Mom vs. Haight

[Saturday. I have little to add to Chris's summary, especially to his annoyance with the way war protests, at least the San Francisco version, are run. It's depressing to wander around a large-ish festival, agreeing totally with the points being made while simultaneously being rendered totally alienated by the way in which they're expressed. Hence the subsequent heavy drinking and acquisition of glitter which I'm still scraping out of every orifice.]

[My mother came to the city yesterday to visit my new neighborhood, inspect my living situation to make sure I'm not inhabiting a refrigerator box in the Panhandle, and see me. I hadn't seen either of my parents since my high school reunion in August, and that's a longish time for us sans faire rendre visite. I missed the Niece Audrey's second birthday earlier this month thanks to a rotten cold, and so have been eager to hang with the parental units.]

[(Later: For the record, I live in a refrigerated box adjacent to the Panhandle. While the landlord isn't technically in breach because there is a heater, I've never seen it in use because I'm told it stinks. We put on sweaters instead at dear Maison le Trou. Good thing it never dips below 45 in San Francisco like it's threatening to do tonight. Brrr...)]

[Mom and I strolled both the upper and lower Haight, chatting, window shopping, and ignoring the fragrant folks whispering "green buds" and asking for spare change. Sunny Sunday afternoons are when the upper Haight (a.k.a. Haight-Ashbury) is en fuego with tourists, tramps, teens, and twenty-somethings all trying to purchase some flavor of the '60s, the '70s, the '80s, or '90s, and usually getting in each other's way doing it. If you don't have flowers in your hair, you have a mohawk/fauxhawk, ink, and piercings. Failing that, you're toting that essential pair of $300 sneakers, or walking away from Amoeba records with the Remix of the Minute. I threw Mom into this mix feeling she'd have to sink or swim.]

[Mom went to S.F. State in the early '60s, see, and although she'd left with Dad before the Summer of Love (and admitted she didn't hang in the Haight in her college days, and couldn't remember spending any time there since), she's not unacquainted with some of life's more bohemian aspects. Her current hairstyle is a silver take on Billy Idol, but one can never be sure if, like the Robin Wright Penn character in A Home At The End of The World, that's just her hair.]

[I never worry about "TMI" with her, but there are lines: she just finished reading my copy of Michael Tolliver Lives (I've lent her all of Armistead Maupin's oeuvre over the years), and she did say some of the brave new-ish world he describes made her a little uncomfortable. Huh. At one point, Sean called me to see what I was doing, and I found myself explaining the Eagle beer bust to my mother.]

[This is Mom, though: she steps right over some filthy gutter punks begging for beer money, sweeps into a jewelry/accessories store, and snaps up a capacious, reasonably priced, locally made handbag that will be "just perfect" for the upcoming cruise she's taking thru the Panama Canal with her other sexa- and septuagenarian cronies. (Dad's staying home to work in the garden, since he hates cruises.)]

[Speaking of Dad, he was going to come down separately from Sonoma to join us for dinner, but there was a little more time to kill, so we walked down to the lower Haight, grabbed iced coffee (me) and Perrier (for her) at Cafe International, and sat out back on their minuscule patio while an eight-piece band set up inside. There were more band members than customers at the sparsely decorated International, as often seems to happen. Mom remarked that it usually seems to take bands longer to set up and tear down than to perform.]

[That block of Haight between Fillmore and Steiner was where I first stayed when I moved to S.F., and International was my first regular cafe. We shared the patio with some vulgar, foulmouthed, twenty-something urban hipsters, all women, and even though I learned most of those words from her own mouth, I felt protective of my mother's sensitive ears. Ridiculous.]

[Next I dragged Mom down to Duboce Park a few blocks away (the sun had begun to go behind a cloud, but she was game), but the cute parts were mostly fenced off because they're installing a plaque, discouraging homelessness or laying new sod. Or something. We rode the N Judah streetcar one stop to Cole Valley (where she didn't take my hint and buy us a wedge of triple-creme at Say Cheese!), walked back down to the upper Haight, and she called to check on Dad's progress. She got into the spirit of the neighborhood, telling him via cell phone how excited she was by her new tats and pierced belly button.]

[I left her at the Zam Zam bar, ran home, changed clothes, and ran back, by which time she'd started getting outside a dainty Gibson martini and was chatting with thirty-somethings on adjacent barstools about turducken. Fine. We finished our drinks and went over to Cha Cha Cha, my first tapas restaurant and somewhere I'd been wanting to drag my parents since before the dot-com boom.]

[We sat in the bar, Dad showed up, and we ate the usual garlic-mushrooms, chicken paillard, mussels, barbecue pork quesadilla, papas fritas, and cajun shrimps. Cha Cha Cha's menu hasn't changed in the dozen or so years that I've been going there, because if it ain't broke...? I've had more innovative and more "authentic" tapas elsewhere, but for me, Cha x 3 never fails.]

[We got caught up on Dad's heart (fine), my editing job (hoping for more), Mom's handbag (still "just perfect"), the Niece (I was showing the photo of her with birthday cake smeared on her face to total strangers right there in the restaurant)...the usual. I sent them off into the night, realizing again how lucky I am to have relatively sane, relatively happy, and very much living parents.]

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