Pay homage to future or past?

Compare and contrast: The 30th annual Goldman Environmental Prize ceremonies and the concert for Notre Dame at Grace Cathedral. On Monday, April 29, the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House was filled to the brim with a crowd of environmentalists and young people for the first event; Grace Cathedral was filled to the brim (5,000 people, I read in one account) for the second.

My grandmother used to say you can’t sit on two horses with one backside. So which way to go?

Ultimately, I chose the future over the past, partly because honoring the planet’s future started a half hour before honoring the cathedral’s past, and I thought if the future was quick, I might be able to hurry over to Grace Cathedral for a nod to tradition. I wasn’t. By the time the Goldman crowd emerged from the Opera House, it was 7:30 p.m., with only a half hour left in the scheduled Grace Cathedral concert.

My friend Alison Owings, who was at Grace, emailed the next morning that Frederica von Stade was “YOW double” (that’s the Little Man jumping out of his chair), and that the only detail that organizer Charlotte Shultz seemed to have left out was Muni. The bus home was so packed that people couldn’t get on, she wrote, adding, “I figured out that at least half the crowd walked home.”

As to the Goldmans, despite the rescinding of so much environmental protection legislation in the current era, the mood was, as always in the past 30 years, both upbeat and defiant. Keynote speaker Al Gore praised grassroots activism, pounded his fist on the podium and said, “Time is running out, but we will win.”

Linda Garcia of Vancouver, Wash., who organized a community, despite “relentless bullying, intimidation and threats,” to stop the construction of an oil terminal, called out “corporations who put profit before people ... corporate greed that exists only for the benefit of a chosen few.” The ferocity of her stance exemplified the “radical” idealism of Goldman winners, whose speeches always sound like calls to the barricades. The model of foreign investment, said Alfred Brownell of Liberia, has “destroyed everything in its path.”

Belen Curamil, whose Goldmanwinning activist father, Alberto Curamil, worked to stop the building of hydroelectric plants on a river essential to his Mapuche people, is imprisoned in Chile. “He resists with dignity,” she said. “We are people of the earth, and our central responsibility is to protect everything that makes life possible.”

Reasons for local pride: Kim Kardashian’s baby shower, in Hidden Hills (Los Angeles County), was CBD-themed, with (and here’s the local angle) the CBD products supplied by HelloMD of Larkspur. Kardashian’s fourth child is due via surrogate in a few weeks. “I thought it was kind of ridiculous to have a fourth baby shower,” said the eloquent guest of honor, “but I thought, ‘I’m freaking the f— out having a fourth kid.’ ”

Before April was over, Lucy Johns received her first 2020 calendar, from the Yosemite Conservancy. “Maybe we could get the presidential election over with in a couple of months?” she asks.

After fulfilling judicial obligations in the McKinley School fundraising Dogfest (that artist dog who could draw was a showstopper in the talent competition) on Saturday, April 27, I walked from Duboce Park to Fillmore Street to catch a bus heading north. By California Street it was mostly empty, and at Sacramento Street, I got up to ask the driver whether there was a stop at Jackson Street. “Yes,” he said. “You going home?” “Actually, to the church on that corner for a memorial service,” I said, “for an older man who lived a wonderful life.”

He nodded and continued driving slowly up Fillmore, where pedestrians crowded the sidewalks. When he paused at the northeast corner of Clay and Fillmore, a man stumbled and fell to the pavement, seemingly unconscious. He was surrounded instantly by concerned passersby. The driver inched the bus across the intersection and opened the front door, to look out and make sure someone was calling 911 (done).

“I saw him go down,” said the driver. “Probably a heart attack or a stroke.” I nodded as he pulled the bus into the stop at Jackson, just across the street from the church that was my destination. “Go in there and say a prayer for him,” said the driver.

And now, please read today’s Public Eavesdropping quote.

PUBLIC EAVESDROPPING “The thing you have to remember about San Francisco is that it’s San Francisco.” Man to man, overheard on Valencia Street by Janice Polizzi