A Tour of San Francisco

I am visiting my sister with the boys at her home in the Dog Patch district of San Francisco.

Today, we take a tour of Chinatown before noon so we can see the fortune cookie factory in operation. We park the car several blocks away after looking for a space for over fifteen minutes. This is the first and least obvious lesson offered by urban life. Stowing the vehicle that got you here takes time and effort. (Good luck with that.)

The walk is a colorful one. Live fish slap around in deep trays, eyes bulging, as water is sprayed in to keep them alive. Fresh flowers, ripe and round citrus, green peppers and prickly golden fruit are mounded high in crates while men and women pick through them, talking, talking, talking in a language that is foreign to us. Trinidad and Sam turn their heads from side to side taking it all in.

"There are so many people!" says Sam.

"We'll have to take a left on Chaos before Jackson," says Trin.

"We're stopping here for coffee," says Robyn. We have one hour on the meter, most of Chinatown and half of Little Italy between us and the fortune cookie factory. Surely there's time for everything. We duck into the Italian bakery.

Yesterday, Sam was sick but slept and is now well. I'm fighting a cold and know I'd do better to eat my greens but... authentic Italian pastries? Hippie health must take a holiday. I buy a chocolate croissant, Sam gets a strawberry and cream danish and Trin has a hot cocoa. Robyn gets her coffee and a macaroon. It's all divine.

We walk on to Ross alley and discover our destination. It is a factory that appears to be composed of a 600 square foot room. Four women sit at stations where cookies slide off hot irons in round discs. The women grab a fortune, press it to a warm disc and bend the cookie around a string to fold it into shape. A sign tells me to pay fifty cents if I plan to take pictures. We give the man two dollars. He has been very generous with offering cooled flat cookie rounds our way. He nods graciously at my offer.

"How long has this place been here?" asks Robyn.

"Fifty year!" says the man.

"How long have you yourself worked here?" she asks a woman.

"One day!" says the woman. When we laugh, she looks flustered and asks us to talk to the man.

"Fifty year!" he repeats emphatically. She is clearly younger than that, but much can get lost in translation. Or perhaps she always gets the best fortunes?

Robyn digs for cash to buy a bag of "adult fortune cookies" with naughty fortunes inside. We agree to split the cookies. She hesitates, embarrassed to ask the man for them. He grins broadly and assures her that they are adult fortune cookies, chocolate and vanilla. We make a point to separate that bag from the one I buy for the kids.

We are tempted by Chinese candies and wooden swords on the way back to the car. We buy more candy than I have all year as I am suddenly nostalgic for edible rice wrapped gummy delicacies like the ones I ate as a child. The boys are in shock when they see what I've purchased. Is it tourism? Am I under the influence of my sister, or are the two of us (so rarely together) suddenly recreating our childhood to pass on to my boys in imported sweets?

We move the car and climb the hill to Coit tower on foot with our sugar highs in full swing. The boys look out over the bay in all directions. Only for a moment. Then they are fixated on the foreign coins that have been set on the outside sills of the locked windows. How did the coins get there? Who left them? Could they somehow squeeze their hands through the opening and take one, just one? More perhaps? Such beautiful foreign coins! The view is disabled by this novel diversion.

I stare out at the land around and walk the perimeter of the tower in a slow circle. Alcatraz island brings me back to a tour of the prison I took in seventh grade. The Marin hills remind me of Ben and his days playing the piano many years before I knew him. The boats remind me of so much water and the desire to command it -- boats from childhood, boats I was learning to sail, all dreams that lap in and out at me like the bay itself gently tugging at my heart.

With irritation, I hear the boys still discussing how they might get at the coins. The yearning in their voices rankles me. I express my frustration with their focus on the sill when so much beauty stretches beyond under a bright blue sky. But here I am, myself counting the tangible coinage of my past from the top of a tower so tall. What did I see that was new here? What am I learning from my view?

The boys and I distract each other from our perseverations. We shake ourselves into interacting with one other, with the cypress trees below whose tops are blown flat as if they'd painted the sky too roughly. I see my sister, tall and beautiful and quiet. We have been appreciating each other, seeing and hearing one another in longer stretches. This is something.

We descend the tower, each lost in our own thoughts. Maybe a view is just a view, and a vista point is a place to see what we have to let go of while we also celebrate what we've ascended. Perhaps the pinnacle offers us an opportunity to look down at our own expectations and the ways that we isolate ourselves from one another and the world.

And maybe, from that vantage point, I felt a little lost for a moment. All the nostalgia and fortunes in bagged cookies across the city could not save me from my own inner chaos as I ascended that place and sorted it out. It's all mine.

Perhaps the finding has to start with being lost somewhere.