summer solstice in the Tenderloin
On the early afternoon of the day of the summer solstice on this year, I spent an hour with fellow volunteers of San Francisco's Civic Joy Fund, in the Tenderloin Weekly Cleanup community event.
Got to the Boedekker Park clubhouse on Eddy and Jones a little bit before 1, met with the organizer Beth, and sat beside an elderly Chinese woman, Sue, who lives in the neighborhood, chatting with her about this and that. Then Sue and I were assigned by Beth to a volunteer regular, Antonia, and we were joined by Alan, and we made our way along one of the designated routes: west along Eddy past Leavenworth, then right up Hyde, then right again on O'Farrell.
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I've been to various volunteer cleanup events in the City before — to Ocean Beach and the Outer Sunset; Dogpatch and China Basin; and in my Russian Hill and Marina neighborhoods.
But, as I mentioned Alan at one point, doing trash pickup in the Tenderloin makes for a qualitatively different experience, where practicality and utility is concerned... as anyone who has walked through the Tenderloin, or lives there, knows.
In a very real way, the litter on the sidewalks directly reflects life on the streets, in this historically down-trodden San Francisco neighborhood. The neighborhood is alive and even vibrant, in that clichéd 'gritty' and hardscrabble way, but it is also fraught... and this is evident in the ubiquity of people living on the streets and giving themselves fully to the sway of drugs, their addictions out of control, their silent desperation fully on display to anyone with eyes to see.
And when that silence gives way to guttural expostulations of voice and random vitriol, which it will, it is on display to anyone with ears to hear, and heart to feel.
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The hour passed quickly, as if in minutes, the Tenderloin's blocks bleeding into each other in a uniformly chaotic visual sensation of sidewalk, trash, litter... plastic bags of all shapes, sizes and colors, broken shards of potteries or devices, discarded lighters, paper detritus in all its forms, stray bottlecaps, the unrelenting viscera of cigarettes' stubs and yes, discarded needles.
Traces of excrement dried or fresh, human and canid alike, always in evidence, inescapable. Not blind to this qualic form, but nevertheless inured to it somehow, our little but mighty group made our picking way through our assigned streets and sidewalks and at the end accepted our dole of karmic gratitude from all in attendance, whether volunteer or organizer, sidewalk denizen or passing motorist: silently given, quietly understood, abiding.
Thus did I spend this part of the solstice and, as it happens, Father's Day — before I journeyed to the Tenderloin at noon, a lovely FaceTime convo with Pono at home this morning, when he called me in the time before his work shift at a Maui resort.