Live From Caffe Trieste

I am tired of writing about cities in some ways. Always the language seems to be self-consciously manic, to match the "city energy." It gets a little wearisome at times, like sitting in rush-hour traffic, reading the bumper stickers on the car in front of you for thirty minutes. So I won't regale my faithful readers with a description of horns honking, people walking without glancing right or left, but straight ahead, as if looking towards some unreachable goal. I am drawn more to the sad homeless man asleep under blankets on the sidewalk, his life a patchwork of secret tragedies, and to the way the buildings of this city seem like giant lanterns, luminous from within, lives going on behind each lit and darkened window.

I'm at Caffe Trieste tonight with my beloved, on a corner in North Beach, the cafe close to shutting down for thenight. A young man in a battered army-green coat sits to my right, reading a battered copy of The Dancing Wu Li Masters; another man sits three tables away, talking about Mafiosi bosses and where he thinks they get their money. An Italian pop song is on the stereo, something about "amore" and "bella ragazza." and the baristas sing as they clean up, wiping counters, stacking saucers, but never touching the ancient electric coffee grinder, which holds inside it the essence of a million cups of espresso, years and years of chocolate-colored bitterness served in shallow brown cups. I fell in love with San Francisco all over again when I met the angel who shares my life, went to the top of Coit Tower with him and looked out over the tangled labyrinth of this city, the bay like a broad curve of chopped blue and white ice, fog pouring over the hills like the embodiment of forgetfulness. The baristas at this cafe speak Italian, and here I understand the language that surrounded me as a child, words that held mystery and fear. Far to my left, a handsome man with silver hair and a bushy grey mustache gestures like one of my uncles as he talks, says to the woman across from him, "It's horrible, but it's nothing. Don't worry about it." The cafe song changes to "If You're Going to San Francisco"--in Italian! And I remember Sundays in the San Fernando Valley when I was a child, with all the relatives over, strong coffee and biscotti, cannoli from Sarno's, and stories, the thousand stories told a hundred thousand times, staining my heart and my imagination indelibly.