OK, Gentle Reader, I must stand corrected. Falling corrected would be more like it. Sitting corrected simply doesn’t work syntactically…so let’s get on with it and join the throngs thronging their way to Civic Center, San Francisco, United Nations Plaza, USA. But we have to join them theoretically because they just weren’t. 

Never mind APEC, the global Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit that has long been touted as mind blowing and traffic stopping and all the rest. No crowds or threatening circumstances of any kind. Instead, I alighted at the Civic Center BART, this time en route to Davies Symphony Hall, and everything subterranean was still spic and span. The BART police seemed to be policing each other, as I observed them between elevators, five cops standing around accomplishing nothing but being five cops standing around. Which should be enough to deter any evil doer from doing anything evil.

Surfacing, things got even better. No, I’m not being ironic. Not only was it a beautiful day, but the jackhammering in United Nations Plaza had produced results. The skateboard park, which I had cynically assumed would be empty and under-utilized at best, was doing a brisk trade in young people flying off ramps. It was, after all, Sunday, and a sunny one at that.

There was a small area adjacent for working out. Bars one can grab. Stuff for stretching. And there were terribly physically fit people doing what fit people do with all this gear. Next, a set of permanent chess tables. Made of stone or what could pass for stone. With people sitting opposite each other playing chess. And along one side of the plaza, a counter where a staff person was heading out the chess sets. Renting? Free with a deposit? I don’t know. But the tables were full. The players looked happy. And it would be hard to convince me that I wasn’t in Copenhagen.

With Jane at the grandsons’ birthdays (yes, they were all born at about the same time of year), I was meeting our old friend Judith for a pre-concert lunch. Shishido peppers for me. A root beer float for her. And here I digress to explain an essential part of my daily life. I am trying to lose weight, and having only modest success. Jane–and I learned our friend Judith–are both trying to gain. So there we were sitting outside at Arbor on Hayes Street, doing exactly what I had done the previous week, waiting for a 2 PM curtain. Not that the symphony hall has a curtain. Duh, as the young people would say.

Speaking of young people, I found myself aging by the hour during the concert. Yes, the first piece by Esa Salonen, our Finnish conductor/composer, had some melodic moments. And I was grateful that it sounded like a film score. You know, strings and sweeping effects. It wasn’t very long. About 15 minutes. As was the next piece, part of the California Festival, whatever that is or was. A 28-year-old with a name I can’t remember, commissioned through the emerging black composers program, did a perfectly good job. An unseen electric guitar burst into song occasionally. It was OK. It wasn’t clear why the California Youth Orchestra wasn’t playing this. But there you are, or there we were, and the afternoon redeemed itself with Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements. Which I almost know by heart.

There was still sun in the sky as I headed back towards Civic Center. Passing City Hall, I glimpsed a very discreet and professional looking APEC cop ushering 15 Chinese into a side door. A block beyond a very focused and Covid-masked Chinese tour group magically materialized. They were wearing name tags with the logo of the same coach that was turning into Fulton Street while I waited for the light on Van Ness Ave. No way they could have gotten off, assembled and made it to the library. Yet they did. Their driver was explaining in Cantonese/Mandarin and English, that to use the toilets in the library basement…. Don’t know where they were headed. But I was headed home. And not before I took another mysterious look up Market Street. Lots of policeman on the main drag. There was supposed to be a protest but maybe that was canceled. I was feeling a little canceled myself. But it had been a long day.