Walks with my dog!

Anytime spent in San Francisco will inform even the dullest of souls that it's the typography of the place that creates a unique sense of place.  The streets simply rise up to meet you, creating villages out of blocks that would, in a flatter place, merely be addresses further down the street.  It separates too.  My own street of neatly maintained little homes is more connected to the Medical University just through the cloud forest and the very grand houses perched further up the mountain than to the rows of similar little sweet homes that steeply descend the other side of the mountain. Though truly part of my neighborhood, the steep drop from 850 feet above sea level to 150 feet, the arduous climb back up again,  precludes my including them in my daily walks with my dog.

The spell is enhanced by the light.  In fall that filtered light embraces city and coast.  The summer fogs end and golden toned hues lighten the space with joyous azure, pinks and whites. The city presents itself to those travelers hardy enough to climb the highest peaks an appetizing array of sweet fresh sights and smells, colored by coastal hues playing off mountainous coasts and great inland sea.  The only place I have visited that resembles its gentle splendor is the divinely decayed capital of Portugal, Lisboa!  There too barrio's are carved upon hilltops, villages huddle around parks and every hill has a view of the Ocean and massive river that meets it, crossed by a rusty colored span much like ours.

Any traveled European who has visited the United States for more than a week and finds themselves in San Francisco will state that they are more at home here than elsewhere in the nation.  The compactness of the place, the active street life, people gone mad with a celebration of food as art all served up with a wealth of music playing everywhere.  A small place,  half its people from elsewhere, speaking dozen's of different languages and dialects continually create and reinvent a city whose people have a unifying language in music and food.  It is the surest language of nurturing love for the world's sojourner's that rest for a time within the golden gate.

Food! It's the language understood by us all.  It matters not if you're Asian, European, San Franciscan or a visitor from the exotic East.  East, that place settled and populated east of the Sierra's but ending at waters edge well before London and Paris.  East! The indistinct large place ones distant ancestors originated.  My neighbors the Wong's hold a similar view of the mysterious place over the water in the far West. The place from which, in the hazey distant past, The Wong originated.  This originator of his race on the Ohlone villages ruins, after climbing the golden mountain and seeing that it was good, settled down, rolled a dumpling or two ate one and served the other to a gentleman from a far away place named Brewster who in turn spoke of it to a gentleman from Brazil who thought that that just might be the thing to serve with his roasted coffee.
The universality of excellent food is the language spoken most readily upon our hillsides glowing in the golden fall light. It is understood by everyone.