Timeless ...

 

On the seventh floor of this 100-year-old hotel (old for California), I am looking out kitty-corner across the street from the offices of the San Francisco Chronicle. In another life, as a young graduate working in PR for a housing company based in Beverly Hills, I had to try to place articles of interest in the SF Chronicle (in order to sell houses being built in the Bay area). I watch the traffic, and there is a Waymo driverless car, its ‘cherry-on-the-top’ roof structure readily identifying it as such. In an hour, I need to get a cab to meet up with Mhairi, but I am rather hoping I end up with one with a driver made of flesh and bones.

Hemmed in on all sides by high-rise structures, I can’t really see much of the city, but the sun is shining out of a clear blue sky and I am grateful.

On my brief walk to the next door coffee shop for breakfast, a homeless man, bent double, staggered past me in the bike lane, pushing an empty wheelchair in front of him. Signs of a hardened society everywhere: how can this be?

I ordered buttermilk pancakes and fresh fruit, and remembered sitting at the counter of ‘Aunt Jemima’s Pancake House’ somewhere here in San Francisco, umpteen years ago with Mom, Dad and Judy, watching as the fry cook flipped our pancakes and then squashed all the air out of them with the back of the spatula. My dad was our pancake cook and he was appalled. The pancakes were tough as leather. It became a family story we laughed about for years.

I ate my light and fluffy pancakes to cheerful background music from Turkey, served by Turkish immigrants. They were great – the pancakes and the people.

I’ve enjoyed the graciousness of this old building. The bathroom door, kind of warped or else so thick with layers of paint that it won’t properly close, adds to the charm. The wooden trim speaks of a time when building standards were not so conforming, when builders had time to be craftsmen.

Every day I marvel at the way God released me to plan this trip with Mhairi before I knew Mom was going to pass away before it. I am grateful for every experience. The sore back has not been fun, but I am grateful that despite it, I have been able to do everything.

Including lowering myself into a deep hot spring above the awesome coastline at Esalen in Big Sur. That was luxury laid on by Almighty God.

I am so blessed.