Stopped at the Asian Art Museum and the library, fixed the name on my card, picked up Las biuty queens in Spanish. The sun came out while I was indoors but the March wind kept up and I kept my knit cap on. The city finally back, everyone picking up their affairs. The new tent encampment off Civic Center screened from tourists by opaque fencing, voices inside explaining routine around the portable toilets, and I, coward, glad for less chance of those voices yelling at me. In Alamo Square I kept my mask off when ordering from the “Lady Falcon” coffee truck: a step.
The nice thing about the painting galleries at the Asian is how often they have to rotate. The standouts this time were Gao Qipei fishing in the mountains (messy pine needles, as they splay in life) and this amazing, amazing rock by Jeong Hak-gyo, painted in the last year of the Joseon. Did he know the 500-year order was about to fall to the Japanese? Had it fallen already? The inscription says “At the age of seventy-nine, in a dream.”
Went past the house on Broderick Street where I crashed in 2000, the café where I wrote my first manuscript, now a sake bar, on through the panhandle and the park and out to Ocean Beach. Four hours in all, sore heels even in a good pair of Converses, but the air stayed cool. I never had to take off my coat.
