Being a bright and breezy San Francisco day, damned if I didn’t hurtle out the door and down the hill for late morning coffee and toast at Cup, the redoubtable Jordanian/Hispanic café by the subway station. I do this increasingly, getting out just for the sake of getting out. The product of this is doubtful. But Sam, the proprietor, is always friendly. And the whole experience confirms that the outside world still exists. It has been a long year. Soon it will be a long year and a half. And my worst fear is that soon it will be two years and then forever. This may be overstating the case. But there’s no overstating my apprehension. Existence was tentative enough without an additional virus or two going around. But it has acquired an entirely new level of shakiness. You heard it here first.

I find solace in certain things. First, we San Franciscans are now allowed increasing free rein, which opens strange new opportunities. For example, during the pandemic the Muni J tram line was suspended and replaced by buses. Then, for mysterious reasons, the trams began to run again. And now they have stopped again. And the latter is actually a good thing for me, because it turns out that the local tram stop is utterly wheelchair inaccessible. The stopgap buses actually do a better job of getting me from A to B. Or from A to L, depending on one’s metaphor. And what this has to do with anything involves the ever-changing dance of social opportunity in this era of COVID-19. There are a couple of people from my library book group in the neighboring district of Noe Valley, right on the J tram line which is now the J bus line, whatever. You get the idea. But will I get the tram? It also doesn’t matter. Honestly, it doesn’t. 

Does it matter that I am no longer driving? Not so far. I have taken my name off the auto insurance policy, a maneuver that saved Jane and me all of $100 a year. The policy itself costs $2400 a year. Suggesting that I was never a major liability to our insurance company. But I may have been a liability to pedestrians, other drivers, dogs, and so on. Whatever. It’s over. That era of my life.

And how many eras are there? That is the question. I keep trying to gauge my activity based on likely longevity, and the reasons for this, the gauging, are uncertain. It’s the time and energy that count. And I can’t see that as one ages, these commodities do decline. Everything declines. That is the other thing.

But one thing that hasn’t declined is Santa Barbara. I have fond memories of the place from my childhood. I have some other memories to, but those didn’t intrude too much during our visit last week. We saw an old friend. We had lunch at an old beach, a place where I used to go body surfing as an early adolescent. We ate in a restaurant after restaurant, drawing pandemic caution to the winds. State street, the city ‘s main drag, has now largely been closed to traffic. Restaurants along it now spill out into the pavement. One place, Joe’s, or Santa Barbara landmark, Is running out of kitchen capacity, so many people are dining alfresco, their omelettes illuminated by an ever changing traffic signal just overhead.

If there is a major end-of-pandemic milestone ahead, for me it is the resumption of theaters and concert halls. We have seats for Tom Stoppard’s new play “Leopoldstadt” in London’s West end on 19 June. Should that fall through, there is a Lincoln Center touring production of “My Fair Lady” back in San Francisco in early November…a chance to make up for the confusing little boy’s experience of seeing the show with my aunt in the late 1950s. Surely it can’t all fall through. With dismay I look at the season of the San Francisco Symphony and the San Francisco Opera. Nothing on the web. No chamber music. Nothing happening at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. And so on. Say it isn’t so. And when it is so, remind me to say hallelujah.