Night Shot: Kastl's (Meetings with Remarkable Men), San Francisco, CA, 1980
flash memoir by Dory Adams
I fell in love with a man and a city, in that order. I kept the man but lost the city.
My San Francisco is gone. The place I’m homesick for and long to visit no longer exists—at least not as I remember it. My San Francisco of the late 1970s and early ‘80s is closer to the one in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the dreamlike one inhabited by Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak, than to today’s real-world city where homelessness seems to be on every doorstep.
In my San Francisco the steel wheels of green N Judah streetcars still rumble and vibrate the Irving Street pavement; cool morning mist still hovers around the old seedy TransBay Terminal for the dawn commute to industrial South San Francisco; electric buses zap and spark along California Street; evening strolls lead to Kastl’s Coffee Cup on Sacramento Street (now gone, long gone—forced out by Bell Savings wanting the prime corner location); watching sunsets at Ocean Beach while eating takeout from Leon’s Bar-B-Que; and falling asleep at night to the comforting drone of foghorns.
Some of those things still exist, but in a different era and not quite the same. They feel a bit off kilter, distorted by distance and memory or by new things surrounding them.
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