Tales of the outer, outer Excelsior
A part of me is always writing this column. That me figures out how to describe my week in 750 words. That me wonders whether I should tell the story about the Kipcap getting rearended on Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, and that the driver was so nice that I call it the best collision ever.
That me wonders what’s off limits when I talk about this crazy-quilt family of rescue dogs, fost-adopt children, a dancer and a deputy. Should I describe the time when the AstenBennetts gave Zane his psych meds in reverse order? Would Nurse Vivian mind me telling the story of her throwing up on Aunt Rita’s wedding dress?
In 1787, during a debate in the House of Commons, Edmund Burke noted, “There were Three Estates in Parliament (the nobility, the clergy and the common people), but in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important than them all.” For it is the journalist’s duty to tell the facts honestly and without prejudice.
I take that responsibility seriously. My words may not get me on Trump’s enemies list, but they do reveal the truth of one family on the edge of a fragile civilization where we spend more money on the security of a golf resort than we do on the National Endowment for the Arts. I report “warts and all,” and so, when the Kipcap gets hit for a second time (on the way to the repair shop) or when Aidan gets his head stuck in a concrete staircase, it becomes part of the narrative.
There are a few friends (Uncle Doya, Crazy Mike, SASB) who are wary of saying clever things, lest they appear in print. In fact, I rely to some extent on Zane not just failing gym, but failing gym in a spectacular way. And there’s a part of me who is a better person just because I tell our history as it is, so I don’t want to make myself the bad guy. Every once in a while I get recognized in a Safeway, and I want to be known as the guy who coaches soccer, not the guy stocking up in the liquor aisle.
The editors of The Chronicle are kind enough to forward emails about this column. Lynn Barnard wrote to tell me that my style reminded her of “Tales of the City.” I was humbled and honored. Long before I ever even read The Chronicle, back in Jersey City, I followed Armistead Maupin’s stories of Anna Madrigal and Michael Tolliver in the quirky town of coincidence that is San Francisco.
Life imitated art, for when Brian and I moved to San Francisco, way back in 1991, we lived in an apartment in the Mission, on Fair Oaks Street. That first day, I took the dogs for a walk, and all three of them sniffed and sniffed at this poodle being walked by this white-haired man with a mustache who looked familiar, although I had lived in the city for less than 24 hours. He let his poodle sniff back before he said, “My name is Armistead.”
Each week, I am humbled to remember that this page has been occupied by the likes of Herb Caen, Jon Carroll, Mark Twain, Bret Harte and, yes, Armistead Maupin. My story of how Bandit, the rescue dog, still has not learned how to wag his tail does not compare.
The blue bungalow is not Barbary Lane. Barbary Lane is fiction, but this is a real home, located on one of the very last streets in San Francisco. The Flat Earth Society postulates that if you go one block more, you fall off the face of the Earth. Technically, it is in the Crocker Amazon, but most readers would recognize it as the outer, outer Excelsior.
But one of my regular readers, Ann Magner, gave her address as Pacifica, the outer outer, outer Excelsior. And I realized we are all of us in the outer, outer, outer, outer Excelsior, all hanging on to that last edge of San Francisco. We are all of us Muslim, all of us women, all of us transgender, all of us Latino, all of us hungry and needing that meal on wheels, all of us mixedrace families, all of us trying to live in small-town America, wanting to get along with our neighbors but not sure if we belong. That is the story I write.
Back in Jersey City, I followed Armistead Maupin’s stories of Anna Madrigal and Michael Tolliver in the quirky town of coincidence that is San Francisco.