So as not be to run out of town strapped to the hood of a Prius...

10 Reasons I Love San Francisco
1. The Civic Center Farmers’ Market which offers plenty of ordinary produce but also features unidentifiable vegetables/fruit with spiky fingers like Edward Scissorhand's or shiny skin as faceted as a gem. When you ask the vendors what they are they scream the name of the produce, which is there written on a piece of cardboard for all to see, if only you’d ever once in your life encountered such a combination of vowels and consonants. They do this several times at increasing volume, as if unfamiliarity was an entirely auditory problem.
2. A multitude of literary organizations like the Grotto, Litquake (a wonderful annual city-wide literary festival, which the Grotto sponsors), and 826 Valencia, which also sponsors Litquake but also teaches writing classes, runs a pirate store, where kids can take away prizes for telling a story or joke, and also offers free tutoring for SF’s many kids who need it.
3. The Dungeness crabs that are begin arriving on fleets of hallowed Crab Boats today.
4. The Tenderloin at 8:30 in the morning, when children are being walked to school, the Vietnamese restaurant owners are sweeping their sidewalks, the Pakistani/Indian restaurants are slowly coming alive, the homeless are folding up their cardboard box tents, and the European bookstore, well, is still asleep.
5. The Sutro Baths, their glorious past and what’s left of them – the algae-infested pools that sit next to Ocean Beach, where one can stand and look at a crushed Budweiser can floating in the muck, but still imagine people in modest yet stylish suits diving off scaffolding into warm salt-water pools.
6. Transvestites who actually try to look like Angela Lansbury in Murder She Wrote.
7. The fact that you can shop at Safeway for the Safeway Club Card 10/$10 canned black bean special, Trader Joe’s for the frozen gyoza your kid thinks is a special treat although he’s starting to get suspicious, Rainbow Grocery for a pound of white miso that will last until the apocalypse, Whole Food for perfect looking Japanese eggplant even if you don’t know what to do with it, Bryan’s when you’re trying to impress someone and halibut is the only way you can think of to do it.
8. The palm trees that line Dolores Street like aging beauty queens.
9. Ocean Beach, especially when your heart has just been broken. Oh how melancholy the cold harsh wind and gray sky above and yet how comforting the sound of the waves.
10. The San Francisco Fire Department, who rescued my son and me when our house burned down and to whom I remain eternally grateful. And who are cute.

Comments

[Anali]

Great list! And I'm glad you and your were son were rescued, especially by cute firemen!

[Susan]

Of course you're now making me feel really sad that I don't live in SF anymore. I used to live really close to the Sutro Baths, and another gem right near there is Sutro Heights Park. I love re-enacting Harold and Maude scenes there. I miss it. Wahhh!