San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Sublime sunset says it all: Better times ahead
We were driving over Diamond Heights after a run to the Safeway late on one of the last afternoons of the old year and caught a spectacular sight: the city laid out before us, the reflection of the setting sun glistening on the city’s tall buildings. And the full moon rising over the East Bay hills. Moonrise at sunset. You don’t see that every day.
“Wow,” said my companion, “That’s beautiful.”
But it was more than that. It was a good omen. Think about it. We had the onceinalifetime convergence of Jupiter and Saturn, we had a rainbow on Christmas morning, the very same day some unknown good soul erected a monolith made entirely of gingerbread on a San Francisco hilltop, only to see it disappear completely after a single day. And now this spectacular winter sunset show. It’s a sign, a message. There are better times ahead.
It’s the first Sunday of a bright new year. It’s not too late to make some new year resolutions. And not just the usual ones, promises to eat less and exercise more and be nicer to pesky coworkers. These resolutions have to fit the time and the place: our little corner of the world after a COVID Christmas and associated unhappy holidays.
The first thing is we have to make a resolution to get through the plague. We have to obey all those health rules, as annoying as they are — resolve to stay close to home, to wear a mask, stay away from other people, no birthday parties at the French Laundry. You know the drill by now.
However, you don’t have to give up life by resolving to follow the health rules. Life goes on. Social distancing has not been followed in all cases. I bet there are a lot of lockdown babies being born just now.
January is the proverbial longest month: mostly gray, often rainy. But there are also those famous winter days when the rain wipes the skies clean and the sun comes out. It is a gift to live in the Bay Area, and if you have the gift of health, you should resolve to enjoy the region. Get out and explore: Go for a walk in the park, walk across the Golden Gate Bridge, take the 17mile trail across San Francisco,
ride a bike across the RichmondSan Rafael bridge. Get out of the house. The rules allow it. You should resolve to do it.
Don’t feel like walking? You could drive to the top of Mount Diablo on one of these clear wintry days. It’s a famous view. At the very minimum, you should be able to see the snowy Sierra Nevada and maybe one of the domes in Yosemite. One Bay Area legend claimed that the view from Diablo was second only to the view from Mount Kilimanjaro. Television station KQED sent reporter Asal Ehsanipour to find out. Not true, she said. But rangers told her anyone could see 44 of California’s 58 counties from the top of Mount Diablo. You could resolve to see for yourself.
While it is still winter, you could resolve to keep an eye out for the first signs of spring. That would be the second week of February, only six weeks from Sunday. This is when the fruit trees start to bloom all over the Bay Area, a gift to the street. The street trees start blooming around the Lunar New Year. Surely a better year than the old one, which was the Year of the Rat. We should have known.
The new year is the Year of the Ox, plodding slowly toward the end of the pandemic, if the fates allow.
When will that be? You can only guess. A friend who has listened to all the television experts and studied the tea leaves wrote a date on a whiteboard on her office wall: June 2021. Five months from now.
That is when our real new year resolutions will kick in. You should resolve to have adventures that were not possible in the plague year. You should resolve to travel.
I’ve been thinking about walking across Manhattan to get a pastrami sandwich at Katz’s Deli. I thought about flying to England first class — you only live once, right? — and walk around London town. Maybe take the train to Edinburgh, and have a pint and a lamb pie at a pub in the city’s West End.
I want to go to John O’Groats in Scotland and Mousehole in Cornwall because I like the names, because they are on opposite ends of Britain, and it would be an adventure.
I’ve made my own local resolutions: to not pass up the small pleasures: sailing on San Francisco Bay, walking through the Berkeley campus on a football Saturday. Drinks with friends.
Here’s a resolution for you: If you get a stimulus check, you should put aside some of it for the day when the cities open again and go out to a restaurant. Have a good, slow meal. Taste the pleasures of life in the city and remember what it was like to be locked down. It would also help restaurants that struggled through the long, long winter.
As always, it is a tale of two cities. We should also never forget the pain of the city, the homeless, the drug addicts, the lost souls. Most of us avert our eyes. We walk on by. The best new year resolution is not to walk away, but to try, even in a small way, to make a difference. Maybe take some other part of that stimulus check and give it to St. Anthony Dining Room or the Salvation Army, or even to some business that is struggling to survive so it can share in the good days just ahead.