It was 100 years ago when a car went sailing out of Natick Street and right into a tram on Chenery Street. The wreck was a big one, killing either five or seven people. I can’t recall. But it’s certainly part of neighborhood history. The sidewalks are narrow, and Natick Street itself is barely a street, more an alley, which means that going uphill it is impossible to see around the building and also to realize that drivers are oblivious to the limited view of pedestrians.
Of course, San Francisco has changed a lot since then. Trams are now called Light Rail Vehicles, LRVs. And also…sorry, but there is no also. In fact, everything is exactly as it was, except that trams have relocated to other parts of San Francisco. And traffic still bursts right out of Natick Street into whatever happens to be there, such as a person in a wheelchair. That would be me. Such are my thoughts as I head up Chenery Street toward our home. When I sailed down the hill this morning, I passed a Chinese man sorting through the recycle bins for stuff that he wanted to recycle on his own. Tin cans figured largely in his schema, as far as I could see. But I didn’t see, or foresee, that at the end of that same day, sailing back up the hill after having picked up some Thai food, another Chinese man, and maybe even the same one, was poking around the recycle bins again. Monday being the day rubbish gets collected on our street.
My reaction was mostly sad. But to live in San Francisco is to experience this everyday reality. The gap between rich and poor is a chasm. We stare from opposite sides of a sort of fault line, but not the kind of fault that spawns earthquakes, just the sort that sends one tectonic plate north and the other south. And tomorrow and tomorrow. And I’m old, and I’m not going to see this change, I fear. And that’s life. Not that I remotely accept this reality. Which doesn’t matter, does it?
On the way to collect the Thai takeout, I stop at Glen Park Cleaners. The windows have been boarded up. They were boarded up this morning when I rolled into Canyon Market and heard the news. A fire in the adjacent apartment had done whatever it had done. The place is currently out for the count. And I counted myself one of the neighborhood when I stopped two passersby, lamented the day’s misfortunes…yet another family owned business…and also observed that the owner couple’s daughter had graduated from Davis, a university of California branch, only last year. I was proud to have this insider’s knowledge.
Anything illuminating on the sign, I asked, referring to the notice in the dry cleaner’s window?
No, the man said. Just says it’s shut. I had phrased my question carefully, wanting to make it clear that I was not mentally deficient, as so many so often assume of those in wheelchairs. Nor was I destitute, that has to say, uneducated. Thus, being part of the City’s residents wheelchairs, its mechanized division, we protect our image, we do. And why we even care about our image is another matter.
Lincoln Highway is a splendid read. The book is what might be termed an old-fashioned novel, although for some unexplained reason, while the chapters move forward, their numbering moves backwards. Go figure. Or don’t. Because it really doesn’t matter. It’s an American novel. Very full of the 1950s. And also bursting with factually based magical realism. We see virtually nothing of the Lincoln Highway, by the way, which is or was a real thing. Things mythic unfold quite pleasantly in the book. And the language is elevated when it shouldn’t be within the structures of character. I can’t wait to see what happens next.
True enough of just about everything.