Slipstream

Last week in San Francisco, I was strolling down Mission Street toward the 24th Street BART station. From there, I was planning to catch a train to the Embarcadero station and then walk to the ferry terminal, where I was meeting friends for an outing to Sausalito. Sausalito is the ritzy suburban tourist town on the north side of the Bay. In all the years I’ve been coming to this area, I’ve never visited Sausalito, so I figured it was time to check it out.

On the way to the BART station, I passed the Mission District unemployment office, where a line of men and women spilled out of the front entrance and flowed down the sidewalk for half a block. Those queued up next to the building ranged in age from 16 to 60, most of them Hispanic or African-American, and most of them just standing there looking at nothing in particular as they waited for the line to start moving. Several of the adults had children with them. The kids, for the most part, stood patiently with everyone else, indifferent to their surroundings, as though they’d been waiting on that sidewalk since they were old enough to stand. (more…)

I ride San Francisco’s MUNI train, the L line, toward its termination point at Embarcadero station, in a car that’s surprisingly empty for a midmorning Thursday, given this cutback economy.

At the Van Ness station, a group of older teens boards the train. I notice them only because one announces, “I sit here. I sit here,” as she plops down on a seat that faces the aisle. (more…)

At a small café in San Francisco’s Mission District, wedged between a taqueria and dry cleaner, Grace has been serving eggs and hash browns and coffee for about a hundred years.

She stands at five-feet-four, minus a couple inches for her perpetual stoop. When she walks, she never lifts her feet off the floor. It’s more a sleep-walker’s shuffle—a mix between indifference and the result of a stout, squat body that no longer wants to move. (more…)