The day is an open road stretching out before you. Roll down the windows, Step into your life, as if it were a fast car. —From Barbara Crooker’s Promise Along with strong black coffee, a bracing poem is one of my favorite ways to start the day. By the time I reach the breakfast table, carrying my steaming mug of Italian Roast and a bit of poetry, I’ve already glanced at the morning headlines and am holding on to my sanity (if at all) by my fingernails. 
My breakfast table today
I sometimes find myself clinging all day to a single line as if it were a rope thrown from a passing ship. “Still I rise,” I mutter, blessing Maya Angelou for this mantra when events seem hell bent on bringing me to my knees. “Still I rise.” I also cling to the wisdom of Karen Shepherd’s poem written in the voice of her dog, Birch. Are you gonna eat that? Are you gonna eat that? Are you gonna eat that? I’ll eat that. A blessed reminder of the way our best friends live in the moment and keep a firm grasp on life’s true priorities. I can’t imagine getting through a single day without the company of the written word to comfort, inform, and inspire me. How do the 57.4 million Americans who can’t read survive? Many don’t, and studies show the turning point comes in fourth grade. Any kid who doesn’t learn to read by the end of that school year has a two out of three chance of ending up in jail or on welfare. One of our local authors is trying to give children better odds. You may remember Dave Eggers for his modestly titled, Pulitzer-finalist bestseller, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. His technothriller The Circle is a movie on Netflix and the subject of the new documentary To Be Destroyed, which discusses why his book was banned in Rapid City, South Dakota and designated "to be destroyed." 
Dave Eggers
But to thousands of kids, Eggers is the guy who started 826 Valencia, a nonprofit that provides free tutoring services to help youngsters develop the skills and vision to express themselves through creative writing. It's also a pirate store. If you're planning to sail the Seven Seas, here's where you can stock up on such swashbuckling accoutrements as spyglasses, eyepatches, peg legs, Jolly Rogers, and of course, bottles of giant squid repellant, leech-based gangrene cures, and Scurvy Begone. The building’s zoning required a commercial venture, and Eggers figured, rightly, that selling pirate paraphernalia would attract youngsters (of all ages). Opened in 2002, the store took its name from the address — 826 Valencia — in San Francisco’s Mission District. Upstairs Egger installed his publishing company, McSweeny’s, and volunteers from his staff started teaching youngsters about writing as an act of courage and imagination. The kids’ best work was published, sometimes with forwards by public figures such as Gavin Newsom (then San Francisco’s mayor, now California’s governor) and Robin Williams. “We have to go check it out,” I told Rich. “You had me at pirate store.” We took the ferry to the city and hopped one of the vintage trollies, which let us off at the north end of Valencia — which, as we soon learned, is the dodgy end. Picking our way past shuttered storefronts and the occasional sidewalk sleeper, we stopped for coffee at Carlin’s café and laundromat. The staff was welcoming, my croissant was buttery perfection, and our espresso was as zingy as the bright ceramic cups it came in. 
Midmorning coffee at Carlin's
“And as if that wasn’t enough,” Rich said, “I get to look through this glass wall here and watch some guy folding his clean underwear!” After this refreshing pause, we strolled south to the more vibrant section of Valencia Street, with its oddball shops and the famous murals of Clarion Alley. When we reached the Pirate Supply Store, Rich ambled about happily investigating its treasures while I worked my way to the back so I could peer into the kids’ now-empty workspace. “We have 38 kids in the summer program,” explained a young associate named Brynn. “With our school outreach programs, we’re serving a thousand kids in the city.” The organization has opened chapters in eight other US cities and established 826 National and 826 Digital, touching the lives of 710,000 American students and countless more in nine other countries. Well, shiver me timbers, mateys — that’s a lot of budding writers! Fair winds to them all. 
At the heart of 826 Valencia, this space is for kids to hone their writing skills.
A block further on, we encountered the scrappy, old-school Dog Eared Books, lone survivor of the nine bookstores that once graced Valencia Street. Modernization? Don’t make them laugh. Sales receipts and inventories are still written by hand in an atmosphere of creaky wooden floors and the heady scent of vintage paper. 
In Dog Eared Books, Rich pulls out his phone to check the address of our next stop, Fabulosa Books.
“You can find the answers on the Internet in a split second,” long-time Dog Eared customer Bryan Foster once told journalists. “But unless you read books, you don’t know what the questions are.” Finding the right questions and answers is never easy, and it’s particularly tough in parts of the US where access to "inappropriate" books is restricted. That’s why the Castro’s famous LGBTQ+ bookstore, Fabulosa, launched the grassroots, donation-funded Books not Bans project, shipping free books to areas where gender-themed works are taboo. In a similar spirit, the national Banned Book Club provides free digital versions of a wide range of banned subjects. What makes a book “inappropriate”? In 61% of cases, it’s sex. I used to think teenage boys were the most sex-obsessed creatures on earth, but it’s clear they’ve been surpassed by conservative school board members. These officials have denounced thousands of books — To Kill a Mockingbird, Like Water for Chocolate, and Peter Pan, for instance — over alleged “sexual content.” 
Peter Pan is known worldwide as a free-spirited, mischievous young boy and an icon of innocence. Now some claim he's luring kids into thoughts of violence and sexual deviance. Could this be a case of "the eye of the beholder"?
And it could get worse soon. You may have heard of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 — a blueprint for overhauling the government along more conservative lines. Page five of the 922-page document defines as “pornography” any book contributing to the "sexualization of children” (see list above!). They want “porn” like Peter Pan outlawed nationwide so that educators, booksellers, and librarians selling or lending these books would face criminal prosecution as sex offenders. That’s seriously nuts. While we're growing up, books are supposed to help us learn about sex, and love, and how relationships work. Stories teach us about fairness and honor, betrayal and heartbreak, compassion and cruelty. Novels show us that monsters are real, and that they can be beaten — but sometimes aren’t. Books help us rehearse for real life. They let us catch glimpses a larger world, cope with loss, and begin to dream of the kind of person we want to be. Saying books shouldn’t teach us about the realities of life is as ridiculous as telling a dog it’s unseemly to stick his head out the car window. Everyone has the right to experience, if only metaphorically, the glorious rush of wind in our face as we drink in the full, tumultuous wildness of the world, grinning from ear to ear. And that’s why I read poetry every morning: to revel for a moment in the rapture of being alive. 
A walk down Valencia Street will lead you to all these places, plus incredible eateries and more oddball shops. Fabulosa Books is a mile east in the Castro; we had lunch out there, enjoying the Frango Acebolado (Chicken with Onions, $20) in the Brazilian Café del Casa.
NO POST NEXT WEEK I'm away at a family reunion in the mountains with no wifi. SUBSCRIBERS If you miss a post announcement, please check your spam folder. Internet security is in a frenzy these days. This post is part of my ongoing series OUT TO LUNCH IN CHEAP & CHEERFUL SAN FRANCISCO My goal is to discover some of San Francisco's most colorful neighborhoods so I can check out what's really going on in this zany town. Are we in a doom loop? Already on the rebound? Still fabulous? And where should we eat afterwards? These and other questions will be explored in upcoming posts. BROWSE PREVIOUS POSTS HERE DON'T MISS OUT! If you haven't already, take a moment to subscribe so I can let you know when I publish my weekly posts. Just send me an email and I'll take it from there. [email protected] And check out my best selling travel memoirs & guide books here. PLANNING A TRIP? Enter any destination or topic, such as packing light or road food, in the search box below. If I've written about it, you'll find it.  A good ending begins with chocolate cake. I don’t know if you’ve firmed up your plans for entering the afterlife, but until recently I favored the viewpoint popularized by that old reprobate Woody Allen: “I’m not afraid of death, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” Now I’ve learned this is an old-fashioned attitude that has failed to keep pace with modern trends. Baby Boomers are giving up the ghost at a rate of 2.6 million year, and a hot new industry is helping us exit with dignity, grace, and that 1960s I-gotta-be-me spirit. “I want to die at sunset. I want to watch the sky change and turn orange and pink and purple,” says Alua Arthur in her TED Talk. “I want to hear the wind fluttering through the trees, and smell very faintly nag champa amber incense … I want to die with my socks on my feet, because I get cold. And if I die with a bra on, I’m coming to haunt everybody.” Yikes! I’m obviously way behind the curve, because it never occurred to me to think about what undergarments I’d like to wear as I cross the Rainbow Bridge, nor have I considered optimal lighting or fragrances. Luckily it’s not too late to get my final act together, says Arthur, America’s most famous death doula.  Death doula Alua Arthur, founder of Going with Grace What’s a death doula, you ask? You may have heard of birth doulas, who provide physical, emotional, and informational support to women during childbirth. A death doula does much the same thing for those getting ready to depart this world. Because despite what Woodie says, you will be there when it happens. And chances are you’ll find yourself considerably easier in mind, body, and soul if you do a little prep work to get ready for your swan song. It sounds sensible, but I have to admit, when people I knew organized a death doula talk, I wasn’t madly keen. “Do we have to go?” I asked Rich. “Sounds a little depressing.” With typical husbandly sensitivity, he told me not to be a wimp; we might learn something useful. And we did. For a start, I learned that many attendees felt a similar eye-rolling reluctance, and yet within ten minutes we were all jumping in to talk about our own mortality. We discussed getting our affairs in order, assessing medical interventions, and maintaining the kind of autonomy that makes life worth living. To keep the conversation rolling, our death doula, Rebecca Jones, produced a death deck of cards with thought-provoking questions.  And she introduced us to the idea of death cafés, where strangers meet to eat cake, drink tea, and discuss death in a safe, confidential, supportive environment.  To find a Death Café near you see the link at the end of this post. “We could organize a death café,” Rebecca said. “But there’s a national organization that owns the name. We would have to call it something else.” “From a marketing standpoint, a change of wording might not be bad,” I commented. “We could call it a ‘death group,’” she mused aloud. “Actually, the word ‘café’ wasn’t the one I thought might be off-putting,” I said. I’m not the only one who feels reluctant to use the d-word. “In my family, we don't really talk about death,” says health journalist Sara Kliff. “Because I am as terrified of having serious end-of-life conversations as the next person… ‘Death’ is the word that confuses the conversation, that makes people too afraid, and too angry, and too frantic to keep talking.” Rich likes to think of death as a journey, the ultimate luggage-free trip for which you don’t even need a toothbrush. Similarly, the poet Mary Oliver invites us to approach the transition with bright-eyed anticipation: “I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?”  Mary Oliver (1935 - 2019) in 2012. Photo: Mariana Cook “So how do we cultivate that kind of curiosity?” I asked Rich. As usual, our solution was to organize a fact-finding day trip to San Francisco — in this case, to explore attitudes toward eternal rest. We began in the cemetery tucked behind the city's oldest building, the original 1781 adobe chapel known as Mission Dolores. Officially it’s named after St. Francis of Assisi, but everyone uses the old name taken from the nearby Arroyo de Nuestra Señora de los Dolores (Our Lady of Sorrows Creek). In the lovely, creepy cemetery, among the old roses, tilting tombstones, and meandering stone paths, there stands a somber image of the man who built the first missions: Father Junipero Serra. When I was a kid he was hailed as the hero who “civilized” California. Nowadays his work is viewed as cultural imperialism, converting (not always voluntarily) thousands of native Californians to Catholicism, European ways, and a lifetime of labor. Although many Miwok and Ohlone converts were said to be buried there, Rich and I couldn’t find any marked graves, just a statue inscribed “In prayerful memory of our faithful Indians” and a reproduction of an Ohlone hut. We did locate the final resting places of California’s first Mexican governor, wealthy landowners, and Irish and English fortune hunters. One of these was Yankee Sullivan, a champion boxer turned "shoulder striker," hired to prevent people from voting for candidates other than his employer. He was arrested by the infamous, self-appointed Vigilance Committee and died in jail of suicide or possibly murder. His tombstone says, “Thou shalt bring forth my soul out of tribulation and in thy mercy thou shalt destroy mine enemies." I didn’t get the impression Mr. Sullivan is resting all that easily. Stepping out of the cemetery into the largely Hispanic Mission District, I found a far more convivial attitude toward the afterlife. According to Mexican tradition, you never really die until your name is spoken for the last time. So people make a point of telling stories — often funny, outrageous ones — about the departed. Officially this happens November 1 and 2, Los Dias de los Muertos (the Days of the Dead), but memories are kept fresh year-round. I love this tradition and am doing my best to give my family and friends plenty to talk about after I’m gone. Eventually we made our way to the restaurant San Jalisco, named for the Mexican state that gave the world mariachi music, tequila, and Saint Toribio Romo, a martyred priest famous for miraculous assistance to immigrants seeking to cross the US-Mexico border. The restaurant was jammed with laughing people and grinning skeletons. We ordered a seafood cocktail called Levanta Muertos (Raise the Dead), which I expected to be blow-the-top-of-your-skull-off spicy but found surprisingly mild. “That’s never going to reanimate a corpse,” I said. Rich happily slurped up more shrimp. “True, but it’s giving me a new lease on life.” As I sat sipping beer among the eyepopping images of our common mortality, I realized that far from being gloomy, they were comforting reminders of the joy that comes from doing our best to live each day to the fullest. “When it’s over,” said Mary Oliver, “I want to say all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms… I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”  INTRIGUED? Find a Death Café Near You Learn More About Death Doulas Watch Alua Arthur's TED Talk Discover the Death Deck Game Enjoy Mary Oliver's poem When Death Comes SUBSCRIBERS If you miss a post announcement, please check your spam folder. Internet security is in a frenzy these days. This post is part of my ongoing series OUT TO LUNCH IN CHEAP & CHEERFUL SAN FRANCISCO My goal is to discover some of San Francisco's most colorful neighborhoods so I can check out what's really going on in this zany town. Are we in a doom loop? Already on the rebound? Still fabulous? And where should we eat afterwards? These and other questions will be explored in upcoming posts. BROWSE PREVIOUS POSTS HERE DON'T MISS OUT! If you haven't already, take a moment to subscribe so I can let you know when I publish my weekly posts. Just send me an email and I'll take it from there. [email protected] And check out my best selling travel memoirs & guide books here. PLANNING A TRIP? Enter any destination or topic, such as packing light or road food, in the search box below. If I've written about it, you'll find it.  Old-school wisdom, preserved for modern times. “One day if I do go to heaven,” wrote columnist Herb Caen, “I'll look around and say, 'It ain't bad, but it ain't San Francisco.’” I don’t know if he’d be pleased or outraged by the headline, “Much-Maligned San Francisco Ranked 7th Best City in the World.” Clearly Mr. Caen would vote for his city to be proclaimed top banana; the rest of us are just relieved to get an honest assessment that doesn’t suggest it’s already in the dumpster. “Despite San Francisco’s meticulously documented challenges, job opportunities and infrastructure buildout pave the way as the world continues to rush in like it always has,” says Resonance Consultancy’s 2024 World’s Best Cities Report. “High salaries that draw global workers,” make it the “number one place for start-up innovation.”  I’m convinced much of San Francisco’s bad press is due to readers being fed up with 175 years of journalists gushing about the city’s charm, creativity, and get-rich-quick opportunities. With all due respect to Mr. Caen, claiming that San Francisco surpasses Paradise itself may be a slight exaggeration. But there’s no denying that ever since the Gold Rush of 1849, the city has offered new arrivals the chance to build a better life. And among the earliest and most successful of those newcomers were the Italians. Of course, technically they weren’t Italians at the time. Unifying the kingdoms and city states of the Italian peninsula was still under discussion — by which I mean there was a power grab of Biblical proportions, with wars, insurrections, and revolutions wreaking havoc across the land, destroying property, crops, and economies, to say nothing of human life. Thousands of sensible families chose to leave the chaos behind and seek their fortune in the New World.  “They were lured to California by the Gold Rush,” wrote historian Michael LeMay, “but instead of mining, most became wine growers, vegetable farmers, and merchants, giving rise to the Italian American folklore that ‘the miners mined the mines, but the Italians mined the miners.’” Many opened businesses in San Francisco’s North Beach district, soon dubbed “Little Italy,” and got to work introducing their new neighbors to the joys of espresso, biscotti, pizza, and chianti. Soon the city’s Italian-Americans were making headlines: baseball legend Joe DiMaggio, chocolatier Domingo Ghirardelli, mayor Joseph Alioto, singer and entrepreneur Antonietta Alessandro, poet and City Lights proprietor Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Joe Finocchio whose Prohibition speakeasy featured drag shows that put some extra roaring into the 1920s … there are so many to be proud of. These are the immigrant stories I was raised on: tales of everyone’s ancestors who arrived, often with nothing, to become part of the free nation George Washington called “the last great experiment for promoting human happiness.” Every Fourth of July, as we celebrate that experiment, I wonder what Washington and Jefferson would think of us now. In the mid twentieth century, North Beach became home base to the Beat Generation — or, as San Franciscans dubbed them, “beatniks,” a mashup of “beat” and the ending of “sputnik.” (For younger readers, sputnik was the first artificial satellite to circle earth, launched in 1957 by the Soviets, igniting the Cold War’s Space Race.). If you’re thinking the beatniks and the Italians made strange bedfellows, think again. Along with recipes for ossobuco and gelato, some arrived carrying passionate beliefs about the dangers of materialism, the value of the individual, and the sanctity of intellectual freedom. The Beats didn’t invade Little Italy, they grew up in its coffee houses, late-night bars, and home-style eateries like Mama’s on Washington Square.  Beat poets and artists in North Beach Rich was never a beatnik, but he does claim to be a quarter Italian on the Costello side of the family; perhaps that’s is why, in his youth, he spent so many Saturday mornings in North Beach eating at Mama’s. “Best breakfast in town,” he told me. “Let’s see what they offer for lunch.” But first, we had a few stops to make. If I’ve learned anything from living in Spain, it’s that it takes good, strong coffee to properly launch any excursion, and the area around Washington Square, the big, grassy park in North Beach, offered plenty of choices. We wandered into Mara’s, an old school bakery with two tiny tables, a dozen kinds of biscotti, and espresso powerful enough to make your eyes pop. The proprietor and a few old friends were taking their ease at the back table, chatting in Italian. After serving us, he returned to his conversation, and Rich and I settled at the other table, feeling as if we’d been magically transported to the old country.  Biscotti and espresso at Mara's Nearby, across Washington Square, stood Saints Peter and Paul Church, located, rather ominously, at 666 Filbert Street. (For atheist readers, 666 is “the number of the beast” in the Bible’s Book of Revelation. Scholars differ on its exact significance but agree it’s got such dreadful karma that they invented a special term for fearing this number: hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia.(Don't ask me to pronounce it.) Undaunted, when we'd drained our last drops of espresso, Rich and I walked over to check out the church. Movie buffs might recognize it from the sniper scene in Dirty Harry and from San Andreas, where it was pulverized by an earthquake and tidal wave. Which is ironic, as the original 1884 building actually was destroyed in the earthquake of 1906. After it was rebuilt in 1924, it survived five separate bombing attacks by anti-Catholic anarchists. That’s some wonky karma! After strolling about the neighborhood a while, we eventually fetched up at Mama’s, which was bright, cheerful, and packed with people of every age, race, and background, all talking at once. I stood at the counter to place my order with a tall, robust man who turned out to be the original owners’ grandson. “I used to come here fifty years ago,” Rich told him. Our host grinned. “Welcome back!” he said warmly, a publican with enough experience — and kindheartedness — to make it sound authentic. As we sat down, I asked Rich, “Is it as good as you remembered?” “Hasn’t changed a bit,” he said happily. I was delighted to hear it, as revisiting old haunts can be tricky, infused as they are with unreliable memories. “San Francisco isn’t what it used to be, and it never was,” said Herb Caen. “But when there’s a good bar across the street, almost any street, and a decent restaurant around almost any corner, we are not yet a lost civilization.” In 1997, San Francisco marked Mr. Caen’s passing with a spectacular fireworks display over Aquatic Park that ended with a pyrotechnic image of the manual typewriter he called his “Loyal Royal.” And everyone imagined him standing at the Pearly Gates, looking around, saying, “It ain’t bad, but …”  In April 1996, Mr. Caen, 80, won a special Pulitzer Prize for his columns, which were a "continuous love letter to San Francisco." We still miss him.  As alert readers may have noticed, North Beach isn't actually a beach. It was once, but now, thanks to landfill projects, it's completely landlocked. WHY I WON'T BE POSTING NEXT WEEK I'm taking time off to celebrate the Fourth of July in the traditional California manner: refurbishing our go bags and restocking our Apocalypse Chow Food Locker. Wildfire season is upon us, and we're currently on a Red Flag Alert for possible evacuation. Wish me luck! SUBSCRIBERS If you miss a post announcement, please check your spam folder. Internet security is in a frenzy these days. This post is part of my ongoing series OUT TO LUNCH IN CHEAP & CHEERFUL SAN FRANCISCO My goal is to discover some of San Francisco's most colorful neighborhoods so I can check out what's really going on in this zany town. Are we in a doom loop? Already on the rebound? Still fabulous? And where should we eat afterwards? These and other questions will be explored in upcoming posts. BROWSE PREVIOUS POSTS HERE DON'T MISS OUT! If you haven't already, take a moment to subscribe so I can let you know when I publish my weekly posts. Just send me an email and I'll take it from there. [email protected] And check out my best selling travel memoirs & guide books here. PLANNING A TRIP? Enter any destination or topic, such as packing light or road food, in the search box below. If I've written about it, you'll find it. |
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I'm an American travel writer dividing my time between California and Seville, Spain. I travel the world seeking intriguing people, quirky places, and outrageously delicious food so I can have the fun of writing about them here.
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