Paying attention to and living in the city has filled me with delight and fascination these past few days and weeks. Fall in San Francisco has a mix of some of our warmest days alongside fall-like days and there are festivals almost every weekend: Folsom Street (kink and leather), Chinatown’s Autumn Moon festival, Castro Street Fair, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, Day of the Dead, LitQuake, and Fleet Week.
This past weekend was Hardly Strictly Bluegrass weekend. It’s a free, three-day concert of bluegrass, folk, blues-rock, and other adjacent genres of music. It’s estimated that between 500,000 and 750,000 people attend the event over the course of the three days. With five or six different stages, each in large meadows and open areas in Golden Gate Park, it’s basically a city-wide, end of summer picnic. I went all three days and saw over a dozen different bands. Free music, sunshine, and beer have a way of putting people in a good mood.
This week is fleet week. I stayed in town to checked it out last year. The “parade ground” where the planes fly over the Bay and the reviewing stand are about a ten minute walk from my apartment – it’s where I go running on a weekly basis. Being that close is convenient if you want to see the activities – less so if you don’t want fighter jets shaking your building for three or four days. A jet flying overhead at 300 or 400 feet is quite possibly the loudest thing I’ve experienced and by the time you hear it, it’s already gone. Don’t get me wrong, the Blue Angels do some amazing acrobatics, the latest fighter jets have a wow factor that can make you feel a like a little kid, but the noise and the constant back-of-mind nagging that these are, after all, weapons of war makes fleet week complicated, at best. Additionally, the noise can be triggering for people suffering from PTSD and it can drive dogs nuts much in the same way fireworks can. This year, due to the government shutdown, the Blue Angels will not be performing, but Canada has sent their elite demonstration squad. I had thought about getting out of town to avoid fleet week (the bars also get more crowded), but I didn’t manage to pull anything together.
Also in the fall is an event called LitQuake. It’s a series of literature related events throughout the Bay Area (mostly in SF, Berkeley, and Oakland). Last year I went to a poetry competition that was emceed by Daniel Handler (funny guy, good emcee, and author of the Lemony Snicket books). This year, I went to a book fair and poetry reading, and this weekend, I’m going to hear former US Poet Laureate, Ada Limón.
Additionally, a few days of jury duty have had me on busses to parts of town that I don’t usually visit. A few early morning and evening walks have gotten me out of the apartment at different times of the day – it’s pretty cool to see the first rays of sun light up the Golden Gate Bridge or see the super moon rising over the city. I’ve also been more deliberate about being present (no earbuds, no staring at my cellphone) which, in turn, helps me tune in to various heartbeats of the city, the people and faces and sounds all around me.
I may miss some aspects of autumn from back east (mostly the way the air feels and the smell of leaves), but fall in San Francisco is pretty fantastic too, and I’m glad I’m paying attention to it.