Windows, Windows Everywhere

I wasn’t quite sure how long it would be before I felt the urge to write again. The National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) started easily enough but ended with me as a brooding half-wit. After losing 4,000 words (not to mention my entire photo collection) I went into my fear mode…fear of losing it all. And my computer was operating in an entirely unacceptable mode. The rest of my words were pulled from my heart and brain that had closed with fear. But finish I did. 

I have always enjoyed looking at Art Journals and thought I would give it a try. Now it is all I want to do. Housework be damned! Laundry, go ahead and pile up. You, too, dishes! My muses are telling me to ignore you all and direct my energies to journaling. Afterall…does anyone ever feel all that great when the house is clean knowing that it was doomed to run amuck again as soon as the family got home? Dirty socks on the floor, toothpaste on the mirror, and a multitude of free range dust bunnies mean nothing to me…Nothing good anyway.

I had already decided what the cover would contain. Windows…lots and lots of windows. I had recently found an old real estate magazine featuring properties in San Francisco. I opened it and saw….windows! Windows, windows everywhere.

 

San Francisco is one of my all time favorite places. I came to know it well in the 1980′s when my sister chose the Bay Area to make her home. She had a flat near the Golden Gate Park. I was sad when she married and moved away. However, my daughter, husband, and I often jump the Amtrak train with our backpacks for a hobo adventure. Sometimes we make hotel reservations, sometimes we don’t.

I love to walk the ‘streets of San Franciso.’ (Hey, wasn’t there a television show by that name?) San Francisco is a walking town despite it’s many steep streets up the hills and back down. I remember as a child a time when Mom and we three kids were in the old station wagon. The light turned red as we were trudging up a steep hill. I recall feeling like the station wagon was a rocket and pointed up to the sky. All of a sudden there was a “uh oh” noise and the car began rolling backward. There was a hard bump and suddenly we were being propelled up and over the hill. Bad news was we had lost our brakes. Good news was that there was a police officer driving a squad car with a big sturdy bumper right behind us.

Besides people watching and sea gazing, I love walking the various streets and looking at the houses. There is such a wide variety of architectural styles there. In fact, one would be hard pressed to think of a style that is not displayed somewhere in “the city by the bay.”

I love that I can look at all the windows on the cover of my Art Journal and know that each one will take me to another place…and another time. The windows with the lady’s (and I use the term loosely here) legs protruding between are located in the Haight Ashbury district. Those of you familiar with the sixties and early seventies have probably heard of this place. It was known world wide for the legions of hippies touting peace and free love (or peace, love, drugs, rock and roll). The baby boomers ran away from their square parents whom were too strict, too right winged, and too narrow minded to understand the importance of community, freedom of speech, and making love instead of war. The Haight Ashbury district was filled with hippies and runaways who decided their happiness was closer there than in their home towns.

Many minds were blown by epiphanies realized under the influence of LSD. Many brains were fried by the multitude of drugs freely consumed. Many fatherless children were born to mothers not sure which man in the commune was the father. Many of the Haight Ashbury youth were never the same again. However, a recent trip showed me that the neighborhood itself had not changed all that much…just the people (many but not all) who resided in Haight Ashbury. The pendulum of the American culture had begun to slowly swing back towards morality and healthier lifestyles.

The stores still had peace signs, t-shirts with marijuana leaves, canvases decorated with ‘Flower Power,’ and bumper stickers promoting love not war. Some things are timeless. We passed a “rainbow bus” parked along the street taking up two or three parking spaces. We were invited in and transported back in time thirty to forty years. The outside was painted with neon colors resembling something between the Partridge Family and Herbie the Love Bug. The inside of the bus was sparse but comfortable and served as a moving commune for those still stuck in the sixties. Believe me when I say, I love people who hold on to their beliefs tanscending time. Chances are the issues are still the same and so are the way they conduct their lives. For isn’t life forever moving in circles? We look out the same windows to scenes that are different and yet the same. The trees are taller but still the same trees we gazed upon in the past.

I was in second grade when JFK was assinated. We had just finished our ‘earthquake’ drill (which I now know were, in fact, nuclear bomb drills). I was in charge of pulling these huge plastic, drab colored, floor to ceiling blackout curtains across the windows. I had just pulled these curtains open when the principal came into the classroom and told us the awful news. I sunk into my chair/desk combo, laid my head down in the cradle of my arms and cried. I stayed in my seat staring out of the window when most of my classmates went outside for recess. I remember thinking there were no recess sounds…no tetherball chains striking the poles…no laughing or screaming during the playing of dodge ball or four square. I wasn’t sure if the silence was inside my head or outside.

 I had no clue about politics and such at the age of seven but I was incredibly sad our President was dead. He sure was handsome and had a smile that lit his entire face. His wife was nice but had a funny whispering voice when I watched her giving a tour of the White House on the television. He had little kids, his daughter around my age. All I knew was that I trusted him and he “felt good” in that unnamed place in my heart. He was my country’s president…whatever that was.

I was old enough to know more when his brother, Bobby, was shot. I had fallen asleep in my sister’s room listening to a stack of 45′s (records). I don’t know if I dreamed it or if the radio was on, but I knew he was dead. My only thought was of his pregnant wife and all those children, the Kennedy clan, and poor Jackie, John, and Carolyn. Surely they must feel like their father had died all over again.

My father still lived at home and we were a family united. My parents gave the best parties in town. My sister and I would sneak into the living room behind the couch and reach up to the bar where Mom’s home made Chex mix and other goodies were waiting. We didn’t know that everyone saw us in our pajamas with the feet crawling on our hands and knees down the hallway. We had no idea that the bowls on the bar’s counter were too high for us to get Chex Mix with our young childish arms and that people were lowering the bowls down within our reach. No one ever said a word to us. We don’t know if they smiled or not because we knew that if we didn’t look at them, they could not see us.

 It was a time when music became the center of our lives, especially when the older kids in the neighborhood were always playing their records. I can still feel the magic of the summer nights when it was a free for all and all the kids on the block came out to play in the late setting sun. Dad made us scooters out of apricot crates and old metal wheeled skates. We drew chalk numbered squares on the sidewalk and played hopscotch.

Dad had built a playroom in the garage. There was a booth from a restaurant in there and we would have sock hops. I learned at an early age how to twist and shout. Ah, those were the days…so long ago. I crave those days when the world was simple, neighbors talked over the fence while hanging the wash on clothes lines, and no one worried about kidnappers and sex crimes.

And though I sometimes grow maudlin and long for those days, I know that special time in my life has longed passed. Still, I hold tightly to those treasured days when we knew all our neighbors and no one called the police if they saw you looking into their windows.