Good Neighbors

I fear the Cybertruck won’t catch on because there’s no place for a headache rack.

I’m sure an enhanced neighborliness is now being found in other cities in this country just as it is in Italy with folks singing off their balconies. But I certainly see a lot of it in San Francisco, where the great majority of citizens are willingly cooperating with the shutdown and, moreover, are doing things in their neighborhoods to lighten the austerity. This is happening all over the city, but I’ll mention a few instances.

Let’s start with the Page Street professional cellist who puts on a two-hour concert on Tuesday afternoons for folks in the area. Yes, he puts out a tip jar because his income has plummeted, but still, it’s neighborly.

Then there’s the Sanchez Street bagpiper who plays one song every day at sundown from the roof of his apartment building. He has a considerable following enhanced by his natural amphitheater location at the bottom of Eureka Valley that lets the sound carry for quite some distance.

How about the Russian Hill neighbors singing Happy Birthday to a four-year-old, maintaining social distancing, of course.

Or the opera singer who performs around 5:00 most weeknights from his balcony on Ripley, between Folsom and Alabama.

And just this afternoon I was taking a scenic route to Folio’s window to pick up some books they’d ordered for me and discovered that Muni had closed Sanchez Street to through traffic from 30th to 23rd. What a pleasure it was to glide along on my Segway maintaining a safe distance from the kids playing on bicycles and scooters as I swerved from side to side on the street to cover up the bottom line truth that I was, in fact, through traffic.

There are of course countless other examples of neighborhood joy, but I’ll end with Josh and Joe on Coleridge Street every Thursday at 5:00 playing covers of (mostly) Beatles and Simon and Garfield songs. Josh on accordion, Joe on guitar, both on vocals. These guys are not only good musicians but also delightful and generous neighbors who have a karaoke mike for anyone who can sing with them. A surprising number of my neighbors have turned out to be quite competent singers. As a token of my appreciation, I give Josh and Joe a jar of my preserves whenever I attend. By now for the folks gathered on the sidewalks, the handing over of the jam has become an integral part of the concert, so they applaud it. Oh wow.