My new neighbor
It’s been a long time since I’ve written an update. I have been lax with the movie-making due a whirlwind of activity that has disrupted the flow of video processing. At this point I have so many things backlogged that I have video constipation. The best thing to do at this point is probably to just throw everything away and start fresh.
I moved recently.
When I moved in, it was clear that the house next door was abandoned. A broken and boarded window, grass as tall as me, and a bright green pond I named the West Nile breeding ground. We threw bars of soap in it.
On my way to work one day I saw an old man in old Lincoln parked in the driveway of the house. I smiled. He stepped out.
“Are you the new owners of this place?” he asked me.
“Yes. We just moved in, but we’ve been living in the Mission for years.”
“This home,” he gestured “was my mother’s. I like to check on it every day. I’ve lived in San Francisco my whole life.”
He tells me about the soccer field across the street - how the balls used to break his window and the players would urinate behind his stairway. He reminisces about having breakfast with his dear wife.
I wanted to invite him in. I wanted to have tea with him and listen to all his stories. The Great Depression, both world wars and another war in Viet Nam, the haven for beatniks, hippies, gays. He must have lived through many beautiful experiences in the midst of such a center for social and political change. I wanted to soak in this city through him.
But he only speaks of his wife and soccer field. The pain of her loss has not diminished much in 10 years. He doesn’t care for the neighborhood because it is “too dirty”, and yet he spends every morning here. Sometimes he sits inside the house, gazing out the window and I wonder what memories he sees.
He may never tell me about drinking with Kerouac at Vesuvio, or campaigning for Harvey Milk, or hiking through the mountains with Ansel Adams. Nonetheless, I still love to hear him talk about holding his wife as she passed on and how the soccer balls broke several of his windows.
mirrored from Karenism