<font color='black' size='2' face='arial'><font face="arial">Th<font size="2">e final copy for Wednesday.</font></font>
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<div><b style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 18px;">Letting go of San Francisco</b><br>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline">There is nothing in
San Francisco that does not tug on my heartstrings. This city was my entry into the NA continent
in ‘65, and after the melodramatic passage under the Golden Gate Bridge in that
August morning, I alighted on Embarcadero from a 20-day cross-Pacific sail from
Manila to SF via HK, Yokohama, and Honolulu.
At sunset, billeted with relations on the foothills of Oakland
overlooking the Bay, the sight of a fogless bridge and the wharf overlooking my
bay window served as the backdrop of the uncontrolled tears that streamed down
my eyes. I was twenty; twenty days
before, my mother saw me off South Harbor in Manila Bay, to come halfway around
the globe for graduate school.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline">I came back to SF a
year later in ‘66, and spent half a summer when I turned 21 by Union Square
getting familiar with cable cars, Geary, Stockton, Market and Powel streets. SF has since become the city where the
northern CA members of INHS60 (my high school class in the Philippines) do not
hesitate to find an excuse to get together in South San Francisco. This visiting classmate is treated as a long
lost brother. I showed up almost 50
years after I last saw a shadow of any of them since I skipped the class’ graduation!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline">More recently, my
second daughter’s family of Irish husband and two boys, moved to the foothills
of the East Bay in the Oakland area.
After being spoiled a week by my eldest daughter, her husband and her
family (two grandsons, too) in Chicago, it was my second child’s turn to spoil
this old coot on his farewell appearance in North America. They make home in Concord and thanks to the
BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), they are only a 30-minute rail trail from the
Embarcadero and Market train station.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align: baseline;"><font size="4">A colleague who lives
by the Marina had me billeted at the Holiday Inn by the Fisherman’s Wharf one day last week with a
family dinner. My daughter made sure I
had protection from the evening winds that hit on the unwary out-of-town
visitor, letting me don an Irish Sport’s pullover jacket, and since I was
within walking distance to the famed Lombard St. zig-zag road, graced with
colorful flower pots this season of the year, I blended well though oddly to
the numerous tourists in town as an Asian Irish sports’ fan. I thought of cracking crab legs at the Fisherman’s
Wharf but I was informed that the service was expensive and the fare is, at
best, crabby!</font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline">I was a student
tourist in ’66 when I first came to be a summer resident in the city. It was my first summer in the country after a
year of schooling in Kentucky. I thought
I would be a bellboy at the Francis Drake Hotel but that summer, the friendly
skies of United went empty when UA employees decided to strike, depriving the
city of more than half of its regular tourists.
A dent on the hotel occupancy left me without a summer job in the city.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline">An outfit that preyed
on foreign students, who expressed themselves relatively well in English, lured
us to conduct “market analysis” in neighborhoods; I joined them (a Norwegian,
Swede, Chinese, and I comprised a team) in knocking on doors to “place”
Colliers’ Encyclopedia into “qualified” homes. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline">Professor Mortimer Adler
of the Great Books’ fame had a well-crafted sales pitch we used: “Just for the
price of a pack of cigarettes a day (25 cents at the time), a set of
encyclopedia with a wooden bookcase would be sent to qualified families,” we
said, after an engaging and well-spirited 30-45 minute presentation, leafing
through the plastic laminated pages of book samples. Bonus books were added if the targeted couple
(we knocked on homes that had children’s toys in the yard) wrote a check of
$375 for the whole set to cover the yearbooks that followed the next ten years.
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline">Our team stayed on
wheels and motels during the week as we scoured the suburban landscape for our marks
around UC at Berkeley and the foothills north to Richmond and south to Hayward,
even putting on a week around Eureka’s lumber and timber towns, and cruising
along Stanford U in Palo Alto when a cop gently reminded me that it was illegal
to knock on people’s doors to sell something without securing first a permit
from the local business bureau.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline">That’s when my sanity
pinged back and immediately resigned from the sales force. I was never good at closing out a sale anyway,
for though I supported the notion of “placing a library into qualified
families’ homes,” I knew too well that the pitch was a ruse for a well-crafted
sale. I was not selling Hoover vacuum
cleaners, but the method was the same, so I could just as well have been, and
it was illegal.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline">My INHS60 classmates got
together at an SSF residence and they provided a warm and convivial send-out for
me. The Pinoy food added to the 10 lbs.
that already girded my girth gained since I landed in North America some four weeks
before. The voices in Iloko spoken
freely and fluently was music, and when one of our musical talents set her
fingers on the piano keyboard, we started belting out what could have been
easily serenade songs in our youth.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align: baseline;"><font size="4">Over breakfast, I chatted
merrily with my hosts before I was driven to the airport for my flight
out. They were polite by not mentioning
the obvious. I was wearing my shirt
inside out. (They said, they did not notice.) Not a fashion
statement. I was old and forgetful (left
behind my pony tail cap, as well). But it
was time to get out of town.</font></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"> </span></div>
<br>
<div style="font-size: 18px; clear: both;"><i>j'aime la vie</i><br>
<a href="mailto:pinoypanda2031@aol.com">pinoypanda2031@aol.com</a><br>
<div><i>yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today. participate. In all, celebrate!</i></div>
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