Fourth of July Weekend

On the Fourth of July I rode out to Sutro Heights park with the bookbinding ladies, where we managed to get a charcoal fire going in the hearth at the cliffside looking down over the Pacific. We roasted kebabs and s’mores and enjoyed a watermelon full of vodka that was big enough to excuse us sharing it with new friends. Kids from Reno with a guitar joined us in the tree and one of them left his bandanna tied to the handle of my bike with a message scrawled on it in blue eyeliner.

On the long bike ride home the next day, I stopped in the Conservatory of Flowers for the first time, where the fairytale feeling of Victorian fantasy adventure made me helpless to my notebook, unable to keep pace with the docent and the crowd following her. Under the whitepainted wood filigree, stained glass, and tiny mirror mobiles, I sketched Cecropia moths, carnivorous plants suspended over a rock pond, orchids. Children watched me, especially when I was drawing the moth. I had forgotten that museum-goers often prefer to watch a work in progress. It was a place of fantasy for me, where the feeling of the lady explorer draped in black pearls rose in my gorge.

On the lawn, I drew the King of Wands, which is the card of passion and creativity so fully manifest that it can easily be shared with others, the king’s subjects. It was clear to me that this referred to the children watching me draw. I practiced yoga in the grass and went about my way, riding through the shady Panhandle, full of Eucalyptus and redwoods, daisies and verdant light at the foot of a statue, I sit under the trees and sing aloud to myself.

After meeting with friends in Dolores Park in the afternoon, we went to a house party in Bayshore, where I was genuinely surprised at being thrown into the (what seems now rather distantly) familiar environment of intoxicated boys, many of them French. I made friends who live just a block from me, and who escorted me home long after 0400.
Here I am now, lazy in afternoon pyjamas, my eyes still smeared with last night’s mascara and kohl.