Not of a Feather

This ran a while back, in a slightly different form, in 7x7 magazine. I was reminded of it when a friend asked me, in a recent conversation on the Writers Grotto's participation in the upcoming Litquake, how I would describe the cultural identity of San Francisco. I still can't describe it, for the reasons explained below.

Outside the Peet’s Coffee in Potrero Center, there’s a flock of birds who perch on the chairbacks near people sitting and drinking their coffee. It’s easy to take them for blackbirds looking for food, but they’re not. Blackbirds are like New Yorkers, restless, quick, aggressively biting at opportunities. These slower and more patient creatures are cowbirds, who might grab a crumb if it lands near them but are generally content just to sit near people, as if enjoying our company; which they are, in a way. Cowbirds evolved to survive on the insects startled out of the grass by herds of bison and cattle, equipping them with an instinct to hang around groups of large, sedentary mammals. Somehow this flock found its way to a place where there are no cattle, and so they seek out the company of the only large, sedentary mammals they can find: San Franciscans drinking coffee.

      There’s something, as we like to say, “very San Francisco” about that odd, serene scene. It reminds me of one of our best traits, our ability to coexist quietly, perching in our separate realities in a sort of loose mutualism, even a benign indifference. I experience fewer tensions here around cultural or individual contrasts—fewer tensions about anything, really, except parking—than in any other city.

      But I experience something else, too, as I move through the city: some lack of collective identity, a mystery about what it means to be a “San Franciscan.” From neighborhood to neighborhood I feel like I’m moving through herds and flocks of very different creatures, coexisting contentedly but in separate realities. When I drive from Noe Valley to a Hong Kong dessert place in the Sunset, it’s hard to say how I and the guy behind the counter are both San Franciscans except in the literal fact of our residence. This is not about being a native or an immigrant either. Raised in the Santa Clara Valley, I feel very Californian—genial but cautious, with a certain mellow, all-weather slowness. But by that very fact I feel like a perpetual visitor in this foggy island that feels as far from California as anywhere else.

      I could say similar things about any diverse city, of course. But even in New York, as heterogeneous as a place gets, there’s a sense of what it means to be a New Yorker—someone who, whether his ancestral tongue is Italian, Yiddish, Spanish, or Southern Black, has been molded by the city to a certain attitude and speed, a particular way of pronouncing “R.” Here, we don’t even agree on how to pronounce our street names. On my way to Candlestick Park, I drive past Kay-sah-dah Street, but the people ignoring my car live on Kyoo-say-duh Street, although we all clearly see the sign reading "Quesada." (And don’t even get me started on the East Coast expats who still talk about Jew-nipero Serra Boulevard.)

      There are native San Franciscans. My former doctor was one, proud to be sending his son to Lowell, his own high school. His San Francisco, though, is a city of tract homes on quiet streets inhabited by low-profile Asian professionals, a city I’ve barely come to know in three decades here. There are even old-soil, multigenerational San Franciscans. But most of them live in San Bruno. Drive down Mission through Daly City until it becomes the El Camino and you'll eventually pass the San Francisco Police Officers Credit Union building, a breadcrumb on the trail to where the people who wear the name of our city on their uniforms have been driven by housing prices. The people whose ancestors lived in a town called Frisco are mostly an invisible substrate; and when they do call attention to themselves, it’s likely to be some unfortunate demonstration of how the city has left them behind, like trying to save Army Street from the unstoppable waves of American change.

      Recently, a friend of mine took off on a rant about the Bridge and Tunnel Crowd, those invaders from San Ramon and Novato whom she only grudgingly tolerates in her San Francisco. She is the very image of one version of San Francisco, riding her bike in her canvas high tops and Peruvian knit cap. Except that she just moved here from Pennsylvania five years ago, while I’m sure many of her despised B&Ters grew up within 20 miles of here.

      What most of us consider “San Franciscan” is constantly being rewritten, usually by newcomers. Again, I could say so is New York, but there, a continuing culture of publishing and galleries that molds new influences into an umistakably Manhattanesque shape. The New York literary community is full of out-of-town immigrants, but most seem directed by a sense of being New York Writers, with the ghosts of Max Perkins and William Shawn also lurking in the corners. In the SF Writers Grotto, where I feel like something of an oddball for being from the Bay Area, I can’t say what distinguishes us as SF Writers, except maybe a relative lack of vanity and competitiveness. Which is often how we define SF, not by what it is but by what we’re not; specifically, not New York or LA.

      Maybe that indefinability is one of our great virtues. This city is less an entity than a stage, a benign and beautiful setting in which we all have the freedom to create our own, separate San Franciscos. Like the Peets patrons and the cowbirds, we exist side by side but in different realities. The woman with the latte may never understand that the bird perching on the next chair is really there for her, not her scone, and the bird may never catch on that the woman just isn't going to stir up that long-desired cloud of gnats. But the sun is out, and the breeze is soft, and who needs to worry?

      In that quiet coexistence there is deep comfort. We all perch together in the diluted sunlight of a San Francisco morning, lost in our own contemplations, nomads at rest, waiting together for the universe to serve up its largesse. These can be the city’s sweetest moments, these tentative encounters between two locals both feeling like eternal visitors, no one having any proprietary claims or any particular roles, pausing for a moment in our separate migrations.