A Day in San Francisco

It is amazing how quickly air travel can pluck us from one world and put us in another. An hour and a half after leaving Las Vegas I was already wearing a jacket and looking at row houses with big bay windows and Eucalyptus trees out the window of the BART. I got off on 24th St. in the Mission District. It is the kind of neighborhood with narrow streets and small shops. I saw a boy in an apron washing off the sidewalk with a hose. Azaleas spilled out from behind walls. One block had large trees with tall white trunks and dense foliage high above that I felt as a cool shade on the sidewalk below. And there were murals everywhere. One alley was painted over completely by all different artists. The neighborhood had something of a Latin feel. Stores so overflowed with cheap plastic items that they hung from the awnings and filled tables outside. A man on the street corner called me bonita to try to sell me something. Fruit stands sold yuca and papaya. A panaderia displayed Mexican breads glossed with egg white and pink sugar.

I had come to visit a community called Church of the Sojourners. I met up with them at one of their houses-- "Big Blue"-- on 22nd and Florida. They were preparing a salad for a gathering they call "The Celebration of Yahweh's Kingship." The community doesn't believe in pledging allegiance to anything other than God, including our nation, so a patriotic holiday like Independence Day is replaced with an alternative (though I got the sense that this was more important to some members of the community than others). It started with a church service in the living room of another one of their houses a block away. There was singing and scripture reading and the children waved purple ribbons. Then we all ate barbecue chicken, salmon, and salad in the backyard. To round out the celebration they had a "Lack of Talent Show" which included such acts as surfing on an ottoman, singing a song learned to memorize the minor prophets, and rambling while wearing fake bad teeth.

That evening we watched fireworks from the rooftop of Big Blue. Their neighbors seemed not to worry about issues of safety or legality, so we were right in the middle of the show. I twirled around to see little electric sprouts in all directions. Flowers of light blossomed directly above my head. Some of them made more noise than light; they were short green pops in the sky. Others were white willows slowly dissolving in darkness or bright red rings. In the distance we also saw the city's fireworks show bursting from behind the buildings of downtown. Even after we went inside, fireworks lit up the windows like lightning.

I was exhausted from travel and from being around so many people I didn't know all day. Yet I found myself lying awake on my pad on the floor. Night, when everyone has gone to bed, is an irresistible time for thinking. I thought about my journey, how I could really call it that since I had no plan for how it would end. I thought about the people I met that day, about what it might be like to live in community, how ordinary it truly was-- the every day of things like tallying and splitting food costs or waking up early to pray together. Yet they also seem to know something about loving one another, the kind of thing that I would like to learn and perhaps can only be learned by sharing ordinariness. I am not sure how a stranger like me becomes part of that ordinariness, which brings me back to journey.