4.19.2004

Her cheeks drooped when she did not smile and I thought gravity is unkind, but then I thought no, it's not unkind. It is the force of waterfalls and the builder of birds' wings, and I cannot judge the weight the world takes on another's cheeks. Albert Einstein once said gravity cannot be held accountable for people falling in love but I must insist it turns the making of love into a wonderfully physical experience.Weight and balance, pressure, strength. Grace. It shapes the face of the world. Without gravity we would not exist. That seems such a reduced phrase for how much it means. The world rotates, turns, reels, spins. It takes us all along for a lifetime ride.

I tripped some days to San Francisco and found myself thinking much about the physical forces of travel. I watched planes touch down and roll to the terminal, others form a line on the ground for departure in a great sleek rush of steel. I watched the white egrets when the tide came in and covered the mudflats, the rise and fall of plovers diving into the shallow water, the whistling flight of terns as they flocked. Beyond the birds, the planes circled a slow amazing spiral up and up before engaging the course for their destination.

The first night in the Airport hotel ended restless and annoyed with paper-thin walls, telephones ringing, conversations echoing the hard consonants of speech in more languages than I could count. The conference ended early and we called a cab company to take us into downtown and to a different hotel.

I have been in some wild car rides and I anticipated a certain taxi driver flair, but nothing prepared me for the cab ride from the airport hotel to the place downtown. Eighty, ninety miles an hour, cutting people off, accelerating and then madly braking... It was big old black Lincoln Town Car with slate grey leather seats the same color as our cabbie's hair, shocks like jello, cheese seduction music playing over the radio. My coworker handed me her bottle of hand sanitizer. It alarmed me greatly when the driver talked on his cell phone, and then dropped it while weaving in and out of heavy traffic, reaching down between his feet, glancing at the road and then back down. I don't know if I've ever been so happy to get out of a car in my life.

San Francisco. A fair city of steep narrow streets, women in narrow steep heels trotting caprine, defying gravity with balance and quick steps. Steel grates seeped warm sewer air out from beneath towering buildings of all shapes sizes and magnitude, glass, concrete, steel. The smells of the city assailed my senses, heavenly scents of apartment balcony jasmine gardens and exquisite restaurants, hellish smells of vomit and garbage. Old sidewalks with amethyst glass providing daylight to the nether reaches of buildings, thrumming steel trolley guides set in the black streets, and wires above for the electric cars. The air is alive with noise.

Madamoiselle Fishfry, who is both sweet and hot, no doubt a fiery girl with an appetite for coffee and encyclopedic knowledge about the City where she lives, met and took us to lunch at a sweet little Italian streetside cafe. We watched people and talked of everything from school and work to tattoos and music. She also escorted us along busy streets past Chinatown, into the North Beach where she and we parted ways. It was a treat to meet.

My coworker and fellow traveller wanted to ride a street trolley and visit an aquarium, so we combined the two in an excursion to the Embarcadero. I loved the streetcar with the conductor's bell cadence, the shift of gears, the mechanical motion. The trolley to the Bay was crowded, and we ended up hanging precariously on the inside rails, automobiles and trucks and other laden trolleys rushing past us the opposite direction. It was an exciting roller-coaster of a ride, up and down the steep hills, tall buildings side by side looked like they were leaning uphill, all the California colors bleach bright in the wind and sunshine. We walked five blocks to the Pier, and found the seaside aquarium building.

The clerk at the aquarium seemed very put out when I counted my change and discovered she had shorted me by $11, but other than that, our visit was interesting and fun. We went through the big glass tunnel twice, mostly to see the many different sharks and rays in the second half of the exhibit. Without gravity there would be no water.

Twice during the day I swear the earth shifted beneath my feet, a slight shrug, a sense of vertigo despite my ground level footing. The earth moves, and sometimes shakes. I once read San Francisco and the San Andreas Fault experience something like 100 earthquakes a day. But gravity is not unkind. It is like the wind, or sun, or water, some force we can neither ignore nor do without. The design of all things is greater than we. We are small. We fall.

After returning to the hotel populated almost entirely by drop-dead gorgeous transvestites, I called an old friend and we met her for dinner in a swanky French restaurant. We all ordered the steak. It melted in my mouth, and went nicely with the mushrooms with spinach and cheese, and the glass of red wine. We went to a small grocery store and bought small portions of whiskey and rum, and rode the ancient elevator, complete with velvet on the walls and cheesy elevator music, back to the room. Our little party was a nice end to a good day.


I felt exactly when the shift in altitude took place and we began our descent through the clouds. The plane landed in the rain. I'm happy to be home again, and gravity is not unkind.