It’s a blown-up snapshot from 1980. The print has a reddish tinge.

A dozen eleven-year-olds cluster on the steps of a pebble-dashed estate house. In the middle, two sit with arms around silver trophy that stands as high as their scrawny shoulders. One is Gareth, whose dad has just captained Waterford to victory in the FAI Cup soccer league. The other is John.

They’re all skinny, with skim-milk Irish skin and the slightly hunched posture of a rained-on tribe. It makes them look cold, though the sun is shining. Several wear identical tracksuits, navy-blue with red and white stripes on the arms. John says it wasn’t a soccer team strip; that’s what Dunnes Stores was selling that year, and so that’s what the Dooradoyle mammies bought.

You can see the excitement of the day in the way the boys tamp it down—the smirks that bite back smiles. The faces are blurred, partly because of camera shakes, partly because they’re too young to have taken shape yet. The best-looking boy does smile broadly. “Well, his dad was English,” explains John.

Whenever I go to John’s house in the Sunset District, I look at the picture on his living-room wall and ask him to tell me again who each kid is. Twenty-five years on, a core of them are still best friends in San Francisco, and he is still in the center. Armed with Morrison visas, they reassembled here a decade ago, drawn by surfing, mountain biking, and a technology boom. It wasn’t planned. John and Conor sold their hoopty and crossed the country when winter took their jobs as landscape gardeners back east. A few weeks later, their funds had almost run out when they saw a face from the St Joseph’s Boy Scouts on Market Street—Kevin, who was well-established enough to share a roof when they needed it. Later, Gareth showed up from Chicago. Then they they added a Dublin chapter to the tribe. Each will tell you that they never set out to find an Irish crowd. They’re sleeker altogether than the drunken nostalgics you’ll find in the Sunset bars. (And I mean that literally. I’ve heard them reel off their body-fat percentages in Limerick accents.)

They’ve hiked, biked and backpacked together; shared apartments and survived; married, bred and babysat; carried each other’s boxes into new houses; taught each other how to drive on the San Francisco hills; started companies and weathered wealth and layoffs. They meet for Christmas pints at home, and weekly pints in dive bars in the Lower Haight or the Mission. “We’ve known each other since we were three,” says John, as his own three-year-old son sing-songs his ABCs. It’s love.

On the Sunday morning phone call, Dad asks what I did last night. For ten years I’ve lived too far away for him to have much sense of my daily life, but now I can tell him I was out with the Dooradoyle boys, who first knew me as Seán Hanley’s daughter. That’s how I think of them, though they’re nudging forty. I remember these guys from school; my friends’ big brothers, lanky fellows in navy-blue uniforms, playing guitar or hanging out by the Sixth Year radiator in the Central Area. Dad remembers them too. “Oh, yes, and wasn’t he a brother of Maeve? Did he go off to UCG?” he says. Teachers with a generation of experience have sharper memories of students twenty years gone; it’s the recent ones that blur.

Growing up, I dreamed my parents would relent and move us to Dooradoyle, the little housing estate where everybody lived. We lived three miles out, facing a farm whose tang of slurry and silage assaulted the Hanley sisters’ metropolitan ambitions. In Dooradoyle, you could hang out under the street lights—there were street lights!—until way past dark. Adolescence is about waiting around for Things to Happen, and in Dooradoyle, there existed the slight possibility they just might. But how could anything happen in a place called Mungret?
“Town mouse and country mouse,” my mother would tease, and though she would drive me anywhere, any time, being collected just wasn’t the same.

So they’re glamorous to me still, the Dooradoyle boys, the big brothers. Their circle reminds me of home because it is home; an Irish outpost based not on banding together against the new culture, but on hundreds of years worth of banked friendships.

Bonus musical link: John and Gareth play “Outside Looking In.”

Nora rode a Raleigh bike. It was black and basic—three gears, hand brakes, a pump for the inevitable punctures. A gray leatherette bag hung from the handlebars. Every day or every other day she’d ride into town for “messages.“She would return with some muttonchops and rashers, the day’s provisions, staples and necessities, ten Woodbines for Tommy, Maguire & Patterson matches, and a newspaper. The spuds and onions and cabbage all came from the haggard out the back door beyond the whitethorn trees. The eggs came fresh from her own hens. Bread she made—plump loaves of soda bread, crossed like a good Catholic, baked in her covered cast-iron pot with turf coals on the bottom and on top. Milk was their business. Every now and then she’d kill a goose.

But it was that trope, “going for messages,”—not marketing, not shopping—that best described the difference between the “custom” in West Clare and “consumers” in Michigan.

…

By then in America we went to “super” markets for the stuff that filled the back of cars with a month’s provisions and spent the time at the checkout watching the charges as the clerk rang them up, or rummaging for the coupons, or sighing in commiseration with our fellow shoppers and sellers fro whom the transactions had become just work, just getting it—the money and the stuff. In trade for “messages” we got discounts, “paper or plastic?” and “have a nice day,” all in the one monotony of corporate good manners. The market is common, global, and dull. We buy in bulk, bank by machine, and couldn’t care less about the name on the sign. More and more, we point and click our way past any human interaction.
…

Nora came home the long road from Kilkee with a small bag of things—a day’s worth of perishables, a night’s worth of news—her messages. We return bulging with our bags and boxes of stuff—our newer faster brighter bigger better-than-ever-right-priced stuff—laden and empty, grim and wordless.

—Thomas Lynch, Booking Passage

For the first time in what seems like months, Twin Peaks is unblurred by the fog. I’ve missed its humps, which last night were as sharp as my reply to my mother when she asked—again—if the weather was hot in California. (I was instantly sorry, but didn’t say.)

I walk up brown Bernal Hill and look down over the city, out to Golden Gate Bridge and the Marin Headlands, and over to Twin Peaks again on the left. The first Bay Bridge carries people to Target and IKEA. Next to it, the second Bay Bridge is still a disappointed pier. The other major landmarks, or maybe timemarks, are two giant billboards, one pink, one blue. In silhouette, a man and a woman fling their arms in solo bliss, a mile or two apart on Highway 101. They are slender, oblivious, and plugged up. I want to rip them both down, but instead I strike an aerial X through each one, and skip to the next John Prine song on my own goddamn Shuffle. We are mistaken, the iPod ciphers and I. The yellow labrador and the Maltese sniffing each other’s arses by the park bench have it right.

At the bottom of the hill, where the freeways tangle, the Bernal Farmers’ Market gathers every Saturday. You can buy heirloom tomatoes for $3 a pound from the white farmers, or disposable tomatoes for fifty cents from the Mexican growers. The Vietnamese sell flats of duck and quail eggs, and knocked-up chicken eggs. There are lemon cucumbers and cling peaches and honeycombs and tamales, and Vietnamese herbs “for diabetes.” It’s a hike to get there, over the hill, but I like to watch people getting excited about vegetables.

Charles the baker has a stand next to a man in an orange turban who pushes his overpriced Sukhi’s chutneys so hard that I don’t go near him any more. Beside him, Charles is still, even a little forbidding. I watch him as middle-aged women wave at the racks of breads and ask for “one of those.”
“Which one?” he asks, and they don’t notice the tiny edge, frayed from hours of vague demands. I try to have my order right, and ready.

But he took a shine to me a while back, and each time now he surprises me with a sudden smile and a yard of flattery. “Where have you been?” he asks, and makes me wonder. Where have I been? Not doing the good stuff—scribbling, seeing pals, cooking food bought from other human beings who grew or baked it. I ask him for a loaf of black olive bread, because even though he’s chatty now, I don’t want to hold up the line.

Charles says he’s the only seller at the market who lives in San Francisco. Everyone else drives in from the Central Valley farms before dawn. He has a bakery over on the other side of town; I’m not sure where. His olive bread is good enough for Bernal, but truth be told, it makes me miss the loaves that Caputo’s on Court Street sold out of by noon—the ones Nicholas Cage dripped sweat on in Moonstruck. But the Brooklyn Italian bakers were surly, and Charles makes me feel like more of a hot young thing than I’ve felt since I used to gatecrash the geriatric nudist camp for morning swims with Tim.

He wraps the loaf and says I look beautiful today. “Damn, girl, you got some kind of portrait in the attic?” I realize Charles thinks I look great for 47. Then I scrabble in my bag and tell him, worriedly, that I think I’ve forgotten my wallet and I’ll just go back home and pick it up and maybe come back later for the bread. He shakes his head, cocks an eyebrow, and hands me the loaf. I wave it off, mortified.
“Take the bread,” he says. “It’s four dollars. You can give it to me next time. That way you’ll come back.” I hem and haw, and take the bread. “Do you have more shopping to do at the market?”
“Em…”
“Do you have more shopping to do? Yes or no?” I hear his tiny edge again and admit that I do. He reaches into his cash box and hands me a twenty. “Here you go, sweetheart. Now go on, and eat that bread when you get home. You got skinny since you last came by.”

I stuff the bread and the gratitude and the goddamn white earbuds into my rucksack, and nose around to see what else looks good today. The egg man with the aviator glasses packs six white and brown ones in a paper bag of straw. The fruit lady offers bruised peaches for ten cents off. A woman with a basket of baby aubergines shares her ratatouille recipe. I tot up how far Charles’ cash will get me if I buy the Mission figs. I’ve made the same happy calculations in Bangkok and Lima, Chiapas and Hanoi, but never in the swipe-your-loyalty-card Safeway at the other side of the hill. At the farmers’ market, no one has shopping lists. That’s because markets are conversations.

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.
(more…)

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.

Sal was thirty years old when his apple-green ’56 Chevy truck rolled off the production line. It sits next to his pick-up, his battered convertible, his cigarette boat, and his catamaran. Like Tim, they are part of the flotsam that has ended up on his ranch in the Santa Cruz mountains.

Sal says it’s no way to meet someone, cussing like that, especially not a young lady. But James keeps leaving stuff all over the workshop so’s a person can’t find a damn thing, and it aggravates him so, and well, shit. Then he wipes his hands on his pants and steps out of the workshop into the sunshine, and says hello.
“Where’d you find her, anyway?” he says to Tim. I say, San Francisco, which is true for today and saves time. “Awn’t you a sight for sore eyes,” he says, in an old Long Island accent, admiring my dirty green tracksuit from neck to ankles. Correctness has made social eunuchs of my generation, except when we’re as hungry for attention as half-weaned babies. We don’t know what to do with a frank Fifties once-over, except laugh.
“She’s an Irish girl, Sal,” says Tim.
“An Irish girl! Look at you, all out like a little leprechaun. You know what a leprechaun is?”

I admit to having heard of leprechauns, most of whom probably now consult for Google in Dublin.

“There was a fella playing golf who hit a leprechaun,” he tells me. “Knocked him out cold. Fella gets down on his knees, gives him the kiss of life, and eventually the little leprechaun sits up and rubs his head. Hardly remembers what happened. So he wants to give the fella three wishes for saving his life. Guy says, aw, you don’t have to do that, I’m the one who hit you in the first place, I can’t accept three wishes. So he goes on his way, and a year later he’s back there playing golf and the leprechaun recognizes him and asks him how it’s going. ‘Pretty good! I’ve been having a good year, he says. Leprechaun asks him about his golf game. Guy says, it’s the damnedest thing, he went from a 36 handicap to a zero nearly overnight. Leprechaun nods and smiles and says, how’s the money? Every time he puts his hand in his pocket, guy says, he pulls out a couple hundred dollar bills. It’s amazing. Then the leprechaun says, what about the sex life?
‘Oh, you know,’ says the guy, ‘once, maybe twice a week.’
‘Twice a week?’ says the leprechaun. ‘Jeez, we can do better than that for you. Let me figure out what’s going wrong there and take care of it.’
‘God, no, no, no,” says the guy, “Don’t be doing that. I’m just a priest in a small village.’”

Sal says I’m the best-looking woman Tim has brought to the ranch in three weeks. Tim brings thirty or forty women up to party in a month, he claims, and they’re usually four hundred pounds apiece. “I think he gets ‘em in the bulk department at the Trader Joe’s” he confides.
(more…)

I found these unfinished notes from my first week in San Francisco. Caitriona was right.
——————————————————

I’ve just moved in with a city I barely know, and I feel like an Edith Wharton heroine embarking a European tour. My inbox jostles with advice and opinions, and I want to remember this time before I knew the place.

They call it “The City.” The definite article makes me giggle; bless their 750,000 hearts. Caitriona predicts that within two weeks of moving here I’d be my usual obnoxious self. She’s seen it before, from Dublin to London to Manhattan to Brooklyn to Lake Superior.
“Oh my God,” she mimicked, “I can’t imagine going back to the East Coast. San Francisco is soooo great. Everybody in the whole world should move there. I just can’t understand why you still live in DC. Dudes.”

For an accidental nomad, fawning over novelty protects the soul.

Five days in I’m not quite there yet. The skies drip like Dublin—and none of us leaves Dublin to be rained on, whatever about snow and ice and heatwaves. But I hope that soon that ambitious little definite article won’t evoke a New York smirk. In the meantime, I get to pretend I think real people say “Frisco.”
(more…)

Tim was telling me about his weekend. “Real breasts vary more than you’d think,” he said thoughtfully.

He’s a free spirit; a wanderer who makes each temporary cabin into a home. These days he lives in a small, ramshackle community in the Santa Cruz mountains, an hour and a half south of San Francisco. I haven’t visited, but the set-up seems to suit his bush values. He draws a paycheck in the software world, but his cabin isn’t plugged into its grid. He’s rigged a series of 12-volt batteries to power the laptop and lights, and bought a propane-powered fridge on Craigslist. Craigslist also provided a stock tank that he outfitted as a hot tub, fit for boiling any missionaries who come to call.
(more…)

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.