This Crisp Bay Morning

I had a meeting this morning at the Blue Bottle coffee shop, down there on Sansome and California.  I had to get through a call first that I dreaded but proved to be less vexing than I’d assumed.  Harold Land was a tenor from Los Angeles but around the same time he appeared on the 1971 Bobbie Hutcherson album “San Francisco”, he had also had his own recording date, “A New Shade of Blue” and though I’d listened to it a few times recently on planes it really sounded fabulous on this crisp, Bay morning. 

The Blue Bottle is posh.  Clearly.  The seating areas were all claimed, I noticed, as I took my place in line.  A double espresso and a juice ordered, I considered where to sit. I’d be meeting two gentleman whose office was around the corner and I began to position my back pack and novel so as to claim three stools by the window.  Another couple departed and now I really had a surfeit of space.  My meeting arrived and introduced me to his colleague with whom I traded cards it around this time it dawned on me that my espresso was taking quite a lot of time.  I strolled down to the end of the counter.  An attractive woman who was ahead of me in line was sitting, waiting there, as well.  I took a peak up the counter, inquired and was notified that I was two drinks back, delayed gratification, swelling the solemnity of the proceedings.

Walking along Market Street later, considering the Hobart Building.  Assuming it was from before the 1906 quake.  It wasn’t.  I need to get the Kiehl’s “Men’s Silk Groom” and the Westfield Center up the road a way has such a place.  A cop on a rather unassuming little motorcycle stops and then turns left before me, slows and doubles back up on a homeless man sitting in the sun, against a building.  I think I pay more attention than I otherwise might, as I don’t generally see such things. I can’t hear what is spoken but the cop seems to have effectively convinced the homeless man to move on.  The cop turns back up Market St. and does not have words for the many other homeless people who are begging on the main street.  It occurs to me that the first guy stood out perhaps because he sat in the sun. 

I get my hair stuff and tell them all that Keihl’s doesn’t sell this product in any of the many dozens of stores they have in Asia, and I know because I’ve tried to secure it in China and Japan and in Taiwan and someone, somewhere has decided not to offer it.  They politely consider this.  I now want to find Bath and Body Works, which is another brand of scarcity China which is atop my younger daughter’s Christmas list.  But before I can find it I bump into an Ecco shoe store and decide to get myself a pair that look reasonably sharp and especially comfortable.  And by the time I reach my hotel my feet hurt in these new shoes and I wonder if getting them was a waste.  Later though, I break them in.

Monday, 12/18/17