Cesar Chavez Park

A man-made park, I fear, and a totally different perspective as on my usual walk. I spied across the bay trying to figure out where my neighborhood was. I realized just how tiny Telegraph Hill is. There’s a hazy fog bank between Telegraph Hill and Russian Hill, and that’s the only way I could figure out where North Beach was from the Berkeley Shore. I took the children that I’d rented for the day and walked around the perimeter. You get to walk by the little lagoon between Berkeley shore and this park, whcih sticks out like a peninsula in to the SF Bay. It’s all pretty flat too. We, rent-a-kids and me, lay on the grass and stared at the sky. Nothing of much interest except for all those little hairs that are on your eyes and show up when you stare at a big blue screen like our sky. There was a kite trapped in a tree. No bugs in the grass.

Really beautiful out today, a super warm wintry day, if that’s possible. The late afternoon glare is pretty impossible to navigate. I blaze through downtown San Francisco on the cruise back, where pedestrians are ballsy to the point of suicidal. As I’m shooting with freeway traffic up Fremont Street, this middle aged woman in a really half-hazard Halloween costume appears to my right, in the middle of the street. She does that move of walking confidently like “I know I’m about to get killed.” And then walks behind my car, timing her walking so well with the speed of my driving. I of course inferred an entire story for her: administrative assistant intent on getting home to pass out candy, and decided to be a vampire today but took off half of the costume. Oblivious to the dangers of crossing Fremont Street in rush hour because she does it every day, and if you stress yourself like that every day you stop being worried about it, like kids who grow up in Israel and witness suicide bombers all the time.