One Crowded Hour

There's a sensual quality to Indian Summer in San Francisco.  It is lovely and warm, rarely humid.  The air is sweet yet musty but not quite salty to the taste.  The ever present fog, with its accompanying sea breeze, is conspicuously absence.  It has been replaced with a stillness that envelopes us.  During these dog days of early October we fling our windows open with wild abandon.  There are celebratory explosions of bare limbs, limbs that had been, just twenty four hours prior, wrapped within layer upon layer of fabric, fabric that had protected them from the abrasive cold and salty air that regularly flows in from the Pacific.  We breathe deeper during Indian Summer.  Sigh really as we willingly succumb to its inherent beauty while sitting within the inevitability of its finite end.  I feel our ability to be fully present for these fleeting moments comes from the deep and abiding knowledge that at any moment life as we know it could come crashing down upon us in a cacophony of crumbing bricks and broken glass.  This lends itself to us having a somewhat irreverent attitude towards life.  Maybe, some might even say, cavalier. 

From this place I have come to understand that we San Franciscans are an eccentric bunch.  We are joyful at times, curmudgeonly at others.  We are willingly tolerant of human peculiarities while reveling in the Otherness of those around us, and indeed of ourselves.  We venerate tradition especially San Francisco tradition.  We hold in special esteem those few amongst us who are lucky enough to have been born here.  They are the story tellers, the holders of the past, the ones who are connected to this soil in a unique way.  The rest of us, interlopers as I call myself, the nonnative lot, we are exceedingly grateful for the opportunity to build a life here.  To be a part of this urban isle.  This grand experiment that was once know as the Paris of the West.  Most importantly though we all deeply know that we are integrally rooted to that  mythological Phoenix, the immortal bird that rises from its own ashes to recreate its life.  Many of us have risen from the ashes of our former lives, the ones we inhabited before coming to San Francisco.  In that we embody the past of this great City as much as the present.  We walk the same streets that were teeming with life before that fateful morning of Eighteen April Nineteen hundred and Six.  We carry their hopes and fears, their dreams of a fulfilling and joyful life.  With each breath we take we are living our crowded hour of glorious life just as they were.  The Call by Thomas Mordaunt says it all: 

"Sound, sound the clarion, fill the life,

Throughout the sensual world proclaim,

One Crowded hour of glorious life

is worth an age without a name."