Take Off on a Joyride

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.

via GIPHY

 
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.

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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.

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​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.
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