Flowers in my Hair and all....

"If you're going,
  to San Fran Cisco....

"Be sure to wear...
  Some flowers
  in your hair....."

I can't come to San Francisco--the first time in fifty (!) years
without hearing that Mamas and Papas song
echoing in my mind--the song said to be the
"Anthem of Flower Power...."

And the song that brings back, to me,
the spirit of the Sixties more than almost anything.

Then, of course, there's Andy Williams' version of "I Left My Heart in San Francisco"--
a song Mark and I danced to back in the day before we got married....

San Francisco is almost iconic, a city with so many facets that it can't help but stir the imagination.

What do I want to see here? Rivka asked me last night soon after I'd arrived here.
All I could think of right up front were the places that I want to see again, to see how they've changed, to see if they impact me the way they did in 1963: the Fisherman's Wharf, Chinatown, the Golden Gate Bridge....

It seems to me that we set up destinations on trips as imaginary points to move toward, but often the real destinations happen accidentally (or fortuitously)  on the way there.  

San Francisco remains close to imaginary for me--a watery image of two trips here so long ago.  But the road here last night I've laid some claim to, so it's real for me: stopping and taking pictures of pumpkins and artichokes and weaving through amazing countryside between Santa Cruz and Half Moon Bay as the sun was setting.

When we return to a place we've visited long ago, we see it through multiple lenses: the lens of The First Time, and the lenses of the Present.  

Notice how often we go back to places we've been before, and remark over and over how it used to be?
As if we expected our  Place to stay exactly the way it was once upon a time?
As if we are surprised by change?

It reminds me of the obvious comment we make when we haven't seen a child in six months: "My, how you've grown!"  And the child--you might notice--usually looks back with a look of "Duh!"

I have absolutely no authority to write about San Francisco.
I am, however, over-the-top happy to reflect on the final hour of last night before arriving at Rivka's house: the self-congratulatory rush of having Made It, through the woods and over the hill and across the bridge and all!

Only one other driver honked at me, and only once.  (I think I was driving in the lane intended for people with actual physical passengers in their car--not the imaginary ones in mine!)

Or maybe I was so engrossed with the enormity of the city I remember smaller and quainter that I switched lanes without announcing my intentions?