TheyLeftTheirHearts
InDalyCityVille....Freedom So Much?
"And if Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it.
We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco.
You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead."
When we lived in the Berkeley California during the enlightenment (ie. pre-Bushtopia) we had a very wise, but very impatient, friend who decided to rename BART as 'BAST' for Bay Area
'Slow' Transit.
Often this had more to do with the bloody ticket machines that could only read brand new bills that been carefully extracted from hermetically-sealed flat-packs couriered directly from the US Treasury.
As a result, you would often be stuck at the BART station desperately trying to buy your fare while train after train rumbled below you on their way from the East Bay (read Oakland) to 'The City' (read Tony Bennett's favorite cardiac town).
Those problems are long gone now thanks to a new set of highly efficient machines that can instantly tell the difference between scans of Andy Warhol-painted soup can labels and the real thing, not to mention the ability to instantaneoulsly identify the wart on the end of Ben Franklin's nose while simultaneously mapping the topography of your retina.
Regardless all the big brother stuff, one thing I still love about BART is the fact that even though they are technically 'redundant' the trains are still driven, and the doors are still opened and closed, by real humans who actually look up and down the platform at each stop (Skytrain take note, would ya - sheesh).
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Anyway, I woke up in Berkeley again this Wednesday on the exact same street where we used to live, in the house of our friend and former neighbo(u)r 'M'.
As 'M' had to head into the City himself that morning I caught a break, I guess, and he gave me a ride. But we went to the BART station first anyway.
Why?
Because on the Bay Bridge the HOV sign really means something, so cars actually line up at the train station to pick people up so that they can head for the fastlane and skip the toll. You can also make your way to this commuter tesseract by buying yourself a hybrid but 'M' just sent a kid to college so after re-mortgaging his (now) million dollar, 2.5 bedroom bungalow that he will never actually own outright. Thus, he's stuck with his 10 year old Honda Accord.
So, what you really have here is a flourishing, civilized, and highly ritualized symbiotic hitchiker's guide to the progressive galaxy with a whole set of rules, regulations and niceties that I will not go into here save to say that it works. And to my knowledge there have been no incidents worthy of the parachuting in of Anderson Cooper to turn the world upside down looking for blonde-haired paralegals who have disappeared into the wilds of West Oakland because of a bridge ride gone bad.
But enough of all that.
What I really wanted to tell you about was the BART trip I actually took later in the day on my way out of The City that Bill O'Reilly hates so much.
I got on the train downtown, underneath the Cable Cars at the Powell St. Station, and instead of heading back to Berkeley through the Transbay Tube I headed south to SFO and a plane ride home.
(By way of one last digression, while I hate that bloody Cambie St. route and the bloodier still 'cut and cover' method', I've got to admit that a 'Downtown to YVR' Skytrain trip that costs, say, five bucks, is sure going to be something down the line.)Anyway, when the BART train finally came rollicking out of the underground tunnel's mouth somewhere near the windswept, bungalow-packed hillsides that ring Daly City down the penninsula (about halfway to Silicon Valley to be precise) I was drifting into reverie of days gone by when I glanced out the window and saw two older, but not quite elderly, ladies walking towards me on the platform.
One was maybe Scandanavian and one was definitely Asian.
And they were completely unremarkable except for the fact that they were clearly happy.
Not in a guffawing, laughing, or even a smiling way.
Just somehow comfortable, langorous, and wise, all at the same time.
Of course, this being the place that it is, they were also holding hands
And it was a truly warm-handed embrace, wrists intertwined, knuckles down, arms parallel, shoulders almost touching.
Perhaps it was nothing. Perhaps it was care giver and cared for, or perhaps it was friendship, or perhaps it was something more..........intimate.
Who knows.
The point is that no one so much as batted an eye at them.
And that's what San Francisco is to me.
Freedom - the Real Thing.
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