernal Hill in the background.

At five in the morning, a woodpecker sets up the kind of racket that panics householders. Bang! Bang! Is it the boiler? Or a burglar? Bang! Bang! Bang! The fat neighbor cat who clicks across the roof at night never shows up when you need her.

After an early-morning gatecrash swim at the nudist camp next door I hang a towel on the clothes line. Soon the bugs with red underwings turn it into a page in a fully-illustrated bug kama sutra. Afterwards they weave around the garden, drowsy with sex and sun. A flycatcher takes up a sniper post on the clothes line above them, her head jerking as if under a strobe light.

Below, a pair of housefinches browses branches on a white-blossomed bush, like newlyweds at the Pottery Barn curtain rack. A hummingbird sizes up the possibility my red shirt is a giant blossom. Eventually he decides I’m a timewaster and whirrs off, dropping into some aerial calligraphy to impress the girls.

A doe and a fawn stumble through the trees. Lucky, the ancient, anxious chow down the hill, has no interest in female dogs, but he loves does. He looks up, interested, and then worries his boner. I wish he wouldn’t.

The garter snakes are shy.

We hear Rocky cantering back up to the stable.

    “I wonder what the poor people are doing today,” says Tim, as he always does.
    “We live like kings,” I say, as I always do.