To San Francisco

My father is making it possible for my two boys and me to travel to one of my very favorite cities in a few weeks—the city of hills, San Francisco. I never stop walking when I'm there. I never stop going up and down and in and out, looking over and past and through. I am happy in San Francisco. I find gifts there for people I love—the sorts of things that don't exist where I live. I find happiness just in moving through, in standing on street corners, in watching tango dancers in the square, in waiting for a light to turn green beside the likes of Tracey Ullman. I like the bookstores. I like the people. I'm in love with San Francisco.

And I'm empty here. I have been, for awhile. I'm in desperate need of the new. New streets. New people. New photographs.

Do you want to know who my father is? I will tell you. He sent a letter, and in the letter he wrote: "It would gladden my heart if you all would take a few days off together and go somewhere you could enjoy building a fond memory. Do it," he wrote, "for Grandpop."

We will.

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The Liquid Wash of Was

The birch in the back yard was a gift, ten years ago, from my parents. The brick walkway that leads to the front door was a gift, the last one from my mother. And this week, in between the rest of everything else, I was retracing the provenance of the hard metals and spark that I've carried forward, from girlhood until now.

I have been thinking, in other words, about the way things signify. About how often the objects in our lives are less about the things themselves—their utility, their value—and more about who we were at the time that they entered our lives, and who shapes our lives, and how memory waits for us in a quiet afternoon. Memory waits, and it lingers.

I'd bought myself a proper jewelry box, my first. I was putting my history in place. The ring I'd proudly acquired with the $35 dollars I'd earned one summer as a teen in South Carolina. The earrings my son brought home for Mother's Day. The ring I bought to remember my uncle by. The pearl that remembers Chicago. The tarnished silver from a friend who forgave me my decision. The ring I purchased one day, post-surgery, to prove to myself that I am a survivor, and the other ring, the one born of a poem. Reiko's Hawaii, in a pair of dangled fish. My brother's aquamarine. My own Seville, in tangled silver. My Barcelona, my San Miguel, my Nashville, my husband's exquisite taste in sapphire.

I have too much jewelry, I kept thinking, as I fit each piece into its velvet wedge. Too much, and I was almost in tears. But then the tears were for something else altogether—for lost time, for lost friends, for the liquid wash of was.

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Gifts

I am the recipient of gifts: too many, none of them earned.

Yesterday, for example, in the airport: a young girl from Penn State who, like me, waited for that ersatz plane to San Antonio. She was beautiful—dark haired, a diamond chip on the left flare of her nose, a tender kind of edgy. Studying Spanish, dreams of becoming a translator, a good sort. I liked talking with her. We made a pact. We said, If we hear again that the plane that is about to take us high in the blue cold sky (the plane that was so tiny that it had no overhead luggage compartments) needs "more" maintenance (after already waiting a long time for maintenance) then we will be officially spooked. We got word. We were, together, spooked. She went her way and I went mine, but I felt as if, during all that waiting, I had made a friend.

Another gift: Dina Sherman of HarperCollins was kind beyond description about my airport dilemma. She understood. I am an uber responsible, don't let people down if I can possibly help it sort, and I never not show up for things; it's against my annoyingly obsessive nature. Dina made it okay for me to go home during the swamp of airline confusion.

Another gift: A few days ago, Vivian of Hip Writer Mama took the time to lay out, step by step, just how one embeds links in a blog. I had no idea previously how this got done. I don't know how anyone learns this stuff in the first place. But I know that it took Vivian a long time to teach me, and this was after she had already gone the distance, interviewing me and three others for last week's Winter Blog Tour. She's something else.

Another gift: Jane Satterfield, whose beautiful, searing memoir, Daughters of Empire: A Memoir of a Year in Britain and Beyond, is due out next year, sent, arriving just today, a book of poems by Elizabeth Spires. It's called The Wave-Maker and Jane's generosity is inexplicable (except that Jane, whom I profiled not long ago on this blog, has always been enormously generous). Jane's taste is immaculate. I've been sitting with this book for the past half hour and I think I'm in love with every page. I wonder if Ms. Spires would mind me quoting a stretch from a single poem called "Translation of My Life":

Imagine: a town
in the same universe as this one,
with the same physical laws,
but no poets, no poetry.
No scribbling hands up late
at night writing words
they believed would save them.
No noisy fluttering pages
to disturb the peace
of a dreaming populace.

I hope not.

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