city lights doesn’t waste much time in being a great bookstore. the first room is rich with great literature. we weren’t halfway across it before katie noticed a poster hanging in a corner. speaking that very night was gary snyder. that night. city lights. 7:00. it was about 1:00 at this moment. neither of us could really believe it.
usually we see those kinds of posters three days after the event. or like wilco, who were actually playing in minneapolis that very night, which we discovered, ya know, after we planned our wedding date and our honeymoon.
we noted what we needed to note and we wandered on. i realized that if we were going to come back to city lights we needn’t spend too long there that afternoon. we went upstairs, following the sign that said “beat literature upstairs.” i grabbed kerouac’s scattered poems off the shelf and opened it to a great one called “hymn.” i’ll post that next week or something.
i decided to buy that book and katie told me to buy a postcard of the bookstore’s 50th birthday party last year and then we boogied on out, with several more distracted pauses at various shelves of books on our way. the clerk that rang me up didn’t look up the entire time, nor did he when we tried to confirm all necessary info for the gary snyder appearance that night. i didn’t let it get to me… would jack? would japhy?
we headed out. we walked back up to where we’d gotten off the cable car, waited a few minutes, and then jumped onto the next car. i’ll say this: san francisco has some seriously big hills. it’s a lot of fun to leave the driving up to the cable car, crowd onto an antique street car, and putter up and down those slopes.
from the top of the big hill we saw down into the bay and the golden gate bridge was there and the hillsides with their white buildings and the rich blue water. it was beautiful. we could see a long ways in each direction when we crossed various streets. at the bottom of the hill, we jumped off and headed to the first pier. after some wandering around the various piers, we ended up in fisherman’s wharf central and found ourselves one of the many shacks where we bought clam chowder in a sourdough bread bowl and a sierra nevada EPA and sat down where we could see out into the bay. it was really great. the soup was delicious, the bread was delicious, the beer was the perfect beer for the moment. the afternoon was bright but cool, the breeze clipped along, there were people around but not too many. oy.
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