SF in my heart

I WROTE it once. I write it again: You don’t leave your heart in San Francisco. You take San Francisco in your heart.
No apologies to Tony Bennett there, much as I love his song extolling the City by the Bay over Paris, Rome and New York.
Ah, crisp, fresh, cool, cool air. From the early morning mist to the high noon fog there is no avoiding the air of the city touching your skin, seeping into your pores, caressing your very soul.
A city with a soul San Francisco is. No wonder the love-peace movement was born here – at Haight-Ashbury Streets – maturing to the hippie culture. Yes, there are still remnants of the now aged Make-Love-Not-War generation there: bell-bottomed Levi’s, beads, medallions and banded long, albeit thinning hair. Though not the faintest trace of the acrid smell of hash and grass. Peace, man, peace.
Joy, childlike joy, comes to the heart at the sight of those little cable cars of song that “climb halfway to the sky” and slowly, slowly, roll down the hills, past Lombard – the world’s “crookedest” street where the zigs and the zags are really the sharpest Zs, totally unlike Baguio’s smooth Ss.
This defies explanation: going down Lombard – done that every time I come to San Francisco, five times including this one – gives me an enormous appetite.
That gets more than sated at the Fisherman’s Wharf: clam chowder soup in hollowed bread, calamari, shrimps, fish and fries, anyone?
Uh, oh. San Francisco found its way to my heart through my stomach too. Got the shock of my life when I tipped the scales in Don Robert David’s home at 200 ungainly pounds! And I was only a trim 184 coming in from Philadelphia less than a week ago.
Poundage aside, what piece on San Francisco can be complete without a mention of the Golden Gate Bridge. Contrary to the image that it generally conjures in the mind, the bridge is not golden. It is red. The appellation refers to the mouth of the bay to the Pacific – a way to opportunities weighed in gold in the glory days of conquests and empire, and conversely, the gateway of migrants from the Pacific to the American Dream.
The Golden Gate Bridge stands not only as an engineering marvel – think bridging the sea, erecting concrete posts in the deep – but also a symbol of might and power – of man mastering the elements, politically translated to a nation superior over lesser nations.
Got to check on the political and get more on the personal here.
My deep affinity to San Francisco is caused by dear friends and family who have taken residence in and around the city. The deep, abiding friendship of my seminary brothers -- Don Robert and his family, Perry Rodriguez, Fathers Raymond Reyes and Kenneth Sales, Edwin Bustos, his wife Anna and their lovely daughters Marie, Madonna and Camille – is way beyond measure.
Then there is my very own family here: my mommy – June V. Whitmer – whose hand rocked my journalism cradle that was The Regina at the then Assumption College in San Fernando; my dad Jim Whitmer, a dead-ringer for Don Johnson of 80’s TV’s Miami Vice; my sister Jeanbelle, her husband Mickey and sons Kevin and Shawn, future hockey stars and piano virtuosos both.
They all give San Francisco that special place in my heart.