sometimes one place wants to slip into the other just to see

On Friday evening, as most San Franciscans know, some mixture of hail and snow came flowing down from the sky. It is funny how something that was commonplace and dreary can become fascinating and mesmerizing when taken out of context. The rain, sleet, snow, all of it used to be cause for much complaining when I lived on the east coast. Maybe it had something to do with the inevitability of it. And the utter predictability of it. A year was not going to pass without a snowfall, without a heavy rain, without a cold enough night to turn that rain into sleet. But in San Francisco, hail or snow is nearly magical. I was driving when it happened on Friday evening, first a few strangely slow droplets that seemed to hit the windshield with just a bit too much deliberation. And then, as if someone was drizzling a Slurpee over the city, loose clusters of ice started to fall with more ferocity.

Couple this with lightning bolts that illuminated the sky periodically, and I could not help but grin from ear to ear. It was all so wrong and right at once. The hail took all the drivers by surprise, so much so that traffic simply came to a standstill. On a Friday evening, normally, this should have been enough to make me see red, but I found it hilarious. Oodles later reasoned with me that it's the California way, this ineptitude at driving in the rain. I would like to quickly turn my nose up at this, except for the sad fact that much of San Francisco is peopled with east coast transplants. So, either California has cured them of their previous abilities, or they were never good drivers to begin with. Maybe that is why they moved to California.

Anyway, I got home and watched everyone slipping and sliding around, gathered a handful of slush from my windshield, and felt a momentary wave of longing. I missed, for a split second, the days of this kind of evil mixture being a recipe for vicious snowball fights. In just the next second, the nostalgia was gone, swept away with other memories of shoveling snow, trying to cross icy puddles in Manhattan, and long, grey, bleak winters that nearly drained me of my sense of self-preservation.

By the next day, the weather was no longer novel. It is funny how fast context can change. One minute, it's "dude, cool!" and the next minute it's "dude, enough." Hey, no one ever said I was an easy person to deal with, unless they were lying or being extremely sarcastic.

Anyway, I came to terms on Saturday with my neighborhood elitism issues. I just cannot deal. I dare not dive into all the reasons, because this is not the time for a diatribe. I will say this, instead- the silver lining around the rain clouds of North Beach is that it feels like I'm visiting from out of town when I go there. It is so not my neighborhood that it does feel like I am visiting another city. I feel this in North Beach more than any other neighborhood because there is something very vacation-land about it. It seems manufactured for non-San Franciscans, which will probably earn me the ire of San Franciscans who actually live in North Beach (of course, they probably don't read this blog, so I guess I don't have that much to worry about), but that seems to be the slant.

If you need more evidence, take this- maisnon, oodles, ads and I went to Steps of Rome for dessert, and what was the song playing when we were seated? Bob Marley's Could you be loved. Now, mind you, I'm all for this song being played everywhere, all the time, especially when trying to give the impression of being on holiday, but as maisnon put it, "Because that's what you think of when you think of Rome- Bob Marley." See, I had good company, b*tches, so I guess going to North Beach is fine by me, after all.