San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Music, melancholy as summer fades from view
The summer went by quickly, didn’t it? It seems as if Memorial Day was just yesterday afternoon and the long summer lay ahead. Everything was open again. We were going to go out for dinner, going to travel, have a good time. But the next thing anybody knew, it was Labor Day, the last day of summer in this part of the world. Now it’s autumn, not officially, not quite yet, but autumn nonetheless.
The switch in the weather is gentle on the western edge of the continent, but you can see it if you look. The golden hills turn a deep tan, and in a dry year like this the little creeks look as if they have given up. The leaves start to fall from street trees, especially in places like the Berkeley hills and in Sacramento, where Westerners have planted Eastern trees. It’s blackberry season in the country, and the poison oak turns from an oily green to bright red, so that nasty plant is almost beautiful.
It’s nothing like New England, of course, except on the eastern side of the Sierra where the aspen trees shimmer in fall splendor.
September and October are the best time of the year on the coast: warm days, cool nights. The summer fog is gone, baseball winds down and football begins. Music is in the air: Opera and Symphony and bluegrass, art shows, parties, celebrations. Even in these shabby times, people dress up.
But September does have a bit of melancholy to it, a feeling that time is passing. “The days grow short when you reach September.” as the lyrics of “September Song” remind us. That song was old when I was young, but “September Song,” a 2017 tune by British songwriter J.P. Cooper, has the same theme: a look back at a lost teenage love.
So there’s something in the fall air. This year it is apprehension, a feeling of unease. It could well be the autumn of our discontent.
That’s what happened last year. We all remember the September day a year ago when the sky turned as red as Mars. It was smoke from huge fires, and it hung over the Bay Area like a vision of the end of the world. The air felt like poison that day and the next one; the air quality in San Francisco reached a score of 235 at sunset on Sept. 10. That hasn’t happened in the city yet this fall, but the threat is there again. The country is more dry than ever, and the fire next time may be worse.
Mother Nature herself seems to have turned on us: drought, wildfire, climate change — and a virus we thought we had beaten, but now it’s surging again.
Not that humans have helped much. Take politics. Please. There is an election that wraps up this week. It may well be that San Francisco’s Gavin Newsom will be thrown out of office, and next week the governor of California will be a talk show host whose views are so conservative that he couldn’t be elected dogcatcher in San Francisco. Or a man who growled like a bear on the campaign trail. Or maybe the ex-mayor of San Diego will replace the ex-mayor of San Francisco. How’s that for an autumn surprise? When I worry about San Francisco, I usually head out to take a look around. Over the weekend, I took a long drive, out Taraval Street, through the Sunset and Parkside, all the way out to the ocean. Taraval is not a lovely street, but it’s interesting in its way — the main street of a different and diverse city, a jumble of cultures. Not your grandmother’s San Francisco.
There was time for a walk on the Great Highway, right on the edge of the ocean. The Great Highway has been in the news lately — some residents want it closed to cars; others say the road, which runs straight as an arrow from Golden Gate Park to the zoo, is a vital traffic artery. A compromise was reached to close it to cars on weekends. I took a long walk on the highway without cars, but full of bikes, people strolling, skating, hanging out. A simple verdict: It’s great.
Back downtown on Geary Boulevard, main street of the Richmond District. Another San Francisco mix: a Russian cathedral, all grandeur and gold domes, and a funeral home nearby, a place with an Irish name, and a sign in English, Chinese and Russian.
A little detour on 10th Avenue between Anza and Balboa streets where there is a whole block of beautifully maintained 1910-era houses, a hidden gem off the beaten track.
Then back home and a walk up to the top of our local hill to sit in the sun and look out over the city at the end of the day: sunset over Noe Valley, the Mission and the glistening towers of downtown. In a couple of hours over a single day, you can see the city in its complexities, shifting, changing, like a kaleidoscope. You have to admit: For all its faults, San Francisco is beautiful to see.
You have to wonder. Will those glass towers ever fill up with workers again? Will the city ever come back to what it was not that long ago?
I don’t think anyone knows. The best we can do is hope for the best and remember that September comes only once a year. Winter will be here soon enough.